Friends and friendship

I used to be real social being, always surrounded by friends.

Since I am not moving around much, I am finding myself lonely.

When I am among people even now, I find myself out again!

I read this following piece somewhere and thought of sharing it with all you friends!

A friend in need is a friend indeed.

Meeting new people and cultivating friendships with others is something that we all do throughout our whole life. For some people making friends comes naturally and easily, for others it is a difficult task. Whether you are a ‘social butterfly’ or lonely, or any shade of grey in between, you will benefit from reading this article. The suggestions in the article help you maintain the friendships you already have in your life, as well as giving you a ideas on how to strengthen the ones you already have in your life.

1. Don’t Judge People: Treat everyone you meet with dignity and respect. Accept that everyone is different; we are all individuals all with different backgrounds and experiences. The people in your life don’t need to share exactly the same values, beliefs and behaviours as you do in order for you to be friends with them. Don’t be narrow-minded! That is, don’t be too picky in the beginning with the people you engage with and don’t restrict you to just one group of people. Doing so could lead you to missing out on opportunities for meeting new people and forging new friendships. It can also limit the amount of fun you experience.

Every person is important and has their story to tell and after all, it takes many different people to make the world. It would be a pretty dull world if we were all the same, we would have nothing interesting to talk about and nothing to learn. So the message is clear, if you allow yourself to mix with a variety of people and are accepting of them you open yourself up to the possibility of engaging in interesting and fulfilling conversation as well as an increased opportunity to forge many great friendships.

Another important pointer to keep in mind is, you may not like or agree with everything your friends do or the choices they have made, but don’t judge them for that! After all, you too have done things you are not proud of and have made bad choices. Think about how you would want to be treated and offer that to the people in your life. Do you want the support and understanding from the people in your life, or condemnation and criticism? In other words, if you want a friend, be a friend because you only get what you give away, or you reap what you sow.

I would also like to say that the common grounds we have with people make forming a bond with someone easier, giving you both something to talk about. And the differences we have are just as important. For, they are what makes us all unique and interesting, important and beautiful human-beings. Use the differences in others as an opportunity to learn something and to express your understanding and compassion to them. Make your goal to make others feel better and happier every time you see them, spread the joy and sunshine around from your heart. By following the above advice, you will be an invaluable friend to everyone you meet everywhere you go.

2. Be a Good Listener: If you are whiny, bitchy, negative, boastful, conceited or only talk about yourself, is it any surprise that you are without friends? Instead of being whiny, talk about the things that you are thankful for. Instead of bitching about the flaws of others, talk about what you like about them. Make your goal to uplift and brighten the lives of others with your words, not burden them by dragging them down into misery. There’s enough misery in the world without you adding to it! The world is in great need of people to make it a better place and it all starts with YOU!

If you are boastful or conceited and only talk about yourself, you deprive your friend from sharing what they want to say and what’s important to them and miss the opportunity to learn anything about them. The moral is, talk less, listen more for there is a great deal you can learn from and about the people in your life if you take the opportunity to listen to them and let them talk.

It’s important to remember that good friendship goes both ways, it is a two way street. Your friendship should be built on cooperation and mutual respect for one another. For a good friendship can’t work if one person is doing all the giving and the other doing all the receiving. Make it your goal to give unconditionally without expecting anything in return. I believe a good friendship is built on balance!

3. Show a Genuine Interest in Others: When talking to someone new, ask them questions about themselves or what they like to do and listen to what they are saying, rather than focusing on your own nervousness. Remember to smile and look them in the eye. Nod your head and say something like “un huh, I see” and ask questions about what they are saying to keep the conversation about them and to keep it going! It’s also important to support what is important to your friend. Remember significant events and dates in their lives, such as birthdays and anniversaries. Call your friend regularly and always remember to send birthday cards, this is one of the ways to show

your interest in them.

Be happy for your friend. When they do something well or share with you their achievements and things they are proud of, show your recognition in any way that suits you best.

4. Don’t Gossip: Be loyal and trustworthy – if your friend tells you something private, keep it to yourself! Unless it is an ‘unsafe’ secret (i.e. your friend is contemplating seriously hurting themselves or someone else) then you would tell someone you trust to help your friend. The question you need to ask yourself is, “If I divulge something my friend has told me in confidence, is it going to get them into trouble, or out of trouble?”

