Being missed by some

(Posted on all my major blogs.)

Approaching sunset in Oulu, Finland at 10 pm on a lovely summer's day.




After I crushed my knuckle and went through the trauma of an operation, Finnish style, which I will blog after I get out of the hands of the doctors, I have tried to keep up with my schedules, but not with much success. Typing, driving and doing just simple tasks as taking of my jacket or putting on my shirt, with one hand is painfully slow.

The travel schedule has not reduced. My daily routines have increased substantially since Nisha, Sunil and Hannah are holidaying in India and also Ganesh has taken his annual holiday. Number of group arrivals in Helsinki has mounted substantially and juggling the apartments to keep everyone happy has been a Herculean task. But Sunil has been a great help, even though he is working through a dial-up internet connection from a Kerala village!

Last week I drove up to Rovaniemi, on the Arctic Circle, and back twice. Each a 450 km round trip. Then on Friday I did a round trip to Tampere, about 900 km. Levi, our Zambian friend from Helsinki, was there and, with my one hand, I helped him empty one flat, load and unload the trailer and finally dropped him at the station.

(Just as I reached the office at 21:30, I had a call from Levi that he had got back to Helsinki and he was driving to deliver a lecture when he smashed his car into another, fractured his shoulder and ruined his car!)

I must say I am living a charmed existence and walking a tight rope trying to keep all my schedules in order.

The next week will be equally hectic, but with Sunil and Nisha back, maybe I can ease up a bit. (One can always hope, but knowing my intent to work myself to the bone, it is just idle mental chatter.)

When people remind me my last blog update was so many weeks ago, I feel a terrible moral guilt as I love all my readers more than they love my ramblings.

The gentle reminders a tremendous boost for the ego.

I have been going through a nightmare trying to get a suitable location for the Mumbai Findians Evening on Friday 13th November 2009. Now I understand why they say that Friday the 13th is unlucky. Help me prove that is wrong!

Annikki and my 59ers Directory Project of 2009 is progressing nicely. Just arrived is a video from our 1999 40th Year Reunion. I am waiting to get my hand on that and extract some good stills for inclusion into the Directory.

The registrations for our 50th Year Reunion are coming along nicely. If you are a 59er and have not yet registered, please do it as soon as possible.

Many of you are not being careful. I have sent several of you information that your Facebook, email address, etc. have been hijacked and your address books are public property. These guys add your name to CDs that they sell and then you are receiving thousands of spam mail while thousands are being spammed in your name! Please be careful where you sign up.

I am busy planning our Indian trip for October through to December, 2009. If any of you want Finnish know how or want to start a business or exports to / from India, please let me know and I will try to fit you into our schedule - Kottayam, Cochin, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad (possibly), Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Delhi!

One interesting news item from India - some of the better known colleges, like our alma mater, St. Stephen's College, may soon be giving their own degrees! Wonder how that will work out as I am already sceptical of people get 90+ average in school leaving to get into the college of their choice!

I have also been helping to organise our Indian Independence Day celebrations. About 70 people will attend and it is going to be a blast.

Founders' Day 2009

Word has just reached me that the original plan to hold the Founders' Day Church ervice and programme on Thursday, 12th November, 2009 has been scrapped and it will now be held on Saturday, November 14th, 2009.

The Church Service at the St. Thomas Cathedral is scheduled for 17:30 on the Saturday evening.

Watch this space for more info as it reaches me.

Claustrophobia - A new definition?

(Posted on all my major blogs.)

Ever since the age of 12 or 13, when an uncle of mine taught me the art of relaxation using artificial stress inducement, I have never had a problem of going to sleep. Before my head is settled in the pillow, I am fast asleep. I do not wake up at night and toss and turn. I nod off as soon as the reason for waking up is attended to. I hardly ever dream. Sit in a car with a safe driver, and I can drop off into neverland within a couple of minutes.

I usually wake up fully relaxed, even if the sleep lasted only a few minutes.



I came back from the hospital on Thursday afternoon with my left hand in plaster from the forearm till the tips of my finger. The operation to repair the knuckle of my fourth finger in my left hand had been successful, but it meant that my arm would be in this plaster-cast for 5 weeks. Plenty of painkillers and a course of antibiotic for 5 days, so no real problem of pain.

When I went to bed on Thursday evening, I thought I was going to sleep in my usual fashion. However, when my head hit the pillow, and as recommended, I put my plastered arm in a suitable and comfortable position on a couple of raised pillows, I felt a tremendous and overpowering feeling of restlessness. Sleep was just not coming in the next few minutes. Each passing second was raising an anxiety within me. I was feeling claustrophobic, even though, bodily, I was not in any confined situation.

Then it dawned on me that my mind was reacting to the fact that my left hand had lost its freedom. It was caged, and the stress relaxation technique, which I have used for over 50 years to drop into my slumber, was blocked by an overpowering feeling of fear. My fingers and wrist had lost their freedom. They were confined and this feeling of confinement was causing my mind to say that I was totally confined. And the realisation that I would have to endure this confinement for 5 more weeks was mentally unbearable.

I jumped out of bed, feeling as if I could not stay put down. I walked into the kitchen and expressed my claustrophobic thoughts to Annikki.

She was cool and calm and told me that I should take each day as it came, and the 5 weeks would be over even before I knew it.

