Fairly unique patterns in each of the petals (including two that are completely bland). This exact set of pattern is present in each and every flower. I have no idea what the name of the flower is. Saw this planted in a pot while pacing up and down on a phone call outside the place where I work…
(Update: Later learned from Sharmila that this is a Pansy)
This one is from Mirza Ghalib:
Yeh na thi hamari qismat, ke wisaal-e-yaar hota
Agar aur jeete rehtey, yehi intezaar hota.
Tere waade par jeeye hum to, yeh jaan jhoot jaana
Ke khushi se mar na jaate, agar aitbaar hota
Koi meray dil se poochhey, tere teer-e-neemkash ko
Yeh khalish kahan se hoti, jo jigar ke paar hota
Kahoon kisse main ke kya hai, shab-e-gham buri balaa hai
Mujhe kya bura tha marna, agar ek baar hota
Huye mar ke hum jo ruswa, huye kyun ka gharq-e-dariya
Na kabhi janaaza uth ta, na kahin mazaar hota
Yeh masaael-e-tasavvuf, yeh tera bayaan Ghalib
Tujhe hum Wali samajhte, jo na badaa khwar hota
The translation is from Khuswant Singh. Other than the lines I marked with ##. Those two lines were not there in the version Khuswant translated.
To be united with the beloved was not writ in my fate,
Had I lived any longer, it would have been the same long wait.
I lived on your promises, I knew they were not true,
Would not I have died of joy had I believed in you?
Ask my heart about the pain of love and it will tell you
The half-drawn bow’s the assassin, not the arrow that pierces through.
To whom can I speak of sorrows that come with the fading of light?
Death would be welcome, if it did not stand at my door every night.
##Disgraced as I shall be in death, why not I drown in the sea?
##Fated, as I am to not have a funeral, nor a tomb erected for me.
Your concern with mystic problems, Ghalib, your language is such
You could have passed off for a saint, had you not drunk so much.
The other night, Avi, Sharmila and I were discussing what would your mom’s aunt’s daughter be to you. (See here). As I had explained to them that would be first cousin once removed.
Some time back, curiosity had gotten the better of me in terms of what are the rules of this nomenclature. Turns out there are some fairly nifty rules. The biggest shock I had was that generations way before you can also be your cousin! I always thought cousins are at your own generation or maybe below your generation.
The following chart (thanks to Alice Ramsay) is a neat way to picture it in your mind. If you are more of a rules based person (which is the way I think), this is what I have boiled it down to…
Let say you are trying to find the relationship of person A to you.
Keep traversing up the tree (your parent, A’s parent) till you find a common ancestor.
Let’s say you had to jump “x” steps and A had to jump “y” steps.
Take the minimum of x and y. Let’s say it is “w” (w=x or w=y). Take (w-1)
If (w-1) is at least 1, then A is your (w-1)th cousin. Now take the difference in your generations – which is (x-y). The absolute value is the difference in your generations. Let’ say, that is “d” (x-y=d).
Then A is your (w-1)th cousin, “d” times removed!!
So to calculate your mom’s aunt’s daughter… You have to jump to your mom’s mom’s mom to find a common ancestor. And the other person has to go mom’s mom to get to the same point. Minimum of 3 and 2 is 2. 2-1=1. So the person is your first cousin. Now you had to jump three times to get there and she had to jump twice. Which means the difference in generation is one. (3-2 = 1)
So, she is your first cousin, once removed.
In short, jump from either side till you get a common ancestors. The minimum value in jumps less one is the “what”-eth cousin. The difference in the jumps is the “how much” removed.
What if (w-1) was not at least 1? Then they are siblings (at same generation level) or uncles/aunts at higher generation and nephews/nieces for lower generation. For every generation jump you go Great, Great Grand, Great Great Grand, 3rd Great Grand and so on.
Of course if the jump up and down goes thru you (all points are common ancestor/descendants) then they are your child or parent – with the same Great, Great Grand, Great Great Grand, 3rd Great Grand rule…,
See if the picture makes it easy..
Seven years back, Prabasaj-da had surprised me by walking up to me at the local Durga Puja and asking me if I was Rajib Roy. Prior to that, I had last seen Prabasaj-da in Narendrapur, way back in 1984. He was an year senior to me in high school and that is when he had left our residential school campus.
My blog site reminded me of that meeting a couple of days back and that led me to reach out to Prabasaj-da and set up the meeting today. It is a pity that I waited for such a long time. He was a legend in academics in school. But what had impressed me always was his independence in thinking. From deciding not to go for engineering or medical sciences (which is what just about everybody did those days – certainly the ones who laid any claim to fame in academic prowess) to the subsequent life journey that has taken him from Utah to Cameroon (he volunteered for the Peace Corps to teach Physics in a very small school there) to moving from Physics to Epidemiology sure makes for a fascinating story.
He came to our agreed upon coffee place riding in his bicycle that he has had from 1992!! His other bike apparently had to be paid as ransom so that they could go free from a village in the marshy lands of Darien Gap (in the border of Panama and Colombia). He and a friend of his were riding thru Central America in their bikes and you can read up about Darien Gap to realize how scary it is.
After enquiring about our common friends and teachers, most of my questions for Prabasaj-da was around the pivotal learning moments in his multi faceted life. We talked about why being an SME (Subject Matter Expertise) is something we should be afraid of and why our tendency to model any problem in the constructs of the one field we are experts of is fundamentally a flawed one.
The conversations also included why icebergs are in an unstable state (got to do with the center of buoyancy and center of gravity) or rather metastable state. One famous line from Prabasaj-da – “Reality is for people who cannot deal with animation”!
Since he is in CDC now, of course, we touched upon the topic of Covid – but more from mathematical and statistical modeling point of view. In a conversation reminiscent of what Madhav had once explained to me, Prabasaj-da explained how when the large pharma companies try to model where the highest concentrations of Covid is likely to be (so they can do A-B tests) – that knowledge of the model output itself changes behaviors of the the population (taking more precautions) that render the model invalid!! Madhav had explained this as the challenge in forecasting variables that are endogenous to the system.
I had the time of my life! We agreed to get Sharmila, Kathleen and ourselves together soon in the next few weeks!!
