1. City of Angels(1998)
2. The Notebook(2004)
3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind(2004)
4. Casablanca(1942)
5. Love Story(1970)
6. The Holiday(2006)
7. Pride & Prejudice(2005)

Today i attended the talk by the 1992 Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry, Prof. Rudolph A. Marcus! he visited our university...WOW!  i feel this was like one of the best experience i ever had....all this while i've only read about nobel laureates...and now i get to see and hear from them. i dont think i'd have got such an opportunity had i been in my home country!

May be it’s been more than 100 years since the first aeroplane took flight but a little more than a decade ago two kids of the age 8 and 9 set out to build the aeroplane from scratch! Having been witness to a couple of construction works and hence having access to a lot of raw materials they felt greatly “blessed” and all set for flying the first aircraft in their small sleepy locality.  They discussed late into the night about the travails of an engineer trying to build an aircraft. To them, flying was certainty; the main problem was the overhead transmission lines!! “What if we crash into that?!”. They hadn’t got over their “shocking” experience after inserting a metal wire into the plug point…appazha 11kV line! 

Encyclopaedia Britannica was their reference esp. the picture of Wright brothers craft. They studied the picture for days to unravel the secret of flight. To build a flying plane in the primitive form, all that was required was 2 wooden planks and a network of rods to hold them apart!!  They also had two posters of Airbus 320’s in their hand..just in case they wanted to go for an upgrade!

Thus the construction work began the next day.

For them, that day was the most important day in the history of mankind.

From morning till evening, for about a week, all that could be heard was sound of the hammer striking the wood, and some occasional verbal arguments.

“Oh! look what have you done?!! You haven’t left space for the pilot to sit! “.They had hit their first obstacle. But they had read that it took about 3000 trial for Edison to make the first successful electric bulb, so they weren’t discouraged. Infact they were happy as after all their reading they came to the conclusion success always comes after failure. “Yeah!...we are in the right path!” commented the elder one.

Their parents used to look on and wonder “What are these guys doing??...wasting all the ply wood and nails!...hmm…let them do it may be one day might invent something!”.

Finally the “plane” was ready. But again, ”how will we move this plane forward with great speed?!  That’s how planes fly right ?.. they run with great speed then lift the front part of the plane and there it goes! Hmm…so how are we gonna do that?!”. A “brilliant” idea came to their minds. “Yes, lets carry this plane on our bicycle and ride the cycle down the slope and when the plane just begins to fly, we’ll hold on to the plane!!”. With all plans set, they carried their plane and took the cycle along with them to the top of the slope. But still again “how are we gonna land?!”. They felt may be an umbrella will help!! They did a couple of tests with umbrella by jumping from top of the compound wall with no success. “appam ee cartoon-il kannikunathokke veruthe!”, they concluded.

“The plane has to be tested. Someone had to do it even if it meant risking our lives” they thought.  They decided the pilot will have a rope around his waist and the one on ground will hold the other end.  The eldest of the two volunteered to be the “pilot” and the younger one the “ground staff”. At last the flight was going to be a reality. Holding the “plane” in front, the pilot rode the bicycle as hard as he could. He started gaining speed, sensing some lift on the plane, tightly holding on to the plane he jumped from the cycle.

The ground staff looks in the air, then, looks on the ground. A plane crash.

The pilot escaped with some minor injuries. But he felt no pain. All that mattered to him was the plane and its relics.

That night they understood…..”May be, building a plane is too much for us……so, from tomorrow onwards we’ll start our work on a helicopter”!!

Well, the chief architect of this experiment is now in Singapore, and his junior will soon join him...lets wait and see if the next phase of it take place there!

Signing off,

Vineet

(moving to Singapore soon)