What Goes Up...

The last few weeks, I've been on an utter high (as may have been evident from my blog posts in case you didn't see me hopping around with mad joy). It had to end sometime. Grandpa G passed away this morning. Some more time is all everyone asked. Hopefully he didn't suffer. Right now, I want to do anything but to go and be with the family. Reminds me too much of earlier deaths in the family. But it's time to grow up and keep oneself in the background. I just wish S, S, V, M everyone gets the strength to cope up with this and be able to remember the long, active, productive life he led till now.

I will miss you KG.

October is the new March...

How can I say it without sounding self-congratulatory? Anyway, one more first...Got my first paper accepted in an international journal...things have been really happening this October...Those of you who will be interested already know where to look for it...I guess it'll be out in few months...A nice way to start 2010!

For what it's worth, I was selected in the interview.

I am nowhere nearer to clinching this extension, yet it feels so amazing. Actually, I don’t even care whether I get selected. I feel so great right now. This comes out of doing something properly and your efforts being appreciated.

I was nervous, coz I hadn’t appeared for an interview in three years, and that can make you out of practice. The best strategy I thought was to be myself and not pretend to be someone else, coz that starts consuming so much of your brain. Warts and all, take it or leave it. Moreover, the bigger problem is the attitude which keeps yelling in the background, do better you asshole! End result is even when you have given your best, you never feel satisfied with anything that you do. Now, it might be a good strategy to go forward in life and be your biggest damned critic, but in stressful conditions, when you need to feel good about yourself, that attitude doesn’t really help. So be yourself and be more kind to yourself were the only two things I kept reminding myself.

It went well, but the great moment was when one of the interviewers said in the end that how amazed he was at how much I have done, what I have done and my presentation skills. Now, this fellow was the one who I was most stressed about coz he is an amazing scientist and always comes up with questions least expected. Plus, in my first year here, I had taken his course, and he was so so great…so I didn’t want to measure any less in front of him. Add to that, presence of my advisor in the same room, and the pressure to perform in front of him. With all this, when this guy said that about my presentation, I realized how important all this was for me. Their realizing that I have worked my ass off for 4 years, and this is just a small part of all that. And if they find this much a lot, then the thesis will more or less fare well when presented in its entirety.

The best part of the interview was when boss said that just give them an idea about the other projects you are simultaneously working on. I was not prepared about it and that made it kinda exciting. I had no supplementary thing to support my talk, so decided to use board and give them an idea about various projects I have been running simultaneously with the one that I presented and how they relate with each other in answering the bigger question on the table. Don’t really know what they thought, but the most important thing was I felt exhilarated. There was no preparation for this part of the talk and so everything was impromptu. And I think I did a good job coz they seemed really focussed on what I was saying and giving all the right reactions, nod when they need to nod, smile when need to smile. So everything was great.

After all this, it might not be such a boring idea to teach. I always felt teaching is a big bore, and that’s because I always thought it’s so predictable. Year after year you teach more or less the same things, your punchlines are the same, your jokes are the same, your conclusions are the same, where’s the bloody excitement? But maybe it’s up to me to make it interesting for myself…Let’s see.

This is a mistake...

The Nobel Peace goes to Obama!

According to Alfred Nobel's will, Peace Nobel should go to the person "who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.''

Nobel committee is ridiculing these words, right? Have they forgotten Obama's decision of sending 15,000+ American soldiers to Afghanistan "to stabilize the deteriorating conditions". A rhetoric if I knew any. Isn't this the lingo in which neo-rulers speak?

I am disappointed, disillusioned and my worst beliefs are turning into reality. Obama is turned into a demi-god by people who are confused and don't know where to go and whom to turn to. Obama is a saviour for them.

Ohhh, what a shame. I can't see his name (and deeds) in the same league as Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi, just to name a few luminaries who have been felicitated with this prize in the recent past.

I envy R and R (can you guess who they are??!!! R1, I don't want him to ever come to my blog coz he will 100 per cent throw a fit reading some of the stuff here...R2, now she is a different ballgame...she is a regular buyer of my shitty monologues and keeps coming to this blog like an ant to a fungus). These are two people I know who sleep even less than me (ha ha ha)! Now in case you are wondering why (I know, I know, there's absolutely nothing else to envy about them), I am the kind of person who thinks sleeping is a waste of time.

So, are you smirking already? That probably goes on to show that either you love your quota of sleep and find my reasoning ridiculous or you know me too well to believe what I said in the previous line. But who said thoughts and deeds are one and the same? Wanting to achieve something and actually being capable of achieving are two different things. I learnt it long back. I loathe sleeping. It's just that I can't help falling asleep. For the logically/verbally challenged, who still haven't got hold of my uber-cool logic on why I loathe sleeping, I will spell it out for you in numbers...1/3 rd of your life, you've spent sleeping...Look, for me, that's a big deal...I mean 9 years of my life...Do you realize what it means?

1. With my average, I could have had 9 more girlfriends.

2. I could have done 2 more PhDs (ok, this actually sounds scary, but you get the point, right?!)


So, the problem is that I sleep after a gap of every 14-15 hours even when I hate it coz I just can't seem to keep awake. My brain starts giving up. I can actually hear the knobs and switches in my brain getting turned off, I can actually see the lights being turned off and I can sense the buzzing and whirring of my neurons slowly coming to a standstill. Things start running in slow motion and I slip in the whirlpool of darkness.

