About Today

 Today morning the tea lady at the cemetary made me wait for nearly half an hour for tea. She was in a talkative mood and was tealking to another customer who was not even paying attention, he put his headphones and was lost in his phone while she continued to talk to him. Her attention turned to me and she told me about how the cost of Indie mint had gone up to 15 rs and that well-educated people do not haggle like the poor people, and paid 150 rs for a packet at night after she had closed up the shop without blinking. These two people were desperate for smokes, and insisted that she sell them a packet even after she had packed up her shop and stashed it in the cemetary by 22:30 hours IST. 

Then she told me that well-cooked chai is better, and the other dude walked off without paying for his purchases. Then she told me about the story of Itnu, a boy who was missing for 1.5 months and had turned his phone off. He is about 25-26 years old, and his family people had come to the shop showing his photo on the mobile, and they had left behind his number. She believes that the boy had visited the shop over the past month. 

Then I came to the office and bashed out my eight copies by 18:44 hours IST. After that me and a friend headed to Urban Kasba, but it was closed so we went to Midnight instead. The cover charge has come down from Rs 150 per person to Rs 50 per person. In places such as these the system is you buy your own booze, pay a cover charge, then order something, along with mixers and glasses and whatever. We had an involving conversation about plate tectonics, the journey of the Indian subcontinent across the Tethys Sea and a mystery of how a diverging fault showed up in Tibet despite most of the faults being reverse thrust faults. In this conversation, I was asked to tell the complete story of the formation of the Himalayas, which I will do so now. I was able to say this whole thing out aloud, and my friend, who has a masters in geology said that the explanation was acceptable for someone who had not studied geology. 

About 13.5 billion years ago, the universe was produced in the Big Bang, with most of the matter and antimatter instantly annihilating each other. A small imbalance led to a marginal portion of matter surviving, which was mostly in the form of hydrogen, with trace amounts of helium, lithium and beryllium. The first stars were massive balls of pristine hydrogen gas, that collapsed under the influence of gravity, living short and fast lives, producing the heavier elements such as oxygen, nitrogen and carbon. The Sun is a third generation star, rich in heavy, metallic elements that collapsed from a dense knot in a cloud of molecular gas about 4.6 billion years ago. The planets in the solar system were assembled in the material leftover from the formation of the Sun. The temperature and heat gradient blew away gases and ices from the inner solar system. This resulted in rocky worlds such as Venus, Earth and Mars forming in the inner solar system, with gas and ice giants in the outer solar system. The Earth has a differentiated interior, with a core rich in iron and nickel, a convective zone of molten rock known as the mantle, that drives a super continent cycle on the solid outer crust that lasts between 300 and 500 years. The Indian Plate broke off from the eastern part of Gondwanaland between 130 and 120 million years ago, and started a journey across the Tethys Sea, initially accompanied by Madagascar, that splintered off around 90 million years ago. The Indian plate was bisected by the Narmada seaway in the west and the Godavari seaway in the east, and India travelled over a plume of mantle, leading to excessive volcanism in the deccan plateau, playing a role in the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Between 60 and 40 million years ago, India collided with the Kohistan-Ladakh island arc in the neotethys sea, the region which is now Ladakh. The Indian plate then slammed into the Eursasian plate, leading to thickening and fracturing of both plates, with the Indian plate subducting beneath the Eurasian plate. There was peeling underneath the continent, with ripples and fractures caused by the low density rock of the Indian plate floating above the mantle, putting upward pressure from beneath the Eurasian plate. This resulted in the formation of the Himalayas, a process that continues till this day. 

Anyway, I didn't even understand his question, but he said that I had provided him with the answer. I then went home, and had fun with my neighbour and his pets, including an adapted cat. Both me and the guy realised that there was a cat who would sneak into our homes and look at us when we came back home from inside lol. Poor cat died. Anyway, good day.