The God's Own Country.


With the Arabian Sea in the west, the Western Ghats towering 500-2700 ms in the east and networked by 44 rivers, Kerala enjoys unique geographical features that have made it one of the most sought after tourist destinations in Asia. An equable climate. A long shoreline with serene beaches. Tranquil stretches of emerald backwaters. Lush hill stations and exotic wildlife. Waterfalls. Sprawling plantations and paddy fields. Ayurvedic health holidays. Enchanting art forms. Magical festivals. Historic and cultural monuments. An exotic cuisine... All of which offer you a unique experience. And what's more, each of these charming destinations is only a two hour drive from the other. A singular advantage no other destination offers.

Kerala, India's most advanced society: With hundred percent literacy. World-class health care systems. India's lowest infant mortality and highest life expectancy rates. The highest physical quality of life in India. Peaceful and pristine, Kerala is also India's cleanest state.

For administrative purpose, the state of Kerala is divided into fourteen districts. Most of these districts offer all the tourism products typical of the State.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

BCCI to nominate Rahul Dravid for Khel Ratna, Yuvraj Singh for Arjuna Award





Khel Ratna for Rahul, Arjuna for Yuvi!










Mumbai: The Cricket Board has decided to recommend recently retired stalwart Rahul Dravid for the prestigious Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ra
tna award and Yuvraj Singh, the player of the World Cup, for the Arjuna Award.
   
"We will be forwarding the names of Rahul Dravid for Khel Ratna Award and Yuvraj Singh for the Arjuna Award next week (to the government)," BCCI's CAO Prof Ratnakar Shetty said on Saturday.
   
The Government had recently extended the deadline for the nominations till July 20. The 39-year-old Dravid retired from all forms of the game at the international level following the Test series in Australia last year after having accumulated over 23,000 runs in Tests and ODIs combined since making a spectacular debut at Lord's in 1996.
   
If awarded the highest sports award in the country that was instituted in 1991-92, former India captain Dravid would follow the footsteps of his illustrious ex-teammates Sachin Tendulkar (1997-98) and Mahendra Singh Dhoni (2007-08) as the third cricketer to win the coveted award.
   
So far 20 sportspersons have been bestowed the award. Yuvraj, who has started practising at the nets at the National Cricket Academy in Bangalore after his battle with a rare form of germ cell cancer between his lungs, was India's hero in the 2011 World Cup triumph. 

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Higgs boson-like particle discovery claimed at LHC


The moment when Cern director Rolf Heuer confirmed the Higgs results

Related Stories

Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.
The particle has been the subject of a 45-year hunt to explain how matter attains its mass.
Both of the Higgs boson-hunting experiments at the LHC see a level of certainty in their data worthy of a "discovery".
More work will be needed to be certain that what they see is a Higgs, however.
Prof Stephen Hawking tells the BBC's Pallab Ghosh the discovery has cost him $100
The results announced at Cern (European Organization for Nuclear Research), home of the LHC in Geneva, were met with loud applause and cheering.
Prof Peter Higgs, after whom the particle is named, wiped a tear from his eye as the teams finished their presentations in the Cern auditorium.
"I would like to add my congratulations to everyone involved in this achievement," he added later.
"It's really an incredible thing that it's happened in my lifetime."
Prof Stephen Hawking joined in with an opinion on a topic often discussed in hushed tones.
"This is an important result and should earn Peter Higgs the Nobel Prize," he told BBC News.
"But it is a pity in a way because the great advances in physics have come from experiments that gave results we didn't expect."
'Dramatic'
The CMS team claimed they had seen a "bump" in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 125.3 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) - about 133 times heavier than the protons that lie at the heart of every atom.
The BBC's George Alagiah explains the Higgs boson
They claimed that by combining two data sets, they had attained a confidence level just at the "five-sigma" point - about a one-in-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.
However, a full combination of the CMS data brings that number just back to 4.9 sigma - a one-in-two million chance.
Prof Joe Incandela, spokesman for the CMS, was unequivocal: "The results are preliminary but the five-sigma signal at around 125 GeV we're seeing is dramatic. This is indeed a new particle," he told the Geneva meeting.
Atlas results were even more promising, at a slightly higher mass: "We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of five sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV," said Dr Fabiola Gianotti, spokeswoman for the Atlas experiment at the LHC.
Peter HiggsPeter Higgs joined three of the six theoreticians who first predicted the Higgs at the conference
Prof Rolf Heuer, director-general of Cern, commented: "As a layman I would now say I think we have it."
"We have a discovery - we have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson. But which one? That remains open.
"It is a historic milestone but it is only the beginning."
Commenting on the emotions of the scientists involved in the discovery, Prof Incandela said: "It didn't really hit me emotionally until today because we have to be so focussed… but I'm super-proud."
Dr Gianotti echoed his thoughts, adding: "The last few days have been extremely intense, full of work, lots of emotions."
A confirmation that this is the Higgs boson would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the century; the hunt for the Higgs has been compared by some physicists to the Apollo programme that reached the Moon in the 1960s.

