Ruchira's Ramblings

It has been a while since I’ve blogged. Apologies to you, and to myself as well for not writing. I have been planning this piece for a while, and it has been so long that I have probably forgotten what I was going to say. But then, this is a ramble, really, so it doesn’t matter in the end. A few weeks ago, I came across an article about the first phase of a major radio sky survey using Low Frequency Array telescope, revealing “hundreds and thousands of previously undetected galaxies.” Without going into technical details, seeing as I am not a sciencebro , here’s a figure: “their radio signals have traveled billions of light years before reaching earth,” (one light year is 5.8 trillion miles)- which just blows the mind, really. The actual article shared on Twitter had a highly entertaining comment thread, with people talking about mass, infinity and multiverses. All of it reminded me of Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy. For all its subversions, politics, imagina...

Okay, let's get this bit over with first. Google serves cookies to analyse traffic to this site. Information about your use of this site is shared with Google for that purpose. There, I said it. And that's all I know. I do have a third party sharing tool that also analyses site traffic, but that's about it. I don't know who subscribes to my blog or who reads it (unless they tell me about it, or you know, like/share/comment- that's a hint) & I personally have nothing to do with your data. Now can we move on? The following bit of rambling writing grew out of a poem that grew out of a CNN tweet  of an article about the biggest ever black hole that has been discovered so far: "Astronomers have found the fastest-growing black hole ever seen in the universe. " I am not a science person, but there are two topics that I have always been interested in- the first being evolution and the second being space. One reason for that would be my par...

There’s this word, or idea that I like. Journey. Odyssey. We are travelers in time and space, all seeking, knowingly, or unknowingly our purpose in life. Pilgrimage. That’s another word. Draupadi and her five husbands knew this when they embarked on the final journey of their lives (perhaps a lifelong path of wandering homelessness taught them that) – the one we call the ‘Mahaprasthan’- the Great Exit. And that’s true too. We journey to a purpose while also moving onwards towards the final leave-taking. Estragon and Vladimir were travelers too, even if all they did was wait beneath a dead tree. But what if our paths are ellipses, an Ouroboros circling Godot? What if we were all just lonely planets lost in our own orbits of individual, inexplicable sorrows? And the hope of meaning and purpose, like the sun, gives us light and life-sustaining warmth, but we can never really touch it, and getting too close would burn and blind us, and so it’s much, much safer to remain content with...

Before  the beginning was the  night . And the night was without boundaries and the night was without  end . In the beginning was  time . The relentless beat in which things could happen, in which everything could  become , dust could coalesce, matter could  exist . In that coming together, the  universe  was possible,  all  versions of it.  In  it, people could dream and die. In it, stars  burned  and  flared  and  went out. -       Neil Gaiman, Overture-04, A Madness of Stars Where did we come from? I remember once watching a documentary about circles. It began somewhere in Venice, with children skipping with circles they use in the circus. Taking that circle as a starting point, film proceeded to increase the diameter of the circle tenfolds. And so with each increase, the circle held Venice, and Europe, and Earth. Within a few leaps, it had reached the boundaries of the kno...