Image above is a photo taken from a hill top while I was hiking in the beautiful seaside of western Italy, a group of five centuries-old seaside villages called Cinque Terre along the Italian Riviera coastline. I would like to claim that it shows my skills as a photographer but the reality is that it was sheer luck that I could get the man who was rowing quite fast in the centre of the frame. I could have just easily missed him. (Unfiltered, unprocessed image. The blue of the Mediterranean Sea is very much real.)
These days I don’t watch sports that go on for a long time, which is a marked departure since a considerable portion of my life has been spent in watching cricket matches. I tune in to football every four years for the world cup and support whichever team make it to the finals amongst Brazil, Argentina, and Portugal, in that order.
Chess is one game that is easy to follow. Blitz and Rapid are over in a matter of minutes while in classical chess, you just need to monitor the board while you can multitask. I am looking forward to the 2024 FIDE Candidates tournament that will decide the cadidates who will challenge the current World champions in men and women category. Candidates 2024 will have the highest number of Indian participants with R. Praggnanandha, Vidit Gujrathi, and Gukesh D. competing in the Men’s section while R. Vaishali and Humpy Koneru competing in the women’s section. Incidentally, Pragga and Vaishali are the first-ever brother-sister duo to qualify simultaneously for the Candidates tournament. We are witnessing the golden era of Indian chess.
Apart from this, the Algorithm shows me amazing clips of superlative athletic performances. For instance, here’s Indian cricketer Mithali Raj taking an unbelievable catch.
Let me unpack what happened here for non-cricket playing readers. To make a valid catch here, following conditions have to be met
- You have to catch the ball inside the boundary.
- You cannot drop the ball.
- You cannot touch the boundary while touching the ball at the same time.
Mithali makes a clean catch, then realises that she is losing balance and is going over the boundary. She throws the ball inside in the air, goes over the boundary, regains her balance, jumps back inside just in time to catch the falling ball. Brilliant!
Except for the inspiring Netflix documentary The Last Dance that chronicles the amazing career of Michael Jordan, I have never really watched basketball. So why am I watching American women’s college basketball? One reason – Caitlin Clark from Iowa. Iowa are trailing 85-83 against Indiana with 1.5 seconds to go and Caitlin scores a three-point goal, no pressure! She can score from any position in the court with the equal effectiveness.
Caitlin is 22, has decided to go professional and has become NCAA basketball’s all-time leading scorer, breaking the late Pete Maravich’s 54-year-old record. She on her way to breaking all the records in American Women’s basketball in the years to come.
Eating with your hands
With growing interest in Asian cuisines, I am coming across articles and videos about eating with your hands that is a common tradition in much of Asia. While the videos do a great job of showing how it is done, I just want to mention two caveats that are absolutely essential before you try this experiment.
First, wash your hands thoroughly with soap before eating. And second, your fingernails must be trimmed. The second point is sometimes overlooked and is very important. When a patient visits a doctor in India with a stomach related complaint, one of the things that she is bound to check is the patient’s fingernails. Grown fingernails are home to all kinds of contamination that can be unhealthy so just be sure to trim your fingernails regularly.
While fork is a must for foods like spaghetti or pasta, I love eating most Indian foods with my hands. For instance, if you are eating rice and curry, you must mix suitable amounts in each bite along with the side dishes, pickles, and chutneys. You can never get the right mix with a spoon. So the taste always ranks a 6 or 7 with a spoon as opposed to a 9 or 10 with your hand. Or if you are eating roti with daal/vegetable, you cut a small part of roti, fill the daal/vegetable in it, put it in your mouth and then add a bit of pickle/chutney on a fingertip and lick it with the bite. Again, this is not doable with a fork and knife.
Indian moms mix these amounts in each bite for toddlers and feed them by hand. There are metaphors, idioms, and references in many of the Indian languages about eating with hands. It’s an integral part of the Indian culture.
Harry Potter and the Eighth Horcrux
I had this great idea that I should read the entire Harry Potter series in Italian. I already know the story so it will help me improve my Italian. Off I went to Amazon and searched for the Italian edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
I had a mini stroke when I saw that the Kindle edition of the book cost ₹1,41,360 or nearly $1700!! Normalcy returned when I saw this astronomical price was scratched and replaced with a reasonable price (100 % discount, Yay!!)
But the question remained. Why was it priced like a collector’s edition that was personally signed by Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore?
Voldemort held out his wand and whispered the incantation. An arc of red light flew from his wand and landed on the object in front of him – the lost diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw. The diadem glowed red, then decided that red was not really its color and turned purple instead. Last sparks flew from the wand and the diadem reluctantly assumed its normal color.
Voldemort sighed with content. This was the last of the six horcruxes. His job was finished.
In another dimension, Prophecy smiled, then coughed a little (Prophecy had a sour throat). Unbeknownst to anyone, a TCP/IP packet was traveling at the speed of light near the diadem just at the same moment when Voldemort was creating his last horcrux. A tiny part of his soul (approximately 0.0008 nanograms in SI units) latched on to the TCP/IP packet and was carried away with it.
Far far away, in Seattle, Washington, the Amazon Kindle office was buzzing with wizards hard at work, preparing the first Kindle edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The TCP/IP packet with Voldemort’s soul arrived at great speed, turned a corner round a busy circuit board, exchanged pleasentries for an attosecond with a particularly chatty incoming electron, dodged a deserted IC terminal, bypassed a lazy microprocessor and lodged itself into the first empty space it could find.
Phophecy prophesied : From now on, that Kindle edition will be priced exorbitantly high and muggles world over will wonder why. They will never know.
It was the horcrux that Voldemort never intended to make. Well, that one and Harry Potter. (2 misses out of 8 means a failure rate of 25%. Between you, me, and Prophecy, Voldemort was not very good at making horcruxes, was he?)
Prophecy smiled. Prophecy coughed again. (Maybe Prophecy should get that cough checked out.)
