A little hope, a little cheer,
We’ll all make it, there is nothing to fear,
Medical science and spirituality has made all life easy,
The creator has made us surrender and rest, when we unnecessary crave to be busy.
Vaccinations have helped and this is our prayer for those,
Who have tested positive for Omicron, that it be just nature’s way of giving a booster dose.
The scientific mind thinks in terms of systems: of their inputs, outputs and states in a way that any system be it a motor car or an economy can be taken from one state to another by action of required inputs. The outputs of the system also depend on its current state. This at best is an idealization because it leaves nothing to chance which determines modern understanding of the world more so in the atomic and the realms of electronics.
The great psychologist Alfred Adler writes in his ‘Understanding human nature’ that human behaviour is dependent on two things: firstly a set of inner desires and wishes an individual is born with and secondly the social environment he or she happens to be in. Now at birth both the desires and the environment are not in the child’s control and this results in behaviour that determines the next set of her reactions and so on. Thus every person’s thoughts and actions are just unfolding as if from a plan, leaving no room for things like the free will or action by choice. Similarly Newtonian mechanics can predict the position and velocity of any mass if its present position and velocity are known.
These are very reliable understandings of the world around us, physical and social, but there is a catch. These are only good approximations to more general theories which point out that in the case of small particles moving close to the speed of light, we disturb the particle whenever we try to observe it and as first stated by Professor Werner Heisenberg, if we measure the position of a unit mass accurately, we can measure its velocity only with a little uncertainty. Likewise if we measure the velocity of a unit mass accurately we can measure its position only with a little uncertainty. Determinism has given way to chance. Can we say that the free will has given way to providence…
Have you ever wondered why?
Radio waves are made and how they fly,
Making possible myriad applications,
Ranging from the internet to radar or even microwave ovens.
The story is very old,
Of Maxwell, Faraday, Coulomb, Volta, Ampere, Oersted, Ohm, Tesla, Franklin, other greats whose feats are all gold.
Volta invented the battery and produced the flow of charge called electric current,
Oersted discovered soon after that this flow in a straight wire,
caused a circular magnetic field, in the perpendicular plane, to be present.
Faraday discovered that a changing magnetic field through, say, a coil produced a voltage that is a source of electric field.
Very important outcomes did this finding yield.
It was left to Maxwell to realise that a changing electric field across a condenser
with a dielectric within, produced a displacement current, which we will soon explain;
For now we notice it produced a magnetic field: Oersted all over again.
Now a capacitor we do recall, consists of two parallel conducting plates separated by an insulator,
which when connected to a battery, a DC voltage generator,
stores charge on its plates the quantity being proportional to the voltage applied.
This is like the common rubber balloon which can store a volume of air depending on the pressure pumped inside.
Thus when an alternating voltage is applied to a capacitor,
we see the positive charge on the top plate and the negative in the bottom one increase as the voltage rises and decrease as it falls.
This amounts to a conventional positive charge current flowing in the connecting wire from the bottom plate to the top one when the voltage rises and from the top plate to the bottom when it falls,
despite the fact no charge can flow across the condenser, because its plates are separated by an insulator in between.
This changing electric field then is what displacement current is about,
All very clear without any doubt.
Thus in a wire if an oscillating current does flow,
A circular, also time varying magnetic field we find to grow.
Now this changing magnetic field will produce still further a perpendicular changing electric field as per Faraday’s law.
Which will lead to a displacement current giving rise to a changing magnetic field again and further beyond,
And a wave propagates ahead on and on.
The Survey of India has a very old and significant position in the history of the world.
It is reported the mapping of India took 40 years and cost more in terms of rupees spent and lives lost than all the wars fought by independent India. But before the advent of satellites, the global positioning system and Google maps on mobile phones there existed up-to-date Survey of India maps of India and its major cities including Delhi.
When my daughter Bhavya was three years old she had a mild seizure, as a result of which we were referred by the ONGC doctors at Dehradun to the neurologist at Delhi.
The ONGC, which had given me a new lease of professional life in 1982 (and which I proudly served till I attained the age of 60 in 2015), had enabled officers having three years service to own a car. We got our Fiat through Dr Anil Agarwal a kind and capable doctor primarily a psychiatrist who treated me with care and competence.
The car was constantly under repair and I was spending many of my weekends on understanding the mechanism of the automobile.
