Spring

‘No winter lasts forever, no spring skips its turn’- Hal Borland.

The word spring itself brings joy and colours with it. After the ode of the winter the carol of the spring arrives. The time when beauty is at its peak. Talk about the different shades of flowers or the splendid bluishness of the sky, all wrapped in the showers of tenderness and tint of colours. The spring features itself as a romantic hero, after the dull and lazy winters as if the nature dances after a long sleep.

Spring means life, life is to render. Life is to live to the fullest. All of us are in so much hurry that we have no time to wait and watch the elegant beauty which covers the entire landscape as far as we can see. Beauty is not something which is hidden in the deepest corners of the world, it is right behind our eyes. We have forgotten the crisping of birds, the fluorescence of the moon, and the sparkle of those tiny objects glittering above our heads during night. 

What is happiness? I know happiness is subjective. All of us have a different taste of happiness. I believe it is a collection of moments, small moments which pass by unnoticed. Moment when you see a child dancing in rain, moment when an unknown person smile back at you when you smile at him, moments when you do super silly things with your friends in class, moment when your mother calls you during class just to ask have you washed your bedsheet or not, moment when you take a photo and you know it will become a memory. I think all these things make our life worth living for and this is what spring teaches us, the colours of life are these small things which we miss in search of big moments. We must preserve them like the spring preserve its beauty for next year. Forget all the bad and always be hopeful as described by the great poet P.B. Shelley in these lines ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’

Submitted by:

Ankit Mahato

A6429713003

"The grand dame of Urdu fiction: Ismat Chughtai"

Ismat Chughtai (1911–91) was Urdu’s most courageous and controversial woman writer in the twentieth century. She carved a niche for herself among her contemporaries of Urdu fiction writers—Rajinder Singh Bedi, Saadat Hasan Manto and Krishan Chander—by introducing areas of experience not explored before.

Chugtai stayed on in India after the subcontinent was partitioned. Ismat's work revolutionized feminist politics in the twentieth century Urdu literature. She explored feminine sexuality, middle-class gentility, and other evolving conflicts in modern India. Her outspoken and controversial style of writing made her the passionate voice for the unheard, and she has become an inspiration for the younger generation of writers, readers and intellectuals.

She also wrote for films and much later, even acted in one-- she played the role of the grandmother in Junoon (1978). Several of her stories have been made into films. Of these, Garam Hawa (1973) won a great deal of acclaim. She is, therefore, also a part of the complex relationship that existed between Indian cinema and the progressive writers in Urdu.

Ismat Chughtai was a born rebel. She led an unconventional life, went in for higher education, took up a job, lived alone, married a man of her choice and was cremated, as she had desired, instead of being buried.

Submitted by:

Muktaparna Boruah

A6429713002

Driving 'on' Sunshine

Submitted by:

Aravind K.A.

A6429713001

Charging Electric Cars– On an atypically cold night in Austin,the confab of area  and technology companies,  hosted an event to unveil the Solar Wing ACPV system at local engineering design firm Concurrent Design. The crowd of nearly 400 people represented an eclectic mix of Austinites–solar and enthusiasts and technology lovers who seemed to have been waiting for this kind of collaborative project for years.

The Solar Wing carport offers the covered parking many businesses pay for, with the added benefit of generating clean power. The two canopies hovering just outside the Concurrent office hold a 7.5kW PV system that will produce enough power to charge up to four electric vehicles (EVs) simultaneously.

With 30 MAGE AC Solar modules powered by  on the back of each panel, the ACPV system was a breeze for the team at Circular Energy to install and ideal for harvesting maximum energy when nearby trees cast a shadow on the array.

As EVs continue to grow in popularity, an ACPV system that can efficiently recharge those EVs strictly from the power of the sun can be a game changer for individuals and organizations looking to broaden the appeal –and adoption–of cars that run on .

Concurrent Design owner Tom Ortman, an engineer and EV owner had wanted to incorporate a PV system into his business for years. Tom understood that to realize the full benefits of driving an EV, he would have to find a solution for powering his EV from the sun.
When he saw the SolarWing system, he knew he’d found the answer.

“It’s elegant, it’s sophisticated, and it shows off the idea that solar can be sexy,” Tom said. We can create energy for our homes and our transportation right out of thin air,” he added. “And we can all be driving on sunshine.

Hybrid Fuel Cell Power Generation

Submitted by:

Aravind K.A.

A6429713001

Electric Power Generation Technology -   a fuel cell electric power generation company, announced the JV partnership execution with the Italian firm Associazione Italiana per lo Sviluppo Economico (AISVEC) to leverage the expanding global natural gas supply infrastructure to deploy its fuel efficient electric power generation devices within Italy.

Alessio Montanarini, AISVEC Vice President, states:

The competitive advantage of the GEI hybrid fuel cell electric power generation technology will address the paramount need to decrease the high energy costs in Europe, whose market amounts to 500 million people. Initially, the partnership will focus on the Italian market and later on Europe, the Balkans and CIS countries, addressing the 3000 public authorities and private companies connected to AISVEC. To this end, AISVEC is negotiating with governmental authorities in Central and Eastern Europe with regards to fuel supply, power requirements, and economic development.

“The GEI goal is to remove the fuel infrastructure as a commercialization barrier, and to provide the GEI hybrid fuel cell electric power generation technology to large scale potential consumers and thereby lowering manufacturing costs”, stated Dr. K. J. Berry, GEI Chairman and CEO.

The partnership between the two firms will enable European companies to install the GEI hybrid fuel cell cogeneration power system, and take advantage of the new EU Policy on Climate Change. Also, companies will be able to leverage the large scale methane and natural gas infrastructure system presently in Italy and the rest of Europe to become grid independent.

