Tag: infinity

🍁Sauntering🍁,🍁Strolling🍁, 🍁Scrunchfesting 🍁

The son and I pranced into the house with our bouquet of fall leaves. We went for a walk to feel the nippy November air on our faces. While out there, we ran after leaves fluttering down in the winds, and indulged in the inevitable scrunch party. 

“No one saw us jump and scrunch in the leaves, Appa!” he said entering the house wind-blown and happy.

“Are you sure?” said the husband, accepting the beautiful bouquet of fall leaves from us, and giving it right back to me with a flourish.

“ I saw some neighbors scuttle inside looking dubious at the activity outside. You sure it wasn’t you two?” 

The son guffawed loudly at that. I scrunched up my face – but was too happy to care. Who could when you’ve just been able to look at views like this?

IMG_0506

Seems only yesterday we were ushering in 2023 and now we are already looking at the final curtain calls of the splendid trees before the closing of the year. As usual, if I throw my mind back the year felt differently at different points in time. Bleak, dreary, joyous, hectic ,the travails of aging with parental figures, friends, events, work, school, volunteer work and so much more.

There is a book called the Secrets of Infinity in my library – Edited by Anonio Lamua, it is a gorgeous book. It gets taken out and seen every now and then just for the sheer brilliance of the topics and the range of topics in them. But there is one thing the book doesn’t quite put the finger on: the feeling of infinity in the repeating seasons of the Earth, the different joys of each month. 

The Tibetan Infinity Knot and the Ouroboros come close in their symbolism – but one of more to do with our actions and therefore Karma and the other a destruction/creation paradigm. 

“So, how do the leaves turn color?”, I said with a flourish revealing the book Summer Green to Autumn Gold – By Mia Posada. The book’s illustrations managed to capture the natural beauties outside, and we settled in to read the book contentedly. 

We flipped the pages comparing the leaves we had in our precious bouquet to the ones in the book. The final reveal of the pigment colors gave us the different colors.

🍁Carotenids : the pigments for the orange and yellow colors

🍁Anthocyanins: the pigments that are responsible for the purples and reds. 

🍁Tannins: responsible for the brown color.

“Trees must be beings of infinity!” , I said sighing happily and the son rolled his eyes.

The Infinite in Us

This week-end was extremely well suited for cozy pursuits. 

Rain slashed down, our surrounding hills sported snow caps and we proudly reveled in the rare beauty of green hills, snow capped peaks, gushing rivers, brimming lakes, rains that sometimes lashed down, other times, lulled and drizzled. In fact, one afternoon, we saw the sun light illuminate the clouds in so many different ways: there weren’t words to describe the crepuscular wonders anymore. The infinite ways in which watery sun and waxing moon can dazzle white, gray and thunderous clouds, is entertaining enough. 

vintage_pointimg_3557

But as evening crept in, we found ourselves wondering whether a cozy family movie night might do the trick instead. 

So, we settled down on both week-end nights to watch two movies that we knew would fascinate the son:

∞ The man who knew infinity – a movie about Ramanujan Srinivasan, the mathematics prodigy. Thomas Hardy , a mathematician at Cambridge who helped Ramanujan publish his works. Ramanujan eventually was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society. The movie, while it had its good moments also felt oddly fragmented in parts. 

The Man Who Knew Infinity (film).jpg

The life of Ramanujan for a person of Indian origin is fairly well known. The poor man who lost his health and vigor to tuberculosis and died at the age of 32 leaving a younger wife behind is tragic.

It is also unnerving to see how hard belonging is. Our immigrant experience is so vastly different from the one Ramanujan braved a century ago. Yet, some of the questions remain: Do we belong to a geography? A culture? Or with like-minded human-beings?

Human kind’s need for social connections is a fascinating aspect (introverts, extroverts, families, friends, colleagues, the importance of whimsy, the energy of youth, and the wisdom of those wiser – every aspect seems to play a part in the worlds we construct around us)

None of this seems easy, and in that struggle lies the beauty of messy human lives.

🚀 Hidden Figures – the movie depicting the lives of 3 African American women who worked at NASA and were stalwarts in their respective fields. 

The official poster for the film Hidden Figures, 2016.jpg

As we sat watching the movies, there were places where we stopped to thank the stars that things seem to have improved for the better. Progress is never easy and the ones who braved the struggles placed in their path with resilience, hard work and good humor, are truly inspirational. The movie was also a good reminder of the human spirit and its capacity for the impossible. With computers having far less than the computing powers in our cell-phones, humankind was able to leave Earth’s atmosphere, orbit the planet, land on the moon and launch space vehicles to explore the solar system. 

The movies were good reminders of a philosophy that is often not given as much importance as other aspects of philosophy: the pursuit of happiness via the pursuit of knowledge is tough, but endlessly rewarding. The truths we come to understand, the worlds we get to unravel are all gifts that keep on giving.