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Why? Well, I feel a bit guilty about having left this blog in a forgotten corner in the unchartered reaches of the blogosphere and decided it would be better to have a fresh start.

Due to mysterious reasons like hatching underground conspiracies and working for shady secret organizations being a total lazy jackass, yours truly had to disappear from the spotlight and minimize his blogging time. However, you have been granted special access to read his latest sci – fi story, which unlike his earlier works is actually complete.

From this distance, the red giant looked hellishly insane – a raging inferno of hydrogen, helium and carbon. Even as they watched, fiery rivers coalesced and disappeared, the surface burned with a searing blood-red vengeance, and giant prominences which could easily have wrapped a dozen earths within it burst and crackled with its accompanying flood of radiation. It was a red giant in its very death throes, a star ready to go nova.

They watched with disinterested curiosity as the planet closest to its star emerged out of the red background. As finer details began to appear, they saw that it was a sterile world – its lands were scorched, atmosphere lost and oceans evaporated. It was a planet barren of a single bacterium and will never know life again.

The long space vessel landed on the night side of the planet with a careful grace. It was not completely dark; the land was suffused with a pearly glow from the sky. The scene in the heavens looked like a star-gazer’s dream: today the stars were a hundred times brighter than they had once been.

The first to descend to the ground were the Elgae, strange and intelligent winged creatures from a planet that was a hundred light-years from here. The searched the land for days, patiently hunting for signs left by the planet’s long gone occupants. On the third day, they found it.

***

In five billion years, Earth was no longer recognizable. A lot had happened in the solar system and across the galaxy.  Andromeda, the Milky Way’s larger cousin, had drifted ever closer to it. The cosmic collision was bound to happen, but the event was painfully slow and long drawn out. Across millions of years in time and millions of light-years in space, the two galaxies passed through each other, danced and finally became an irregular, single galaxy.

In Earth, men watched as Andromeda grew ever brighter in the sky, and as the island universes began to meet, the chaos was painted right across the night sky, making it look like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. The gases and dust present in each of the galaxies mixed and glowed with incandescence, bringing forth a new burst of star formation. Today the stars burned with more glory than man could ever have dreamed of, turning night into a second day.

But more life means more death, and as more stars were being born, death became more frequent.  And suddenly Nature seemed to draw all its forces against Earth and its inhabitants as one of the closest star exploded in a dramatic supernova. For a moment the demon star outshone the combined light of all the stars in the galaxy in which it was contained.

If space were truly a cosmic ocean, then this was its tsunami.

As the star exploded outward, Earth lost all its ozone due to the unheard of levels of radiation from it; and thus suffering the worst mass extinction since the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid.  Earth, it seemed, was a mere housefly that was entrapped in a blazing blast furnace…

But Nature wasn’t done yet. Earth’s own Sun, which had been its friend and the giver of life, turned against its family as it neared its death. It swelled into a giant as it lost its reserves of fuel, swallowing Mercury and Venus in the process. Now, the drama of the supernova was about to be re-enacted, with different actors, in a smaller scale, and much, much closer to home, as the Sun was about to explode.

Is this the end of all things?

***

The discovery of the Elgae lay in the region of eternal dawn. A considerable sliver of the Sun was visible towards the horizon, along with a sight that was never seen on Earth before, the solar corona stretching out for millions of miles. If they had been on the day side, the sun would have covered at least half the sky.

And silhouetted against the horizon, unmistakably, were parabolic radio antennae. They were all pointing to a single spot in a sky, trained like telescopes. And what’s more, there were an array of solar cells which all drew the energy from the sun.

The radio antennae, they found easily, were still transmitting.

The Elgae barely had time to record the coordinates in which the antennae were pointed before they received an urgent call from the vessel. They glided swiftly to the spaceship, which took off to the sky in a high, elegant arch.

The Sun’s end had begun.

It began with a flash that plunged the solar system with a burning light. The ship sped away from all the dizzying brightness with considerable speed. The Elgae observed over the next few days as the Sun blew away all the outer layers of the gas giants, melted the asteroids in the Belt…

Destroyed the planet Earth…

***

Soon, the vessel would be approaching the point to which the radio antennae were directed. As the ship approached closer and closer, the Elgae’s telescopes finally saw it. “We get to meet them after all,” one of them thought.