Statistics of a 'discovery'

Swiss franc coin
  • Particle physics has an accepted definition for a discovery: a "five-sigma" (or five standard-deviation) level of certainty
  • The number of sigmas measures how unlikely it is to get a certain experimental result as a matter of chance rather than due to a real effect
  • Similarly, tossing a coin and getting a number of heads in a row may just be chance, rather than a sign of a "loaded" coin
  • A "three-sigma" level represents about the same likelihood as tossing eight heads in a row
  • Five sigma, on the other hand, would correspond to tossing more than 20 in a row
  • Independent confirmation by other experiments turns five-sigma findings into accepted discoveries
Scientists would then have to assess whether the particle they see behaves like the version of the Higgs particle predicted by the Standard Model, the current best theory to explain how the Universe works. However, it might also be something more exotic.
All the matter we can see appears to comprise just 4% of the Universe, the rest being made up by mysterious dark matter and dark energy.
A more exotic version of the Higgs could be a bridge to understanding the 96% of the Universe that remains obscure.
Scientists will have to look at how the Higgs decays - or transforms - into other, more stable particles after being produced in collisions at the LHC.
Dr Pippa Wells, a member of the Atlas experiment, said that several of the decay paths already showed deviations from what one would expect of the Standard Model Higgs.
For example, a decay path where the Higgs transforms into two photon particles was "a bit on the high side", she explained.
These could get back into line as more statistics are added, but on the other hand, they may not.
"We're reaching into the fabric of the Universe at a level we've never done before," said Prof Incandela.
"We're on the frontier now, on the edge of a new exploration. This could be the only part of the story that's left, or we could open a whole new realm of discovery."

Sunday, July 1, 2012

Bollywood royalty at Esha Deol's wedding

Proud parents Dharmendra and Hema Malina welcome Bollywood royalty to celebrate daughter Esha Deol's wedding to Bharat Takhtani. 
Abhay Deol, Rani Mukherjee, Fardeen Khan, Madhu, Neeta Lulla were present amongst others.

Films of India

Friday, June 29, 2012

New Lovers:Asif Ali & Mamtha Mohandas

Hided Beauty:Mayyanad


Mayyanad is a village in Kollam district in the state of KeralaIndia.[1]
Mayyanad is located at the south western suburbs of Kollam city in Kollam district of Kerala and is about 10 kilometers south of Kollam city. Mayyanad can be reached by frequent buses from Kollam City and Kottiyam town and by local train from Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram. Mayyanad is situated on the banks of the Paravur lake. Mayyanad's costal line along the Arabian sea is famous for its fishing.
Several famous Temples, Churches and Mosques are situated in Mayyanad.
Mayyanad is the birth place of several social leaders like C.Kesavan, C.V. Kunjuraman, etc. The first Panchayat President was Prof. K. Ravindran who went on to become the founder principal of Mahatma Gandhi Government Arts College in Mahe and Tagore Arts College in Pondicherry.
Malayalam Daily Newspaper "Kerala Kaumudi" was started from Mayyanad in 1911











Sunday, June 24, 2012

Hided Beauty:Enchanting Wayanad


Enchanting Wayanad

Had been to Wayanad with the whole family...uncles, aunts, cousins, all of them. A few snapshots from there.
It rained quite a bit both the days, and we were on the road for quite a bit.

En route Wayanad, somewhere along the Mysore-Gundlupet road




Entering the Kerala border proved a big pain with the Check post having a massive traffic jam. Gave me time to explore the fields around




Viewpoint at Vythiri, this is the stretch that connects Kalpetta to Kozhikode




The hair pin bends seen from the view point, called "Churam" in the local language


Visited poookot lake too, sadly they do not open the gates until 9AM, so we waking up early and making a dash did not help us much.


Pedal-boated a bit with family, and also netted a couple of P. fasciatus with some nice earthen base color as stripes


Also seen were tons of tadpoles, have seen similar looking ones in the streams of the western ghats




There was tons of fern growth...they tend to grow nicely in moist areas.




And where there is moisture, there are leeches too. Thankfully caught one on my leg before it could latch on. Showed my cousins the way the leech "tracks" heat movement, almost like a snake.

Spotted some nice spiders too, a tiny red one which hopped onto my hand. Jumped off before I could transfer my camera from th e other hand.

Managed to click this HUGE Giant wood spider, a good 4"+


We moved on towards "Soochipara" falls amidst tea/coffee plantations. Though these are not really "natural" scapes, the green sure does soothe the eyes. It was heavily overcast and the humidity levels rose. Plus, without a particular light direction, metering enough from a moving bus to expose enough details on the landscape was getting tough!





Made use of every pothole where the bus slowed down to help compose the shot a bit






Even managed a macro, although a crappy one :P


The walk/trek to the Soochipara falls took a toll on some of the family. The walking distance is 1KM+
The falls itself is pretty tall, and the sound of the water thundering down on the rocks helped us reach faster :)
It was just filled with college folks and a few "Revellers", thankfully in about 15 minutes the crowd cleared out


Even with so much greenery around, the landscapes and sights enticed me into clicking a few B&W shots. Landscapes for some inexplicable reason just feel "Stronger"









There's so much more to explore, surely will be going back again to explore more of this captivating district of Kerala.