Well coming back to our trip to Delhi the first one was with Bobby,( the man who had sold me the car) at the wheel. He told me that before going out on a drive I must ensure that there was water in the radiator, engine oil level was okay as well as that of the brake oil.
On our way to Pilani from Dehradoon we used to change buses at the Inter State Bus Terminal (ISBT) at Delhi and didn’t need to know the layout of the city. But for my first two years at BITS (1971-73) I had to travel by train from Lucknow to Old Delhi and then proceed by auto-rickshaw to Kashmiri Gate where the ISBT was located.
As was our bad luck auto drivers aware of our ignorance of Delhi took us all over the capital showing us the sites of India Gate to New Delhi and then overcharged us when we were finally dropped at the ISBT, which was in fact only a few kilometres from Old Delhi railway station.
I shudder on recalling the apprehension we felt in the long duration of our transhipment from Old Delhi railway station to the ISBT at Kashmere Gate.
Coming back to our journey on our Fiat ( it was a white one with a cracked steering wheel and bore the registration number of DIC 7705 ) I have to mention that after the first trip when Bobby had driven us to my brother-in-law’s place in Tilak Nagar we carried a Survey of India map of Delhi which to our relief never let us down. I used to pull the car to the side and spread the map on the bonnet. I then looked around for the street name board, which was always to be seen no matter where we stopped. Further to our relief we always found the name of the street in the index which clearly revealed the coordinates on the map to which the location belonged.
What was left was to reckon in which direction was the north. For this I looked at my watch, to see the time of the day; it was normally in the afternoon and the direction of the shadows pointed towards the east; what a relief to never be lost in what could have been an unfriendly city.
Their mother had called them out of their wooden home, a nesting box we had bought from Amazon.
One of them could fly away but the other landed on the balcony floor. After a while the father returned, pecked in the biscuit crumbs my wife Jaishri had sprinkled for them to nourish themselves, and inserted some inside the beak of the young one. He seemed strengthened and could fly a foot above to the trunk of a potted flowering plant. We were encouraged and thought the parents will keep on feeding him and he will summon the courage and the ability to fly. It went on, he survived overnight outside the warmth of the nest and then by the evening was perched on the top rung of the iron grill door of our balcony.
“Sh*t!” I heard my daughter Bhavya exclaiming in the next morning followed by expressions of panic and dread. All of us were affected. The baby sparrow was lying on the ground: dead. Maybe he had fallen down.. I pondered on death. Sparrow babies feed on insects who too lose their lives in the normal course of things.. This time it was the pre-maturity of the end that pained us. But then to the bosom of the earth we or our ashes will return. We have to struggle on, hope for the best, yet surrender to the call of the divine whose purpose is not fathomable by humans.
“Apan bhal to jagat bhal”
: – If you are good yourself then all others will appear nice-
Old Assamese saying…
It was either Sardar Khushwant Singh or Ernest Hemingway who wrote that if you want to be a published author you should learn to type from head to paper.
Thus I begin my story of Nazira Town, the headquarters of what was then known as the Eastern Region Business Centre of the Oil & Natural Gas Corporation Ltd where I lived with my family from 1994-1997 and where in the shopping street one could buy everything ranging from chicken, groceries, dictionaries, vegetables and bicycles, that I had the fortune of purchasing a second hand portable typewriter.
Assam is a beautiful region with beautiful gentle people, but then disturbances began in the late 1970s and the green colour of the paddy fields plus tea gardens got smeared with that of black oil and red blood.
When I moved in with my family to Assam the violence had abated and the ONGC had made good provision of basic amenities of housing, security, schooling of children and medical support.
For some months though we had to live in shared quarters; further I had a background of bipolar disorder which required the care of a psychiatrist then available only in Dibrugarh 50 kms away.
Fortunately I had good friends like V. Radhakrishnan and Subal Bose also electronics engineers, Narendra Pal Singh, Dutta Paradkar both Russian language experts assigned to P&A (Personnel & Administration) duties, my country cousins Amitesh Pant and Deepak Misra also from that cadre, and many many others who I’ll mention as my story unfolds and new friendships began.
Babul Ali
Every morning a group of daily wage workers stood outside the gate of the ONGC complex in Nazira, gathered there so that someone hire their services for the day.
It is there that I first met and engaged Babul Ali regularly for 3 years. He was small statured, good natured and talented; a great assistant he was and a useful companion for me and my family when we ventured out in our old Fiat car especially to visit the psychiatrist at Dibrugarh.
