To thine own cell...

Paimane Bitte

2008-12-25T09:29:00.003+05:30

I find this song to be very haunting and must I add that I love the lyrics. They have this air of mystique and non-understanding that I find hard to resist. Really.

Hattip or if you are the plain vanilla types you can go here to see five white guys take their kurtas off.

In which I berate techonological progress

2008-12-13T06:47:00.009+05:30

Dont get me wrong I am a slave to technology - laptops, mice, Youtube, Joost, Hulu, GPS, iPods, Guitar Hero. Chances are if i can afford them I will have them. It was in this spirit of being technology's slave-girl that I got an Orkut and Facebook account and signed up for Gmail chat. The honeymoon was great, I loved the way I could keep in touch with my friends on Gmail chat or with scraps (micromail for the attention span challenged) just to remind friends that I am around. I loved the potential for getting back in touch with childhood friends.

This followed a period where I aggressively searched for long lost neighbours from my childhood home and in the process met random people from school who were 8 when I was 14. Once I even made this very heart rending post, where I asked to know of my school friends whom I had lost touch with. The upside to that was thanks to a combination of that post, Facebook and Orkut, I am now very definitely in touch with them.

In fact, I now know whats on the mind of as much as 6 people before breakfast (via status messages on Gmail chat, facebook and orkut) impossible as it may seem.Some of them even have blogs to further subject me to their thoughts and actions during the course of the day, week, year. (Oh wait...!) Not that I am close to any of them. Most of them I have met once maybe twice, few have something stimulating to say and almost all of them have sent friendship requests when I was in a benevolent mood.

Subject to this much barrage of information of who is getting married, who had kids, who moved to Australia, who is going to a certain hemisphere, who got a job and where, who crashed a car while learning to drive, who is making pasta for dinner, who hated sky diving and who is bored, I am losing my sangfroid. Schadenfreude anyone?

Earlier it was all hail-fellow-well-met and then a vacuum which you really only bothered to fill if you had a crush on that person in question but now even the Facebook updates from my highschool crush are a chore to read as he hops from one debauched Dubai party to another. Sometimes I just wants to disappear into a technological rabbit hole of obscurity and emerge in a few decades and then seek out Nisha, Vikas, Ann, V., A., B., W., and the other endearing letters of the alphabet.

Several times I have come this close to deleting my accounts but the addiction persists! I am cursed to live out my life in this Kalyug where friendships after the actual physical proximity criteria is eliminated go from email exchanges, to Facebook wall messages to Orkut scraps to Gchat status messages and finally hang on with the claws of Facebook updates. Welcome to eternal damnation where friendships don't gracefully melt into obscurity but are well and truly forever.

Dido

2008-11-19T07:10:00.002+05:30

This has been pretty much on a loop in my head for the past 24 hours. I love her voice, the video, the lyrics, the actress in the video and the Mumbai landmarks as they fly by her cab window.

Here is a part of the lyrics.

Lets forget that we're here and make some plans
We'll go for walks
Sit on the bench we always sat
I'll tell you every little detail of my day and so will you
Don't try to stay awake
I'm feeling tired too
This is just another day
Let’s do the things we normally do
Don't hold my hand for longer than you need to

First saw the video here (Yes, I am turning into a fashion junkie and this is my first acknowledgment of the fact) and the lyrics are from here.

When dreams die

2008-10-08T12:02:00.001+05:30

....do they make a noise?
Like the splash when a frog jumps into a pond or
Like the continuous patter of rain on a rooftop or
Like the roaring incessancy of a waterfall?

Most people would say
They don’t make any noise at all
Like a glacier melting.

Evolution

2008-10-04T03:31:00.003+05:30

....is put in perspective by a Youtube video. Have fun!

Thanks to The Other 95% for the link!

Look out for the monkeys on a typewriter(get it?? :) ) bit somewhere in the middle.

On Muses

2008-09-17T07:25:00.002+05:30

"O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things I saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!"

- Dante Alighieri, in Canto II of The Inferno

Is it me

2008-09-15T10:44:00.002+05:30

.... or is Prateik Babbar emanating some very subtle gay vibes in Jaane tu ya jaane na?

Shogun

2008-09-12T23:34:00.002+05:30

I first read James Clavell's Shogun when I was 16 in the summer of '96 before the Std. XII exams, sneaking time between the chemical reactions we were supposed to memorize and the integrations I was supposed to practice.

I was hooked from the first page with his descriptions of Japanese life and customs (boiling of tea leaves during peacetime and boiling of prisoners otherwise). The complex plots and the in depth characterization of even minor players left me reeling. Its descriptions of Japanese concepts of wa and absolute obedience were the closest I could get to escaping the dreary desert sands of the Middle East. All this mind you in the Dark Ages before the days of the Great WWW.

Times changed and here I am in the US of A with a Netflix account.

I find that "Shogun" had been made into a TV series in the mid-eighties! I had it ordered promptly and now the disc is sitting there next the DVD player. I am wondering whether I should watch it at all. Would the watching of this DVD completely ruin my imaginings of Blackthorne, Lord Toranaga and Lady Mariko? Would these be lost to be forever to be replaced by the budget restricted panderings of three executive producers who may not have read the novel at all?

Hmmmm....

How long

2008-09-11T10:39:00.002+05:30

...does it take for the wounds of dove to heal?

oh it does not take long.

at first they keep stabbing at you frequently and without reason
but later on
slower
triggered by snatches of conversation overheard from strangers
or by
a box of cereal that you see in a store
or when
you are all alone and least expect it
till finally
you are numb to the pain
and only the memory remains
and that
can never go away, will it?

A Sexee Witch

2008-09-09T10:35:00.003+05:30

....is my new LG Chocolate3 - a 3G 1GB CDMA with iPod like sound quality and a 2 megapixel camera with two screens all for 40 bucks. Me is in love!

Micro-blogging

2008-08-31T02:35:00.002+05:30

.....is a just a passing fad or is it here to stay?

The Moral High Ground

2008-08-28T02:32:00.003+05:30

.....is such a lovely set of words but when you get there it is a pretty lonely place except for the occasional whining derelict.

Recycle bin therapy

2008-05-21T11:18:00.003+05:30

I cleaned out my office desk today in preparation for the Voyage to the Great Beyond.**

Aside from that, I threw away a lot of stuff. I mean lots.

- Old Cd covers (why did i ever keep them in the first place?),
- Old paper reprints (God when did i ever read this?)
- Xeroxes of my certificates (i was OCD case once and to apply to any place i would carry three xerozes or more of all my certificates all the way back to my tenth),
- Non-working mosquito repellants (mosquitoes in the lab?)
- Hand santisers (wtf?)
- Binoculars (wtff?)
- A photograph of a person reading a girlie magazine (this was used to blackmail him by his friends and then left in my possesion. yes i have/had weird friends)
- a blank greeting card that was never sent.
- a new york momento got by Certain someone which i had forgotten. it shows the World trade Centre towers still standing.

All the bins in my lab and adjacent labs are overflowing with my discarded stuff.

I feel as if I am suddenly free of cares and don't have attachments anymore. Its a wonderful feeling. Perhaps this is how ascetics feel when they renouce the world.

** - the Pacific Ocean not the River Styx.

Hello world!

2008-05-20T13:32:00.002+05:30

Hello there!

Just to let you know faithful reader that I exist and have not abandoned you. Forgotten a little maybe in the great hurry burry of things but not given up on you completely. Not yet.

I still have hope that you will make me famous someday. Heh.

My blogging skills seem to have evaporated in the meantime. But hopefully I will have something substantial here pretty soon.

Meanwhile,
Be good!
Samu.

P.S. pretty soon = 1-2 days

A Shloka

2008-02-20T12:58:00.002+05:30

अश्वं नैव गजं नैव व्याघ्रं नैव च नैव च अजापुत्रं बलिं दद्यात् देवो दुर्बलघातकः

Not a horse, not an elephant, and never a tiger. It is the son of a goat that is sacrificed. Even the Gods are against the weak.

A Shloka I came across on my wanderings. Of course the interpretation of these things is always a subjective issue but I like to look at it as a subtle agnostic snub.

Right now I have no idea which text it is from. Help would be appreciated and acknowledged.

The Unwaba Revelations - A Review

2008-02-12T21:43:00.000+05:30

I rarely review books or movies because I am sure that there are other people who do. But in my wanderings on the great www I did not come across a decent review of the "The Unwaba Revelations" therefore this post is born.

Before I start this I must confess that I have not read the first two novels. But I did not think that it mattered because novels even if they are part of trilogy must be enjoyable on their own without resorting to what happened before. I wonder if this was a factor is my actually enjoying the book only half way through it when I had managed to get ravains, vamans, asurs, humans and other myriad life forms that inhabit the book sorted out in my head.

I started reading it with a lot of expectations, considering reviews on the net and all that though I must confess that Samit Basu’s state-mate’s brushes with science fiction one of which produced the Calcutta Chromosome should have made me wary but nevertheless in the quest for fiction that is based in my reality and not Central Park, contemporary London or post WWII Jewish Boston, hope springs eternal from the human breast.

I was hooked from the first page when not only was Aishwarya(Rai?) was compared to a duck but she was also given a species name. (Viduci olwwasysac – Why does she always ask?) My favorite is the Kaos butterflies used by Kol(get it?) to defend itself against enemies, which can create thunderstorms by flapping their wings. (Get it? Get it?) Some other allusions that I came across. - Regal Eagles(?), Streakers in Central Kol Park. (Quite obvious), Free States (USA!) ,Xi’en (China?) [Oook tells me that the Kaos butterflies bit is borrowed from Terry Pratchett.]

Yes "The Umwaba Revelations" is chock full of these weird references. Some of which I am sure I did not get. Though two friends tried to convince me that forest Ekyavan whose leader pretends to sleep but is actually meditating is a reference to Vaijpayee. But in retrospect it might be referring to Area 51 as later in the novel some fancy alien ships are found there.

An interesting new literary device the single paragraphed conversation between two people was original. Sly references to Mumbai in the form of Bolvudis(Get it?), which I applauded. The hero(Kirin) who prefers sex to saving the world and outwits the gods by mere argument I liked.

At some places his language seems strained and sometimes too much of a college cliché especially the conversations between Maya and Kirin. A little cutting and snipping would have made it perfect. Towards the end the complex battle scenes had my head reeling and wondering when it would all end. There are a lot of names common between the people he acknowledges and some characters in the book. I wonder if they are in-jokes. That would be poor taste.

I went in looking for a book that would represent our cultures our inflences in a sartorial way like Terry Pratchett. (the Gods here so speak like Death from Terry Pratchett - ALL IN CAPS.) I was slightly dissapointed but still it is a great effort overall - perhaps I enjoyed it a little bit more because reading of said book was punctuated by the reviewer meeting with the author at a book lauch where he most graciously returned her pen after signing her book (the high moral standards thus displayed had impartial reviewer swooning.) Now if only he wrote a novel about a great city named Mum with meandering roads by the sea where great rains come once a year and a cold wave paralyses the city’s denizens, then I shall deify him.

A cold wind this way blows

2008-01-27T18:20:00.000+05:30

Now a days I dread the setting of the sun when the darkness takes over.

It is unusually cold in Mumbai right now. I am told the temperature was 10C yesterday. It is fine if you are well equipped to deal with the cold but Mumbaikars are not. I mean cold weather in Mumbai lasts for two days in a year. And my hostel room has been carefully chosen to be shielded from the sun so that it is the coolest in summer. Problem is it is also the coldest room in winter!!

I have resorted to ad hoc techniques which involve not opening my windows of my room at all and sleeping with three sheets, one sweater and a pair of socks. This has been happening for the past two weeks with hopes that it will get better soon. I hope this goes away, or pretty soon I will have to actually *buy* a blanket.

To add to this some bright peeps (read people from the North who were in their element) came up with the idea of going to Marine Drive yesterday. I acquiesced. There we were hanging out on windy windy Marine Drive in the coldest day in the year for an hour almost. It was when ice-cream at Natural’s was suggested that I drew the line. A cold Mumbaikar is a disgruntled Mumbaikar and that is one thing you would not want to mess with.

On the plus side, after a long time, I have come across Hindi music which I have listed to in a loop (you know when you play the song/song track again and again and again and again and again.......) Ladies and gentlemen, I present Jodha Akbar. Listen to the magic of Rahman!

Coat Uncoat

2007-12-02T16:21:00.000+05:30

A quote that deserves more visibility.

"The Universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements: energy, matter and enlightened self-interest."
- G'Kar, Babylon-5

MEI dinners

2007-11-30T14:46:00.000+05:30

Assume two people A and B, both of whom are standard MEI students.

A is in the last stages of having his dinner in the famed East Canteen with live entertainment (in the form of scuttling rats) and candle light ambience (on all days but in certain corners only). B joins A. Now A’s dining ritual is tending towards completion yet B in his ignorance, feigned or otherwise, has still joined A.

How long should A, whose dinner is almost done, wait for B in such a situation?

Keen observation and several MEI dinners later, scientists have deciphered the factors that determine the time that A will wait for B.

The time is directly proportional to

The size of the intersection of their social circles. i.e. the number of mutual friends that they have.
The days that A has not met B.
The number of favors that B can do for A. (e.g. exchange of library duty, giving competent cells, helping with assignments etc.)
The number of favors that B has done for A.
The number of treks that they have been together on.
The number of technical terms that B uses frequently and which A understands. E.g. cytokinesis, Euler buckling, Sandpile model, Euclidean space, etc. (Putting it another way whether or not they are from similar fields)
The number of social causes B espouses.
The number of books, movies, etc that B owns that A is interested in.
The number of mood altering substances they have had together.

On the other hand, the time is inversely proportional to

The time that A had been sitting at the table before B joined.
The number of people at the table other than A and B.
The difference in the years of their joining. (e.g. 2002 – 2007=5)
The number of days B has not taken a shower.
The number of favors that A could theoretically do for B
The distance between their respective home towns. (See Addendum below)

A special case is if A and B are of the opposite sex. In such a case, the time thus obtained after these computations is to be doubled. (The time may be quadrupled if B and A are single). The time is also doubled if A and B share the same mother tongue.

Admittedly the actual relationships of all the factors are complex and involve other emotional factors which cannot be quantitated but this is major step in deciphering the complex social dynamics at MEI and will help in understanding that greatest of enigmas - the MEI student.

(*** - Addendum - Consider a line drawn between the two respective hometowns and an imaginary mid point at the exact center of this line. It can now be said that the effect of “distance between hometowns” factor is more complex as its effect in turn increases exponentially as increase in the distance of said imaginary midpoint from Mumbai, location of MEI. A very subtle jibe there if you can get it!)

[Some creative inputs from S.J., P. S. and S.S. MEI here standing for My Esteemed Institute - a place of some repute I am told.]

Eleven things

2007-11-23T13:55:00.000+05:30

Eleven things I want to do before I die

1) Read "The Lord of the Rings". All three parts.

2) Visit Paris/Vienna.

3) Bungee jump.

4) Become a size 0.

5) Drink absinthe.

6) Own a Joni Mitchell CD. This one to be precise.

7) Write a short story- in Marathi. Just to prove a point.

8) Direct a film – horror preferably set in my institute. Its long corridors with multiple doors and desolate areas are a perfect setting.

