How old are we?

[Disclaimer: The stats are taken from Wikipedia and some of my words/opinions may strongly support the practices of Sanatana Dharma. It is probably because I follow the same principles. Please accept my ignorance.]

I was not sarcastic while I set the title to the post. Obviously, everyone knows their age. But I did a research after a question that got triggered in my mind. What is the age of earth? What is the age of the universe where the earth and our solar system is surviving? Although the question as quite simple, in the sense that even a high school student will ask it, the details of the answer could vary depending on the age and level of understanding the person asking this question. I request you to read till the end of the post even if you have no interest/skip the Sanskrit words of this post.


Science (astrophysics) did not give me a solid answer to my question. I went through few sites over the internet and every one quoted approximate values. The most concrete answer being 13.8 billion years since big bang and varying somewhere between 15-20 billion years. However, I did not get satisfied with what Science has answered. I further did some more research in Wiki and found out how the Sanatana Dharma (Hinduism, although I don't like to call it that way) has given some statistics and calculations which no other "ism" has even given a thought. Further to this, the Vedas and Puranas gave exact figures of the age of the universe, which is a small thing when compared to the entire chronology theory proposed by the same Vedas. In its simplest format, see the following calculations. This is all based on how Lord Brahma creates and destroys the universes. Also, there are two scales of time in this, one is Brahma year and the other one is human year. I am not going into more details of how Lord Brahma creates it but all I wanted to talk here is about the time scales.

• Lord Brahma - life is 100 Brahma years.
• 1 Parardha = 50 Brahma Years (Currently we are in Dwitiya parardha, 2nd set of 50 Brahma years)
• 1 Brahma year = 365 Brahma days
• 1 Day of Brahma = 2 Kalpas (1 Kalpa - Brahma Day (time of creation and destruction), 2nd Kalpa - Brahma Night (time of sleep))
• 1 Kalpa = 14 Manvantaras
• 1 Manvantara = 71 Mahayuga
• There is a gap of 4 Charanas after every Manvantara (which will be a total of 6 MahaYugas for 1 Kalpa). So in a more detailed way
• 1 Kalpa = 14 Manvantara + 6 Mahayuga = 14*71 Mahayuga + 6 Mahayuga = 1000 Maha Yuga
• =>1 Kalpa = 1000 Maha Yuga
• 1 Maha Yuga = Total years in 4 Yugas (Satya, Treta, Dwapara, Kali) = 4,320,000 human years
• Satya Yuga - 4 Charanas - 4 x 432000 human years (Charana = Feet of the cow that represents Dharma)
• Treta Yuga - 3 Charanas - 3 x 432000 human years
• Dwapara Yuga - 2 Charanas - 2 x 432000 human years
• Kali Yuga - 1 Charana - 1 x 432000 human years
• Total human years in Maha Yuga = 4320000
• One human year = 2 Aayana
• 1 Aayana = 6 months
• 1 Month = 2 Paksha
• 1 Paksha = 15 Human Days

Average human life is 100 years in Kali Yuga but will go less because of the sins made by Humans.
Also you can reverse calculate the current age of Brahma and current age of this Universe. There are multiple universes. And the cycle rotates with a new Brahma after every 100 Brahma years.

We are in currently in 5116 year of the Kali Yuga of the 28th Mahayuga of the 7th Manvantara (Vaivaswatha Manvantara) of the 1st Brahma Day (Swetha Varaaha Kalpa) of 51st year (Dwitiya Parardha) of Brahma. For completion of this Mahayuga we are yet to complete Kali Yuga which is 5115 years complete out of 432000 years. For a person who knows about "Sankalpam" of a ritual performed in Sanatana Dharma, this is the time classification that is read.

One can question the validity of this theory. This is not accepted nor proved by Science. Well, I believe science may "discover" this in future. From the science end, the Wiki page says that the Hindu Chronology provides the closest figures to the figures what are quoted by Science. This is what Wikipedia says in their article. This article from Wikipedia is an interesting read where there are quotes mention from various works of Sanatana Dharma like Bhagavat Puran, Srimad Bhagavatam, and The Gita etc. It gives an introduction to various characters like Kakbhushubdi who sees everything everywhere outside normal time, somewhat similar to the "Griffin" character in MIB 3. More interesting things can be understood from the same article which mirrors the concept of a world with in a world and a universe with in another universe as shown in Hollywood blockbusters like "MIB 1" and "A journey to the center of the earth". Another reference is in an article about What Vedas say about age of universe?


