Shobha Yatra 2024 - Gudi Padwa - Vasai Road | शोभा यात्रा २०२४ - गुढी पाडवा - वसई रोड

Vasai Road - Din Dayal Nagar Shobha Yatra 2024 on the ocassion of Gudi Padwa organized by Pandit Din Dayal Nagar Utsav Mandal and Rajadhiraj Vasai, Maharashtra, India

Shobha Yatra is celebrated on the occassion of Gudi Padwa which was on the 9th of April for 2024 and designates the start of the new year according to Marathi Calendar, with the new year of 1945 started as per the calendar.

Shobha Yatra features various instruments such as dhool, tasha, among others and is a very mesmerising and energizing experience to watch. The performers are of various age groups, most of whom are young, both boys and girls. These performers carry huge dhool(s) (drums) with them, with a group playing small drums. A director can also be seen instructing the group of performers on how to play, and whether to walk or stay at a place. This group also has flag bearers, where the flag is a bhagwa (saffron) flag indicating the rein of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the great warrior king of the Maratha empire who ruled over the entire Indian subcontinent. The Shobha Yatra group of permormers walk across the streets of the entire neighbourhood. The sound also simulates a war cry and fills you with adrenaline.

--- Marathi Translation ---

वसई रोड - पंडित दिन दयाल नगर उत्सव मंडळ आणि राजाधिराज वसई, महाराष्ट्र, भारत यांच्या संयुक्त विद्यमाने आयोजित गुढीपाडव्यानिमित्त दिन दयाल नगर शोभा यात्रा २०२४

शोभा यात्रा ही गुढीपाडव्याच्या निमित्ताने साजरी केली जाते जी 2024 च्या 9 एप्रिल रोजी होती आणि मराठी दिनदर्शिकेनुसार नवीन वर्षाची सुरुवात ठरवते, 1945 चे नवीन वर्ष कॅलेंडरनुसार सुरू होते.

शोभा यात्रेत ढोल, ताशा यांसारखी विविध वाद्ये आहेत आणि पाहणे हा अतिशय मंत्रमुग्ध करणारा आणि उत्साहवर्धक अनुभव आहे. कलाकार विविध वयोगटातील आहेत, त्यापैकी बहुतेक मुले आणि मुली दोन्ही तरुण आहेत. हे कलाकार त्यांच्यासोबत मोठे ढोल (ढोल) घेऊन जातात, एक गट लहान ढोल वाजवतो. एक दिग्दर्शक कलाकारांच्या गटाला कसे वाजवायचे आणि एखाद्या ठिकाणी चालायचे की थांबायचे याबद्दल सूचना देताना देखील पाहिले जाऊ शकते. या गटामध्ये ध्वज वाहक देखील आहेत, जेथे ध्वज हा भगवा (भगवा) ध्वज आहे जो संपूर्ण भारतीय उपखंडावर राज्य करणारा मराठा साम्राज्याचा महान योद्धा राजा छत्रपती शिवाजी महाराज यांचा लगाम दर्शवतो. परमोरमर्सचा शोभा यात्रा गट संपूर्ण परिसराच्या रस्त्यांवर फिरतो. ध्वनी देखील युद्धाच्या आक्रोशाचे अनुकरण करतो आणि तुम्हाला एड्रेनालाईनने भरतो.

#shobhayatra #shobha #gudipadwa #2024 #vasai #vasairoad #maharashtra

Meditation and creativity

I have observed many people claim that meditation increases creativity, brings calmness and improves productivity, which is great!

Well, I am going to test that from today, 8th April 2024, by meditating for a minimum of 1 hour every single day no matter what for the next 1 month, until 8th May 2024, and observe and note the progress here on this blog.

How do I meditate?

I meditate by:

1. Sitting with a straight spine, preferably at a quiet calm place
2. Closing my eyes
3. Focusing attention on the feeling of air touching my nostrils as I breathe in and out
4. As my mind wanders away, I realize this, and bring back attention to the breath

Minimum session duration will be 12 minutes, expected to go to 20 minutes every session, forming a total of 1 hour per day.

Am I meditating for the first time? no. I have been an on and off meditator for quite some time, I would say for more than 8 years now, but the frequency varied and it was very occassional.

Time to make it serious now! at least for the test! and whatever is ahead in my life!

I meditated for about 25 minutes today, in 2 sessions, time to do the rest now!

The first was in my room and the second was at a beautiful location, after watching the sunset, in a cool breeze (but with some people and noise around, which I don't care about) and was an amazing experience.

The Mumbai Local Journey

This is a nightmare for any sane person living on planet Earth.

You sleep at midnight every day, or even later, set up an early morning alarm to get up, at around 5:50AM in the morning, complete all your routine activities as quickly as possible and run.

