Serendipity : Musings of an Islander

Every one of us had sung the rhyme – twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are ... numerous times during our childhood, isn’t it? Apart from featuring in our nursery rhymes, stars have been important to civilizations throughout the world. They have been part of various religious practices and used for celestial navigation and orientation. Many ancient astronomers believed stars were permanently affixed to a heavenly sphere, and that they were immutable. By convention, astronomers grouped stars into constellations and used them to track the motions of the planets and inferred the position of the Sun. The motion of the Sun against the background stars (and the horizon) was used to create calendars that in turn regulated agricultural practices. The currently used Gregorian calendar is a solar calendar, based on the angle of the Earth's rotational axis relative to its local star, the Sun. Let ...

Summer vacation is on, the sun is shining overhead and the children have declared they are going to make this vacation a memorable one. Everybody is out there on the playground with their cricketing gear chasing the passionate dream of emulating Sachin Tendulkar and nothing is going to stop them from achieving it this summer, not even the scorching sun. Passion fruit vine While dad feels proud seeing his kid shaping in right direction, mom is getting tense for the fear that her child may get dehydrated. She did add a bottle full of nourishing drink fortified with glucose, vitamins and essential salts to the kit bag, but her  Sachin in the making  seldom drinks it because he does not like the same drink everyday. Though he enjoys playing cricket everyday, but would not gulp the same drink daily. At the end of the day her child returns home all exhausted. A refreshing drink would charge him up, but how could mom find a new drink every day! If t...