9) Listen to the Berlin Philharmonic perform Carmen live.

10) Meet my high school crush.

11) Put up this poster on the wall on my room.

Someday. Someway.

MEI stories Part Deux (From Satyajit)

2007-11-07T01:33:00.000+05:30

Samudrika has taken a break. Some thing about a hangover or thesis writing one of those things. I can never make out the difference. So this week I write 'her little column' as she calls it.

I am Satyajit. A long suffering guy in the biological sciences. Oh you scoff and think that I am the luckiest person in the world to work in a field where the sex ratio is so pleasantly skewed in my favor. Oh you are walking away! But pray, wait a while. Listen to my side of the story too.

I am the average guy. Not too skinny, not too fat. Not too fair not too dark. My teeth are a little irregular but if I keep my mouth shut no one notices. Everyone says that I am a nice person. On that my reputation precedes me and of that I am proud. I play hard, work harder. Yeah, I am the average grad student.

Coming back to sex ratios, there are a lot of Pretty Young Things (PYT’s) in my lab. You think I am lucky. Think of my boss! Yes, my boss has a field day/month/year all right. Imagine having all these nymphets throwing themselves at you with “ I would really like to work with you, sir" for M.Sc/Ph.D./summers/whatever.

And to add oil to the ego massage, they think he is God and will do anything that asks them to do. By anything I mean scientifically - the stupidest experiments, and the silliest things. Stands to reason, that when such PYT’s do come along they all work under his express guidance - reporting to him directly. If a bespectacled acne laden guy comes along he is pushed off to work with me and I have to field his questions, which start from the mundane ("Do you believe in god?") to the profound ("Why is the fly testes bigger than the fly brain?").

I swear my eyes would have popped out of my head when a PYT (Pretty Young Thing) used the word "sexxeeee" to describe data from her experiment that had not worked! And boss smiled and said "Excellent, you are doing a great job.” I was tearing my hair out of my head wondering how to clean up the huge mess she had left behind.

If she makes a mistake, she replies in a sweet simper, “But sir I have just been doing what you told me…..” That melts him completely. He asks her, "Let’s discuss this over a cup of tea. Shall we?” And the discussion is continued in the canteen, until the canteen closes or the sun sets – whichever is later.

On the other hand, my discussions with boss conclude in minutes with “I am sorry but I have to pick up my kid from soccer practice, just do the experiments and then we will sit down again.”

I mean I have no problem with someone else's sensuality. I love a little sensuality especially if it is simmering just below the surface or smoldering in smoky eyes but it is the blatant in your face, chest bursting out of shirt type of sensuality that I have issues with. Especially when the face in question is that of my boss.

He is not used to sensuality. It puts him off balance. As it is, getting intelligible ideas out of him is difficult but after he has had a session with one of these nubile nymphets he goes completely ballistic. His ego reaches for the sky and he actually starts thinking, which is not a good thing. (Under ideal circumstances they have to be carefully conditioned to think that they have thinking and you should actually make them think out "your" ideas. Umm get it?) And when HE starts thinking then I have to do the craziest experiments. One of them involved me going to local abattoir at 5 a.m. to get brains of freshly butchered goats.

All a PYT has to do is go on stage dance a bit during the annual variety show and there she is the most popular person in the institute. I have been here longer than her but with one swish of her sheer dupatta, every one in the institute knows her. While if I want to know how to use ImageJ I have to run to ten people to get answers and here she gets tax advice for free. Who cares if I am the star striker of the volleyball team that wins the hostel tournament every year. Every fracking year damnit.

The icing on the cake comes when they get hitched finally. Not with someone like me. But someone from the First Department. (Which is like First Citizen but only in plural and I don’t belong to it.) Oh yes I am screwed personally. Professionally. Both ways.

I am sure I have managed to convince you that all is not what it seems. Now you must excuse me. I have do a trainee's experiment for her. She had to go out to dinner and she asked me so sweetly I could not refuse.

Unofficial Department Mottoes in MEI

2007-11-06T13:58:00.000+05:30

First Department – What we do is great and what others do is junk.

Second Department – What we do may not be great but what they do is definitely junk.

Third Department – We should get noticed. Somehow.

Fourth Department – We don’t know and we don’t care. We are going to Bangalore anyways.

Fifth Department - We know but we don’t care. Pune is great at this time of the year.

Sixth Department – We know and we care very much but we don’t know what to do about it.

Seventh Department – We earn so much more than the rest that we don’t need to care. So we play badminton.

(S.S. to be credited with the first two. MEI stands for My Esteemed Institute.)

On being cynical

2007-10-18T15:19:00.000+05:30

When I joined the insti, the fifth/sixth years were this hallowed tribe you could make out from the others. They were always worried, always serious, never smiled. They did talk to you occasionally to give you advice like “go home more often” or “time flies like an arrow” or something more practical “if your flies don’t mate, sing to them.” (huh??). Some lost their temper on the silliest of things – like when I overshot my time and then invaded into theirs on the confocal microscope or when a lizard entered the culture room. ("Get it out! Get it out! It will eat my flies. I have to finish in two months!")

Something about the hard phd life that makes them like that I used to think. Now I am beginning to wonder whether I am like that too.

Lets see. In the past ten days I have..

Intensely worried - check
Never smiled or laughed - no.
Screamed at junior - check
Screamed at junior for no reason - check
Given unsolicited advice - check (this was about fly mating, for the record.)
Been in a bad mood - check (but that was because of a hangover. That does not count, does it?)

Not bad. 4 and a half out of 6. I pass!

MEI stories

2007-10-11T14:48:00.000+05:30

Things you must do to be grep ('geekily hep') in MEI

1) Music - Must profess a love for Pink Floyd, Bob Marley or Leonard Cohen. Denver is too pedestrian and Billy Joel is too 'whatever'. Britney Spears and her ilk is definitely a no-no. Though Eminem will do if you can say something suitably clever about his lyrics. To be truly eclectic you can say jazz. But pure classical rules as always.

2) Books - non-fiction - Must have read all of the following books - selfish gene, blindwatchmaker, nobel dreams, tao of physics. Reading them means being able to discuss them or trash them with sentences that begin with "looking at it like a scientist........"

3) Movies - Must have watched (and enjoyed in an explainable, virtue extolling kind of way) a movie in a foreign language - Russian sci-fi, French romance, Irani social commentary, Japanese anime, or Spanish fantasy.

4) TV- Must watch one or more of the following series and profess and undying love for them - Star Trek, Heroes, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, IT crowd or something more geeky. On the animation side, South park or Simpsons but then you will have discuss their social relevance.

6) Books - science fiction - Terry Patchett, Isaac Asimov or you might want to say Ray Bradbury just to show your predeliction for the dark side of things. Non-science fiction - late 19th century fiction if you want to be differently different, or something dense like Nietzsche, Chekhov or Chaucer. Say "I like Rowling" and you will be wandering in the dreary desert sands of MEI social wilderness for years.

5) Graphic novels. They are the IN thing these days. Persepolis is a good start though Sarnath Banerjee is a close second due to his bong connection.

7) OS - "Never judge a book by its cover, a man by his shoes or a geek by his operating system.", so said a wise man. but who listens to wise men anyways? Be warned, you WILL be judged by your OS. You must know UNIX/LINUX or at least pretend to use it even if you cannot use the command terminal and prefer a mouse. OSX is a close second. Mention Windows XP you will be summarily eliminated from the conversation. Vista and you might as well jump into the sea.

8) Dress - dress is everything. This has to be carefully casual. A hopelessly crinkled kurta or shorts. Just to show the world that you are so fracking devoted to your science that you dont have the time to dress properly. Maroon is currently very much in style, replacing black as the t-shirt colour of choice. However, at any given time in MEI there will be at least one maroon or black shirt in a gathering of 5 or more people.

9) Must espouse some social cause, which is a good thing.

10) Must be a blogger or a blogger to be. The latter mainly means reading blogs.

11) Should be able to discuss the pros and cons of the iPhone versus the Blackberry versus any other PDA, even if you have never seen them. All this within hours of their release. Time is critical. If you discuss it before release you will be labelled jobless, if you discuss it the next day it will be yesterdays news. Literally.

This combined with a healthy dose of the relevant recent research in your field of interest and there........you are all set to tackled the behe'mouths' of MEI.

The very idea of 'grepness' involves refusing to be defined. So these very things might just be non-grep tomorrow. You have been warned.

I am what I am

2007-10-05T13:29:00.000+05:30

(This is written along the lines of the weekly article that appears on the last page of the Brunch magazine brought out by Hindustan Times. They interview a celebrity with a standard setof questions. So here I interviewed myself.)

Who is your idol?

Satyajit Mayor, NCBS for obvious reasons.

What are you reading currently?

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

If you were reborn as a man, what would be your first thought?

God! Now i cant lust after Johnny Depp legally (at least in this country anyways)

What is deepest most darkest desire?

I wish I had a cat of my own, rather than sharing one with the entire building where I live.

What is your poison?

Vodka, Dark Chocolate, Icecream.

What is the last thing that you do before you sleep?

I wonder if I died in my sleep when would my dead body be discovered and by whom.

What do you do first after you wake up?

Thank God that I did not die during the night. (Yes, I am morbid that ways)

Who is the most sexiest person on earth?

Rahul Bose.

What makes your angry?

When people call homosexuals perverts.

What makes you happy?

A day when I dont make any social faux paus.

What makes you sad?

Misunderstandings.

One incident that you are embarrassed about.

There are several actually and most of them involve a certain amount of ethanol.

What is the first place you would visit if had a time machine?

The Monterey Pop Festival to see Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin play live in their full psychedelic glory.

A secret never before disclosed?

I am scared of pigeons. Do they have a term for this like Arachnophobia for spiders?

(Feel free to tag yourselves!)

Dreamer of Dreams

2007-09-28T02:38:00.001+05:30

(Stumbled on this poem from this site, where it was just two lines at the bottom of the page, but after that it has been stuck in my head. It is what can be called a poet's poem. What haunts me the most is the last two lines. )

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

-Arthur O'Shaughnessy.

Everyone cribs

2007-09-21T14:31:00.000+05:30

(This post owes a lot to ideas that popped up from a conversation with A. P. and K. over coffee at Barista’s)

Crib: v. to complain (about something)

Most people crib about most things. But everyone cribs about their boss.

A casual link has been reported between cribbing about your bosses and working in sciences which almost attain the dignity of manual labor (hereafter referred to as SWAATDOM and this being the English language and since I have made the word, it will be pronounced as “sweat n doom”, thank you). In other words, if a person cribs about his boss, there is a high probability that he will be from the SWAATDOM. Is the kind of work you do correlated to the amount of time that you crib? Or to put it another way in the eternal battle between the experimentalists and the non-experimentalists, who cribs more?

Do experimentalists actually crib more? Is it the nature of their work that causes the experimentalists to crib more? Or is the admission procedure designed in such a way that in the experimental sciences more cribbers are admitted?

For this we need to know the mental make up of a cribber. Why does a person crib? There is every possibility that given the same situation one person will crib and the other person will not.

Then, there are people who will never crib – they gush about their boss so much that one tends to think that they would propose to their bosses the very next minute. Why does one person not crib? Either he lacks the ability to see the futility of his position or he sees the futility but believes that it is good for him. (e.g. “I know my boss is screwing me but it is for my own good. Therefore I shalt not cribbeth.”) Yes these blissful people do exist.

A person who cribs sees the negative side of the situation. But then why would the admission process in the experimental sciences be designed to select for people who crib? Is it that the very process of cribbing makes people around them give in to their and actually ask them to leave or give them better things to do (say apply to other places for example). But then how do they get past the interview process? It could be that perhaps that little hint of irritation on your face is mistaken for eagerness to work for the SWAATDOM.

Far fetched as it may seem, do the non-experimental sciences really have fantastic bosses who do them no wrong? Perceived or otherwise? Or does this have to do with the nature of the fields? I mean the SWAATDOM is competitive. And is the general nebulous frustration of the bosses reflected in the frustrations of the students? Or are experimentalists in general pessimists? Is it necessary to be a pessimist, forever looking for flaws, to be a successful experimentalist?

Then of course we come to the great inter subject debate. Do biologists/chemists crib more than their non-biology, non-chemistry (a lovely word which though encompassing several subjects is definitely pointing towards those subjects which-shall-not-be-named) counterparts? For that we would need to analyze the cribbing capacity of an experimental physicist/mathematician (a rare entity) to a theoretical biologist/chemist (an even more rare entity)? Would the theoretical biologist/chemist crib as much as his experimental counterparts or for that matter would the experimental physicist/mathematician crib as much any other inhabitant of the SWAATDOM?

Can cribbing be measured? If you crib once a day can you call it a unit say CRB? Would a ‘crib’ involve just the feeling of wanting to murder your boss or the critical point where the feelings reach such a crescendo that they assert themselves vocally? What kind of controls would these experiments require? The mind boggles.

Is the cribbing related to the amount of success that you have? Do you crib less if your experiments are working? No. Working experiments – now that’s an oxymoron. (There exists an unacknowledged belief in the SWAATDOM that an experiment that worked means it is an experiment whose results can be interpreted. And if you interpret the results innovatively enough, you write a paper.)

What are the complex social dynamics at play here? Is cribbing just a part of an ancient evolutionary mechanism for a group to band together with shared unhappiness? If that is so, why have the non-cribbers survived? Have these perpetually happy souls been placed here to torture us lesser mortals? Are they practitioners of sorcery? Bring on the stake and light the fire!

All our life

2007-09-11T22:59:00.000+05:30

All our life we chase a dream
when we get it we realise
it it not what we wanted.
With these words I set you free.
And in doing so I am released too.

Publicación

2007-08-28T17:41:00.000+05:30

Ph.D. students come in all shapes and sizes - intellectual, menacingly intellectual, pseudo-intellectual, bitter, bitter-sweet, dumb, dumber, etc. but there is one word that sends a chill down any graduate students spine – a word so sacred that I will use the Spanish translation –publicación. (I wanted to use French – more artsy - but the damn word is the same in both languages).

What is in a word you will ask? What is in a publicación? What is in a paper? It is a just a bit of recycled (hopefully) cellulose or in this electronic age just some bits and bytes floating in cyber space.

What makes a paper? A lot of sweat, tears, dollops of pain, a swish of frustration and a generous dose of luck. To get more perspective on this, ask a person towards the end of finishing his/her PhD “how many publications do you have?” That is sure fire recipe for hara kiri – social and otherwise.

The number of papers gives you a nice quotable number - a kind of measure of a persons success like asking a professional how much money he earns. But unlike a salary which can be faked, publications cannot. There is always Pubmed, arXiv, mathnet and now Scopus to tell the truth. Therefore two papers are better than one and 67 is even better. Its like those percentages of marks quoted to determine who is the better in high school – 98%, 95%, merit list, topper.

There are and always will be exceptions to the rule but somewhere or the other you will find that your worth will be measured by how many “papers” you have. Therein are legends born.

There are still those hushed whispers of the legend who published 67 papers when he was a graduate student. (Apparently that is an record for My Esteemed Institute.) The Cynics will ask “ah there are 67 papers but what is the impact factors of those journals?” with a mild snigger. But that is a number that is hard to forget – 67!

