Its raining meteors!!

When was the last time, you just stared at the sky continuously for five minutes? I bet it would have been years ago, when we were kids, when we felt that the sky had a lot of hidden treasures. It was the time when we dreamed of becoming a pilot to go near the sky or fly in a rocket into the outer space. Those days when we badly wanted to become a rocket scientist or an astronomer.

Yesterday was different. I did stare at the sky for almost 20 minutes just to catch a glimpse of the pereseid meteor shower. After spending 20 minutes on August 11, 2009 in vain just staring at the fog covered black sky, I was very skeptical on catching a glimpse of the same yesterday.

With a great view of the Verdugo mountains (The same view as you see in the photo in my blog header.) from my balcony or patio at the third floor of an old 70s wooden apartment, me and my wife almost had one-fourth of the sky under our view. With lots of fog (might be smog given that we are in Los Angeles county) and the temperature low, it was a mixed chance of seeing the meteor. Being close (almost 30 miles) to LAX, we had lots of airplanes flying by and the city lights from Burbank towards the West made us more doubtful.

Then suddenly we saw it. It was a quick streak of white light, bright at the front and fading away forming a long tail. It was really an exhilarating experience (I haven’t seen one before). I had missed the Comet Hale-Bopp, which was visible from India at some point of time. We waited for some more time and we ended up seeing 10 of them. It was really worth the wait.

The only sad part of this entire story is that I could not catch it in my camera. A very sad thing for me, given my liking to photography.

Postcard

Postcards have been an integral part of the Old Indian Postal Service.

I still remember the days when my grandfather would write letters to my father in those light brownish postcards with the dark brown Lion Capital of Ashoka printed on the back side top right corner. My grandfather with his English knowledge gained by reading "The Hindu" newspaper regularly for more than 6 decades (I am sure it will be more than that) would write his blue Chinese "Hero" pen, making a dark imprint on the post card with little smudging wherever the post card's top layer was not well formed. It carried along with it a smell so specific to the postcards, a mixture of paper and the old print houses where they were printed.

In those days, Inland Cover and the Office cover (I am not sure how to phrase it) were my favorite than the postcards. Inland Cover, with the small font letters telling where to fold first and where to fold second was my all time favorite. The Office cover and the greeting card cover were special because of the postage stamps they carried. Most of the Indian postage stamps that I had collected and which are lying somewhere safe in the newly built shelves at my father's home in Chennai have been sourced by those covers. Most of the foreign stamps were bought by me, when I used to vacation in my Grand Parent's house in Coimbatore and some came from those relatives staying abroad who still remembered to drop a card during the Indian festival season or the English New Year. Some of them still remember, but have switched to those fast and easy ways of communication known popularly as the Internet. Maybe DARPA never thought that the Internet will revolutionize the world to such an extent.

When I started studying French, I came to know about the art of sending post cards.

The French whenever they travelled or visited some new places, they never forgot to buy some postcards of that place. They then sent it to their friends or relatives back home with a very short description of the spot they visited and the weather at that place. If anybody is planning to take a French course, be assured that one question will be based on these post cards. At that point, it made little sense to me about the cards like the light decorated Golden Gate Bridge that we used to receive as a young student.

Why this sudden post about a post card? Has the Indian Postal Service woken up suddenly and started to commemorate the post cards or have they introduced something like the Post Card day. Well, I am not aware of them even if they existed, thanks to the marketing strategy of the Indian Postal Service. I got inspired from a post card image I saw in the Internet which I took and added it to this blog on the top right hand corner, with a small note about me :).