You run for the train.

Once you reach the platform, you try your best to board the train, but be careful, there's almost always a huge gap in between the platform level and the floor of the train, if you fall in there, consider yourself dead.
Oh, not just that, you need to get across another force, that is, other people. Other people like you who ran for the train from their homes waking up early in the morning just like you. You got to push them, push them like you are in a battlefield, ready to attack an upcoming enemy, use all your energy and push to get inside the metal container.

Congratulations, consider yourself lucky to have boarded the train, now you try your best to be yourself, surrounded by tons of people, packed in a metal container worse than farmed bovine animals. You look around at other people just like you, who are standing there, nose to nose with you. But now, what do you do next? What do you do until you reach your destination, for probably another hour or two? With no space left to even move your hand around, with hot and humid air, breathing in the air exhaled by hundreds of other passengers, with little or no air ventilation, what do you do?

You either stay calm, close your eyes and sleep, get your mobile phone out of your pocket and stare at it, that is, if you are able to reach your pocket to get it out.

Now you need to be careful not to stand at the wrong place. Because if you do, you will be pushed out at a wrong station by people standing behind you, ready to dive out as soon as the train has almost stopped. Or you will get hit by people standing ready on the platform to jump inside the moving train as it is about to stop at the station. More dangerous than standing in for a bull stampede.

And, are people sober and mindful enough to stay calm the entire journey? Are they really so at peace or have already accepted their fate that they would travel without even uttering a single word or not getting into any fights? Well, of course not, you will also come across people fighting, arguing, hitting each other over minuscule matters and serious matters as well. Going to such an extent so as to throw the opponent out of the running train, killing him or her.

You stand there listening to the automatic prior announcements of upcoming station and prepare a virtual progress bar of how far you have reached and how much more is left. You get excited as your destination comes close, ready to get down.

Now you got to get down, which requires you to prepare yourself and stand at the correct position, so that when other passengers forcefully push outside, you are in their stream. Now you breath deeply, self assuring that you reach your destination safely. But wait is the run over? Maybe you will still have to run to your office or college.

Oh, and you got to repeat the entire thing for returning back home, best of luck for that.
In all, you have wasted approximately 3 to 4 hours of your day running, getting stuck with other people, trying to be safe and running more.

I suspect living in a calm village and farming would be better than this.
And congratulate yourself once again for not being part of a dozen people getting killed by these trains every day.
Now get ready to finish up whatever you have to do at home and sleep at midnight again, to do the same thing tomorrow.

This is inhumane, all these humans deserve so much more comfort, safety, peace and freedom.

I got to sleep, and breathe

In one sentence:

I fail at time (and commitment) management terribly (Promised myself to write a new blog post every day, and this is one after an entire week)

As soon as my mom(and the alarm clock) forcibly wakes me up at 5:50 in the morning on a week day, I am slow at the beginning wasting whole 20 minutes brushing my teeth and then I realize I need to accelerate. Then the picture of missing the daily morning Mumbai local train to college comes in front of my eyes, when I miss it, I have to run (practically run) for the other train, dangerously crossing the tracks on Virar station, with my heart pounding and my lungs demanding more air, still determined to get to the I'st class coach. I start thinking where the time can be saved, even if its a minute, saving it becomes worth a lot. Eating breakfast before leaving has to be completed in less than five minutes, it can be reduced even more if I eat half of it. Reaching for a rikshaw now has to be a sprint run as I cannot afford to run about 200 meters for the train. Something, somewhere is wrong. Not just wrong, but ridiculously wrong.

I got to breathe.

It's not that I don't love going to college, I do, I enjoy the journey, the lectures (YES, I like attending lectures, unlike most others!). The only thing I do not like is giving up my sleep. Because of my poor time management skills, I only get to sleep for around 6 hours a day. I had read somewhere that sleeping less than 7-8 hours per day for long periods of time makes your brain work like that of a drunk person, with above the alcohol limit levels. Which means, every day at college, my brain is of a drunk person, giving worst performance I ever can. I feel like someone gifted me the greatest gift if I get to close my eyes for a mere five minutes at around 2 PM in the classroom.

Others see a walking dead in the classroom, every day.

Not just the morning routine, but the day to day activities like completing assignments,  doing my homework, studying for the test, eating, getting back to bed to sleep, all follow a similar pattern. Every day, I try my best to sleep as early as possible, and end up sleeping around midnight.

The above is my daily story and also that of an average office worker who hates his job  :(

The only difference with me is that I do not hate my work, I love Computer Science, programming, attending college and the lectures.

I need to plan my daily routine, which tasks to complete, when to complete them, their deadlines, what is to be done when I miss a deadline and make sure that I do not assign more tasks to myself than I can handle.