In this instance, telling to get your friend OUT OF trouble is if they are thinking about hurting themselves and telling to get them INTO trouble is idle chatter behind their back. Being loyal and trustworthy also means don’t talk about your friend behind their back, especially if it is negative! How would you feel if someone was talking about you behind your back? Good friends keep private information to themselves and only tell someone about something you said if they are genuinely concerned for you or think you are at risk of going down the wrong path. After all, being a good friend means looking out for their best interest. If someone starts gossiping about someone your friend, say something like “I’m sorry I don’t listen to gossip” and walk away because it’s a well

known fact that whoever gossips to you, gossips of you and if your friend finds out that you have betrayed their trust, your relationship with them is as good as over!

5. Be Forgiving: Nobody is perfect. You’re not perfect, I’m not perfect, and NOBODY is perfect. As imperfect human beings, we occasionally say and do things that are hurtful. Knowing this fact can help you see things from your friend’s point of view. Accept and allow your friends to make mistakes because a friend is going to hurt you every once in a while and you must be willing to forgive them for that. As Bob Marley wrote “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”

Although forgiveness cannot change the past, it can enlarge the future. When you let go of your hurts and resentment by forgiving, you take yourself from a victim to a victor because you have released the pain and are ready to move on. So, forgiveness is pragmatic and liberating.

6. Don’t Wallow in Self-Pity: NEVER, NEVER feel sorry for yourself or wallow in self-pity! This is a big turn-off for people! Although you know you are a strong, valuable person, by acting weak (wallowing in self-pity) people will treat you like a weak person.

Not only that, complaining about your problems all the time will drive potential friends away, and is detrimental to existing friendships in your life. No one wants to hang-out with a negative person. By complaining or talking too much about your bad experiences, how unfortunate you are, people are going to stop treating you with respect and may take advantage of you! Worst yet, it wears people down and you could lose a friend altogether by succumbing to self-pity.

My motto is: “Always laugh at yourself, don’t laugh at others! Never feel sorry for yourself, feel sorry for others.” This makes you a hero! A hero (or warrior) is someone that can move on quickly and bounce back from the bad times and take their hardships in their stride and get on with it with accountability and a positive outlook. Also, by refusing to feel sorry for yourself and by having a sense of humor (being able to laugh at yourself) is one way of winning people’s respect forever

Germs in and around us!

Our bodies and homes are covered in microbes -- some good for us, some bad for us. As we learn more about the germs and microbes who share our living spaces, TED Fellow Jessica Green asks: Can we design buildings that encourage happy, healthy microbial environments?

Jessica Green wants people to understand the important role microbes play in every facet of our lives: climate change, building ecosystems, human health, even roller derby -- using nontraditional tools like art, animation and film to help people visualize the invisible world

Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi. Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes. As we design these things, we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds, and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems.

Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are. The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods. The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system. The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath,or not, and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch. So, for example, when you touch a pencil, microbial exchange happens.

If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways.

I get asked all of the time from people, "Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?" And I believe the answer is yes. I think we're doing it right now, but we're doing it unconsciously. I'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how, through both conscious and unconscious design, we're impacting these invisible worlds.

This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon, and I worked with a team of architects and biologists to sample over 300 rooms in this building. We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building, and to do this, we sampled dust. From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences.This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project. This is a picture of Tim, who, right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, he said, "Jessica, the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, and things have changed dramatically for me."

So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices, and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk.The way that you look at this data is, first, look around the outside of the circle. You'll see broad bacterial groups, and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group. So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare.

Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building. If you look inside the restrooms, they all have really similar ecosystems, and if you were to look inside the classrooms, those also have similar ecosystems. But if you look across these space types, you can see that they're fundamentally different from one another. I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest. I told Tim, "If you could just see the microbes, it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of." And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland.

This perspective is a really powerful one for designers, because you can bring on principles of ecology, and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal, the way organisms move around. We know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air. So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system. Mechanical engineers design air handling units to make sure that people are comfortable, that the air flow and temperature is just right. They do this using principles of physics and chemistry, but they could also be using biology. If you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building, you'll see that they're all very similar to one another. And if you compare this to the microbes in a different air handling unit, you'll see that they're fundamentally different.The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago, and what that means is that mechanical engineers are like eco-engineers, and they have the ability to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to.

Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people, or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices. Given that microbes travel around with people, you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes. And that is exactly what we found. If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another, they have very similar ecosystems, but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away, the ecosystem is fundamentally different. And when I see the power that dispersal has on these biogeographic patterns, it makes me think that it's possible to tackle really challenging problems, like hospital-acquired infections. I believe this has got to be, in part, a building ecology problem.