It was a comet. For generations, comets were thought as harbingers of death and destruction. Nothing was more untrue – it had saved their lives now. This particular comet’s highly eccentric orbit had brought the few hundreds of thousands who had survived the supernova away from the explosive death of their own Sun. In an admirable show of perseverance, men had joined hands, developed technology once more to the fullest and abandoned life on earth. They answered the soft call from space in their minds. To tell the truth Mother Earth had been kind and nurturing, but like all families, all children have to bid goodbye to their mothers one day…

They had survived two disasters, and death had given them a chance for a new life.

Here’s some news:

• I am working on a new theme for this blog; a phrase which here means “limited to simply selecting a favourite skin among the multitude which comes with a WordPress blog, because the undercover agents at WP do not allow you to edit CSS as Blogger does.” Google, I have great respect for you guys!
• Get ready for fireworks in the sky, as the Geminid meteor shower begins this week. The number of meteors passes through a peak during December 13 – 14, with no moon around during that time, this amounts for perfect viewing conditions. The weather’s playing spoilsport here in Coimbatore, alternating between cloudy and clear…and, brr, it’s cold. No wonder I feel feverish. (then again, it could be because of the ice cream and milkshake I ate rather than the weather) Hopefully, it will be a clear night for the next few days.

• Speaking of Coimbatore, my friends’ friends – a couple of subah-talented guys – have started a new hilarious blog called KickStartCoimbatore, dedicated to rediscovering the true flavour of this great city. All Kovaiites this is a must visit!
• I am going to buy my first guitar tomorrow! What do you say? Future member of Linkin Park? (braces for impact from several organic and vegetable projectiles)
• Wondering which techfest to attend… Kurukshetra at Anna Univ or Kshitij at IIT Kharagpur? Yes, I would have loved to go to both, if it weren’t for the malady that plagues all colleges of India except BITS: attendance!

Cheers!

All is not well and it did not end well. Ok, if you are wondering what the hell it is I am talking about, it’s my first semester at NITT Incorporated. More specifically, my cycle tests and the end sem exam. (read “modern equivalent of medieval torture”). Sometimes, I feel that it is better to be a five point someone than a nine point no one.

Oh well, it’s finally over and I am back in Coimbatore now which is as cool as ever (more literally than figuratively), and I have a month of freedom ot look forward to. And I owe you guys an apology….maybe someday I will learn to blog regularly.

But now, I’m back home after a five hour journey by train. Suddenly, everything comes back washing over me like a torrent of freezing water. The moments spent dreaming, reading Fundamentals of Physics and science fiction instead of school books, gazing alone with a telescope. Today, as I went past the countryside, I saw two boys in uniform standing under a sunshade sipping juice packets. An ordinary sight – but it hurt me like a stabbed heart reminding me of childhood happiness.

I will be going back to Trichy by bus tomorrow. It is strange, being just a visitor to your own home, isn’t it?

Peter: I still have no idea what to write.
J.M. Barrie: Write about anything. Write about your family, write about the talking whale!
Peter: What whale?
J.M. Barrie: The one that’s trapped in your imagination and desperate to get out.

Sharp and crisp, don’t you think?

Having survived the previous attempt by secret agents to capture me, I write this article to disclose more never before heard data.

Again, we begin at the hostel codenamed Diamond at the National Institute of Technology, Trichy. The place is a wide, two storeyed building; close to the other honourable first-year hostels Agate and Coral. At the hostel entrance, we find an armoured gate, which could withstand attacks from heavy gunfire and even Hellfire missiles. Despite the presence of this gate, there is little or no fencing surrounding the hostel, a minor vulnerability. It is also rumoured that the hostel contains considerabe quantities of plutonium, and even perhaps antimatter canisters left by experimenting researchers. However, despite the availability of such advanced compounds, I should also remark that drinkable dihydrogen monoxide (H2O) is a relative rarity in the hostel.

It would be injustice to ignore the bathrooms. Despite the hostel’s considerable population, each floor contains only 5 rooms for enjoying baths. After spending a good time in the queue, we finallly enter the bathroom. Some rooms even have broken holes in the doors, thus revealing the occupant inside. When the bucket is finally filled with water for the exciting bath, a young and avid chemist can research the process of sedimentation, or an avid physicist can research the scattering of light; for the water is actually a colloidal solution containing major amounts of dirt. Students of both categories may also contemplate the possibility of being captured and beaten if they spend too much time researching.