There are hushed whispers of the person who has [insert random high number here] papers by the time he/she was in [insert number less than four here] year and there is an aura about hir wherever s/he goes. There is that smirk of self satisfaction which the underprivileged (under‘papered’ or un‘papered’) look on and despair. What would people do to be in those shoes. Kill probably. Him that is.

And then the person who published so many papers that every time you refreshed mathnet there would be another paper. And the girl whose publication list on pubmed list ran into two pages and she finished her Ph.D in three years! One could go on.

But then of course one could philosophize about the whole issue -Hard work is its own reward blah blah. Science is not about publishing but about passion. Yeah right! Besides, Samudrika is too much of a free spirit to take anything seriously even passion.

Misery loves company and me is going off to the local pub…........and no I am still not going to tell you how many publications I have. The next person who asks me that question shall experience instantaneous loss of life or worse at my hands.

Current obsession – Champagne supernova – Oasis.

The rant of the NRI

2007-08-25T23:58:00.000+05:30

I went out today with a bunch of people in that wonderfully grey area between friends and acquaintances - not close enough to be rude to (without seeming to be impolite) and not distant enough to be indifferent to either.

Conversation got around to music – over cups of frappe and mocha, Neil Diamond and Eagles were being discussed. This particular bhumi putra got agitated and said that he could never understand 'Hotel California'. After explaining carefully about the Satanic church interpretation of the song, he got agitated some more. Then to psyche him out further in my enthusiasm I suggested he listen to Alanis Morrissette “I am bitch, I am a lover”. "Which raga is that? Which talam?" he asked, half serious.

"The song has attitude. What more can you want?" I said. Which agitated him more no doubt. He suddenly changed the topic to English pronunciation! He started saying what a sad language English is whose letters are never pronounced as they are written. I almost blurted out, "Hello, dont look now but someones just changed the topic of conversation here!" But the juggernaut continued.

The darling started extolling the virtues of the Hindi language wherein he stated that Hindi language is more scientific. That all the letters are grouped according to which part of the mouth they are pronounced with and it is scientific. I nodded politely with a smile frozen on my lips, sipped my hazelnut mocha and sunk further into the comfy couch. (The couches are utterly great at the new Baristas at Colaba, do try them!)

At this point when conversations turn there I am always confused. If you support the notion and you have several reasons to because

1) you think in English
2) you write in English
3) you watch movies, read books, poetry in English

English has its virtues. Yes you love the English language. So you would like very much to counter the argument but it is just not de rigueur. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against Hindi. It is a wonderful language which had done a lot for national integrity but I have problems with the fanaticism of the people extolling its virtues.

But in polite society you allow the bhumi putras to have their way, unless you want a minor riot. Any way to convince them otherwise is met with cries of “oh but you are an NRI”.

The curse of the NRI. All life you are brought up in a foreign land, constantly in hope of returning to your homeland wandering among people whose cultures, accents and attitudes you never understand. And when you come back to your home country you are lost again. Where do you fit in? The city slickers of the metros with their knowledge of the city like the back of their hand and their devil-may-care attitude or the bumpkins with their “The whole world is my friend” and "I trust everyone” candy sweet demeanor. Snap out of it man! Both of you!!

Yes, I identify with Manhattan so much more than Naya Daur. No I have not lived in rural areas and don’t intend to, god willing. I am a city girl at heart even if the heart in question skips to an faltering, distant NRI beat.

Toodle too till next we meet!

(picture taken from here.)

The week that was

2007-08-16T19:09:00.000+05:30

I have had the nicest week ever.

It started with a play at the NCPA – Cotton 56 Polyester 84. It was brilliant. It is a play about the Mumbai mills, the culture they spawned and the way it died. There were several references to real incidents – the rise and fall of communism in Mumbai, the underworld etc. It hit home is more ways than one, as my grandfather worked in the mills. Interspersed with some traditional Marathi music it really made me nostalgic.

Then mid week for no reason we went to Theobroma and I had a huge choco fudge cake sponsored by S. The only thing better than chocolate cake is a free chocolate cake. Hmm..

This was followed by a movie – Gandhi my Father. One of the more ‘intellectual’ movies to come out of Bollywood and I love Akshaye Khanna and since it has been sometime since a handsome guy graced my blog here I put his pic. Muah! He acts well as usual. So does the guy who plays Gandhi (except for his unintentionally funny prosthetic ears). The actors are great. The sets are fantastic. But the film is smaller then the sum of the parts and whole thing just does not gel together. You would be better off watching the play with Naseeruddin Shah and Kay Kay.

A telugu movie on Friday night – It was called Jagadam. Technically it was a brilliant movie, the way it was shot, the scenes, the background etc. The first half hour was actually entertaining like entering a whole new universe. A few minor hiccups. The heroine wearing a short white skirt falls for the tapori hero after he molests her at the theater. Huh? Are we still living in the middle ages? And their way of expressing love? Ok wait for this. The girl sucking water off the heroes shoulder before he has a bath with a straw. This scene is shown three times in the movie for added effect. Meh!

Then a trek to Mahuli – possibly my first trek. And yes the very idea of Samudrika trekking was enough to send some people into hysterical laughter. But pox on them! The high point was a well wishing co-trekker whose idea of de-stressing was making up rhyming couplets as we climbed up. Ah yes dear readers I made up the rear of the trekking group but I managed it. This was followed quickly by a promise to me to not go on another trek ever, until I build up my stamina. To add more interest to the whole thing, it was raining when we climbed down, when all the rocks became slippery and suddenly the trek was non-trivial.

On Sunday I went to judge to St. Xaviers for a science project competition for Malhaar, which is arguably the most popular college fest in Mumbai. It was the first time the famous college fest actually had a science based competition. That was heart warming. The topic was "Novel perceptions of time and its measurement". How thrilling! I am told that Malhaar usually involves judges like John Abraham, so I am in exalted company. Yes, you may have my autograph!

That brings me back to my manic Mondays. Not bad at all. Time to buckle down and get to work or else my pre-thesis seminar is going to be DOA.

AAAAAhhhhhhhhhh!!!!

That was me screaming my stress off. So if you hear some random screams over the next four weeks (I have only four weeks!! Damn! Damn! Damn!), that would be me. Please be kind!

Currently listening to – Don’t worry be happy – Bob Marley.

Promises

2007-07-20T21:20:00.000+05:30

Some promises are like starshine
Which fade with the daylight
Some are like rose petals
which smell sweet but last for two days
Some promises are like silken clouds
which change with the season
But mine are like hard steel
Cold, unyielding they remain forever.

The Boston Brahmins

2007-06-29T21:28:00.000+05:30

I just cannot get this ditty out of my head for the past couple of weeks. In all fairness, it was coined by a friend and all credit goes to him.

That off my chest, to put it in context, one also has to say that it was inspired by the Boston Brahmin toast/doggerel that goes like this.

"And this is good old Boston,

The home of the bean and the cod,

Where the Lowells talk only to Cabots,

And the Cabots talk only to God."

And here is his version of it.

"And this my friend is MEI,

The home of the geek and the nerd,

Where the mathematicians talk only to the theorists,

And the theorists talk only to God."

Peter Pan-esque

2007-06-28T14:05:00.000+05:30

It has been a dreary couple of months - the last week has been the worst. A friend is sufferring from a illness which has no physical manifestations, and an illness which most people would make fun of.(the D word darling!) Sometimes I feel partly responsible because I ignored my friend when I was needed the most. Wrapped in my own thoughts, I did not bother to enquire about hir** at all. But hir is "limping back normalcy" slowly and hopefully all will be soon be right with my world.

Also lots of people leaving MEI - people I knew, people I loved, people I liked. With each leaving, an era ends. MEI becomes slightly more different than it was before if that oh-so-familiar face is not in the canteen, collonade, seashore or library. What is life if there is no one to share late night multi-hour 'information exchanges' with?

Perhaps all this is just a symptom of the high stress life that being in fifth year entails. you know post doc searching, thesis writing, paper writing, boss fighting, recco getting and all that. interspersed with frantic searches on Pubmed to see what your batchmates have been upto for the past five years, regretfully realising that they have done better than you while you devoted yourself to wine, man and song. Literally.

Now its time face the world. start worrying about money, housing, stock options, money, babies, jobs, visas, passports, money, some serious work perhaps, mid-life crises, in-laws, etc and money too.

** - hir - new article which is gender independant. could mean him OR her. can also be used in place of he OR she.

*** - MEI - My Esteemed Institute - a well known and reputed research insitute in India which I study in, but I will not name, lest Google give me away.

Melancholiness

2007-06-26T00:50:00.000+05:30

The cage of our mind
The thoughts and the feelings
Trapped
Swirl again and again
In a never ending vortex
Bending, sometimes yielding
Sometimes not and then
bringing us down
With them.

And us knowing,
Understanding
Dissecting it with our molecular
Tools and steel instruments
Trying to understand its
Convolutions and turns
Yet when it goes down
We go with it.

When feelings of heart
Take over our brain
When the brain is powerless
And refuses to listen to logic
Where our drugs and
Chemicals have no effect
When it goes down
We go with it.

Yeh Madira

2007-05-23T01:29:00.000+05:30

Alcohol always stirs some strong emotions – negative or otherwise. Even before it’s very consumption.

There are issues whether it should be taken or not. Usually people who don’t drink have very strong opinions against it and when you mention that you enjoy a little ho-ho-ho-ho once in a while, you get the best of their disdainful looks.

Then there are people who drink but then are disdainful of the fact that you being a woman drink. Something about a woman upholding tradition and the home. I am in the mood for mischief and prejudice. This is the dominant attitude of people not used to the city life, whose attitude towards women in general sucks and they some very close to saying that women lack the requisite skills to make intelligent conversation with them. (There are others, who admire a woman who drinks and they go and fall head over heels for her but we are not discussing that for the general sanity of the populace.)

The rest don’t give two bits about you and all they want is to know when the vodka will arrive.

What happens during drinking?

Some drink to get solace from their lives – which may or may not be difficult. I am no judge of that. But those are extreme cases where they are running away from their lives and not facing reality, and those I am not considering at all.

There are people who look at it like it is fun - the greatest, the most stress busting thing to do. That was my attitude too. I always claimed that I was an alcoholic in the most weird way possible. Something about needs alcohol to stress bust because my job is so stressful. A little fun- a little thrills of doing something grown up – about letting go. But always that little underlying tone of humour meaning none of it could be taken seriously.

Some drink socially become a little merry but not merry enough to warrant entertainment.

Some drink and say stuff that they would not normally. Relationships/resentments not normally spoken of come to a head. You can either accept what someone says about you or you can leave. Some try to act out their fantasies. Some get dead drunk and then just forget whatever happened.

What happens afterwards?

The after effects are the most long lasting.

In a major part of the population they just forget that something like that something ever happened. Get up the next day and get to work, with a mild hangover perhaps.

Not everyone was as drunk as you right. So they will remember. They will not forget.

What of the things that happened when you were drunk? The things you said, the things you did. Were they what you wanted to say? Would you have done that in real life if you were sober? If no, then why not? Was it because it was impolite or inappropriate?

In other words, what is the real you? The sober one or the drunk one? Can you be held responsible for your actions? When you insulted someone was that to be considered real? Can you hold them accountable for their actions? Could you actually make someone confess or say something stupid by getting them drunk? Is it a crime getting people to drink with the expectation that they will make a fool out of themselves or do something scandalous?

Is it better to have done something or said something when drunk versus keeping it embedded in your mind forever? If you are lucky you are too drunk to remember – so are the others. There are no records of the time spent thus. But digital cameras have taken away that luxury too.

Suddenly drinking alcohol is not fun anymore. Looks like I just grew up.

Currently listening - 2441139 – Anjan Dutta.

(Dedicated to I.)

Summer time

2007-05-21T11:42:00.000+05:30

(This was written last year when the visiting summer students arrived. I have no idea why I never published it then. But today being the day that the summer students start their six week thing, I figure I would post it today. )

Summer time and weather is fine.
If you stretch right up you can touch the sky…

Thus spake Peter Andre – the one with the six pack abs.

However, summer time for a research scholar means something entirely different. This heralds the arrival of the species which in polite terms are called the short-term students. The people from various undergrad institutes that makes their way into My Esteemed Institute ostensibly to learn something new. This is of course all a part of the great initiative of a government funded research institute to encourage science aptitude in the undergrad.

I don’t know how it works in the theoretical sciences but it the experimental ones they get tagged along with some (un)lucky grad student.

Some of them are quite nice and I have had quite an enjoyable time with them. But these days all the summer students come with one thing – attitude with a capital A. I don’t know it is just me , or just me getting old, or some radical shift in perception.

Situation one

Here I am. We use carbon dioxide to make flies sit still so that we can work on them. The CO2 comes from huge cylinders outside the lab. One of these got over. Me poor me standing there with a spanner in my hand trying to move these huge things and fix them right.

This VSRP comes, makes whistling noise as if he pities me and then he just stand there and watchs. Just watches. All this while i have this huge spanner in my hand and I am trying to move these big cylinders because the helpers have all gone for the day.

“Why don’t you use some other less cumbersome method of anesthetizing flies?

Pregnant Pause.

Are you sure you are doing it right?

Another Pregnant Pause.

“This is really dangerous. What if it explodes?”

I had these mental images of crushing his skull out with my spanner. But then I gave him my MEI sneer and he went away.

Situation two

Then the irritating guy (from IIT) of larger than average proportions who comes into the lab.

Opens the door. Door bangs against some book shelf kept behind it. Then he asks why don’t you get rid of that thing? And gives us a look of supreme contempt. Like the morons that we non-IITians are should have fixed that problem earlier.

Situation three

Trying to make some lunchtime conversation – you know the situation where no one knows anyone and you are trying to pass time while you chew the grub. This fellow happened to be working in a certain s***** theory dept - which MEI is supposedly famous for.

Him: So who do you work with?

Me: XXX

Him:Oh I don’t know him.

That is good thing.

Me:What do you work on?

Him: You would not understand.

End of conversation.

Situation four

Then there was the story of the student who thought he knew everything. And then he would catch people at the time when they had the most work and ask "what do you do?" Most people like to talk about their work so someone would start explaining about drosophila spermatogenesis and then he would say “Yah yah I know.” But he does then you start explaining something else and then he would say “yeah I know that too.”
Can’t you just listen? And no you don’t know these things.

And just when you think that you have got it all figured out and you are finally exploiting them to full glory – pat comes the news. Their six week training period is over and they have to leave and you end up finishing all the experiments that they have started.

Truly speaking they do provide us a whole bunch of jokes to laugh at for the rest of the year. Don’t get me wrong some of them are quite useful. and there are the incidental advantages. Some lucky peeps have found mates this way. But most of all they do remind us wizened old souls about why we started science in the first place – for the wonder and joy of it.

Just when you start to forget them, comes a new bunch of them bigger, brighter better - with attitudes to match.

Here's to another six weeks with the peeps that arrive today!

Death of an obsession

2007-05-20T23:28:00.000+05:30

(Emotions are such fickle things. One day I am desperately in love with Tracy Chapman. I play her songs again and again. Next day, I am bored of her. Bored to death. Therefore a poem is born! If there is one thing I am consistent with is the fact that at any given time I will be obsessed - just that it will be with different things.)

