Trailing the Tiger

The seriousness of the Save The Tiger campaign dawned on me only after my weekend trip to Jim Corbett. Jim Corbett is one of India’s finest tiger reserve but the “luck by chance” factor of spotting the stripped cat made me feel otherwise. I am not saying that it is a poor facility but the small number of surviving tigers is what was unsettling.  There are only around 167 (as of December of 2010) of these surviving cats, as told by the locals. 

I have started this entry with the bads of Jim Corbett only so that you can leave my journal with the goods.

The negatives are:

1. The possibility of spotting the feline or any other animal except for the household deer and monkey is as bleak as expecting stability in Microsoft Windows. However, I did have the joy of spotting fresh tiger paw prints. These prints were along the tracks and were everywhere. It made me feel as if the forest officials had them planted.  In one spot, we saw tiger prints intermingled with a different set of prints – the human kind. The forest guide identified them to be those of a bear. I had my imagination running – was the tiger hunting the bear or was the bear hunting the tiger (be cognizant of the fact that the number of tigers is falling)? 
2. 50% of the road is like a roller coaster ride. However of this 50% I am expecting an improvement in only a 50% in the next few months

The positives are:

1. Pine Tree Resort: a boarding with an Indian village theme. It has brick/concrete cottages camouflaged with mud and hay. It serves simple food with a homemade touch. Most suited for foreign tourists as it is devoid of all of those spicy Indian Masalas. 
2. Reserve Landscape: the reserve landscape is beautifully carved. The four wheeled open gypsy, rides you through a variety of terrain. You can find yourself driving over some shallow river streams, thick forests, open rocky fields, tall grass fields, winding up or down hill. The habitat is simply breath taking.    

Overall, it is a go to place for its panoramic beauty. Spotting an animal in the reserve is just an added bonus for a selected few.

Pine Tree Resort
Jim Corbett Residents
Jim Corbett Landscape

© Copyright for all the pictures belong to Atit Shah. Please email me for permissions.

Addendum:

1. The reserve is around 250 kilometers from Noida/Delhi. “Tadka” is a place to pull over for relief and refreshments. Tadka, is famed for its good inexpensive food and for the stopover made by Bollywood celebrity when shooting for a movie titled “Kaal”. This place is adjacent to Mac Donalds. So look for the “M” along the highway.
2. The reserve has 5 zones (listed in the order of personal preference and feel): 
• Dhikala (highly recommended) 
• Jhirna 
• Domunda 
• Sonanadi 
• Bijrani (the tainted one, the one I tracked through)
3. Visit to Dhikala is permitted only if you have made overnight reservation to guesthouses within the zone a few months in advance. 
4. Cost of Safari (as of 2010 for India tourist) is 
• Rs. 100 per head entry fee 
• Rs. 250 for the gypsy 
• No charge for the tour guide (they are provided by the reserve) 
• The locals may lure you in buy a pair of binocular. Don’t give in. 
• The agents who provide you the gypsy will charge you around Rs. 2500 [this cost break will help you negotiate hard]. 
5. There are two timeslots for scheduling the three-three and half hour jungle safari. The morning trip is at 0700hrs and the noon trip is at 1300hrs. For the morning trip you need to get a reservation a day or two in advance and for the noon trip you need to fall in queue at 0500am at the authority office to get a reservation.
6. After this just sit back and feel the pristine Mother Nature.

Ayodhya ... the verdict is in

Homer Simpson comes home one day with a mammoth chocolate donut of diameter, let’s say 2.7 meters. His three brats, Bart, Lisa and Maggie, watching “The Itchy & Scratchy Show” get corybantic at the site of this chocolate donut and look at Homer with pleading eyes and watering mouths. Looking at this innocent appeal, even from Bart, what do you think Homer would do? 

Homer an imbecile of a father after much deliberation would have just one option. He will divide the 2.7 acre; I am sorry I mean, 2.7 diameter donut of the chocolate into three halves and will give one piece each.

This does sound familiar. Ahh! Yes, “The Ayodhya Verdict”.

Homer Simpson the epitome of imbecile will take at most 2 minutes to make this decision. The same decision for Ayodhya took:

1.  60 years of legal battle
2. 18 years since the violent riots as written in history
3. 3 High Court judges of the Lucknow bench – Justice S U Khan, Justice Sudhir Agarwal and Justice D V Sharma
4. 3 plaintiffs – Nirmohi Akhara, Sunni Waqf Board and the Hindus representing Lord Ram
5. 90 trenches of excavation
6. 15,000 (give or take) pages of evidence of having no evidence
7. 24 page summary of the verdict

 What a farce!

One thing I fail to comprehend is, why did were there three judges – one a believer of Islam and the other two believers of Hinduism, presumably. Isn’t this, 1:2 ration wrong? Why couldn’t they have a 1:1 or a 2:2? It’s good none of the factions have cried foul for this reason since the verdict looks to be in favor of the majority.

Now the plaintiffs plan to file an appeal in the Supreme Court. This is what I think will happen.

After another decade of circus, the Supreme Court will issue the following verdict summary:

Hindus and Muslims will have a joint custody of the complete disputed area. The court shall instruct the government to construct a single two-storied holiness using money from taxpayers. The Hindus shall have the first storey for dedicating a temple for Lord Ram while the Muslims shall have the second storey for resurrecting the Mosque. Since the Muslims bow their head in the East to Mecca, the Mosque will have its dome on the East and the Hindus will have their dome in the west. They will have their separate passages; Muslims will enter the Mosque from the North and the Hindus will enter the Temple from the South. As history will have it, this structure will be the quintessence of secularism in the world, a symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity, a one of its kind.

