Eid Wishes to all :)

Assalamoalikum! Warmest EId wishes to all the Muslims 🙂

Keep smiling… 🙂

FIAMAN-ALLAH

How it all started…

It was the time when I was in ninth class. We lived near to our school ,in satellite town,  like many of my class fellows and naturally we played together in the evening. The ground  was a big one and like pure Pakistani style, one could witness atleast 20 cricket matches and two football matches all at the same time… only that one had to concentrate a lot to watch the intended match because all of them were intermingled. There was a sense of sharing and a pure brotherhood in the ground… different matches happening side by side with almost absolute harmony among the people. Gosh! I loved that time and I miss it now.

Anyway, we fellows, initially, played cricket. We were all mad about it. But with all due respect to cricket-lovers, I don’t like to play it any more (though I like a lot watching the matches). And why is it so… that is the main point of my writing. I changed because circumstances forced me( a good change… I hope you people will agree too). I developed a huge huge liking for another sport that I had played with little interest earlier… FOOTBALL 🙂 😀

Oh! I love it…really. Lately I’ve been accused of being “football maniac” 😛 :P. But for information of some people, this comment is not a reveleation to me. You may check my cell’s welcome note… guess what??? Its “FooTB@LL CrAzY” :P. Yes, I am football maniac! Any objections??? If yes then “Objection over-ruled” 😛 😉

So I was telling you that we fellows played cricket and as Mushtaq Yousafi (a famous comidey writer) also describes it… “Cricket khelty to sirf 2 banday hein, baki sab dekhtay hein” and “Cricket vailay logo ka khel hai”…all this with due respect to the cricket players 😉 ( saying so again and again becasue I won’t mean to disrespect anyone). So this is what happened to me too. Returning to home at the evening I always felt that I had watched far too much than actually playing… Then I started a rather evil scheme… finding the friends who felt the same as me 😉 and it worked. There were a plenty of them. Luckily these were those days when Euro cup was underway. Lucky because our home channel, PTV, was kind enough to broadcast those live matches. And it reboosted my spirit of playing football. Afterwards, the FIFA World Cup 2006 added fuel to the raging fire…

All of this ended with me bringing a football and start playing at a corner of the ground with three other friends… That was sort of a rebellion from me ;). But what happened next was even more astonoshing…several other guys were attracted to the charm and magic of this super sport and without any direct persuation they joined us. Eventually, within a month or so, all of us were glued to football :). And in vacations we played in both the morning and the evening. The real charm in football was that everyone did get a chance to actually play it in the match.I miss those days.

And now here I am, a culprit of being a footballer :P. By the way, I don’t over-estimate my play but I like playing football as much as I like to watch the EPL matches (I don’t under-estimate my play too) . The one who correctly guesses my favourite EPL would get a surprise gift 🙂

Hope you enjoyed reading my little auto-biography. Take care 🙂

Keep smiling 🙂
FIAMAN-ALLAH

“Taste the light”

The late neuro-scientist Paul Bach-y-Rita hypothesized in the 1960s that,

“We see with our brains not our eyes.”!!!

For a long time I have been thinking very strange things. For instance I had been thinking for past many years that we see what we think and nothing else (mostly the abstract world). It all depends on our perception how our brain processes the signals from our eyes because in the end it is the brain manipulating the things for us. I have also believed that the folk stories of love were not necessarily beautiful people but it was the mind-set of both lovers which made them think beautiful of one another. The same idea has been into play ever since. And also this is the sole reason why any mother loves her child and no matter what, she calls him a “CHAAND”…. Again while I am talking of beauty, I am linking with my own perception. So this thing goes on and on.

It was yesterday morning when I was sitting in the library and got my hands on the October edition of Scientific American. There was an article that talked of a rather strange device called “Brain Port” which was developed for the blind people ( strange atleast in the first look). The device had a camera feed and a processor and a further “lolly-pop” like thing to be placed on tongue. The camera takes the live image and sends it to the processing device which processes it to send signals to the peripheral device that is placed on tongue. A blind person normally has a damaged nerve link from eye to the brain. This device instead uses the sensory nerves on tongue to send video signals to the brain. The basic phenomenon behind it is Electrotactile Stimulation for Sensory Augmentation or Substitution, an area of study that involves using encoded electric current to represent sensory information — information that a person cannot receive through the traditional channel…In this way the blind person can actually see things… Wow! A piece of real genius this device is!

The reasearh on this idea had started a few decades ago and first successful prototype was tested in 2003. They say its just a matter of learning for the person using this device, like we need to
learn riding a bike before we can make it a complacent habit. Here again the brain is fed with the video feed and the person is left at the mercy of the perception of things that one’s brain (atleast in case of abstract things)….seems to be little coherent with my view :P. Anyway I was really happy to discover even this small coherence :). It always feels good to find some matching thoughts and people who understand your thoughts the way you actually think. I still feel that the abstract things have a different picture for everyone…

Well this was a rather mix article…my thoughts plus a bit of information about the technology that we are going to experience soon.

Keep smiling 🙂