The gossamer wings of a butterfly
The silky web of a black spider
A dewdrop within a dewdrop
A dream within a dream
Transient, evanescent
An emotion, a feeling
There for a second

And in a flap
Gone forever
Not a trace
That it ever
Existed?

Psychedelia

2007-05-15T22:47:00.000+05:30

The wonders of Adobe Illustrator. I wanted to make a schematic illustrating a stage of Drosophila spermatogenesis - something like the diagram on the left.

But then I started fiddling around with Illustrator and somehow ended up with the picture on the right. (a psychedelic 's view of the Drosophila testes perhaps?). I did not have the heart to delete it so I do the next best thing. Blog it!

Ode to Spot

2007-05-10T21:57:00.000+05:30

(I came across this poem supposed to have been written by Data - the android from Star Trek for his cat. For some reason, I found it very funny, thought right now I cannot recollect why. Text courtesy Memory Alpha, the Star Trek wiki.)

ODE TO SPOT by Commander Data.

Felis Catus is your taxonomic nomenclature,
An endothermic quadruped carnivorous by nature.
Your visual, olfactory and auditory senses
Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defences.
I find myself intrigued by your sub-vocal oscillations,
A singular development of cat communications
That obviates your basic hedonistic predilection
For a rhythmic stroking of your fur to demonstrate affection.
A tail is quite essential for your acrobatic talents:
You would not be so agile if you lacked its counter-balance.
And when not being utilized to aid in locomotion
It often serves to illustrate the state of your emotion.
Oh Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display
Connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array,
And though you are not sentient, Spot, and do not comprehend
I none-the-less consider you a true and valued friend.

Science writing

2007-05-09T20:33:00.000+05:30

I have started blogging at another place. A friend invited me to join a group blog to write about science and other related things. This blog will be pretty much restricted to not-so-serious issues.

You should hop over there. We have real fun discussions sometimes.

Currently listening to - New York state of mind - Billy Joel.

Lemonade Crush

2007-05-08T23:18:00.000+05:30

I have a crush. On a female.

She is effortlessly smart, has more balls than an average male and is fantastically contemptuous of authority. In short, she is perfect.

She is Kara Tharce, more popularly called "Starbuck" from Battlestar Galatica.

I can watch some of the episodes featuring her again and again and again…….

Writing on a wall.

2007-05-06T16:49:00.000+05:30

No matter how many times it happens it always hurts the most.

The strange part is that I thought that it would get easier with time. But it has not.

It has gotten worse.

This pain when someone whom you like and trust betrays you. When someone who you think is a good friend, turns their back on you.

I wish I would grow up soon. But I don’t. I am just a kid at heart – for whom the world is new and still full of possibilities and joys unexplored - naïve and trusting and believing.

Sometimes I think it is better than I have not grown up. Because I am afraid that if I did, I would become bitter. And that would definitely be the end of my world.

Now listening to – I never gonna dance again – George Micheal.

MEI underground - Satyajit

2007-05-01T00:36:00.000+05:30

(for todays article I have given my space to our guest blogger as he reports on happenings in MEI– May the truth prevail!)

From our special correspondent – Satyajit.

Late into the night when the whole world sleeps, My Esteemed Insitite(MEI) awakes. The MEI underground emerges in its full dark glory.

The corridors come alive with sounds of screaming as someone is being strangled (for the record that was the frustrated fifth year was mortally wounding a innocent first year because he asked her how many publications she has) . This is followed by the sound of the piercing laughter of the resident siren (who with her laugh lures many an unsuspecting person into the quicksand of desire from wherein no one has escaped)

From another lab comes the sound of someone yapping nineteen to the dozen telling the world that he will do for [INSERT RANDOM SUBJECT] what Einstein did for physics. You actually pay attention till you realize he is just back from Gokul(local pub) therefore should not be trifled with. You try to shrug him off but he follows like a faithful dog.

There are reagents smuggled from one lab to another, which in broad daylight would have caused more than one P.I. to have a heart attack and would have made the P.I. realize the importance of the saying that no man is an island. Truly some men are not islands but are the Eurasian continent unto themselves. They have been known not to start an experiment until they know that all the reagents they need have been made by someone already. "Why bother making something when you can just beg, borrow or steal it? It is also much faster besides. " says the drunk as he quietly 'borrows' the 2 dimensional electrophoresis apparatus.

Whispers in a small corridor catch your attention. Clandestine hard discs and flash drives are passed around, information too sensitive to be transmitted across the networks, bits and bytes of precious data that entertains, that enthralls, that mesmerizes and that ruins. The digital apple in the silicon Garden of Eden. "Have you seen ********?" A soft voice who in the day you would have never even known existed is suddenly the complete center of your attention. "Later!" says the drunk to the soft voice and drags you away before you can succumb to the temptation. The first sensible thing he has done this evening. You go outside to clear your head.

Strange combinations of people which are not fashionable in the broad daylight of the midday sun can be seen scattered around the campus. The mathematicians politely but guardedly socialize with the experimentalists and biologists consent to talk to the theorists. Class distinctions fall and presence of juniors is actually acknowledged.

Over endless cups of tea and soggy parathas of the open canteen, the days events are mocked, analyzed, exaggerated, re-examined and remade,. New stories emerge out of this. Fodder for another night perhaps.

Subtle nuances gain importance. Whey did the third year girl call her room mate ‘darling’ in that lilting tone? Is there more to it than meets the non-pink eye? "Yes, we get our cheap thrills like this only." says the drunk.

On the sofas outside the canteen various secret societies meet with secret handshakes and even more secret agendas. You hang around and try to listen –certcon certcon certcon - is all you hear so you give up when you notice them giving you strange looks.

where is the science in all this? you wonder. The drunk from Gokul says “This is what science is actually all about”. You ignore him and move on. Time to go home.

Even at the hostel the MEI underground does not let go of you. They take the hostel cat and treat her like a goddess, take snaps of her, cuddle her and feed her, insist that you appreciate it. And the cat she has the attitude of a diva. "I love her, "says the drunk, "I will make a video of her. I will market the video. I will make her a superstar. The world should know my diva for what she is." You suspect this is no longer about the cat so you ignore it.

As the morning hour nears, the players of the MEI underground flock to the beds to sleep till the wee hours of the day like bats. You do too, knowing that tomorrow is another day, another challenge and the MEI underground rests too knowing the same. If they did not get you today, tomorrow they will. You switch off the light in your room and try to sleep.

"Good night" whispers the drunk. You start and then you realize the drunk was always inside your head. The talons of the MEI underground reach farther than you had fanthomed. You have no choice but to surrender.

Current obsession – Comfortably numb by Pink Floyd

Flights of Fancy

2007-03-08T01:27:00.000+05:30

If it were the Victorian age, I would have been a sailor going sailing on any ship that I fancied chasing wild ideas of my capitan, rejoicing at success, paying with my blood for the mistakes that I have made, careless and free as a bird.

If it were the medieval period, I would have been a solider of fortune, trying my luck as things went along, working for whoever paid me, running after imaginary riches and scouting them out to lay them at the feet of my master who has hired me.

If were the dark ages, I would have been a knight, loyal to my King, propounding His Royal Highness' word through the land, making sure that His rule is never disrupted, advocating his law and promises to distant lands and decimating his detractors at risk of my life and limb.

In this age I am a Ph.D student still doing pretty much all these things.

Merry Christmas

2006-12-20T09:32:00.000+05:30

Regular readers of this blog would know about what a sucker I am for English songs with an Indian twist.

Someone called Boymongoose remixed my favourite Christmas carol.

Take a look!

For the Flash player challenged here are some of the words

"On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love sent to me...

Twelve cricket ball tamperers
Eleven syllable names
Ten-minute yoga ..."

etc etc.

But do check the way he says it - simBly brilliant.

Melodrama! (or work in progress)

2006-11-11T18:36:00.000+05:30

Something in her died that night
The light went out of her eyes
And she never smiled again.

When she heard the news that her
Whatever she has lived for had gone
And would never come back

Something in her died that night
The light went out of her eyes
And she never smiled again.

With a poison tipped pen
A few lines written
Her world had shattered and
A thousand shining pieces of
Her carefully constructed dreams
Lay around her as

something that died in her that night
The light went out of her eyes
And she never smiled again.

With horns and trumpets blowing
they tied her hands to the stake and
sacrificed her to the gods.

And she never smiled again.

The masquerade

2006-09-27T18:33:00.000+05:30

In olden times, they would have masquerade balls where you could dress up as someone else complete with a mask. The point being that once you are anonymous you would be less inhibited to do things that you would normally not do.

The internet however has brought this 'charade' to a whole new level.

You can write blogs and pretend to be someone else, more extroverted, more bold than you are in real life or be more knowledgeable, more sensitive than is fashionably allowed.

You can have profiles on Orkut with fancy names like Microchip, or Supernova Shockwave or some totally random hep name. The name could reflect your research interests, other interests or something you love

With this anonymous ID you can proceed to conquer the world or demolish it as you like.

And your real persona hangs behind in the shadows - quite unassuming and unaware.

Anonymity is a great thing. Wearing a mask even greater. At this point the more pragmatic would say that all people in life wear a mask but that would be too much philosophy for a day.

Then there are the commentators who leave anon comments. Funny thing is that most of the times (99.9%) they have nice things to say. If only I knew who they where I would thank them properly. But it’s alright. I suppose.

So if you are new to blogging or the internet,

Put on a virtual mask and join in the modern masquerade ball!

(Picture obtained from here)

A random thought

2006-09-12T21:24:00.000+05:30

I am Maharashtrian(but not a Maratha). I love my language, my culture and my traditions. Yes, I do get upset when people think I am not Maharashtrian. But then, am I Marashtrian really?

I was having this conversation with a newly acquainted Marathi friend.

B: So you are marathi?

Me(face beaming): yes

B: So what kind of Marathi books do you read?

Me (face now clouded) : Ummm...none. I have never learnt it formally

B: So you can't appreciate marathi plays then?

Me (classic sheepish grin): no

The conversation ended quite abruptly there. Before I could put in my standard arguments which I give to the bhoomiputras when they ask with a sneer "but you say you are Marathi and you have not read any of our vast Marathi literature?".

(F.Y.I. my argument to those questions go like this. "I am more well read in English than Marathi not by choice but by chance. It is not that I consiously chose to avoid Hindi/Marathi but it just happened that I was more exposed to English literature than other languages. It is my disadvantage yes. Thank you very much and please stop eating my head." )

Another converstaion on a trip to the Marathi hinterland i.e. area around Pune.

Me: (speaking in shudh Marathi) :I want two tickets to pune.

Bus Conductor (also speaking Marathi) : What?

Me: I want two tickets to pune

Bus Conductor: I dont understand (turning to his colleague) Hey can you?

This infuriated me no end. I was speaking proper Marathi. He does not understand it does not mean that my Marathi is bad. Right?

So I started looking around for some marathi poetry. I enjoy English poetry very much so though I would like Marathi too.

Stopped when I could not get past the first line and it started giving me a headache.

When I get married, I don't think I will teach it to my children. They will probably learn Bengali. (Since husband-to-be is Bengali) I mean I dont know Marathi what I am going to teach them? Though I would probably make them read 'The curious incident of the dog in the night time' before bed and not Harry Potter.

So this is how a language dies then - not with a bang but with a whimper in the hearts of those who choose to marry outside their community.

I hope that the generations after me forgive me. For the last time,

Jai Hind. Jai Maharashtra!

Current Obsession - Lagta Hai Khuda Ka Koi Nek Erada Hai

My latest obsession

2006-09-11T18:39:00.000+05:30

No. not the drummer boy in the picture.

The Drums!

I had a chance to hear live drums last week and what a mind blowing experience that was. I want to buy Sivamani CD as soon as I decide which one.

Of course the ultimate would be a drum kit! Better start saving for it right now.

But then my obsessions never last longer than a flap of butterfly wings. So maybe I will wait till this one wears out.

(picture courtesy of G. )

Tarang

2006-09-09T01:20:00.000+05:30

Like the waves of the sea
Up and down

Heavens own
Two violins

Playing together
Like sand and shoal

Bound from eternity
A storm raging in the ocean

And the silence after
At the same time

Like a celestial dance of
The immortals.

To have those tunes
Forever in my head

To close my eyes
And see it again.

What joy to be alive!

Ode to Morpheus

2006-09-08T12:30:00.000+05:30

With pupils dilated
And rose tinted glasses

An explosion inside your brain
That face that said bye from the plane

When will I see it again?
I may not see it again at all

When everyone is witty
And you are the wittiest of them all

One more drink you say
One more that will wash all cares away

One more and then I shall
Call it a day.

The Researchatti

2006-08-30T00:01:00.001+05:30

(pronouced Re-ser-at-ti)

It has been sometime now that I had been searching for a word to describe them. But it has eluded me.

Society has its glitterati and the chatterati and the world of books has the literatti.

What about the ivory towers of scientific research? Of course we have them too and I call them "Researchatti".

Now we must standardize this things so here goes. To qualify as a researchatti you must fulfill two or more of the following criteria.

1) Eccentricity : This can be anything from the way that he eats food (with his hands when everyone else uses a spoon and fork), to the way that he runs across the canteen after lunch or the way or that he always wears shorts even in the middle of winter, or carries around a pipe(though it is always unlit!) or whose idea of proving his intelligence is poking fun at the nearest grad student.

2) Sado-machocsim. Not the sexual kind. The very student-professor types. (Still not talking about the sexual kind you perverts!). The kind who two days before your qualifying exam your boss tells you I don’t care whether you pass or fail, or the two hours before the poster deadline boss decides that it can be improved so changes it completely or when after you have worked for 24 hrs straight looks you in the eye and tells you the data is junk.

3) The over enthusiastic kind. The one who likes to think that he/she lives, breathes science all day long. Any tea, dinner, lunch session with them is devoted to this. Even if you are caught in the corridor you are subjected to an onslaught of his ‘scientific ideas’. Gradually 15 min turn to one hour. You tune off but still the researchatti continues blissfully unmindful of his audience’s attention, or lack thereof.

4) Field hepness. What they do/don’t do is irrelevant as their field is the most hep in the business right now. That may be quantum computers, single molecule physics ,MEI’s favorite subject, or even the latest fad - biophysics.

5) The rebel: I like to think that I am a rebel so I have to be kind here. The scientist who goes against popular opinion. The validity of this point of view does not matter as long as it is against the general flow, all the time, everytime and he makes sure that everyone in the institute knows that he was against it.

6) High publishing rate: This is the least important but it helps. The kind around whom legends are woven e.g. It is said of a very eminent researchatti that every time you refresh Mathnet, you see that he has a new paper. Another one has said to have 64 papers in his Ph.D and still going strong or the researchatti in a sister institution who only publishes in journals with impact factor of 10 or above say the whispers.

Of course for some reason, these researchatti are the best at what they do. I wonder why?

The Encore

2006-08-22T01:08:00.000+05:30

Once more
Said the raving crowds
Once more
“The symphony again!”

That music they said was
Like a thousand springs
Like diamond rain.

But SHE turned away
Turned and walked out
Did not look back.

That my mind’s hand pointed
Is the reason for this symphony
That sweet face and red lips.
The symphony was for her
My heart shouted.

But I the performer
Have a life to live
And money to earn.

I lifted my baton
Laughed and smiled
Tore my heart from
My chest and started
The Encore.

(Inspired by the name of band I came across called Thee by Encore.)