I went to the living room and plonked down in front of the tv, but my heart and soul were not into watching any of the programmes. I let tiredness possess me so much so that I allowed my body to react to a mentally created feeling of a body becoming tired. Then when I went to bed, it was not my relaxation that put me to sleep, but a feeling of great tiredness - quite different to my normal situation.

As soon as Annikki came to bed, I put my plastered arm around her, and that claustrophobic feeling suddenly lifted and I dropped quickly into my normal deep slumber.

When I woke up in the morning, although relaxed, I still had that feeling at the back of my mind that I was a caged person. My n degrees of freedom had been severely curtailed. I now understood how anyone who loses any degree of freedom, mental or physical, could suddenly feel claustrophobic.

In all my life I had never experienced this. It was indeed a major revelation to me about the sufferings of my fellow travellers on this earth who had lost their freedom, any part of it.

I will be glad when this hand is uncaged. I will value all the degrees of freedom that I enjoy much much more than I ever have! And I will appreciate the feelings of other men and women, and any animal, who are caged in any form.

Golden Directory Project now in full swing

As of today, Monday 22nd June, the professionals have moved in to get the 59ers Directory Project onto a time based schedule.

I have a young Ethiopian student who will work in my office translating all our dreams into a reality. He will work by my side on all the mundane stuff. Annikki will chip in with her artistic inputs and comments. I will do the stuff that can only be done on my Mac mini. (The student is using a Windows computer!)

If you have not sent Annikki your write up, the way you want it to appear, and photographs, please do that as soon as possible.

Besides the usual stuff we have unearthed stuff which will make your heart pump at an accelerated pace when this Coffee Table Book is in your grasp.

Please continue to send us material as we want to ensure we have all useful and interesting material in the book. (I am still looking for a Prefect's tie as that had the gold emblem on a blue fabric, if I remember correctly.

Did I once refer to this as the Mother of All Golden Reunions?

We are well on the way to that, even though many would doubt that we could achieve that status!

1959 Issue of The Borderer

Today I received the 1959 Issue of The Borderer from 59er Trevor Newnes in Australia. (I also got the 1960 and 1961 issues from Trevor, but I already had the last one sent to me by Mr. Billington a few years ago, which I must return to him!)



It is fascinating as much as it is a memorabilia which is worth a small fortune. That is like all things from our school in 1959! :-)

If anyone else has a copy or knows of any, please ask them to contact me immediately. I want to establish how many copies of this issue are available out there. Considering the Prefects´ Notes by School Captain 57er Bhupinder Singh Anand in The Borderer, maybe not many!

It looks like the 59ers Coffee Table Directory is going to be a publication which is going to be worth a million, considering I am only going to publish just a 100 copies of it. Free to all our Class Members attending the reunion and those who assist our reunion efforts (seen and unseen) and on sale to others. (Also free to staff members attending the reunion.)

I already have the 1959 Cock House photograph (Palmer), School Prefects photograph, School Hockey Team photograph, School Cricket Team photograph, School Football Team photograph, Sports Day brochure, many other items, and some absolutely wonderful pictures of many of our year. I do have photographs of almost all the staff members.

I am still looking for input from the 59er girls. I do have a class photograph of them. Wish I had one of the boys, but I do not think we had class photographs for us boys in that time! Maybe I can be proved wrong!!!

But there are a few surprises in store for you in this publication.

Anyone having an undamaged copy of the picture of the class visit to the Sathe Biscuit Factory in 1954 should scan it and send it to me. The one that 59er Percy Mistri sent may may be too difficult to restore - but my photo experts are trying hard to restore it. Was the Sathe Biscuit Factory owned by our late Sudan Sathe's family? Is it still functioning and can anyone get me a photograph of it if it is still out there.

Anyone with snaps from our 1955 visit to Vasind should also let me have a scanned copy of it. Remember the Dead Chicken was reborn there!

More about Cooliris

I was stunned to read one of the comments on my blog about the exciting Cooliris.

It appears that a Cathedralite - Mayank Mehta - is one of the people behind Cooliris. I located a Mayank Mehta who is a 99er.

Anyone with more info about this person - please let me have it.

Reason for excitement

(Also posted on all my major blogs.)

Many of you have emailed me to ask why I was so excited with the software "Cooliris".

There are many many reasons, but I will highlight the two major ones:

1. There is an old Chinese proverb which says: "A picture is worth a thousand words."
2. You can browse thousands of pictures in a couple of minutes, unlike text.

This is now the era of the photo-journalist. If he / she can succeed in capturing the truly great image that depicts an event and add a single one line caption to it, the number of hits one can get to that image or video, and subsequently the caption and then the text, even if the Google Search result was likely to be on the 50th page, is going to be amazing.

Just search for "Jacob, Oulu" on Google Search and you get 95,800 links. It will take months to through those links.

Search for it on "Cooliris" and see how much more you get and you can get to even the 5000th result in a jiffy!

Don't believe me - take any random name of a friend and see what you get!

Truly amazing results. And, you can go through all those tens and tens of results in a flash.

Beware of one problem with "Cooliris".

You can get motion sickness as you race through the thousands of images.

I tried various search combinations yesterday and was thrilled with the results.

But, when I got up from my office table, I was tottering as my eyes had been working overtime going through this huge bonanza of results.

Yes, there is a reason to be excited, but also a warning that this could seriously affect your brain!