Soumya's Weird Musings

English source (also written by me): https://astronomyamateurs.blogspot.com/2017/03/in-defense-of-philosophy.html इस लेख का विषय दर्शनशास्त्र दो कारणों के लिए है। पहला ये, कि पिछले कुछ महीनों में मुझे इस विषय पर नई जानकारी मिली है, और दूसरा ये, कि मुझे ऐसा दिखा है कि कई लोगों को इस शास्त्र की उपेक्षा करना बड़ा आसान लगता है।   कहने को तो ये प्रश्न भी उठाया जा सकता है कि विज्ञान के बारे में लिखते-लिखते बीच में ही दर्शनशास्त्र क्यों आ गया। इसी कारण से मुझे दर्शनशास्त्र का पक्ष लेना उचित लगता है। आज दर्शनशास्त्र का मतलब कुछ ऐसा हो गया है कि इस शास्त्र में बेहूदा या परेशान कर देने वाले सवाल उठाए जाते हैं। यदि कल परीक्षा या ज़रूरी काम हो, तो कोई अपने अस्तित्व के कारण के बारे में चिंतन क्यों करना चाहेगा ? करना चाहिए। कुछ भी कहिये, आज दर्शनशास्त्र के कारण ही हमारी दुनिया को आकार मिला है। कई बार, कई संस्थाएँ आपको उनके इरादों के बारे में बताना चाहेंगी। उनका कहने का मतलब यही रहेगा कि उनके अमूर्त विचार क्या हैं। अमूर्त विचार... मैंने इन शब्दों का इसलिए उपयोग किया क्योंकि इंसानों के ...

  Conceived: 30 Aug, 2020 Completed and Recited: 29 Sep, 2020 With this poem, I attach a recitation which is my attempt at bringing a tune to it. Hope you enjoy. Shut the doors to my heart And hope that it's a start Can't really trust who you are  And I know I belong among the stars. Watch me raise the walls that I have built Against your words laced with gilt And when the gilt corrodes, a light is shone: The Universe is what I call my own. And yet you could be a treasure trove Sometimes the glitter can be gold And diamonds are made from coal; But remember you won't outshine my goal. Yes, I've seen the black and white  Changing days bring changing tides But 'til I know who you are I belong among the stars.

There’s crazy drama around me. It’s like witnessing two middle schoolers fighting. Because of the risk of sounding holier-than-thou, I don’t want to get into it. It’s just a sentence to remember as you read the rest of this. Instead, I will talk about my shenanigans as I stroll on my house’s roof, looking at the sky above me. There was this one evening when the moonrise followed the setting sun almost as if the dance was choreographed – the night of the full moon and a few days before and after, the moon rises just as the sun sets. It’s one of my favorite things about the Sun-Moon-Earth system. It took me some time to notice the moonrise that night, of course – the moon was blocked by buildings for the better part of my walk that evening. But when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie… That’s when you’re reminded that there’s so darn much that makes life interesting, catches and holds your attention. The visual is something along these lines: I was facing southeast. The...

Over the past few months, I’ve had the pleasure of being a participant in the IAAC: International Astronomy and Astrophysics Competition. In late April or early May, I received a link to participate in the competition. It wasn’t very high-stakes, and honestly, I don’t really have a competitive bone in my body. I had just got done deciding that I didn’t need to demonstrate my love for or proficiency in science to anyone. But something just…called to me, I guess. It was by sheer luck that they had just extended the deadline because of the COVID pandemic, or I would have missed my chance. I downloaded the document for the qualifiers and looked at the questions. They were easy enough that I breezed through them in the span of one evening and sent my answers off confidently. I had to wait an agonizingly long time to hear back, though. But when I did, I had qualified for the pre-final round. The pre-final round was difficult, but no less fun. Honestly, it was an extension of my knowled...

It was an explosion. Nay, it was an expansion. It was the birth, In which was also written death. It was the start of a story still in writing. A story which could just as easily not have existed. A species would later on term this "contingency", A species, a member of which writes this today. To witness it would have been agony. To witness it would be a feat. To witness it one would have to transcend reality. To witness it is to witness everything. Everything was brought into existence by it. Everything which could easily not exist today. Everything then is everything now. And everything everywhere is a function of how. Every sunrise, every sunset. Every star to ever adorn the night sky. Every galaxy to be a home to some wonder in this expanse. Every species to ever marvel at the beauty around her. It is a glass bowl waiting to shatter. It is a glass bowl which could have shattered. It is a glass bowl which will shatter. It is a cosmic house of ca...

June 04, 2018 Far apart from the crowds, the meaningless chatter, the gossip of the world, sits my role model. But that's not to say he's detached from the world; usually, he's at the center of it. But his presence itself is a whole new world; away from the societal constructs of everyday life, where base, primal tendencies give way to the distinction between heart, body, and mind, where the mind rules everything.  His behavior betrays nothing; his face, even less. To the world he seems unapproachable, cold. One might even go so far as to say his heart is made of stone. It isn't. It may not be easy speaking of emotions in front of him. I know it is the case for me. But moving past those difficulties reveals a person who gives advice the way no one does. Where the world says, "Dumb yourself down," he says, "Rise above." Where the world forces you to conform, he tells you to conform one facet of you - the body, the behavior, not the mind. Never the min...

