Hum Fit Toh India Fit

Colonel Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore, Minister of State for Sports and Youth Affairs has started a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #HumFitTohIndiaFit , urging the citizens of the country to take up fitness goals. Thousands of people, including prominent personalities from all the walks of life including PM Narendra Modi, Anand Mahindra, Virat Kohli, Saina Nehwal, Amitabh Bacchan and many many more have responded enthusiastically, posting videos of their exercise routines.

For all of us who pick up the exercise ball and drop it multiple times out of sheer laziness, such a campaign is a much-needed kickstart to get in shape before it's too late. We don't need to be Olympic-fit, we don't have to set records in push-ups and crunches and dips and weights, we don't have to post pics and videos of we sweating it out to the world. But we owe it to ourselves.

Let's do this. #FitnessChallenge

The Dark

The alien spacecraft orbited the Solar system for decades, with no sign of any activity. Scientists across the Earth tried to study it via various means, while the politicians grew restless with anxiety. At the long last, they decided to destroy it as a precaution.
Gary Singh of India launched aboard a US SpaceX rocket, from the Xinghou spaceport in China. After parking the spacecraft at a safe distance, he launched his missiles armed with thermonuclear bombs and braced for their impact.

And that was when he was startled.
When the missiles hit the alien spacecraft, instead of a giant explosion, there was a hole, darker than the space around it.
And the blast wave, instead of rippling away, seemed to pull Gary towards the epicenter.
"Houston," Gary called the mission control center, "We have a problem. "
"Roger- go a-ahea-dd Ga-a-ry-y..." Words from the mission control seemed to be stretched out and distorted. As he quickly explained what he saw, Gary saw the dark emptiness engulfing his spaceship.
And that was when he realized.
"My God... By smashing nuclear bombs, we converted the alien spacecraft into a rapidly expanding black hol-

And that was when I woke up last night, perspiring, only to find that the darkness engulfing me due to bedsheet that had somehow crept up over my eyes.

Nagpur to Mars

When ISRO plans its first human mission to Mars, they ought to pick a Nagpurkar. Here's why:
1. Nagpur folks are used to living in hot and arid weather. 47 degrees in the shade? No problem.
2. They can live happily on the diet of tarri poha for years. Less storage needed for food.
3. Most Nagpuri folks live outside Nagpur, so they are quite used to living away from their families for extended periods of time.
4. Nagpur doesn't have an IPL team or a Kabaddi team or even a kho-kho team. So, no distractions from work.
5. Nagpurkars are excellent at infrastructure development, especially transport modes. ?? This would be crucial skill for first settlers.
6. And, Mars night be pretty cool at -55 degrees, unlike Nagpur which barely goes below 30 degrees. So chances are, the astronaut would actually prefer staying on Mars without any complaints.

There are no ghosts

All children love ghost stories, and I was no exception. When the lights went out (and they often did) in our native village of Talkat, nestled deep in the ranges of Sahyadri, we kids used to gather around the earthen stove and listen with fear often masked by excitement to the stories from my paternal grandma, and then, went to sleep often dreaming of those creatures.
Over the years, stories of grandma were replaced by movies like Raat, Raaz, and Evil Dead.
As Swami Vivekanand had a quest to see God, my personal mission was to see a real ghost. So I asked everyone if they had seen one, and no one ever did.
It was then that the realization struck: There are no ghosts.
Majority of the ghost stories are purely hearsay, passed from one to another with some exaggeration. And many are even blatantly false, just narrated to be the center of the group. There are just a few cases that actually defy explanation, but there's no doubt even those will be resolved over the years.

As parents, we should never scare our kids with notions of ghosts. It is much better to simply say, "Don't go in the dark room, you may not see clearly and you may hurt yourself."
And as adults, if you have to walk near a funeral pyre or across a cemetery, just take a deep breath, and remind yourself: Ghosts don't exist.
These days, there's more danger to us from living humans than from the non-existent undead folks.

Does God exist?

"God"... Perhaps more literature has been written about this one topic than all the rest combined; and yet, it remains as unfathomable and unresolved as ever. What Grand Unified Theory is to Science, possibly the existence of God is to religions.
So, does God exist? No one knows for sure, but using the 'learning from first principles' approach of Elon Musk, we can put forward some possible answers to this question...
Poss A. No, God does not exist. He/She does not exist in any form, in any way imaginable. The creation, maintenance, and death of this universe does not involve any sentient authority. It all works as per laws of science.
Poss B. Yes, God exists, and He/She exists as...
-- Described by one particular religion OR
-- As a combination of postulates by multiple religions
-- Who knows... All the Gods exist in all the forms described by all the religions, each one mutually exclusive and presiding over their individual domains.

Poss C. Yes, God exists, but not as described by any of the religions or by others. All of them have got Him wrong. He/She exists in a manner that's never been thought of before. So far, we have not grasped it, but our understanding will eventually evolve over the next centuries... Or, the secret may be shared with us by aliens. That will be like Science achieving GUT... Or, perhaps both are actually the same thing.

Personally... I often find myself moving towards Poss D: We will NEVER know, and that's what actually constitutes it. Consider that in the ancient times, our ancestors considered all natural phenomena, the thunderstorms, the floods, the famines, the volcanic eruptions, even the rains to be acts of God. But over the millennia, we have understood, and in some cases even mastered, many of these, thus removing the God factor. But a huge many things still remain unknown, and I believe they will always remain, which will continue to push us to a better understanding of the Universe. God, in this sense, means the
Unknown. There will be no Final Answer to this Last Question.

Ship of Theseus

Any discussion about intelligence, mind and thoughts inevitably lands in the realm of Philosophy, an area I had considered to be rather unfathomable. However, recent reading has shown it to be full of interesting concepts; one of them is Ship of Theseus.
Consider this: A ship is anchored in a port for many years, being preserved as a war memorial. Over a period of time, its wooden planks are rotten by seawater and weather, so they are replaced one by one.
Eventually, all the structure of the ship is made of new planks.
Question is: Is it still the same ship? If the answer is "No", the next question is: At what point did the ship transform from old to new?
This riddle, originally posed thousands of years ago by Greek philosopher Plutarch, still presents itself to us in many forms. A knife, whose blade and handle has been replaced over a period, is still the same knife? Cells in the human body are continuously replaced by new ones, so after a few years, all the cells in our body are 'new', and yet, we continue to be same person

The Chinese Room

Most of us are familiar with, or at least aware of, the Turing Test. Simply stated, a computer program is said to have passed this Test if a person interacting with it cannot determine if he/she is conversing with a human or a machine. 
Recently, I came across a more intriguing test: The Chinese Room. Consider this: There is a closed room, which has a computer running a software program. We, humans, interact with the program only through a input/output terminal. We input questions or sentences in English, the computer program analyzes them, creates its answers/responses, converts them to Chinese and sends to us through output terminal. If the program is really good, we will not know if we are conversing with a computer or a Chinese person in the room. The machine passes Turing Test.
Now, suppose there is a person in the room equipped with the printed version of the same program. He does not understand Chinese. Again, we pass on questions to him through input. Using instructions from program, the person converts answers to Chinese symbols and gives them out through the output. Again, this setup would pass the Turing test... And yet, the fact remains that the person doesn't know Chinese at all, and all he is doing is converting symbols, the same task that the software program did before. 
This thought experiment raises several interesting questions: In this scenario, can the program be considered to have same mind as that of the person in the room? Does the program or the non-Chinese speaking person 'understand' the conversation, as we humans would do? This is similar to the question that Garry Kasparov has repeatedly asked about Deep Blue. The supercomputer may have defeated the Grandmaster, but does it 'understand' Chess?