Another ego trip

2006-08-20T14:50:00.001+05:30

My Inner Hero - Wizard!

There are many types of magic, but all require a sharp mind and a cool head. There is no puzzle I can't solve, no problem I can't think my way out of. When you feel confused or uncertain, you can always rely on me to untangle the knots and put everything back in order for you.

How about you? Click here to find your own inner hero.

Now can I have some magic for my research then? May be a little potion to put my boss to sleep for a hundred years? or some clock that will speed up the time it takes for a Ph.D? or a magic wand so that all my experiments will be done with a swish of wood?

Ooops. I am the one who is the superhero. Damn!

When two astronomers meet

2006-07-25T15:37:00.000+05:30

Beneath Taurus glinting red eye
When the Persied showers trail
With the sting of scorpio’s tail
We will meet - you and I.

You will give me a ring (nebula) or two
And I shall name a galaxy after you
Tell me which one you would like
Shall we save a comet for the l’il tyke?

We shall catch a pelican by its beak
Take a trip to North Americas peak?
The Great Attractor shall be like naught
For the fiery passions that we shall wrought.

For a lock of Andromeda’s hair my love
Will you cross the Milky Way?
Navigate through the Magellanic clouds
And meet me at heaven’s gate?**

The zodiacal lights still shine
And the aurora borealis is bright
But the hourglass says we must part
The veil of distance must drop.

Till the next time we meet - Orange
Red, blueshift, ultraviolet, infrared
These colours would be like nothing.
Till then life will be but a sack of coals.

(** - could not find a reference for that. but "Heaven's Gate" made up of four stars is the region between Auriga and Perseus through which the entire zodiac passes through as far as I remember from a night sky observation trip I went to. )

Udhari

2006-07-05T20:53:00.000+05:30

Udhari var chya prema lar arthach kay?

A serenade on a midsummer night
I was not the singer nor the singee
But I was just the look out
To make sure no one else came.

A glance stolen but never returned.
A question asked but never answered.
A thousand conversations all in my head.

Borrowed love on borrowed time.
Teri pan he mana la kon sangnar?

Messages back and forth
All passed through me
I was the guy’s best friend
And the girl’s first cousin.

Ji kavita amcha sathi lihleli nahi
ter ma tyache point ach kay?

I was just a messenger
But you never noticed me
M’lady was happy and
That made me ecstatic.

But this I promise in
Another birth, another lifetime
I will move heaven and earth
To make you mine.

[This is a flight of fantasy. Extrapolations into real life will be summarily shot down or decapitated whichever is more painful. To people who have been pained by reading this - too bad, take some aspirin.

To give credit/discredit where it is due - the first line was made up by Nikhil in a correspondence and the idea of mixing up two languages was Raamesh's. ]

Ode to the Fly

2006-06-15T20:23:00.000+05:30

Flies are such wondrous things.
They buzz, they smell and they flap their wings.
The little critters come in so many colours,
Ebony, apricot, yellow, white and even ambers.
They hatch from an egg to form an adult in ten days
Indeed the grace of God shows in many ways!

In gay abandon they fornicate.
What joy- when with one swish,
Of my forcep, the fly I castrate.

Black Pain

2006-06-12T17:06:00.000+05:30

Pain and blackness
Swirling in my head
Far into the distance.
Hitting behind my eyeballs

A million sunsets
A thousand moonrises
Flash in my head
Unending possibilities

Cinnamon and scandal
Stories of a suicide
On a lazy Sunday afternoon
heat makes me hallucinate.

When life is no longer worth living,
Should I jump from a building?
Hurl myself into an electric box
Or jump in front of a speeding train?

Unending possibilities.

The Welcome Rain

2006-05-31T17:34:00.000+05:30

Mumbai has been hopelessly inundated by a very early monsoon – about two weeks too early. (Was it just yesterday that we were complaining about the temperatures?)

There is something about water falling from the sky that makes hearts soar and minds leap.

Something that goes back to primeval times perhaps when the first life forms arose from the oceans.

When it rains, you just want to stand and stop and stare. Dream a little maybe.

The best place to the see the monsoon break is from the seashore. With the institute close to the ocean, life seems just perfect.

In MEI, the place to savor the pleasure of the first rains of the season is in the library with its full-length glass windows. So you can sample the raging fury of nature and the voluptuous waves of the ocean (that only a monsoon can bring) without actually getting drenched.

Too bad I can’t spend all my time in the library. For now I shall take solace in this glorious picture. (taken by V.L. , I think).

An Esteemed Institute Story V

2006-05-30T01:15:00.000+05:30

(I am dropping the Love out of the EILS. Reason being that love is a many splendoured things, and none of those many splendors has anything to do with the happennings at HEI. )

It was the middle of May and it had been a quiet time in HEI. Nothing was happening on the rumors front. At any given time in HEI every second person is guilty of at least one of the seven sins. Well of course that is nothing new, but in MEI everyone knew about every ones else’s “sins” and gloated over them. However it seemed as if lately they had all turned into angels.

With the intra- hostel tournaments over, badminton matches done, and no music concerts on the horizon, there was just nothing happening. Maybe it had something to with the heat. With the temperature soaring into the thirties people just preferred the coolness of the central a/c and not spend much time outside. These temperature were not exactly conducive to you-know-what. People never ventured out of the insti so there were no stories of alcohol induced debauchery, infidelity or something to keep young minds busy and to provide a source of entertainment.

Dull. Deathy dull. In fact the last most exciting thing that happened was that somebody’s pet guinea pig gave birth and everyone was gushing over the cute baby.

It could also have something to do with the fact that the renewals of terms happened in August. You had to work and get some data by August so that your term got renewed. Perhaps, everyone was busy tying to get some work done. For a change, everyone was minding their own business.

Except two people.

The president of the RMS (rumor monger’s society) **** met the vice president. (These names will be withheld to protect the lives of the persons concerned). With rumors not happening, these two were out of business. Their USP was someone else’s business. Crushes, misunderstandings, the hottest gals/guys - if such things happened they were the first to know and hence the first to be contacted for information. So they were given a lot of (undue) importance. But it had been sometime since that happened.

The Vice-president said “nothing happening boss.”

President said , “Nothing at all. The summer months are always lean. Unless a student starts an affair with one the temporary summer students around. “

Vice-president : “The usual news makers are out of town, out of the country or they are actually working in which case they are out of this universe.”

The president cringed. He/She** had been brought up in a convent educated school and did not like the misuse of words for effect.

“Dear VP you do have a way with words. But that is extending a metaphor too much.”

VP went on unperturbed.

“What do we do?”

“What can we do?”

“I have a brainwave.”

“Why don’t we manufacture gossip? ”

“Yeah we can make up things – like that new faculty has decided to name his daughter after his grad school crush or that the new firang has a new girl in his room every day! ”

“No! That is not ethical. I mean real manufacturing. Lets make an explosive situation and then sit an watch it explode. ”

“One more out of place metaphor and I bang this bottle on your head. ”

“No I am serious. ”

“Do you remember AJ? ”

“How can I forget? He was guy who got hit by a cricket ball when he turned to see his crush what was her name ? Shweta. Those were the days when gossip was sweet and sour at the same time. It seems like ages ago. Whatever happened to those two? ”

“Let’s get this AJ and make him meet Shweta alone. ”

“How? Tell her some junk that some junior wants to see the telescope. She will fall for that. Tell AJ that Shweta wants to tell him something. AJ is so dumb that he will believe it anyways. Of course all this will be done through several neutral bystanders so that it can never be traced back to us. ” VP had just seen Godfather. Hence these elaborate plans.

“Brilliant!” exclaimed the President.

“But that is just the beginning….then we tell Vishal!! ”

“Vishal as in Shweta’s current boyfriend! ”

“Yes tell Vishal that AJ is proposing to Shweta on the terrace. Then we sit back and watch the fireworks. ”

“Wicked! Wicked! ”

“Don’t forget in addition to us we will arrange for a few “civilians” to be present at this event who just happened to be casually strolling along to the terrace. ”

“We will have things to gossip about till the end of our time. “Said the president rubbing his/her hands in glee. “ Goldmine! ”

“Yes we just have to start digging it. ” Vice-president said with a smirk.

President gave Vice President another dirty look at that misplaced metaphor.

The stage was set. It looked like the lean period had just ended.

[**** - the term Rumor Mongers Society sometimes abbreviated to RMS was first used by A.B. Now A.B. has nothing to do with this.

*** - in the interests of the safety of the Vice-president and the president, the persons sex will also not be revealed. ]

Linkety Link

2006-05-20T17:26:00.000+05:30

Its that time of the year again folks, when I put together all the great links that i have recieved for you to peruse at your pleasure. (actually no I put them here so that I dont misplace them)

1) The Gamma Song : This is a brilliant geeky parody of the famous Llama song. Best part of it is that it is entirely desi - made by two intrepid students of IIT, Kanpur who blog here and here. Link courtesy of A.B.

2) Mozart : Ever since I saw Amadeus which is about the life and times of Mozart - particularly about his rivalry with his closest competetitor Salieri, I can't get over the music of Mozart. Here is link that takes you to several of his works. My personal favourite is Symphony no 25 which incidently is also the tune used by Titan to market their watches. Pox on the critters for not acknowledging Mozart in their ads!

3) Physics Jokes: there is thread over at one of my favourite blogs about science jokes more specifically physics jokes. Here is my favourite though i needed the help of Maths expert S.L. to figure it out!

The cocky exponential function e^x is strolling along the road insulting the functions he sees walking by. He scoffs at a wandering polynomial for the shortness of its Taylor series. He snickers at a passing smooth function of compact support and its glaring lack of a convergent power series about many of its points. He positively laughs as he passes |x| for being nondifferentiable at the origin. He smiles, thinking to himself, “Damn, it’s great to be e^x. I’m real analytic everywhere. I’m my own derivative. I blow up faster than anybody and shrink faster too. All the other functions suck.”

Lost in his own egomania, he collides with the constant function 3, who is running in terror in the opposite direction.

“What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you look where you’re going?” demands e^x. He then sees the fear in 3’s eyes and says “You look terrified!”

“I am!” says the panicky 3. “There’s a differential operator just around the corner. If he differentiates me, I’ll be reduced to nothing! I’ve got to get away!” With that, 3 continues to dash off.

“Stupid constant,” thinks e^x. “I’ve got nothing to fear from a differential operator. He can keep differentiating me as long as he wants, and I’ll still be there.”

So he scouts off to find the operator and gloat in his smooth glory. He rounds the corner and defiantly introduces himself to the operator. “Hi. I’m e^x.”

“Hi. I’m d / dy.”

4)A different sort of wine: If anyone ever gets around to making this, remember you read it here first. Link provided by T.S. so you can blame him for the consequences.

On a high

2006-05-05T23:30:00.000+05:30

Lots of work to do, a fresh dose of estrogen, a few swigs of port wine and great music - a perfect recipe for disaster or a blog post perhaps.

What do I write? Something utterrly sappy and sentimental or something revolutionary and earth shatterring.

What about something risque? Something about the new faculties on campus and each ones merits and demerits(not scientific naturally), which one I like the most and why, how ones accent is so cool and how the other is so passionate about his work. How one persons scruffy hair is so appealing and the others smile is so enticing.

What about something personal? Like how I wrote a small play recently and how four wonderful people brought my dialogues to life and made it more better than I could I have ever imagined. What an amazing thrill that was to have the stuff you write actually acted out!

Or something scentific? Like how much I am reading on high energy physics these days and how much I envy these people. Their field seems to be so glamorous - charms, anti-charms, supersymmetry, superstrings, Tevatrons etc.

Or something passionate? like my enduring love for astronomy and how watching two galaxies merge (even in a simulation) is the most humbling experience in the world. Then of course there is dark energy and dark matter which deserve a whole rant to themselves.

Or something embarassing? like how on hostel day you were made to 'walk the ramp' with the dean. You did not want to refuse then becuase it would have made a scene but in retrospect that would have been a better thing to do. Now whenever you see the dean you run in the opposite direction or try to hide your face.

Or something practical? Like how soon can I get the long distance out of my long distance relationship.

Regeneration

2006-04-13T23:09:00.000+05:30

Inspired by some of my friends who have started blogging about their science, I will attempt a few posts to spread awareness(!!!) about cell biology and perhaps a little about developmental biology. Here goes nothing.

Ugh! Now that's a face that only a mother could love. Maybe..not only mothers but also the few scientists who have chosen it as their model organism. It is not a rule that the model organism you work on should be cute but it helps.(first said by Ralph Greenspan). Imagine waking up every morning and thinking "I have to go back to the lab to work on Axolotl" and then that horrendous image would come to mind. I for one would definitely just turn back and go to sleep again.

However this awful creature is making waves though for one thing that it does - regeneration. If you cut off a limb of this amazing animal it can regerate it....completely! Magic!

Not really. Of course it would have a 'developmental program'[a series of events involving the sequential expression and use of proteins for a develpomental event like formation of a wing etc] . Just that the specific developmental program is not known yet. Once that puzzle is cracked it would bring in billions to the person who figures out how this is done. (and you thought there was no money in science!)

The brightest among you would have figured it out why this thing is uber-hot by now. The application of this program either in vitro or in vivo could possibly lead to regeneration of human body parts like a factory.

All paradise and glory but there is catch! (isn't there always?)

Unlike my favourite model organism, (the fruit fly - muuuaaah!) the genetics of axolotl has not yet been well worked out. I am sure it is because of its hideous looks but then no one asked me. It is related to lizards and genetics here is difficult. For good genetics you need a way to make 'bad genes'(mutations for the purists) so that you can study the effects of these 'bad genes'. One way is to hang around and wait till you get a 'bad gene'/mutation that arises spontaneously in the population. The other way is to actually just go in and damage the damn DNA.

Recently scientists have managed to do something like that. They were able to make transgenic Axolotl i.e. they have managed to put some foreign DNA into a wild axolotl. Actually they put GFP into it.

Why GFP? GFP stands for Green Flourescent Protein which is actually a gene from Jellyfish that glows under Ultra-Violet light. The beauty of GFP is that it can be expressed in any organism still it would glow under UV. Therefore, this is a wonderful non-invasive marker for cells that you want to track.

Advantage Axolotl...and now you can track the cell lines with GFP as they develop so that you will be able to follow which cell gives rise to what(the so called cell lineage). So then you can determine in the final regerated limb which cell came from where. Of course this technique can be used to damage DNA to make mutants as well. With this new technique we should be able to figure out soon how axolotl manages to regenerate body parts.

So will be able to order our body parts soon? Don't hold your breath. There is still a long way to go.

P.S. For the nitpickers, axolotl is not the only organism that can 'regenerate', there are also the planaria(lower in the evolutionary ladder and therefore farther from humans), lizards(tails!) and earthworms. In addition, there was one report of a mouse that can completely heal its heart.

(The picture is from here.)

My Bloginfluence is 105.6

2006-04-08T13:35:00.000+05:30

Got this nifty link from this blog.

My influence

[105.6]

The most comprehensive 'blog ranking' system I have come across. It takes into consideration blog links, post links, web links, bloglines subscriptions and Google page rank. To top it all, it has a formula to put each into perspective. Of course, perspective is always a subjective matter.

Somethings.....

2006-04-06T13:44:00.000+05:30

Somethings irk me. This is one of them.