Apart from the fact I got amazed after going through all these articles and stats, I am also left with a feeling like how small our life is? Out of 100 years of human life, we spend sleeping for about 50 years. The rest of 50 years, I don't know how far we are able to spend most of it useful. I guess this is where the spiritual knowledge on a religion and practicing the concepts of a particular religion would help. They keep you in the right path, make you do good for the future generations. And still, we spend life with ego, impatience, hatred and dissatisfaction. What a pity! Time to realize!! Time for a change!!

Drives getting filled up soon because of the Usage Data–THE TIMER

I recently faced this problem in my production farm where the D: drive which we usually store log files from various technologies running on SharePoint server, gets filled up too soon. We have a directory called D:\LogFiles which has various subfolders for storing log files that get created from SharePoint, IIS, log4net (custom logs) and also the Usage data generated by health and usage feature of SharePoint. The drive was almost 50GB in size and at any point of time the complete LogFiles folder generally will be of size 20 GB in total. The majority of those logs will be ULS because we have enabled verbose logging.

When we got a disk space low alert from our monitoring solution for D: drive, we initially thought that the culprit was IIS logs since the SharePoint logs and the log4net logs are configured for rotation. We cleaned up majority of those logs and even cleaned up old, unused setup files etc from D: drive. However, the problem started to repeat again and there is nothing else to delete from that drive.

We did a deep dive to find out that D:\LogFiles\UsageData contains large number of files and they were never getting rotated. We know we have enabled health and usage data collection and it should collect the data but it should not store the data on the drives. Also other servers in the farm (total of 7 servers in the farm) were not affected. That had given us a clue that there was something wrong with THE TIMER service.

We know the timer is the most important service of the SharePoint architecture. It makes sure all tasks with in SharePoint farm are carried out at the designated times. I really think of it as the heart of the SharePoint body since it mobilizes the rest of the SharePoint tasks and activities in the farm of timer jobs. If the timer is not working, multiple things start happening on the server and the farm like the problem described above. There is a timer job called Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Usage Data Import which will actually import all the usage data into the database and deletes those temporary files from the server. I checked the timer services from the Services console but it was running. However its not doing its job properly. So we restarted the timer service, which cleaned up the usage logs like eating up a piece of cake. Once again, the importance of timer service is understood.

Hope this helps in your troubleshooting and thanks for reading!!

A Short Visit to Singapore

Recently, I had an opportunity to visit Singapore on official purposes. However, I utilized the opportunity to visit the tourist attractions of Singapore. This post is a brief guide for all tourists who plan to visit Singapore and hope you will find it interesting and useful. It might be felt that the post might contain the topics which are relatively inclined towards the observations made by an Indian. Please treat them as my personal opinions.

To give a general introduction to Singapore, I have taken some text from Wikipedia. Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign city-state and island country in Southeast Asia. It lies off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula and is 137 kilometers (85 mi) north of the equator. Made up of the lozenge-shaped main island (widely known as Singapore Island and over 60 much smaller islets, the country is highly urbanized, with very little primary rain forest remaining. Its territory has consistently expanded through land reclamation. Singapore is one of the world's leading commercial hubs, with the fourth-biggest financial center and one of the five busiest ports. Singapore is highly diverse: 75 percent of the population are Chinese, followed by significant minorities of Malays, Indians, Eurasians, and others. This diversity is reflected in the country's four official languages — English, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil — as well as in official policies that promote multiculturalism. Singapore has a tropical rain forest climate with no distinctive seasons, uniform temperature and pressure, high humidity, and abundant rainfall. Temperatures usually range from 22 to 35 °C. April and May are the hottest months, with the wetter monsoon season from November to January.

The important tourist spots (I feel) in Singapore are given as below.