A pilot plant and technology showcase will launch in October 2014 providing over 6,000 kW-hr per month of combined heat and power (CHP) to a small municipality in Northern Italy. The partnership will focus on clean, efficient and environmentally friendly electric power systems within public owned buildings, shopping malls, commercial real estate, and industries.

About AISVEC
AISVEC is an Italian economic association with a worldwide presence, supporting public authorities and private enterprises with easy access to credit facilities, investments, lobbying and bilateral agreements with foreign authorities and/or private partners.

About GEI Global Energy Corp:
GEI Global Energy Corp is a fuel cell electrical power generation company leveraging a menu of novel and innovative fuel cell power systems technologies to provide clean and inexpensive energy solutions for developing economies.

Daffodils (Summary)

Submitted by:

Ankit Mahato

A6429713003

Daffodils is a poem written by William Wordsworth. This poem describes the enormous amount of joy a simple thing can provide to us. In other words, one may say, search of happiness and peace can be served by mere blossom of nature. It is far more impacting than the short term materialistic happiness. The poet in this poem explains the beauty of daffodils dancing with wind, carefree, innocent and unbound. The poet unfolds the long lasting effect those daffodils have on him.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

The poet used to wander on hills isolated from the rest of the world. May be he wants to counter the feeling of outcast or maybe he just want to find a place solitary. Then unexpectedly he found an ocean of golden daffodils between the hills, beside the lake and beneath the trees, dancing around like a carnival with the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay;

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The poet compares the daffodils with the stars. Like the stars bloom in the mid of a dark night, likewise the daffodils perish the dullness of the poet’s mind and heart. The poet uses various metaphor to create an essence of that portrait, like “never ending line along the margin of a bay”. He describes the daffodils to be dancing by tossing their heads and the magic that is overflowing by thousands of them is beyond words. He wants to capture the whole scene in his mind.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee;

The poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company;

I gazed-and gazed-but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought.

The waves of the lake also danced side by side but they remained unnoticed in front of the daffodils. The poet thinks this scene can touch the hearts of even the most introvert people. Even it can bring cheers to a sadist person. The poet wants to gaze the prettiness of the daffodils as long as he could so that he could retain the beauty of it for a long time. Then he thinks can wealth purchase this ceramic allure chronicle? Can wealth satisfy the vast canvas of unsaturated thoughts, like these daffodils do? It can only provide momentary pleasure.

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Whenever the poet is depressed, vacant or pensive, he remembers the beautiful sketch which was made by nature on the heart of the hills. All the unpleasant thoughts vanishes away and fills his heart with immense joy and his heart start dancing like the daffodils.  

Beginning

Submitted by:

Ankit Mahato

A6429713003

Every day we wake up, we see a lot of people smiling, walking, playing and other things. The ample lives we see sound us are pinnacle part of this world. The world we actually know. But does it has a beginning or is it endlessly flowing? What will happen if time will start flowing backwards? Why we know the past only not the future? Why is this universe created? If there is a beginning, there must be an end.

It is hard to believe that the life and the surroundings that we are so used to has a beginning. At the beginning of the universe, the world we know was quite different. We were talking about the universe 14 billion years ago. All started with a giant explosion known as Big Bang. Before the idea of big bang there were many pre conceived notions about the beginning of universe. St. Augustine accepted a date of 5000 B.C. for the creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. It is interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice age, about 10,000 B.C., which is when civilization really began. Aristotle and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it made too much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the world around it had existed, and would exist forever. But in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever you look, distant stars are moving rapidly away from us. In other words, the universe is expanding. This means that at earlier times objects would have been closer together. In fact, it seemed that there was a time when they were all at exactly the same place.

Hubble’s observation suggested that there was a time called the big bang when the universe was infinitesimally small and therefore infinitely dense. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang. Evidence was also provided by the second law of thermodynamics, formulated by the German physicist Boltzmann. It states that the total amount of disorder in the universe always increases with time. This is like the argument about human progress, suggests that the universe can have been going only for a finite time. Otherwise, it would by now have degenerated into a state of complete disorder, in which everything would be at the same temperature.

At the big bang itself, the universe had zero size and so must have been infinitely hot. But as the universe expanded, the temperature of the radiation would have decreased. One second after the big bang it would have fallen to about ten thousand million degrees. About one hundred seconds after the big bang, the temperature would have fallen to one thousand million degrees, the temperature inside the hottest stars. At this temperature protons and neutrons would no longer have sufficient energy to escape the attraction of the strong nuclear force. They would start to combine together to produce the nuclei of atoms of deuterium, or heavy hydrogen, which contains one proton and one neutron. Gradually these hydrogen atoms combined to form lithium and beryllium and other heavier elements.

We can now see that everything that we look around had their origin directly or indirectly from the big bang. Still there are many questions waiting to be answered. What was there before the big bang? What agency created the universe, and what created that agency? Will this universe which appear expanding endlessly now will sink into a singularity?

A small act of kindness

Submitted by:

Muktaparna Boruah (A6429713002)

A few days ago, I was witness to an incident that touched my heart. My friend and I were having lunch in the H-block cafeteria and a few tables away a group of students were celebrating a birthday of one of their friends. They were laughing, singing and enjoying as the cake was cut. After a while, as they were leaving, I saw them calling one of the staff members who work in the cafeteria. A few words were exchanged and they left. The staff member, a young boy really, called his friends and together they sat around the table and had the cake. The smiles on their faces were priceless.

This is one of thousands of incidents that occur every day around the world. Yes, bad things happen too, probably more than the good ones? But this is probably because we notice the bad more than the good. J  

The next time you get an opportunity; do something which will make someone happy. Because more than often, one small act of kindness brightens up more than one person’s day.