All right, I'm going to tell you one more story about this building. I am collaborating with Charlie Brown. He's an architect, and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change. He's dedicated his life to sustainable design. When he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building, he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did. He went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health. He helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated.

So what I'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building. What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time. Next I'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms. We blocked them off at night so that they got no ventilation. A lot of buildings are operated this way, probably where you work, and companies do this to save money on their energy bill. What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnantuntil Saturday, when we opened the vents up again. When you walked into those rooms,they smelled really bad, and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before. Contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers. In these rooms, the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well, and when Charlie saw this, he got really excited. He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape.

The examples that I just gave you are about architecture, but they're relevant to the design of anything. Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone.

There's a new microbe, I just discovered it. It's called BLIS, and it's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath. Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones?

A conscious approach to design, I'm calling it bioinformed design, and I think it's possible.

Thank you.

(Applause)

Pasupatisvaram - Subha/Shivapantuvarali

Shravanam with a rare song!

Sri B Rajam Iyer sings Pasupatisvaram

paSupatISvaram - rAgaM Siva pantuvarALi - tALaM Adi

pallavi
paSu-patISvaraM praNaumi satataM
pAlita bhaktaM sadA bhajE(a)ham

anupallavi
paScima kASmIra rAja vinutaM
pannagAbharaNa dharaM su-SObhitam

caraNam
pAka SAsanAdi dEva bRndaM
pancAnanaM praNata muni bRndaM
para Siva tatva bOdhitAnandaM
vara guru guha nutaM sOmAskandam
(madhyama kAla sAhityam)
SOka haraM Subha phala prada karaM
paraSu mRga dharaM SUlAdi dharaM
Suka SaunakAdi ghOshita -
Siva pantuvarALi rAga priyam ati caturam

Can you grow a plant in zero gravity?

This one goes for the kids who participated in the INSPIRE camp in St Theresa College, Eluru.
They were so brilliant and curious!

Here is the answer!

Yes, you can grow plants in zero gravity, though there is one complication.

A plant grown on the International Space Station:

The complication that needs to be overcome is that plants make use of gravity when planted to orient themselves (as they can't rely on being planted the right way up), so that their roots go down and their sprouts go up. Without gravity, they will tend to just stay at around the same depth and not sprout. One astronaut reported that this was simple enough to fix, however, just by plucking the ends out of the soil, pulling them to the surface, when they first sprout. From this point, the plant can orient itself using light and will continue to grow. Roots don't suffer as much, as they just grow away from the seed and avoid light (the surface), so develop relatively normally.

After this, growth is mostly normal (as can be seen above). The resulting plants can look a little unusual because they don't have the usual drooping from gravity, so will tend to be more upright.

There hangs the man - Cartoons

People take up all kinds of works.
With experience it all appears to them routine.

I have seen another cartoon where the men hanging outside wonder looking at people sitting at desks and working!

If you consider the heights at which people sit and do the paint job you start reeling!
I have seen the boys and men happily singing away and working there!
The one holding the rope at the top keeps lowering it occasionally to adjust the place of work!
This image does not really give you the feel of the height.
The man is hanging from the wall on the third floor!
I cannot even think of myself at that place.

Seela Veerraju - One Man Show

Veerraju Garu held a one man show at Kalabhavan Gallery recently.
Almost everyone who came to the inaugural was a well known man.
Sri B A Reddy, famous artist inaugurated the show.
Since Sri Veerraju is also a poet and a writer, there were many writers and pots among the guests.
Veerraju Garu is a great human being.
So, many well wishers were there.

The Invite shows two of his very good paintings.
Representing the entire collection on show, these two paintings featured on the card celebrate life!
Life as you and I know!

Rajagopala Sharma - RTP

Raju suddenly appeared and handed over an old bag.
It contained some gramophone records.
Couple of them appeared unusual.
They were bigger than the usual 78 rpm discs.
I have seen inside-out discs that play staring from inside.
I have also seen plastic discs that could be folded.

Here were discs bigger than the regular 78 rpms and were 78 rpms alright.
I started listening to one of them.

It is a RTP of Tiraiyur Sri M Rajagopala Sharma.
The record has a lot of noise.
I have to clean it anyway.
Meanwhile I realised, I have this recording in my library.
Here it is for your listening pleasure.

Turaiyur Sri Rajagopala Sharma - Pallavi and Ragamalika