• Sentosa Island - Songs of the sea show, The Merlion, Casino, Adventure World Water park, SEA Aquarium, Universal Studios, Cable car to Sentosa etc.
• Singapore Flyer
• Marina Bay Area
• Clarke Quay/Boat Quay
• River Safari, Singapore Zoo, Night Safari, Bird Park
• Famous for malls and shopping
• Cruises to adjacent resort islands in Indonesia
• Areas of Personal Interest - Hindu Temples, Little India, China town

The Sentosa Island is the primary tourist attraction at Singapore. I have not been to all the attractions on the Sentosa Island. The Songs of the sea is a live show with live cast, dramatic effects, lasers, water jets, music etc., generally happens in the evening. The Merlion is the Singapore’s mascot and is a creature with head of a lion and body of a fish. A huge Merlion replica is now open for visitors at Sentosa Island and visitors are allowed to go to the top of 37m high statue. The Universal Studios Singapore, the SEA Aquarium, Casino etc are all grouped to be under a single tourist attraction called “Resorts world sentosa”. Casinos are free to enter for tourists and people on Employment passes. The SEA Aquarium, which I have been to, is the World’s Largest Aquarium as recognized by the Guinness book of world records. It contains variety of underwater fish of all kinds including Manta rays, Stingrays, eels and sharks. It also contains the cross sectional replica of giant ship used by the Chinese explorer Zheng He. The Adventure world water park is a water based amusement park with rides. To reach Sentosa, there is public bus facility as well as a monorail that starts from the Vivo City mall. Also a cable car is available to reach Sentosa and it is a tourist attraction by itself. The following video shows the highlights of the Sentosa and SEA Aquarium. Make sure to turn on HD in the settings.

The Singapore Flyer is again the world’s largest observation wheel, standing at 165m height, offers a wide range of panoramic views of the island city and the Marina Bay. Speaking of the Marina bay, which the general attraction seen in any global advertisements related to Singapore, is an integrated resort fronting Marina Bay area of Singapore. The structure basically contains 3 55-storey towers with a marine ship structure connecting their roof tops. This iconic marvel is home of hotels, casino, shopping malls and restaurants. The SkyPark on the top has swimming pools and gardens for the customers of the hotel with one side of the ship allowed for public viewing. It gives a view of the marina Bay and the Singapore Downtown along with flower shaped Arts and Science museum. If you haven’t been to the Empire State in New York, this will be a good start. Watch the video below for more fun.

Singapore is famous for Shopping malls. There are shopping malls in almost every area in Singapore. For tourists, especially from India, plan to visit Mustafa center and dine in Anand Bhavan beside Mustafa Center. Apart from that, there are lot of shopping malls around the city. All major global brand outlets are present in the shopping malls. Almost all major malls have food courts with food stalls serving majority of Asian food including Indian, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese etc. So if you are an Indian Vegetarian, you get it with no major search operation. Watch the video below that shows glimpses of Vivo City mall and the Clarke Quay. Vivo City Mall is also the point from which cruises start to take you to nearby islands like Batam etc. Make sure to turn On HD in settings if it’s not ON.

On the northern side of Singapore, there are few other attractions like the Singapore Zoo, the River Safari and the Night Safari. The river safari is basically a river based theme park that highlights various habitats of the major rivers of the worlds like Ganges, Nile, Amazon etc. Various types of fish and other living beings of these major rivers are the exhibits in this park. The Pandas are the major attraction in River Safari. The actual river safari is also available with boat ride in an Amazon River based theme with fish and other living beings moving around you/your boat. The night safari is another attraction where you are taken to safari in a van in the night and to see the animals in the night. The Singapore Zoo is the home of various animals of different parts of the world including the polar bear and the white tiger.

Other places of interest include the Little India and the China town which has large immigrants from India and China. You will get a feel that you are in India or China when you visit these places. Little India and China Town also has few Hindu Temples like the Srinivas Perumal temple, the Mariamman Temple etc which are very old. There is a huge Indian population, primarily from Tamil Nadu are making their living as human labor in Singapore. The fountain of wealth is another small attraction.

Overall, this city-state is mini-Asia from my view with people of multi regions, multi cultures and multi religions coexist with peace. This country is very secure and systematically managed in all aspects. The public transport is the general mode of transport with buses and the subways, popularly MRT (Mass Rapid Transit), being heavily utilized. Buy an ezLink card (prepaid card) and tap it whenever you enter/exit a bus or subway to get charged for that travel. The city is smart and highly developed. You should visit this place when you have opportunity.