Finally, we enter the classes. All the classes take place at the LHC – the Lecture Hall Complex, although few know that the abbreviation is a codename for a secret Large Hadron Collider replica located underground.

OK OK, enough kidding around – I’ll cut the crap, I want to talk seriously about this one:

The lecturers are really not good. We have the subjects Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Humanities, Engineering Mechanics, Humanities, environmental engineering and engg. graphics; along with practicals. Not one teacher, from the above subjects impressed me. I mean, guys, this is NIT we’re talking about. Even the ones from school, or the IIT coaching centres were way better. To digress, the teachers simply seem to assign work to the students, merely repeat religiously what is given in some textbook and do not teach with gusto or engage the students in any way. Like, as if we’re just 10th grade students or something. We’re asked to take notes; not to express ideas. It is a one way monotonous digress from the teacher to student; never an exciting discussion. Above all, it seems to be about working and memorising, not much about thinking. Many teachers do not even speak proper English. Maybe all of it’s because we’re just first years or something (just?). Or maybe most of the things people learn here are from the library. Still, I expected captivating Carl Sagans; but I found thoughtless bureaucrats.

Thats all for now. Until next time, loads of love from graffiti. Got to go, feeling hungry…

Begin at the beginning: The hostel, also codenamed as Diamond (there are a couple of more hostels with similarly unguessable codenames such as Emerald, Agate, opal and so on). Probably because the college name starts with ‘National’, many of the guys from the humble first year hostel are from all over India; and some are apparently confused with the definition of national, since there are even people from Nepal, US etc etc., Thus it is no great universe-shattering surprise that I share a secret location in the Diamond hostel with a guy from Hazaribagh, Jabalpur and someone from some remote place in Andhra which I don’t even remember. Due to this reason, we all agreed to converse in the language of English, as suggested by my friends in the Illuminati.

Nanotechnology is apparently not well developed in the campus, since the whole NIT Trichy occupies a megnormous area of 800 acres or 3.24 sq. kilometres (if you are a fan of the metric system, as all intelligent guys are) probably one of the largest in the country, though rumors to build a particle accelerator larger than the LHC in NITT are quite rife (OK, if you believe all the stuff I wrote…..well, believe me: you are quite an innocent dude. Paradox?). Training begins in the campus tomorrow, where I’ll be studying Production Engineering (Due to the highly volatile nature of the information, what exactly we’ll be learning to produce has not yet been disclosed to me.) Hopefully, I may sit in the front bench of the class with an air of a seeker of knowledge, taking notes without perpetually hibernating.

This concludes the secret dossier. By no means is this the last one on this topic…more are coming through; unless I get killed by the guys in black suits and cooling glasses who are currently following me for revealing top secret information.

Appendix:

Tomorrow evening is the solar eclipse between around 4:30 and 6:00 PM, with the maximum around at 5:00 PM. Don’t miss it, wonderful comrades!

The only constantly appropriate state of the human mind, I realized, is surprise. I mean, is it already time to enter college? Gosh, I feet like I just left from kindergarten...sniff…sniff…

If you don’t know, I’ll be leaving for NIT Trichy hostel tomorrow, to study ….sniff…production engineering.  I don’t have a laptop, so I dunno how the  HELL I am gonna keep blogging – future strategising isn’t my strong point, you see. Maybe it is time to say good bye to the Good Night series after all! Oh wait. My aunty’s home is near NIT, so I can go there every week to access the Graffiti In My Heart headquarters, or maybe grab a future friend’s laptop, or go to the computer centre (if there is one). The point is ….your dear old graffiti would NEVAHH say goodbye to his readers (even if the no of readers could be counted with a single hand…sniff) yet.

So its time for a new life. Sure its gonna be fulla both good and bad stuff compared to the last one, but I’m pretty sure that the beta version will be replaced by a stable professional version fast. I’m packing all the stuff right now. Along with the usual toothpaste – brushes, clothes, cellphone, clothes, mattresses, stationery items and yet more clothes; I’ll be carrying some unusual stuff: A night sky chart, a poster of the Hubble space telescope, solar goggles (there is a total solar eclipse on July 22nd) and an abacus (I just learned how to use it, just need some practice). Oh, and a copy of Resnick – Halliday’s Fundamentals of Physics, the book which helped me to pass the AIEEE examinations in the first place. (many so-called guides for that entrance examination are just assorted crap. Irony: Fundamentals of Physics wasn’t designed with that purose in mind – as an AIEEE guide.)

