blog@Yantrajaal

On the hill of Bhimbetka, Madhya Pradesh stands a series of craggy sandstone formations in the form of tall and massive rock shelters. These are the painted rock-shelters that constitute the largest repository of pre-historic art in India. These 10,000  year old wall paintings have been inscribed in the World Heritage List and give us peek into the dawn of history when human beings had just about elevated themselves from a primitive animal existence and were learning to think beyond mere existence and express their thoughts through art forms that have survived till date. We approach the rock shelters through this tough landscape until we get a first glimpse of our destination ... These caves were first alluded to by W Kinkaid in 1888 but discovered and conclusively documented by V S Wakankar in 1958. This is the first of 400 odd shelters that are scattered over the region but of these about 12 - 14 can be accessed relatively easily on foot through trails m...

Modern nation states and governments have evolved from robbers and dacoits who extorted money, now known as taxes, from terrorised medieval populations and this behavioural pattern is encoded in the DNA of modern administrative structures. This is true even though they claim to be representative or even democratic. This tendency to extort money has been a common feature in India, and perhaps the world as well, ever since the days of Ashoka, Akbar, the British Raj and the current Sovereign, Socialist, Democratic Republic !   image stolen from http://discuss.itacumens.com/index.php?topic=44977.0 Why do I say so ? Consider the following .. You sell property and  you are slammed with a huge Stamp Duty. Any money paid should be in lieu of a service delivered but what service does the state deliver ? All that it is doing is that it is recording a transaction that shows a transfer of ownership. Why should the fee for doing so depend on the value of the transaction ? After al...

Traffic jams are an integral part of roads in India -- it does not matter if you are at Dalhousie Square in the heart of Calcutta or you are at Panagarh on the Grand Trunk Road -- and when you are stuck you have a lot of time to think on your hands. You begin with cursing people around about their lack of civic sense and road etiquette but eventually you resign yourself to the situation and start thinking about the problem analytically. Could there be a game theoretic approach to the problem ? To begin with let us define a general traffic jam a little more precisely so that the problem is more tractable and amenable to a mathematical analysis. Anybody who has lived in IIT Kharagpur for any length of time knows that just outside the campus there is a railway level crossing (actually two) which are a reliable source of traffic jams on a regular and repeatable basis. Every day, 365 days a year, the gates close two or three times every hour and each time when they reopen there is a a...

At 12,000+ feet above MSL, Tunganath is the highest Shiva Temple in the world.  On our way to Gangotri, we stopped at Guptakashi and made a detour to Tunganath. This is where we saw the first snow capped peaks. Our trek started out from a tiny hamlet called Chopta, which is as far as our car could go. From here it is a 3 km, 3500 feet climb to Tunganath.  We walked through some of very beautiful landscape and finally passed the tree line. Above this point ( shown in the picture above ) there were no more trees.  and there was snow on the ground, left over from last winter ( 2010-2011). The summer of 2011 had not been warm enough to melt these snow deposits!  This was the last sign post before Tunganath, and then we arrived ! The weather was turning chilly and with the mist and fog rolling in, it was darkness at noon. Having reached Tunganath, I thought that I should say somet...