I implore you, if the message in this video is one you find worth sharing, please share it in all the ways that you can, and encourage your receivers to do the same. I am relying on social media to get this letter to the Prime Minister.

“I wonder if there’s life somewhere else. “Maybe it’s not as evolved, but it will be. “There will be the first smart people, and they’ll have to fight. “If you ever need to hasten to my side, by all means do so. “I will always fight for you.” Somewhere between space documentaries, the Divergent series, and my own feelings about school, I had a dream with these words in it. A few days turned into a few years, and I forgot about it. I don’t know the context of the dream. I don’t know if these words were being said to me, or if I was saying these words to someone else (even if I was just musing). I don’t remember any imagery associated with this dream. And one day, unbidden, these words replayed in my head years after I had the dream. This had to have been three or four years ago. The words had made a mark, so I decided to pen them down lest I forget them again. I wrote the words as I remembered them, taking support from the memory that seemed to be surfacing as if breaking the surface of...

May 19, 2020 There's a reason the idle mind is called the Devil's playground, not the stairway to heaven. मन चिंति ते वैरी न चिंति   is a Marathi proverb. It means that sometimes, we conjure up such negative thoughts or scenarios for ourselves that with a mind like this, who needs enemies? There's also the story of the कल्पवृक्ष that my father told me once. कल्पवृक्ष is a mythical tree that grants wishes. A weary traveler once sits underneath the tree without knowing its power and wishes in passing to have a refreshing meal. The tree grants his wish, but the traveler is terrified, not knowing where the food came from. Is there a ghost here? The mind wonders and the tree delivers. Oh no, there is a ghost here! What if he eats me up? मन चिंति ते वैरी न चिंति  . The moral of the story: be careful what you wish for. "(Noise)...is...for the bereaved and guilty," writes Veronica Roth in her novel, Insurgent . The character she writes about is facing trauma at some level...

शादी होने से पहले एक स्त्री की ज़िंदगी कई आनंद भरे लम्हों की कहानी होती है।    एक बेटी होकर जब मैं अपनी माँ और दादी को देखती हूँ, तब ऐसा लगता है कि शादी होने के बाद भी ऐसे लम्हे मिलें, ये भाग्य का सवाल है। ये महिलाओं की बहादुरी होती है कि वे ये निर्णय लेती हैं (हालांकि कई बार ये उनके हाथों में नहीं रहता), न जानते हुए कि आगे उन्हें आनंद के लम्हे मिलते रहेंगे, या कुछ और. मेरी मम्मी और दादी नहीं जानते थे कि उनकी नई ज़िन्दगी पहले से कैसे अलग होगी, लेकिन ये जान लेने का साहस उनमें था। मुझमें नहीं है। मेरा अब तक ये विश्वास रहा है (और इसके खिलाफ़ मेरे पास सबूत नहीं है) कि किसी से शादी करने की परिभाषा में ही " बंधन " कहीं न कहीं आ जाता है, भले ही किसी भी हद तक। आप केवल एक इंसान से ही नहीं बंध जाते – उनकी विचारधारा आपको अपनानी पड़ती है, उनका परिवार, उनके कर्तव्य, और बहुत कुछ। आपकी इच्छा हो या न हो, आप अपने साथी की शैली और अपने नए वातावरण के अनुसार खुद को ढालने लगते हैं। और जो लम्हे आप पीछे छोड़ आए हैं...वे अब केवल आपकी यादों में घर बनाते हैं, शायद ही आपकी नई ज़िन्दगी को रोश...

There are science fiction writers whose "predictions" of modern-age inventions have come true. Jules Verne predicted video conferencing and submarines. Isaac Asimov predicted robots and artificial intelligence. Arthur C. Clarke predicted artificial satellites and portable music players - what we now know as MP3 players or iPods or whatever else you crazy kids use. He also predicted the Mobius Belt. (And this introduction defines the word "understatement.") Well, okay, the Mobius belt isn't an "invention." It's an incredibly abstract concept that is somehow allowed by the laws of nature. In fact, it's such an anomaly that I'll have to write my ideas from bottom-up: the Mobius belt is a huge spoiler for what's about to come. Two dimensional objects have two sides: think paper, wall, door. In fact, every object we come across is tangible across all three dimensions. We can't imagine a cube having no height , for example, or a pape...

Practically every waking minute, I feel as if I’m under scrutiny. I feel like all eyes are on me. There are many complicated reasons for why I feel this way. A lot has changed, and I really don’t think I have a definition anymore. But what of the people who knew me before I entered this in-between? This one’s for them. I’ve been described as brave, intelligent, creative, focused, determined, mature, leader-like, and a lot of other stuff that I’m proud I was able to display. Certainly, none of that was pretense; I don’t have the energy to do that kind of thing. I’m just left wondering how much of that still describes me as I am right now. I lost contact with a lot of people in a certain timespan, and I think my descriptors have changed since then. The result is that I can’t keep up with the scrutiny whose basis is descriptors from an age where I was very unkind to myself and to the people I care about. The reason I’m thinking about scrutiny is that things didn’t go as...