With my next book awaiting publication on Amazon in a few hours, I am on to resuscitating an earlier, more ambitious manuscript.
The upcoming book is a slim one but very current in its theme. "'Vikram Lunar Lander: Dead or Alive" by the well-known reliability and quality control expert, Dr. Bharat Thakkar and I is already in Kindle Direct Publishing's system going through final checks. It should be out any moment. I will, of course, plug it significantly in these columns tomorrow. For now it is enough to give you this blurb:
"Professor Bharat Thakkar, Ph.D., a highly respected expert of quality control and reliability of systems, joins hands with veteran journalist and writer Mayank Chhaya to offer a quick but credible primer on whether the Indian Space Research Organization’s (ISRO)'s lunar lander Vikram could have survived its failed descent.
Dr. Thakkar offers specific mathematical calculations about Vikram’s landing velocity and how at that velocity, its prospects of survival were next to nothing. One of the key questions would be whether it was the damage to the hardware that killed the software or a malfunction in the software that led to Vikram’s crash and destroyed the hardware on impact.
Chhaya draws on his skills as a writer to fuse the science with the riveting last few minutes of India’s highly ambitious lunar enterprise that almost made it but not quite."
The book I am resuscitating is in many ways my favorite endeavor. It is titled "What does Jupiter really do?" Let me tease you with this very short excerpt from a chapter titled "Time".
Time
Summers in Ahmedabad often produce a post-apocalyptic glare. The intense dry heat can touch 46 degrees Celsius or about 115 degrees Fahrenheit and heat up the gases in the air so much that you can see transparent waves. Those waves create a visual misalignment. People and things seem misaligned.
It was on one such summer afternoon in May of 1978 that I was posed an unintentionally profound question while waiting for my bus. A man in his 40s, who was also waiting at the bus stand, asked me in English, “What is time?” In case I did not understand the language he also pointed at my watch. Not only did I understand the language, I understood it so well as to recognize his bad grammar.
To tease him a bit I replied, “That is a deep question to raise at a bus stand. Even Einstein spent his entire career answering what time is. But if you meant what the time is now, it is 4 p.m.” I am not sure if he understood the difference between just time and the time. He was so upset at my response that he did not board the bus with me even though he needed to.