Guess that’s it for now. If you still don’t believe that I will continue blogging, read this piece I wrote years ago in my previous blog (which is now mercifully lost in the blogosphere):

• I believe that a blogger should express himself for what he really is, not what he wants himself to be.You don’t have to be ‘cool’ to write…
• I would much rather respect a person who draws an ugly sketch and gets laughed for it than a person who doesn’t draw at all. Its the same with blogging.
• I believe that there is no need to exaggerate or embellish stuff in life. Life is beautiful as it is.
• A blog should uniquely represent one’s true perspectives, intentions and opinions, no matter how bizarre or uncommon.
• I believe that blogging has its own ultimate rewards, no matter how pointless it may seem.

Now, do I sound like a quitter? DO I, PUNK? (holding the collar)

But…sniff…I really feel like I just left kindergarten!!!

Anyway, this post is about something important as today is a special day. Obviously it is probably important for like 90% of the world’s young-adult population because Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is releasing today, but that ain’t what I am talking about. On July 16, 1969 throngs of people assembled on highways and beaches of Cape Canaveral, and even more people saw the momentous event on live television.  This event, you see, is equally as important as the Moon Landings, for the simple reason that the event in question IS the Moon Landings.

When somebody tells you the word “Saturn”, it conjures up many kinds of images: The ringed planet. If you’re well read, the Cassini spacecraft that went to explore it. If you’re not so well-read, the notion that Saturn somehow causes bad luck. But it is easy to forget the enormous Saturn V rocket, which will take the three Apollo 11 astronauts to orbit and beyond. Not the crowd I mentioned though. They probably will remember it for the rest of their lives, and tell their grandchildren about it.  The astronomer Kepler once remarked that the there would would one day be ships to the moon, filled with explorers who would not fear the vastness of space. Centuries after his death, Kepler’s dream seemed to be coming true.

As the countdown commenced, excitement rose. At 13:32 UTC, the Rocket came to life. In a wave of roaring energy, it rose slowly and 12 minutes later they were on orbit. Four days later, on July 20th, the lunar module Eagle separated and descended into Mare Tranquilitatus. The rest, as they say, is history. Neil Armstrong said the famous words “Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.” A flustered Mission control responded: “Roger, Twank…Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue here. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot!” It was not long after when Neil spoke his next famous words after he set foot on the intensely white (Aaarrgghh….I can’t even stand the thought of that! I hate white now!) lunar landscape. These words I hope I need not mention.

It is hard not to compare these two pictures , the first one showing the footprint of the early caveman, probably just after inventing fire preserved acrooss the centuries; and the next of a modern man, to show how far we’ve come. Or rather, how far we have gone.

Today, it is 40 years since the event, and NASA and the rest of the world are celebrating it. Things have changed, technology has improved and trends had appeared and disappeared many times since then. But very few have walked on the Moon since Apollo 11. The last of the manned missions to earth’s only natural satellite ended on 1972. Why were there none after that?

No one quite believed that men would possibly reach for the moon when John F. Kennedy made the promise of doing that. However, when it did happen, the disbelief turned to hope. People hoped that by the turn of the millennium, men would have established a colony on the moon, explored Mars and be on their way to Jupiter. The turn of the millennium had come and gone, but none of the predictions had come true.

Thus it is with a bit of something like shame we contemplate the event of 1969. NASA plans on going back to the moon with a new program within dozen years or more, but we know more about the moon than we do about the depths of our own oceans.

Sooner or later, it’s time to look beyond…So its only all the best wishes for all the world’s space administrations. And I would also like to wish the people who claim the whole Apollo 11 program was a hoax to eat centipedes, die of asphyxiation, stare at the sun after getting their pupils dilated – preferably with a telescope (an appealing notion eh?), drown in a pond of Hippopotamus excrement and to generally go to hell.

I’m signing off now, my eyes are still watering from the brightness. I just turned off the tubelight. Ahhh, the beauty of darkness….

Edit: Should have suspected it form the start. The Boston Globe’s big picture section has come up with more wow-inducing, jaw droppin, spine tingling and generally awesome pictures of the Apollo mission. If you don’t see it, I wish you share the fate of the Moon hoaxers.