My dear institute has been facing an accomodation problem for the graduate students. Right now there is absolutely no space in the hostels for the new students that will join this academic year. In fact of the ones that joined last year some of them are still living in the colony flats. Most are still sharing rooms.

It is not as if this problem was not forseen. Surely they would have thought of this when they were taking students last year. What would the solution to that be? Take less students which they obviuosly did not do or build a new hostel of course.

How long does it take to make a new building? There was a four storey building in Colaba that fell last May. Now it has been rebuilt and is functioning normally in less than a year. Keeping that in mind, you need a maximum of one year to build a four storied new hostel. Given that this problem was foreseen last year, why has that new hostel building not been built?

Even the construction work on the new hostel has not begun but we hear that the plans have been approved. Anyways, the fact remains that there is no new hostel yet.

All paths now closed to them, what do the power-that-be decide to do? They take their ire out on the students since they are the most expendable commodity here. They ask the sixth year students to leave with a notice of two months. Of course they have been provided accomodation in a place far away from here which would take at least two hours commuting everyday and commuting a city like bombay is hell.

I agree that our having an accomodation so close to campus is a nice thing and it is a luxury that not every grad student in the world enjoys. All I am saying that it would have been better if the students had beeen given some sort of warning that they will have to leave so that they could have tried to finish by the stipulated time. But that sadly did not happen.

If they do this next year it would be justified as the students would have had enough warning to at least try to finish things on time. I would have not have any problem in that.

But who am I anyways? Just a student and I don't have any say in this.

They have the impression as if we like to stay in this rotten place and that we actually enjoy it. We don't. Most of us would like to leave right now if possible but it is our bosses that don't let us go. "finish this and that and then we will see", he says.

Of course that brings us to issues like if a project fails and the student actually spends a long time on a Ph.D., then whose reponsibility is it? The student or the P.I.'s but that deserves an entire post altogether.

No I don't have any friends who have been affected by this decision for whom I am writing this and no, my real world alter ego will not subscribe to any of this if you ask her. Sorry but yes she is chicken that ways. It just the indignation of it that rankles. No this is not an attempt to incite students. I know that they have done whatever was possible. This is just an attempt to put my point of view across. That's all.

Quiz time!

2006-03-31T16:25:00.000+05:30

No not the intellectual, mind bending variety but the less brain power consuming types which makes them perfect for yours truly.

How much of you is owned by your blog?

I got this.

43.75 %

My weblog owns 43.75 % of me.
Does your weblog own you?

43.75% of me is owned by my blog! That leaves a little more than 50% for research. I hope my boss is not reading this.

Are You A Hit-Obsessed Weblogger?

Here I got the following.

45 points is in the 40 through 59 precent
TYPE U (HIT-UNDECIDED). You have a healthy number of readers that you'd like to maintain but you don't think you can keep them happy all the time. It bothers you when your weblog gets less hits than usual. You know there are things you can do to increase hits to your weblog but you just don't think you're desperate enough to actually try it.

This result was spooky. How does the damn quiz know that I have a healthy amount of readers. Are they tracking me? What does it mean by healthy? Who or what in MEI is healthy (in mind, spirit or otherwise) anyways ?

Frivolous

2006-03-31T00:17:00.000+05:30

I do not believe in signs (you know like if you see a white pigeon when you leave the house, then your work will be successful or when you see a dead leaf fultterring down then you know that whatever new project you start will be not work etc). If you do believe in signs and you are trying to cross disciplines, then you will love this.

Is this a sign from above that greater interaction between biology and physics will tell us the secret to the life, universe and everything?

What is this wondrous sign? A DNA nebula!

This a actually a nebula that is shaped like DNA. Like some divine Aprils Fool's day joke on physicists.

There is also an explanation for this phenomenon.

Morris hypothesizes that the wave traveling up the magnetic field lines and creating the double helix nebula is a disk of gas at its base, made to spin by the gravity of the black hole at the center of our galaxy. The double strands of the nebula are created by the dumbbell-like structure of the spinning disk, which concentrates the magnetic field lines in two areas, he said—otherwise, the nebula would be cylindrical.

The original article is here and the link is from one of my favourite blogs.

Perfection

2006-03-29T21:06:00.000+05:30

Sometimes you come across a picture that is perfect. In earlier times you would probably ask the person who took the picture for the negative, get one photograph processed for yourself and then you would stick it in your album.

In these 'modern' times what do you do? Why, bloggit of course!

Here is a picture taken by S.C.J. on a recent trip to Mahabaleshwar. A pretty pink rose.

Personally though I like yellow flowers more. There are a row of pretty yellow hibuscus near the entrance of my institute. It feels wonderful to see them every morning. They make my day. Everyday. (Now doesn't that sound like a bad ad for coffee. Ugh!)I must get over my laziness, buy a camera and photograph them sometime.

Heaven and Hell

2006-03-21T17:08:00.000+05:30

A.D. forwarded me this stuff sometime ago.

Heaven is when you have
An American Salary
A British home
Chinese food
A Swiss economy
An Italian body
Japanese technology
An African tool
An Indian wife

Hell is when you have

An American wife
A British body
A Chinese tool
Swiss food
An Italian technology
Japanese home
African Economy
And an Indian Salary.

This I forwarded to B.D. who suggested that something of the sort could be made up for My Esteemed Insitute(MEI), knowing the number of disciplines that we have here. So here we go.

Heaven is when you have the

1) Theoritical physicist's profs(Each one is so much more uber-cool than the other. I have yet to hear their students crib about them. Did I mention good-looking?)

2) Chemistry's skill (be it NMR or fluorescense these guys are the best in the country.)

3) Computer sciences free time (Some of them are forever present at the hostel or in the badminton courts. How do they manage to get their work done?)

4) High energy physic's foreign trips (They are always jetting off to exotic locales like Switzerland and Japan. I can understand a student going once during a Ph.D. but these people go every year! No fair.)

5) Condensed matter's hype (Even Biotechnology in its heyday never had the position that Nanotechnology enjoys these days.)

6) Biologist's joi de virve(The only department that takes undergrads which makes our average age much lower than the other departments. Therefore, a much more fun place to work!)

7) Math's passion (These guys really love what they do. No kidding. They even discuss Math when they are supposed to be recreating. Truly admirable.)

8) Astrophysicist's instruments (a whole radiotelescope of 30 dishes of 45 m each devoted to gettting readings for you, a satellite system(WMAP) collecting data for your analysis. What uber-geekiness to say "My data? I collect it by satellite.")

But then, Hell is when you have the

1) Theoritical Physic's social etiquette (They have been known to tell people stuff like "Dont expect me to talk to you. I only communicate by mail." and other anti-social statements.)

2) Chemistry's hard work (They slog like crazy and they are always in the lab 24/7/365. Quite an inspiration.)

3) Computer science's frustration (General nebulous frustration, with no purpose or aim, just plain frustration not directed at anyone but it is there. Even though there is no reason to be.)

4) High Energy Physics's instruments(Life must be difficult if your instrument is in some other country and is booked years in advance.)

5) Condensed Matters geekiness (Even in a institute full of geeks, they are the uber-nerds - the uncrowned champs. Dull. Deathly dull.)

6) Biologist's brains (When was the last time we made some earth-shattering discovery? Never. We cant even solve differential equations. Anyone can do what we do. After all, there is only one way that you can dissect out a fly testes.)

7) Maths passion (Passion is a double edged sword. You tell them 13 is unlucky. They will tell you 13 reasons why it is a unique number.)

8)Astrophysicist's sanity (rumour goes that thinking day in and day out about the vastness of the universe and how it all began is a bit too much for the human brain to comprehend and therefore the human brains that do think about these things start to lose it a little. Some talk to themselves. Others don't talk at all.)

Intrigue is in the air

2006-03-16T00:53:00.000+05:30

[As usual, I exaggerate. So take this with a bucketful of salt]

The annual MEI(My Esteemed Institute) quiz contest is coming up. Very exciting. It is the highlight of the MEI social calendar in large part due to the person who conducts the quiz, with great flair.

What is more interesting to the social observer is the political intrigue that goes on to form a team before the quiz. For a quiz you need a team. When it becomes a team then the people you associate with becomes more important than you. It’s not a question of being the best it is more about getting into a team which has good people. This requires more politics than the stuff that happens at the Parliament every four years or so. Indeed the intrigue is so thick at MEI these days that you could cut it with a knife.

There are furious machinations going on at this point. The best quizzers get several offers. [Clarification: Yours truly is not one of them.]

Some offers can be very very spooky like a SMS at midnight from a number you don’t know. “Will you be a part of our team?” It asks cryptically. Then you ask equally surreptitiously “That depends on who is in your team.” Of course once you identify the number you know the answer to that question already. But this is just to stall the situation for a little time so that you know which are the other teams being made, who are in them and what are your chances of getting into the better ones.

The music and the current affairs are two important sections in the quiz and there are people who specialise in these things. Hence the next questions.

Negotiator 1: Who is the music guy?

Negotiator 2: We have E.W.

1: That guy cannot differentiate between Ayyan Ali Khan and Amjad Ali Khan. He is tone-deaf!

2: Who is the current affairs guy?

1: R. D.

2: A girl? For current affairs. No way! Might as well not take part. We need a guy. Get T.L*.

1: Can’t

2: Then I cant either. I will not join unless T.L.* is associated with it.

1: Where is the hacker***?

And so it goes on the furious haggling in some cases till minutes before the quiz starts and in some cases involving exchange of several bottles of intoxicating liquids.

[* - the legendary quizee who had won all the quizzes he participated in when he was a student.
*** - hacker - This is the guy who will try to break into the quizmaster’s computer. Of course this has never happened so far. But that does not mean it can’t right?]

Then you have to make major decisions regarding where your loyalties lie – with the department, your friends or to the person from whom you want that little piece of programming done that will save you a week’s work.

After all this you have to confront your labmates who are forming their own team. First reaction is open hostility.

Labmate: WTF? Samu? How dare you not join us and form a team with someone else? THEM? They are not even from the same departement!

Me: Sorry but they are asked first. When force does not work, they try to invoke pity.

LM : You left us for them. You ditched us. How could you? Then they make faces like a baby seals about to be slaughtered. And you imagine that a tear does slid down their face so you actually start feeling guilty.

Me: I am sorry yaar! Next year I promise. This ends with threats of violence.

LB: Next time next time, you come to us to get that fly stock that that you killed by mistake. Their hand inches toward the scalpel they use to dissect flies. Yikes! You exit the lab before a murder is committed.

Of course after all these machinations, time and again it has been proved that the most rag-tag team formed at the last minute is the one that takes the prize but that dearies is another story and for another day.

Side note: For those still in the Holi mood, hop over to Kate's blog for a near-accurate description of how I spent my day.

Cheapo 6

2006-03-14T15:41:00.000+05:30

Random surfing brought me to this interesting post about an international conference that was held at My Esteemed Institute recently.

People were begging me to do a post on the the Ayaan Ali Khan concert and the President of India's visit to My Esteemed Institute (that were associated with the conference) but that guys post presents the whole thing from a very unique viewpoint.

For the record I don't agree with what he says. I agree more with Kate and Nikhil.

Another one for the record, the questions after the President's talk were not staged.

Isn't the Internet a very powerful thing?

Sabka Katega!

2006-03-07T01:13:00.000+05:30

One advantage/disadvantage of being brought up in the Middle East was that there was nothing that you could identify with. Your cultural input was either the uber-americanised cartoons where they had pizzas for lunch or Indian films where the only reason people went to college was to find life partners. You as a 13-year-old N.R.I. did not fit in anywhere.

So many years wandering in this wilderness of life trying to figure out why Whigfield sang 'saturday night and I like the way you move....' (Back where I lived, in the middle east friday was the weekly holiday. Saturday was the first day of the week so I thought she was having a crush on her office mate or something)

When George Micheal crooned "Last christmas I gave you my heart....." the juxtaposition of joy and un-joy was lost on this Confused Desi.

In the Middle East, there are only three seasons - hot, very hot and unbearable. July and August were the worst months of the year - scorching hot! Autumn - never heard of it. In such a place, the following legendary lines made no sense at all.

No warm july
No harvest moon to light one tender august night
No autumn breeze
No falling leaves
Not even time for birds to fly to southern skies
No libra sun
No halloween

The first person whose music resonated with me was Apache Indian. When he rapped "Sweet like Jalebi..." in Arranged Marriage my heart truly sang with him.

Recently, something like that happened again. Every second line I heard I could identify with. I was going yes that is me and I know someone like that and then that too.....

That was this group called the BodhiTree - a band from XLRI, Jamshedpur. First the bad points, they could do a little polishing and their lyrics need to be more focussed. Three songs I liked.

1) Sabka katega! What a great motto for a Ph.D. and is fast becoming a lab anthem. I agree very much with the second line of the second stanza.

2) Too many potatoes. This is about the preponderence of potatoes in the hostel menu. In MEI(My Esteemed Institute), we can replace potatoes with green peas. One intrepid day the MEI cooks managed to serve peas pulao, mixed veg(with green peas) and kheema(also with green peas) at the same time! Methinks, they have something illegal going with a green peas trader.

3) Xl ki kudiyan I cant get the damn song out of my head! Sometimes I find myself replacing Kudiyan with Profs and XL with MEI to make something like this.

MEI ke Profs bade bade smart
Hai meri tauba tauba
Theory bhi mardiyan, Fundae bhi mardiyan,
Theory bhi mardiyan, Fundae bhi mardiyan,
Fundae bhi mardiyan bade bade wrong!
Hai meri tauba tauba

Go listen!

(Link shamelessly stolen from VW! Picture taken from here.)

My Requiem for a Dream

2006-03-01T17:57:00.000+05:30

(The following was written after consuming a bottle of feni. If you believe even half an iota of this stuff, you need to get you head checked, mate!)

Just finished a terrible book called Memoirs of a Geisha. (Also saw a movie by the same name but that was so bad that it is not even worth discussing). Anyways, the interesting thing in Japanese culture is their intricate system of bows. Deep bow for someone who is elder/more revered than you, middling bow for less revered and slight friendly bow for peers.

How wonderful that you can classify all people you know into different degrees of a bow? Pity that we don’t have that in our culture.

Or maybe such a thing does exist. Herein, follows a classification of the people that a normal MEI(My Esteemed research Institute) student** comes in contact with and how he/she may deal with them.

1) The boss - seeing and then running away in the opposite direction.

One of the advantages of being in the fourth year is that by now you have perfected the fine art of sensing where your boss is and finding something infinitely more urgent to attend to in the opposite direction. This is to avoid potentially career-threatening situations that begin like this
Boss: Have you started that uber-crucial experiment that will get us that nature paper?
You: Actually….ummm…aaahhh…..no.

2) Labmates - Big smile. Then stop and say a few words.

This is for people in your lab. Of course the main reason for such joviality is to get truthful answers to the crucial questions "Is the boss in the lab?" And "Did the boss ask for me?"

3) Department mates. Big smile and maybe a few words.

This is for members of the department. You never know what reagent you have to borrow from them and who will make the next batch of best competent cells (which are worth more than gold in mol bio work and the Lord in his infinite wisdom hath blessth very few with the ability to maketh them). Or you may need to use some precious instrument that only their boss can afford.