I will return to Babul Ali after I discuss the tremendous professional satisfaction and learning I got in my 3 years at the Well Logging Lab at Nazira.
I was called upon to repair a photographic plotter based on a flat panel Cathode Ray Tube display.
It was an output device of the Gearhart (later acquired by Halliburton) Direct Digital Logging system.
Oil well logging or wireline logging as it was known those days employed ingeniously built downhole tools that were immersed inside an oil well supported by and powered by cables where they electronically peeked at and evaluated the contents of the surrounding oil bearing formation.
One such tool was that for the induction log(record which is also plotted as a function of depth). It had its origins in a device that was used in the second world war to detect mines.
The jeep it is said was the first vehicle that could be paradropped.
During the days of the Normandy landings in the final Allied assault on Hitler’s Germany use was made of science and technology to detect and clear mine obstacles so that the huge concentration of force could advance with minimal casualties.
The bonnet of the jeep was fitted with a radio transmitter and a receiver coil. As the jeep advanced the radio waves scanned the ground ahead. If there happened to be any metallic mine in its path the radio waves would get reflected from it and be picked up by a receiver coil on the bonnet of the jeep. Whenever a strong signal was received it triggered a solenoid that automatically applied the brakes.
The advancing party could then deactivate the mine and proceed onwards.
A similar logic was employed in the induction tool to detect oil and gas in the formation the only difference being whereas the metallic mines were good conductors of electricity and hence reflectors of radio waves, hydrocarbons were insulators. A tool with a transmitter and receiver was lowered into the well and made to descend. The receiver output was recorded as function of depth and whenever its value became small it indicated that at that depth there was a strong likelihood of oil and gas being present in the surrounding rock formation.
The cathode ray tube plotting device was very interesting in its principle of operation. The signal after having been converted from digital to analogue was amplified and applied to the electrostatic deflection plates of the cathode ray tube. Because the surface of this tube was flat instead of being an arc of a circle, the focus voltage for the electron beam had to be ramped up and down as the radius varied from its maximum at one end, a minimum at the centre and again to a maximum at the other end.

It is good that we owned an old Fiat car because the roads were rough, the car was rugged and repairable at the town’s garage owned by a Bihari named Bishu who I think had an Assamese wife.
Jaishri, Bhavya and Manu were and always have been a source of happiness and strength to me. And it was the fact that we were all together with our belongings amongst old friends and making new ones with bonds that got cemented after facing hardship together, and because we were in one of the most beautiful part of the world, mobile and well to do that we experienced Assam unforgettably, despite some really upsetting situations relating to my mental health.
By the grace of God and our friends, an expanded communication network of my caring employer the ONGC, Jaishri, Bhavya and Manu could endure the two hospitalisations I had to undergo at a Christian nursing home at Dibrugarh because of bouts of mania.
O mother dear, time drew us together and then tore us apart.
A grieving son wishes you peace, dear Ija, as in clean waters of the Yamuna you depart.
Of all my memories the strongest are those that have to do with fearful, incapacitating and hopeless
feelings. Experience proved though, that things do not turn out to be even a small percentage of feared
negative outcomes.
Thus these memories give me hope.
“I have known many miseries “, said Mark Twain,” but most of them never happened”. How true.
I am hopeful that my retired life will be healthy and peaceful, that my wife Jaishri, my daughter
Bhavya and son Manu will live fruitful and happy lives. Hope begets courage. On one hand is the might
of science notably medical science and on the other the glory of our Almighty father.
My eyes will serve me till the end. I will always have money to meet my requirements as well as some
for giving away. My creativity will accompany me over the long and fruitful years yet ahead of me.
I am hopeful that when my time comes God will take me in his lap, with hands full of care.
Let us talk of sunsets and not volcanoes,
Of the warmth of a mountain hearth and not scorching infernos.
There are forms chisseled to perfection, garnished with smiles,
Leading to fantasies of a thousand miles.
Why does the ‘Neelkanthan’ (blue throated Lord Shiva) the poison not swallow?
In the company of Parvati in the glorious Himalayan nights?
An unbridled lust will lead to ugliness and dirty fights.
The warmth that forms give us, warmth alone be,
I will not let the scorch of this furnace come close to me.
The forms, the smiles, the movements and the gait,
Will always combine some elements inside,
Let sunsets be beautiful sunsets, and to our vows abide.