I do not want to stay a lazy, unorganized, average human anymore!
Someone needs to learn eating the candies completely, and on time.

Knowing a person is not enough

This is my first post in a series of my personal posts on this blog, giving the blog a more personal side of my life.
This blog has always been a technical one, having technical articles, tutorials etc. From Today, I will share my personal life, my beliefs, thoughts to the world on this medium.

So you think you know a person and you can trust him?
I always felt that you can trust a person if you looked into his/her eyes, dig deeper and get that sense of comfort, understanding, familiarity and trust. But I was wrong. No matter how well you study a person, try to understand his background, his personality inside out, you still don't really understand him, and cannot trust him.
Speaking of trust, your closest friend, colleague can decide to trust you or ignore you completely based on his requirements. Of course that is his decision and he has no obligation when it comes to maintaining the relation. Most of the not-so-real relations are formed on requirements. You make friends based on requirements, and what happens when any one of you or both of you do not need the other? You ignore them?

A real friend, a real relation is no where close to that. A real friend (as they say in movies) would die for you. He would give anything he has for you. But again, finding such a person, a real friend is often a daunting task. You have to take risks and reveal all your secrets to your to-be real friend.

Speaking of me, I've recently had a lot of requirement-based relations. People used me for their benefits, they forgot me when their needs were over. When I talked to some of my friends about this, they suggested that this is how the world works with a kind "Welcome to the World" statement. I refused to accept that, the world is not so bad (I told to myself), I still have some hope left in humanity. It's not that I don't have any real-friends, but they are hard to come by.
I felt extreme negativity, the feeling of someone using you for their needs and benefits is (believe me), extremely saddening. So much so that the person even refuses to recognize me when he/she does not have any needs to fulfill, forget about a greeting.

I need to learn to say no! No to people I know, No to my friends (so-called) in need.
No to sharing candy. :(

Basic tutorial for converting normal photo to passport size with signature

Step 1:
Corp the original image with an image editing tool like paint.

Select the "Rectangular selection tool" and drag across your photograph so that an area, completely covering your face from top to your shirt is selected.

Step 2:
Press CTRL + C (to copy your selection)
Press CTRL + N (to open a new Paint file) (Click Don't Save when prompted)
Press CTRL + V (to paste the selection)

And you will get something like the following image :

Save this image on your drive.


Step 3:
Convert your background to white.
Most of the times, a passport photograph requires a white background.
To get a white background, open the image in an image editing tool like GIMP or Photoshop.
Select the "Magic Wand Tool", click on your background, if it is plain enough, it will select the entire background.
After your background is selected and bordered with dotted lines, press DEL on your keyboard to delete the selection (i.e to make it white)

GIMP is a free and open source tool, unlike photoshop, and can be downloaded here : http://gimp.org
Later, Export your image from GIMP by : File > Export As. Make sure its in JPG format.



Step 4:
Change the dimensions to a passport size.
A normal passport size is 3.5cm (1.38 inches) in width and 4.5cm(1.8 inches) in height.
The signature is 3.5cm(1.38 inches) in width and 1.5cm (1.59 inches) in height.

To change your image into these dimensions:
Open Microsoft Word
Paste the image with CTRL + V
Double-click on it, and change the dimensions at top right. ( " indicate inches, so be sure to enter everything in inches)

After getting the required size in Microsoft Word, copy the re-sized image by Right Click > Copy
Open a new file in Paint and paste the image with CTRL + V


Step 5:
Perform the same above mentioned steps for your signature, from changing its dimensions to change the background color.
Once you get your photograph and the signature in proper dimensions, its now time to join them together.

To join the photo with signature, simply open both images in paint, copy and paste one at a time in a new paint file and arrange them at proper positions.

Your final passport sized photograph should look like this:

Change Ubuntu 13.10's brightness below minimum

When your laptop brightness is hurting your eyes when you are in a dark place and you want to lower it but cannot because it is already at minimum, this post will hopefully save you.

To lower your Ubuntu 13.10's (or any other versions) brightness below the minimum level follow the following steps.

Open a terminal (with Ctrl + Alt + T) and type the following commands
Step 1:

cd /sys/class/backlight

Step 2:

ls

ls will show you the folders inside the backlight folder
for me it shows intel_backlight, it can be anything for you, depending upon the video driver.

Step 3:

cd ./intel_brightness

Replace intel_brightness with whatever you got from the ls command above.

Step 4:

cat actual_brightness

This will return the current brightness value

Step 5:

echo X | sudo tee brightness

Replace X is the brightness you want to set. For example echo 50 | sudo tee brightness
Enter your sudo password when asked.