4) Friends. Then a hand wave around the shoulder area. And smile but no teeth showing.

This is for people who you know from other departments, who of course you are never going to need during the course of your experiments but who are friends. No no not friends in the normal world sense with jokes, laughter, shared interests, shared passions and stimulating conversation. Friends in the MEI(My Esteemed Institute) sense that is people you have played badminton with maybe once or have had lunch with them maybe half a once.

5) Batchmates etc. Then the slightest of hand waves but much lower than shoulder maybe around the waist. Very slight almost-not-there smile.

Those you have to tolerate for the sake of tolerating. You know the saying. God gives us batchmates. Thank God we can choose our friends. [Edit: this does not mean that my batchmates are weird in anyway. They are extremely nice people.] [Edit 2: The previous edit had nothing to do with the fact that half of the guys in my batch look like they could break a concrete slab into two with one arm if provoked.]

6) Pesky juniors and competitors - the MEI stare/sneer

This is the perfect combination of disinterest mixed with just the right level of contempt so as not to be insulting. It is for those pesky juniors who think that MEI is just a college and that everyone here is their friend. Not true. In MEI even acquaintanceship has to be earned and as for friendship see point number four. This can also be used effectively with people who due to some fault of theirs (unknowing or otherwise) ruined your experiments some time ago. Be warned. Some recipients of the perfect MEI stare/sneer never recover and are left with deep psychological scars for the rest of their life.

7) Others No reaction.

This is easy for people whom you don’t know. But it takes a lot of effort to keep a straight face when you pass some of the characters that inhabit the MEI campus like the guy who made an ass out of himself at Gokul the other night when he got drunk and asked the waiter “thoku kya?” ,or the biology babe who talks to her flies (and even has names for some of them!), or the astrophysicist who believes that the Big Bang happened when Brahma sneezed, or the chemistry guy who watches Kyunki Saas bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi on the sly. There should not be one flicker of laughter, disgust or any other reaction on passing them. Not one. Because an emotion would acknowledge their idiosyncrasy and science thrives on idiosyncrasies. Therefore this no reaction is the look that requires the greatest control of the facial muscles and the greatest mental strength to accomplish.

** - There is no such thing as a normal MEI student!

A bouquet of links!

2006-02-21T20:23:00.000+05:30

Past few days I have come across some links that are profound, some that are memorable and others just plain hilarious. Happiness shared is happiness multiplied and all that sentimental junk. Therefore, I put them here.

WARNING: Pursue only when you have ample time on your hands!

1) Would you like to have some coffee? I never thought that those seven words could have such powerful connotations. Here is a discussion about a female scientist who was asked for coffee by a male colleague and what followed. Of course underlying all this is the question about whether the double X and the Y chromosome can ever have a platonic relationship. (From Nanopolitan's blog)

2) Asimov has always been a perennial favourite. My deepest, darkest secret- I always wanted to be like Dr. Susan Calvin. From Arjun's blog got this amazing short story by Asimov that made me look at computers in a new light. Oooops, did I just give the ending away?

3) I like satire. One person who used to write the best satire I know, has now stopped blogging unfortunately. But then there is always David Letterman. A collection of David Letterman videos! (I actually thought I would post this as an antidote to post V-day blues.) My favourite - Ten things that would sound creepy when said by John Malkovich.

4) Also listen to the songs of Taxi No. 9211.Something different to come out of Bollywood for a change. I particularly recommend Ek Nazar Mein Bhi. I have problems with the song Azmale Azmale, when he goes, 'Beech ka parda uthale'. Huh?

Bi(o)-curious , anyone?

2006-02-10T23:11:00.000+05:30

It is widely believed that the next greatest progress in science will happen at the interface of physics and biology. In fact several organisations like the HSFP reserve part of their postdoctoral fellowships for Ph.D.'s in physics to pursue research in biology. Most of the papers published in Cell, Nature etc. use simulation in some form or the other, which requires knowledge of Physics.

I agree very much with this. Biologists are too used to looking at metaphase as chromosomes arranged at the centre of the mitotic spindle. It takes some mind-bending to stop looking at them as chromosomes and just some big particles being positioned by two polymer chains. They are as much subject to laws of physics like Brownian motion and physical forces at low Reynolds number.

I have come across very few physicists who can appreciate Biology. There are some brave enough to take it up briefly but their interest is never sustained. I don't know whether they look upon Biology as an inferior science or it is just too confusing for them. The latter cannot be true because Biology requires much less understanding than Physics.

I once spent a whole hour trying to convince a string theorist about the beauty of the mitotic spindle but all throughout there was not even a flicker of interest on his face. I even showed him some pretty pictures. Oh well! Maybe I did not know how to put it across to him.

Perhaps this blog will accomplish what I could not do.

(The picture is taken from here. It is an image of a newt lung cell stained with flourescent dyes undergoing mitosis, specifically during metaphase. The material stained green are the mitotic spindles and the material stained light blue are the chromosomes. The cell membrane is not visible.)

Hamar blog......

2006-02-09T12:20:00.000+05:30

Here is an article on Bhojpuri movies. about which we had a discussion some time ago.

Interesting facts

1) Two Bhojpuri movies did more buisness than Bunty Aur Babli last year.

2) Amitabh Bacchan and Hema Malini have signed up to do a Bhojpuri movie together.

3) Several foreigners have acted in Bhojouri movies including one Cambridge educated babe.

More power to the vernacular!

The Silver Lining

2006-02-07T22:06:00.000+05:30

My experiments are not working these days and I dont know where to take them. Anyways, I will not bore you with the details.

But once in a while even a failed experiment can be a great source of pleasure. Like this one. Isn't the picture worthy of Picasso himself?

For your information that is my model system - immature fruit fly sperms!

Open Letter

2006-02-07T21:17:00.000+05:30

Dearest readers,

First, thank you for all the comments (anon and otherwise) and the appreciation.

But, now I realise that the EI love stories(henceforth called EILS) are a kind of special interest variety. They can only be appreciated by readers in my institute. (You Kray, are an exception that proves the rule!)

Moreover, it becomes difficult to comment on other better blogs. They, that is the authors of the better blogs, would come here to read the stuff I write and they would find all this mumbo-jumbo trash which I am not exactly proud of. I mean that is not the real me anyways.

Therefore as an experiment, I have shifted them to another location. Will let you guys know via the links on the right panel. Then again, maybe I will put them back here if I feel like.

I love indecision.

Warm regards,
Samudrika.

Hilsa and other musings of the idle mind

2006-02-02T20:10:00.000+05:30

Regular readers of the BBC may be familiar with this.

In a study carried out at Avon, it was observed that mothers with greater intake of Omega 3 fatty acids had children with more IQ. In what form did they consume this fatty acid? Oily fish!

What are oily fish? Wikipedia says that oily fish are those that have oil throughout their fillet and body cavity and not just the liver. Like a scientist you will ask, 'Give me examples, Samu!'. Oily fishes include salmon, mackerel and hold your bread.......HILSA and KATLA - the last two of which are consumed so heaviliy by the residents of Bongaland.

One wonders - is this the reason for the intellectual dominance of the Bongaland people over other less hilsa/katla loving people? Are the others doomed to wander in intellectual wilderness then?

But the tides are turning.

Recent reports indicate that the beloved hilsa is getting endangered due to pollution and heavy fishing. Will this lead to the intellectual decline of Shonar Bangla? On a more sinister note, is this a deliberate ploy on the part of the government/foreign agencies/Al-Qaeda/aliens-from-outer-space to reduce our average IQ by hitting where it matters the most?

We wait and watch.

Next: Is there a link between coconut oil fatty acids and Mallu wise cracking?

(The picture is from here.)

A poem

2006-01-30T23:15:00.000+05:30

To all those people who have loved and lost.

A rose is only as good as hand that chooses her
A poet only as great as the praise from his admirers.
The fact that I like you does not make
you great in anyway.
It makes me greater 'cause I see things in you
that no one else can.

Bright Idea

2006-01-23T23:38:00.000+05:30

I have to submit an application for a course, the deadline of which is Febraury 1st. But my head is not working right now. I have reached a mental block. Ergo, I blog.

PP gave a good suggestion in the comment's section of Voice Within's blog. That some of us who share an institute (which will still not be named!) could start a common blog where we can put up stuff.

I don't know if we will ever get around to doing it but it is fun to think of names for such a blog. Here are some I thought up.

1) tea in between fun and recreation
2) procastination
3) phd knights (nice pun on nights here)
4) bluffmasters (75% of research is bluffing anyways...)
5) bombaydreams
6) lord of the strings (all bow to Tolkein)

That's all! Me getting back to work now.

Suggestions and ideas are always welcome.

P.S. The EI love story will resume in a few days, I promise.

So what sex is your brain then?

2006-01-13T20:44:00.000+05:30

Here is a quiz I came across on the BBC website.

It has been claimed that your brain can be either male or female and that may not have anything to do with your actual sex. (Dont ask me how - neurobiology was never my favourite subject). Therefore, it aims to find out the sex of your brain by asking questions based on surveys of male and female behaviour and comprehension ablities. All very scientific.

A bit time consuming but fun. Keep a scale handy.

What is your sex?

As for me I turned out to be just as female as all the other average females who were tested - not one bit of maleness in me. I was slightly dissappointed as I consider myself a techno-geek and all that. Looks like I will have to hit the mascara and rouge now.

P.S. My cold turkey lasted for much shorter than yours, Kate. Whatever have I got myself into?

Seven signs that you need to join the BA

2006-01-12T16:54:00.000+05:30

Seven signs that you need to join the Blogaholics Anonymous.

1) You sleep with a notebook and pen next to your pillow. So that you won't miss a good idea even if you are half-asleep.

2) When you reach the end of a newspaper article, you are dissapointed that no one left any comments.

3) You spend three or more hours everyday, tweaking your template.

4) When something sad/happy happens to you, all you can think of is "How can I blog about this?"

5) You think that "friends" is just another word for "people who link to me".

6) When you understand the difference, you realize you have more of the latter than the former.

7) You no longer recieve any e-mail (mostly because you don't reply to any). People who want to see if you are alive just leave comments on your blog.

The Blogaholics Anonymous meets every Tuesday at the 'Z' block conference room at 9 p.m. right after the Orkutoholics Anonymous meeting.

[As a mental experiment, I am going to go cold turkey for a while. If you see a female going into paroxysms screaming 'I want to blog', that would be me.]

Currently listening to
Cocaine - Eric Clapton

I am a stapler.

2006-01-08T17:48:00.000+05:30

As a rule I hate quizzes. With their apparently tailored answers, they give you a fake sense of individuality. But they are good enough when you are too bored to think of something original!

INDIVIDUALIST:
You make your own rules and boldly go where no one
has gone before. Some may think you are
arrogant and even rude, while others admire
your keen observations. Not that you really
care.

What kind of blogger are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

This one is interesting for two reasons
1) It tells me I 'boldly go where no one has gone before'. Nice to know that I have imbibed some Star Trek principles.
2) I can't, for the life of me, figure out the connection between a stapler and individualism!

New feature!
Currently listening to Hallelujah by Rufus Wrainwright. (For the nth time, no less!)

Depp rules!

2006-01-07T22:25:00.000+05:30

We interrupt the regular transmission to bring you a news flash.

For the second year in a row, Johnny Depp has made it to the FIRST spot on the IMDB's top 25. This rating is based on the search behaviour of over 30 million users of the IMDB. To celebrate this, we present a picture of Depp from one of our all-time favourite movies - The Ninth Gate.

We wait eagerly to feast our eyes on The Libertine and of course, Shantaram. We fervently hope that he drops by in Colaba for the actual shooting of that epic novel.

Beware! Disparaging remarks about Mr. Depp or The Ninth Gate will be deleted. More power to the Deppster!

We will resume regular transmission shortly.

My Boss and I

2006-01-06T23:51:00.000+05:30

4 p.m. today
My boss walked in. I was playing Mah-Jongg solitaire as usual.

Boss: So whats happening?
Me: Ummm...
Boss: Have the proteins been expressed?
Me(doing my best imitation of a sheepish grin): No.
Boss: Have the flies been dissected?
Me(real sheepish grin now): no
Boss: Have set the crosses for the flies?
Me(sheepish grin replaced by panic): No.
Boss: What have you done?
Me: Well I was busy making the poster etc. It was the department review.
Boss: Yes but that is not work.
Boss: Look at your colleague. She was working all the three days.
Me: But she did not have a poster to present.
Boss: That is not an excuse.

(Suddenly, the picture of my boss's neck on a guillotine looked very appealing.)

5.35 p.m.
Discussion ended terribly (for me that is). Boss left to go home with the parting shot of "Show me the data tomorrow". (Samu - "What data?")

5.40 p.m.

His wife calls.
Her: Is [my boss's name] there?
Me: Ummm.....(the devil within me spoke)No actually he left loooonngg time ago.
Her: Oh really?
Me: Yes.
This was followed by the sound of a phone banging down really hard - as if someone was very angry.

Ahh. Sometimes I love being a bitch.

Lord of the Rings Allegory

2006-01-05T00:47:00.000+05:30

Anirudh Deshpande mailed this to me sometime back. I put it in my blog for posterity.

The Lord of the Rings:an allegory of the PhD?
by Dave Pritchard

The story starts with Frodo: a young hobbit, quite bright, a bit dissatisfied with what he's learnt so far and with his mates back home who just seem to want to get jobs and settle down and drink beer. He's also very much in awe of his tutor and mentor, the very senior professor Gandalf, so when Gandalf suggests he take on a short project for him (carrying the Ring to Rivendell), he agrees.

Frodo very quickly encounters the shadowy forces of fear and despair which will haunt the rest of his journey and leave permanent scars on his psyche, but he also makes some useful friends. In particular, he spends an evening down the pub with Aragorn, who has been wandering the world for many years as Gandalf's postdoc and becomes his adviser when Gandalf isn't around.

After Frodo has completed his first project, Gandalf (along with head of department Elrond) proposes that the work should be extended. He assembles a large research group, including visiting students Gimli and Legolas, the foreign postdoc Boromir, and several of Frodo's own friends from his undergraduate days. Frodo agrees to tackle this larger project, though he has mixed feelings about it. ("'I will take the Ring', he said, 'although I do not know the way.'")

Very rapidly, things go wrong. First, Gandalf disappears and has no more interaction with Frodo until everything is over. (Frodo assumes his supervisor is dead: in fact, he's simply found a more interesting topic and is working on that instead.) At his first international conference in Lorien, Frodo is cross-questioned terrifyingly by Galadriel, and betrayed by Boromir, who is anxious to get the credit for the work himself. Frodo cuts himself off from the rest of his team: from now on, he will only discuss his work with Sam, an old friend who doesn't really understand what it's all about, but in any case is prepared to give Frodo credit for being rather cleverer than he is. Then he sets out towards Mordor.

The last and darkest period of Frodo's journey clearly represents the writing-up stage, as he struggles towards Mount Doom (submission), finding his burden growing heavier and heavier yet more and more a part of himself; more and more terrified of failure; plagued by the figure of Gollum, the student who carried the Ring before him but never wrote up and still hangs around as a burnt-out, jealous shadow; talking less and less even to Sam. When he submits the Ring to the fire, it is in desperate confusion rather than with confidence, and for a while the world seems empty.