Now you ask where the Akhara goes? The today’s real estate gyms have made Akharas a dying art form and by the time the Supreme Court delivers this verdict, Akhara would be dead. So they won’t be needing any space.

"Atit" Codified

Never has there been a war movie where a secret message was not encoded and transmitted in beeps, nor has there been a product from a mass merchandiser without a barcode.

I think it will be fun to read on some of the coding systems, my way.

Morse Code

On paper it’s represented as a series of dots and dashes and in harmonic waves it’s a series of short and long beeps. A dot is an “on” element followed by one “off” element and a dash is equivalent to three dot or three “on” elements followed by one “off” element. A dot tone is 100ms and a dash tone is 300ms long.

History

In one line – Samuel Morse created the original but a little different code and was used in electric telegraph in the early 1840s.

Adaptation

I don’t remember the Hollywood movie but there was one instance where the pilot of a high-jacked passenger carrier used light to convey the Morse code to a fighter pilot to not to torpedo them and of having trained armed forces on board. How very convenient.

Now imagine the Bollywood the farce. A smuggler in his out of time Ray-Ban’s standing on a beach and having his men signal a fishing trawler laden with contrabands using a light source which is usually an every day house hold torch. They would simple turn on the off the light without giving it a thought. How very stupid.

Get your own code

I used http://www.translatum.gr/converter/morse-code.htm to render my first name in Morse code.

                  

 Braille

The language of the blind in which is each character is made up of six dots arranged in a matrix of three by two. These dots are numbered 1 to 3, top to bottom on the left and 4 to 6, again top to bottom on the right. This arrangement allows for a total of 2⁶ + 1 (possible combination of raised dots + no raised dot) combinations.

History

Interesting, this was originally developed by Charles Barbier for Napolean’s soldiers to arm them with the skill to communicate secretively in the dark. This system was complex and was rejected by the military. In 1821, he meet up with Louis Braille at the National Institute for the Blind in Paris and the language was refurbished and adopted by the blind.

Adaptation

I don’t know of many Hollywood movies that have used this but in recent time, The Book of Eli, has a brilliant adaptation of this. This Braille twist is the only reason I like the movie.

Bollywood is still ignorant of this but imagine Aamir Khan in Ghajini having short term memory loss and being blind. WOW. I would love to see this.

Get your own code

I used http://www.mathsisfun.com/braille-translation.html to render my name in Braille.

The ubiquitous Barcode.

There are several versions of the barcode but the one you see more often are the parallel lines of varying thickness. These are referred to as 1D (1 dimensional) barcodes. Then there are also those that come in squares and a few other geometric shapes. These are referred to as 2D (2 dimensional) barcodes.

History

This system has been metamorphosed considerably over time and the only part of the history worth reckoning is that Bernard Silver a graduate student at Drexel Institute of Technology in Philadelphia initiated the research on this system

Get your own code

I used http://www.morovia.com/free-online-barcode-generator/ to render my name in both the Code128 and Data Matrix Barcodes.

                                                                  

It’s beyond my cognition but Nokia provides a built in 2D barcode reader. I used my E71 to verify the generated code. This is the only use I think I will ever have.

Ranting Me

I am writing back after my 4 years hiatus from blogging. Has blogging become archaic? It sure sounds like it has! I think I will start referring to this as journaling instead. Journaling my creativity, this is until I find a Fonzie (you sure remember Arthur Fonzarelli aka Fonzie from the sitcom “Happy Days”) among words.

While I marinate my brains with innovative ideas to churn out thought provoking entries for journaling, I want to share some of my traits and how they have been shaping up in the last four years. This is with hopes of having you to revisit my journal.

• Narrating, this has been suffering from a writer’s block until today when I have written this and you are reading it.

• Enriching, this has been active and quite invigorating for me. You can scan through my Shelfari (www.shelfari.com/atitsince82/shelf) for a listing.

• Artistic bend, this is gaining momentum and I think I am clambering some where between an armature and a professional. You can again scan through my Flickr (www.flickr.com/photos/foto_fanatic and www.flickr.com/photos/atitsince82) for a preview. My past and future journal entries will also be exhibits of this.

• Giving back to the community, this is some thing, which has never been able to take flight. It’s true that you can never have a sentence with the words “giving” and “Gujarati”. But I am “Jain” and I believe in its dictum of “intense penance”. I will continue to starve in my trivial life to one day attain “Moksha” by delivering code to the open source community.

• Intellectual Calculus, this is still in its prenatal stage, I did buy a Rubic cube a couple of months ago but haven’t yet been able to complete it.

• Social-ability, my DNA lacks all traces of the Social chemical. I am not on Facebook, never heard of MySpace and my Orkut has been dormant (more like Abhishek Bacchans acting career). Social Networking is just a waste of creativity. But I plan to use to advertise my return to Journaling.

• Time Traveling, this has nothing to do with traveling in time but more with traveling from time to time. This desire stems more from the need to satiate my thirst for photography than from the need to reach out to new life forms and new civilization.

The map and the blue markers (courtesy Google Map) mark the places I have traveled to in the last 6 or 7 years. It was when putting this together, it dawned on me that I have traveled to the furthest point in the East and in the West (for the Geography scraper its Japan in the East and California in the West). WOW. How many of you have had this privilege?

To put this travel chronologically:

2003: Goa

2004: Hyderabad / Secunderabad

2004: Bhubhaneshwar

2005: Bengalure

2006: Noida / Delhi

2006: Japan

2007: Mumbai

2008: Malaysia

2008: Singapore

2008: Qatar

2009: Rajkot

2009: New York

2009: California

2009: Mumbai