Brown Motion

 Montauk Lighthouse.  At the very eastern edge of the state of NY.  In the Atlantic. A light house commissioned by George Washington.  A site to see and experience.  Blowing wind, sun in our eyes and sand making its way up the hill to form dunes with a wind chill around 20 F. It was so worth the trip. The lighthouse is on the same longitude as Rhode Island to the north. It takes a couple hours out of NYC to get there but it is serene and calming when you look around.  Montauk is a village on eastern edge of Long Island which itself sticks out like a sore thumb at the bottom of NY. Beaches were quiet except for some fools like us braving the cold bite. Nourishment along the way came in the village of Sag Harbor.

 NYC and WDC.  It is always fun to visit places that throb with humans representing the globe's variety. NYC of course is five boroughs, the most vertically dense and popular being Manhattan.  That it is an island is noteworthy and is sandwiched between two rivers, Hudson on the west and the East river.   Washington DC also happens to be straddled by two rivers - Potomac and Anacostia.  And both cities are old establishments. NYC has records going back to Dutch settlements in late 17th century versus the military architect L'Enfant asking President Washington to design the new capital for the Federal Republic in late 18th century. Both cities have since grown dramatically in population and structures and their cultural diversity.   Below are views of the landscapes and skylines today. Popular former President's get classy monuments in the District of Columbia to remember them by - Obelisk standing 555 ft tall in honor of the first President Jeffer...

 I found myself in my library looking into the non fiction tomes and few caught my eye. My favorite read for good chuckles is anything Bryson pens and indeed something I had not read was Bill Bryson's 'African Diary'.  A travelogue of his trip to Kenya which I will write in a later blog. A travel book of galactic proportion also by Bryson is titled - Short History of Nearly Everything, where he takes his readers on a journey to learn about us humans to our place on the planet to the planet itself and beyond. The other writings I found were from Carl Sagan - the sage astronomer, author who has several noteworthy books on the space we inhabit. This one was titled 'Billions and Billions' and is in reference to a remark he never made but other shows and celebrities attributed it to him so he caved and wrote a book with that title.  It is a reference to the ubiquity of the stars in the known universe and as a math major he says the title is non descriptive. It should be ...

 Bibliotecas.  Place where you go get books.  To read.  In print. My readership (which is a small boat) will attest that I particularly like reading books in print.  Have been a fan since childhood except for the fact that my nearest half way decent library in Bombay was 30 miles away by train.  No matter.  I had access to it and was able to read quite a lot of material largely published by American authors.  LOL.  It helped that it was run by the United States Information Service back then. Other reading came from a hole in the wall bookstore that my dad frequented.  Paperbacks yellowed with age gave a glimpse of the wild west as it is referred to in America.  Some thrillers and spy novels exposed the life in Europe circa WW II. Other continents I knew not of other than a geography lesson.  Later it was with much pleasure I got to land on some.  But back to the importance of libraries and what might the future hold for th...

 Be it the interplanetary magic of rocks hurling through space tied by an invisible long thread or something I can touch and feel and breathe, natural world is full of delight. Here are some recent observations of our landscape through a phone camera lens. Handy tech to capture a unique view - one that only I had at that point in time. Morning mist on the lake Going red standing tall A time to reflect And reflect closely Big flame out Moon rise Orion setting

 Early Saturday morning of the weekend.  Time to locate new locales.  So I discovered a mount not far from me.  Crowders Mountain State Park. I arrived before the sun was up.  Fog swirled and the birds were just getting started since it was cold outside. The dash had read 40 degrees.  I suspect it would get colder and breezier as I climbed.  I was ready to do this after many months of relative inactivity. Few early birds (the human kind) had also had that idea and parking was starting to fill up.  I picked the strenuous route and decided to summit faster than taking the gradual but longer route. Below were the sights along the way and from the top.   Made it to the summit in about an hour.  1,625 feet above sea level.  Given Charlotte itself is about 750 feet elevation I guess I had climbed 900 or so feet in an hour.  Not too bad given my unfit state. If you look close and zoom in the middle you can make out the Charlotte ...

 Based on news and information available today my contention is that the rise of social has done more harm than good.  Connecting with people you knew in 4th grade or admiring your friend or neighbor's spouse surreptitiously or openly because they have a 'hot' anatomy are hardly worthy pursuits.  But combine with human ego and the desire to chase vanity the catastrophic consequences on people's well being - mental, physical, financial and moral are far reaching. The businesses that thrive as a result of directly or indirectly producing software or platforms to fuel this narcissistic human urge to boast and strut are harming the very customer that they claim to service. Clearly capitalism has created many hydras before and this is not its last rodeo. Some observers are optimistic about the new generations and their desire to change this world order.  But the jury is out on whether the lame, fly to the ointment crowd that finds tik-tok or its many global avatars insati...

 Business loves jargon.  As a management consultant long time ago I was part of a cult spreading the gospel of how businesses can optimize and restructure and re-engineer. To do so required intricate project management and program management and waterfall based roll outs of ERP software.  Who, what, when?  ERP was enterprise resource planning and was a way to integrate back office functions on a single platform to save money. Then in the spirit of planned obsolescence came new tech and new process and new lingo. Largely the domain of some wonk in the arcane science of managing people as a resource they came up with thoughts that said we cannot do complex projects with a waterfall approach. We need to speed things up and that calls for creation of pods of people with differing expertise.  Now let us call them scrums.  A term I think borrowed from a rugby game.  No idea why. This lingofication was bundled in an entire body of work now called Agile framew...

 A morning walk.  Fog rising off the cold waters of a lake in the Carolinas as the morning sun stirred the surface.  Mesmerizing to watch. But a blog by a dear cousin having visited a tea estate in India recently triggered another memory.   It reminded me of my early childhood visiting the Nilgiri (blue hills) mounts of southern India.  We were amidst the tea gardens of Ooty.  Arriving by cog rail it was nothing like Bombay, a bustling metro even back in the 70s. Ooty or Udhagamandalam as it is locally known was/is a hamlet that got popular with the arrival of British 150 years ago.  With peaks at 7,000 feet or so it was foggy most of the day only clearing around mid afternoon to reveal lush green gardens and forests. Today it is still quaint I think.  Funny how back in the day we traveled without any devices to record the moments except to store it in our hippocampus for archival access later in life. Today in the days of ubiquitous cameras watch...

 As we go from one season to another here in the Carolinas it is a spectacle of nature.  Coinciding with the Indian holiday of Diwali or the festival of lights we were able to create and add more merriment to the joys of being able to witness our world in color.