Eventually it is over: the Ring is gone, everyone congratulates him, and for a few days he can convince himself that his troubles are over. But there is one more obstacle to overcome: months later, back in the Shire, he must confront the external examiner Saruman, an old enemy of Gandalf, who seeks to humiliate and destroy his rival's protege. With the help of his friends and colleagues, Frodo passes through this ordeal, but discovers at the end that victory has no value left for him. While his friends return to settling down and finding jobs and starting families, Frodo remains in limbo; finally, along with Gandalf, Elrond and many others, he joins the brain drain across the Western ocean to the new land beyond.

Rage Rage Rage

2006-01-02T20:32:00.000+05:30

Sting operations are a crowd pleaser with the hidden cameras satisfying the voyeur in everyone. Of course they have their utility like increasing awareness like the Tehelka tapes or providing entertainment like the Shakti Kapoor stuff. But when it directly affects you things are a different matter.

In the aftermath of the IISc incident, one intrepid reporter decided to try getting into My Esteemed Institute (MEI). She had a hidden camera in her bag and actually managed to get inside the place by giving false names to the security guard. She wandered around the whole institute - the reception, a professors office, a chemical room and even our famed auditorium. She says that her bag was never checked and she was never asked for an I-card. This was gleefully touted on CNBC as a report about how the security at research institutes is lax. She also got into the IIT, Mumbai and wandered around in the some room with a lot of pipes and ducts and was able to access keys to several rooms

How will this incident affect me?

Security at the gates will be tightened. They will check our bags thoroughly. Life overall will be difficult. But that I do not mind.

Did it serve the purpose?

God knows. In my opinion, if someone actually wanted to attack the institute they are a million different ways of doing it –none of which involve the security gate anyways.

Did it benefit the general public?

The first time I came to MEI was when I was doing my Master’s. I did not have a proper laminated I-card then. I just came with the recommendation of my professor. If the guard had not allowed me inside then I would never have able to access the rich library of journals I could not get anywhere else. To use a cliché, coming to MEI then opened my eyes and all I wanted since then was to a part of it.

I doubt that anyone with good reason in spite of having the right documents will be allowed in at all, unless they personally knew someone with a valid MEI I-card. Hell, it will be difficult even for me to go to IIT to use their instruments.

How did it benefit the reporter? A raise definitely and a promotion maybe.

I hope the reporter realises what a loss it is for science in this country if the limited resources that we have are not shared with the general public and especially with the students who come from institutes/colleges that are not as well funded.

I condemn the reporter as mean, petty and selfish and I condemn CNBC for using this cheap ploy to boost TRP's (and therefore advertising revenue).

I hope she rots in the deepest circles of hell.

New Year is here!

2005-12-31T23:48:00.000+05:30

A stupid poster presentation keeps me away from the New Year's Celebrations. (Still not done, people. Please bear with me.)

If Mohammed cannot go to the mountain, then the mountain will go to Mohammed. Therefore if Samu cannot get her Blue Lagoon then......

Here's hoping that the new year brings more papers, more grants, more wonderful labmates, less haughty P.I.'s, more results, less experiments, more scientific discussions, less ego clashes, more Johnny Depp, less Brad Pitt, more Star Trek, less Star Wars!

Happy New Year!

Haiku

2005-12-31T10:37:00.000+05:30

Deadline slips by, silence
Boss realizes -
Ten screeching crows.

Effect on MEI of the IISc incident

2005-12-30T15:16:00.000+05:30

By now everyone would know of the incident at the IISc. For those who have just arrived from the Andromeda galaxy, go here for an insiders account.

This post is to chronicle the effect that this incident has had on My Esteemed Institution(MEI) mainly for my readers most of whom I gather are away from MEI but still retain an interest in it.

The first effect was immediate. The gates of the institute were shut immediately and for further protection a small wooden stick was driven through the bolts. Quite innovative!

Next the security guards were actually trying to guard the place, not just playing cards or discussing their children's progress in school or solving the daily crossword in Saamna.

The real pain started the next day. When entering the institute something unusual happened. The guard asked for my I-card - which is a good thing, no doubt. The bad thing quickly followed. My I-card had expired in June.

What followed was a tirade about why I should renew my I-card and how important it is. I made an excuse that I had a lecture to attend and made a quick exit, promising that I will get it renewed soon.

The icing on the cake was yet to come. The lecture was by a Great Scientist from Abroad (GSAB) who incidently had done his Ph.D from IISc! The conversation which I report well and truly happened.

My boss: It is sad what happened in IISc.

Head of Department: Well, IISc security is almost non-existent.

GSAB: That was the beauty of it. We could come and go when we wanted. I have seen all sorts of things happening on the campus.

*Slightly embarrassed silence*

My boss: Now the security will increase.

GSAB: Yes now no more walking around holding hands with your girl-friend!

*Totally embarrassed silence*

Did someone say something about scientists not being good at social conversation?

Melancholiness is a state of the mind

2005-12-29T14:30:00.000+05:30

I am unhappy.

My boss just told me to make a poster in two days flat. I am to integrate two things that are as different as chalk and cheese into one poster and in only nine slides!

Back to the point. I am sad. So what right do you guys have to be happy?

Therefore here is a poem gauranteed to make you sad too.

My Father's Love Letters

On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams"
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.

-- Yusef Komunyakaa

There, I feel much better now.

For insightful comments, hidden meanings and other melancholy stuff go here.

Sangeeta Singh, Ph. D.

2005-12-27T20:52:00.000+05:30

The first South Asian character on Ph.D. comics - Sangeeta Singh.

It is strange how the choice of name for a peripheral character from a particular community reflects the perception of the community by outsiders.

There were a few smatterings of South Asian characters in Jeffery Archer and Arthury Hailey novels - very typecast, very typical. Either they were the counter clerks or loyal employees.

They were usually called by some very general name like Mr. Singh or something terribly wrong like Dr. Rao Shastri. (Strong Medicine). For God's sake, both Rao and Shastri are surnames. You would never find a real person named like that. Another was the cashier in the Simpsons but I dont recollect his name. I dont know whether he has one in the first place.

Asok (the IIT graduate from the comic strip 'Dilbert') was the first character whose name was apt somehow. I love his dialogue -"At the IIT, we are trained to sleep only on national holidays". He was shown to be super-intelligent, super-deductive. Type-casting? I say, yes!

J.K. Rowling was better with Parvati Patil but there was the still-unbelievable Padma Patil. Here they are thankfully just students not menials or super-smart geniuses. (Though no fault of hers, IMHO these things were negated when the characters were made to wear those terrible ghagra-cholis at the Yule ball in the movie)

Sangeeta Singh from Ph. D. comics seems just right. Though the cynic in me wishes that George Cham could have used a more unique(?) surname.

Too bad that she is just from the past of Professor Smith.(She was a fellow student that Prof Smith supposedly had a crush on during his grad school days). That means she won't be a recurring character!

See the comic here and here!

Geekiness gone too far?

2005-12-23T19:36:00.000+05:30

Presenting.....the ultimate geek accessory.

A blank keyboard! That's right. The keys are there but they are blank. Nothing insribed on the keys at all. As blank as a black hole.

In case you are flummoxed, their website explains why it is a geek must-have.

If there are no keys to look at when you are typing, you will look down less and therefore will be able to type more rapidly. Soon you will be so fast that you will be the envy of your colleagues and then no other keyboard will do.

They had to coin a new word just to describe the kind of people that would use it - uber-geeks.

See it here!

But my point is that instead of spending such a lot of money why don't I just cover the letters of my keyboard with plastic tape?

In case any of you come across someone who actually buys it let me know....

Ghosts and presences

2005-12-21T18:34:00.000+05:30

The world of research with its late nights and long waiting periods in between(read incubation times) is uniquely suited to the generation of stories about the supernatural. Quite contrary to our purported scientific and logical ability. These stories reflect the imagination of the students and are directly related to the level of loneliness while working.

During my Masters in the M.S. University of Baroda, where the buildings are old and far apart there were quite a few stories. The site on the third floor near the stairs was said to have a 'presence' which was attributed to a labourer that fell during the building construction. This is a picture of the place taken from here.

But regarding the subject of ghosts, our adjacent department at Baroda was more fertile.

Their old building and the new building was seperated by a walk-way that was on the first floor. To go to the ground floor of the new building you would have to enter the old building, go the first floor, then the walkway and then walk down to the ground floor of the new bulding. Heaven only knows why they had this clumsy arangement. But this ensured that the ground floor of the new building was totally 'cut-off', thus becoming a breeding ground for ghosts!

Students working at night had claimed seeing a yellow dupatta that fluttered across the walkway. Then there was the distillation unit on the ground floor that started on its own one night. Interesting times indeed! A good ghost story needs a solid reason. Some said that the whole department was cursed. Some said that this curse extended to the faculty becuase none of them save two had children! Why this curse? No good reason.

Comparitively MEI was a desert - no stories at all. Maybe it was because of the security that sits at the main entrance throughout the night or maybe the students here are really scientific and don't bother about illogical things.

Our Sister Instituion Down South (SIDS) was much better in this regard. There the labs are placed far from each other and some labs also have a terrace seperating them form each other. Some labs are empty. Perfect for the generation of stories!

There are rumours of an entire section of the building being haunted, with people seeing things over their shoulders when sitting at a tissue culture hood. People encoutering things when taking the long walk to the hostel from the institute. The reasons for this vary from a 'pregnant labourer falling to her death' (ho hum...heard this before) to 'the institute was built over a graveyard' (priceless!).

Recently closer home (MEI) a talk with a driver gave some interesting anecdotes. Opposite the canteen we have several sofas which serve as a place for general meetings, discussions and such-like. Earlier drivers used to sleep there at night. But one day a driver slept there and was woken up by some old lady. What happened to the driver? Legend is silent on that matter.

I have never seen or felt anything supernatural yet. However I am thoroughly convinced that I might soon.

My boss currently occupies the lab that was once used by the founder of our department - a very, very revered person. He has now shifted to Banglore and is very old. I am utterly convinced that when he dies, he would want to visit the place from where it all started. Maybe I will see a subjective ghost.

Movies Part Deux

2005-12-19T19:20:00.000+05:30

This being December is 'Oscar Season' for the movies. Therefore I have had to come up with a list of 'movies to see' very soon compared to the first.

These movies won't be here for a few months at least. Therefore I vent my frustrations by blogging about them.

1) Syriana: This is about oil poilitics. I love a good conspiracy theory and if there are huge barrels of oil at stake even better. I am looking forward to see how Arab Sheikhs are portrayed in the movie.

2) Aeon Flux : This movie is not exactly critically acclaimed but I am a sucker for science fiction. Add to that, the publicity blurb goes "400 years in the future, as a disease has wiped out most of the Earth's population, those who have survived live in Bregna, a walled city-state ruled by scientists". Now how can I miss that?

Movie that I will definitely not see even if someone pays for the ticket, the cab fare and the dinner afterwards.

1) King Kong: No, no no I dont understand what can be so appealing about a huge gorilla falling in love with a small tiny female. Big gorrillas are impossible. They have not existed in the past and will not in the future either. To top it all this movie has a rating of 8.3 at IMDB and is currently ruling the U.S. box-office. Life is unfair.

Ten Things

2005-12-15T21:00:00.000+05:30

Ten things that are not supposed to happen but always do by some arbit extension of Murphy's law.

1) It is when you are not wearing your specs that a cockroach will dart across your room. What follows is a hunt for the specs followed by hunt for cockroach.

2) It is the most important experiment for the paper that will require the most troubleshooting.

3) You will spend three hours trying to fix the microscope computer so that it will give you beautiful images but it is when you are 5 minutes into playing Mah-jong solitaire that your boss will walk in and ask "So what are you upto?"

4)It is the night, when you have to give a presentation at 9 a.m. the next day and therefore need a good nights sleep, that your next door neighbour will choose to play tymphanic membrane splitting rock music at the highest volume possible.

7) When your boss has a discussion with you he will invariably ask you about the experiment which you have not done.

8) By corollary, he will not ask you about the experiments which you have done and which have worked.

9) It is the reference ,that you need the most, that will be in a journal which the institute library does not subscribe to.

7) You may attend all (ummm...well....MOST) of the talks in the department but it is the talk that you do not attend which will be attended by the Head of the Department and you absence will be noted.

8)It is the one talk that you will not attend in which the molecule that you work on will be mentioned and hotly discssed. To add insult to injury, there will be public annoucements of "Where is samudrika?Where is samudrika?"

9) It is when you are dressed like something the cat dragged in that your boss will insist that you show your data and discuss things with the Great Scientist from Abroad(GSAB) whose talk you have not attended by the way. (see 7 and 8 above)

10) It is when you have composed your most creative, most witty post (which you think will receive the most comments) that it will be gobbled up by Blogger and sent to the Great Recycle Bin in the Sky.

More details on the GSAB later.

A Poem and A Vision

2005-12-13T19:53:00.000+05:30

The Gardener (LXXXV)

Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring,
one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished
flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one
spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years.

-- Rabindranath Tagore

Poetry is like the distillation of emotion. A good poem can transport you to the place that the poet is writing about and a good poem can also make you have 'visions'.

Permit me to a little flight of fantasy along the same lines.

These words that I write in my blog they will forever stay here in cyberspace long after I go away. Some lost soul will come here, read my works and be inspired. He will accept my words as his religion. Thereafter, his life will change. My words and works he will carry to others and convert them to my disciples. He will be my prophet and I WILL BE GOD.

*HA HA HA HA HA*

Biology Jokes

2005-12-12T21:43:00.000+05:30

BIO Personals

I've been single-stranded too long! Lonely ATGCATG would like to pair up with congenial TACGTAC.

Menage a trois! Ligand seeks two receptors into binding and mutual phosphorylation. Let's get together and transduce some signals.

Some dates have called me a promotor. Others have referred to me as a real operator. Personally, I think I'm just a cute piece of DNA who is still looking for that special transcription factor to help me unwind.

Highly sensitive, orally active small molecule seeks stable well-structured receptor who knows size isn't everything.

There must be a rational way to meet a date! I'm tired of hanging out in those molecular diversity bars, hoping to randomly bump into the right peptide. I want a molecule that will fit right into my active site and really turn me on. I'll send you my crystal structure if you send me yours!

Gene therapy graduate. After years of producing nothing but gibberish, I've shed my exons and am ready to express my introns. All I need is a cute vector to introduce me to the right host.

My RNA, I'm sorry I misread your UAAUAAUAA and inserted three tyrosines when you repeatedly asked me to stop. Something got lost in the translation. Please forgive me.

Naked DNA with sticky ends seeks kanamycin-resistant plasmid. EcoR1 sites preferred.

Uninhibited virus seeks reason to make me shed my coat protein.

This very selective oliogonucleotide has been probing for just the right target for long term hybridization.

Mature cell seeks same who still enjoys cycling and won't go apoptotic on me. Let's fight senescence together!

I'm a prolific progenitor with great potential for growth and self-renewal. Call me if you're a potent hematopoietic factor who still believes in endless nights of colony stimulation.

I don't always express myself on the surface, but I'm looking for a signal that you appreciate my complexity. Send me the right message that will penetrate my membranes, turn on my protein expression and release my potential energy.

M. (another person hopelessly enamoured by Biology) sent me these some time back. This convinced me to dig it out and post it here.