Drawing the Ashok Chakra

The Indian national flag is relatively simple to draw. There is no elaborate coat of arms or any other intricate design on the flag. The only bit of complexity that is added is because of the Ashok Chakra at the centre of the flag.


In school, as a kid, I used to draw the Ashok Chakra as a dark blue circle and drew lines dividing the circle into 24 parts. The Ashok Chakra, however, has more details than I initially observed.




As can be seen above, the Ashok Chakra consists of the following parts:
1) The central circle
2) The twenty four spokes
3) A rim
4) Twenty four bumps on the rim



Here is how I would draw the Ashok Chakra now.
Step 1: Start with the rim and the central circle.



Step 2: Draw a circle which will be used to determine the midpoints for the spokes. Divide this cirlce into 96 parts. Let every 2nd line extend to the rim. The intersections of these lines will be used to determine the spoke end points and the centers of the bumps on the rim.

Step 3: Complete the spokes as shown below.
Step 4: Draw the bumps on the rim.

Step 5: Fill the rim, spokes, central circle and the bumps on the rim with navy blue.

Here are the proportions that worked out for me:
rimWidth = 0.1 * outerRimRadius
innerRimRadius = outerRimRadius - rimWidth
midSpokeCircleRadius = 0.4 * outerRimRadius
rimBumpRadius = 0.05 * outerRimRadius
centralCircleRadius = 0.2 * outerRimRadius

So, with a hypothetical outerRimRadius of 10 cm, the other dimensions will work out to:

rimWidth = 1 cm
innerRimRadius = 9 cm
midSpokeCircleRadius = 4 cm
rimBumpRadius = 0.5 cm
centralCircleRadius = 2 cm

For people who are wondering how I generated the figures above, I wrote a program that generated an SVG image. I then converted the SVG image to PNG before posting here. SVG is really powerful for generating images that have clearly defined geometric shapes as components.

Addictive Songs

Every month or so, I come across a song which I get addicted to. I keep on listening to it till the song loses its freshness factor due to over-listening.

Last month, it was "Welcome Home" by Coheed and Cambria. I was introduced to the song because of the fabulous game called Rock Band. The song lyrics are pretty violent and I don't like them, but the guitar and drums are are amazing.

This week, it has been a song called "Appadi Podu" from the Tamil movie Gilli. For some reason, the beats, the video and the pace of the song has me listening to it all the time.