This creates a dichotomy. My circadian rhythm is screwed up as the hatred pushes me to postpone sleep as long as I can, wondering in awe every single day whether I can skip sleep. Of course that doesn't happen being the sloth that I am, and eventually I do fall asleep, but then it's so late that when I finally get up again, half the day is already over. It's a nightmare (no pun intended).

Anyway, so that is the reason why I envy people who can do with much less sleep than me as they get more time living.

ps. I just can't believe I have spent half an hour of my time on writing a post on sleep!!!

Something happened in Dharwad. One of those insignificant details which make you smile when you think about them later on.

I met this girl. A sweet girl. One who gave me a lot of attention! Haven't got that in a while now. It made me feel years younger...Like when I was in PU or even before that during Bachelor's...

That raw awkwardness when you meet someone new...

What's absolutely great is that for those 2-3 days, I realized I have a heart too...which I'd given up on...so much so that I'd probably forgotten about its existence...and though I know nothing's gonna come out of this, I realized how my heart can thaw and revive at the slightest degree of attention from a female! I feel alive!

To paraphrase G. H. Hardy,

"There is no permanent place in the world for ugly science ... . It may be very hard to define beauty in science but that is just as true of beauty of any kind, we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognising one when we read it."

So, these days I'm searching for a brain wave which will probably hit the right spot in my brain and help me come up with an appropriate title for my thesis. Something snazzy, cool and one which summarizes everything that I have been working toward...

We all have to finalize on our thesis titles by the end of the second year but no one really sticks to it as PhD is all about flexibility, checking out preferences and practicalities in the given arena of work. So the titles are quite dynamic.

Of course, I have seen people slogging, with only the faintest idea as to what is that one (or a few!) questions they would like to answer. Just work, gather data, and something will definitely emerge. This is their motto. It's ridiculous and pathetic. You know what that reminds me of? A supervisor writing a recommendation letter for one of his students, not knowing for whom he is writing and yet scribbling frantically on his notepad, and at the end of it, depending on how it has turned out, deciding which student he will give that letter to.

ps. Okkk. That was a distant simile. What to do? Everything these days reminds me of reco letters. Forget about my vices and virtues, I just hope my boss remembers who I am. He asked me few days ago whether I am done with my colloquium already!!!

Huhhhhhh??!!!

I'm glad I chose ecology. Can't think of doing anything else. This is what I know the best, and this is what I love doing...research...logic...thinking...aaahh...nothing can beat it.

The Panther

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometime

...from now, I will die. May be it's months or years from now. Or maybe I'll be conked off the next moment. With an impending situation like that, I want to make sure my life matters. Not just by having fun and proclaiming that I have lived and done everything there was to do. I want more than just that. I want something to be different in this world because of me.

Someone...

... used this term 'grandstudent' few days back. A great word! That makes me Prof. K. P. Gopinathan's grandstudent. Never met him, but now I want to.

Off the tangent, I've always felt that scientific community is more of a diaspora, less of a fraternity. Where's the bloody brotherhood?? There's a dire need for people to engage in a dialogue. It never happens. Or maybe like what, once in an eon?

I detest some terms. Especially those that commodi-fy natural resources. What the hell is tiger farming? It's a disgusting term...

Almost Forgot...

about Wicker Park...Awesome! Rose Byrne rocks...whattaa performance! And fell in love with the song "Strange and Beautiful" by Aqualung...

The Tunnel And The Light

Last Monday to this Tuesday, the ride has been a roller coaster one to say the least. I spent the whole of last week in trying to keep up with the expectations and deadline and bang on Saturday, just when I thought I have caught up, and fairly confident of things being in control and meeting up the deadline, things started going downhill. It is confirmed now. I won't meet the deadline. It's a big blow.

I conjured up every trick I could think of. Nothing worked. Your data are your kids. The whole world may criticize them, you would want to protect them, come what may. And if someone comes too near to hurt them, you would come in between and do everything possible to protect. After asking boss for a final hearing of the new thesis outline , which eventually led to a negative verdict too, the discussion was over. All my cards were open on the table, and somehow I'd lost this hand.

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One needs perspective to look at things more clearly, especially if one is too emotional about what's happening. And one doesn't need monumental philosophy, even a small sneeze is enough. I got up y'day morning, spent some clueless moments on my bed with blurry vision and then had a terribly strong sneeze which threw me so off balance that I landed on floor. Happened within seconds. I was a sight and the whole thing was too shocking to do anything else except curse openly. It was only when I was in the shower that I could see it differently. Here I was, riding the troughs of life, barely holding onto the reigns, when a silly sneeze shook the wits out of me! I couldn't help laughing hysterically. Still smiling about it. So yeah life is a bitch sometimes and can make you go down on all four. At times you can't control the going down part. What's in your hand though is to get up with a smile and forget about it.

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I love Indie movies. Some of them are too dark, serious and melancholic and I avoid them. Like Boy A. But some of them are exceptionally great yet bearable. Enough has been written about An American Crime and Hard Candy (both starring Ellen Page, who is amazing...both movies are quite gory, especially An American Crime. This was one movie that made me flinch and I watched much of the movie with narrowed eyes, horrified as to what more awaits for the viewer and the protagonist). So I'll pass on them. Two movies I recommend are Keith and Dedication. I don't think these are well known movies. Neither is an edge-of-the-seat thriller. Hardly anything happens. If you like ensemble caste, forget about it. There is hardly any caste at all. Even the plots are quite stale. But something about the dialogues, screenplay and the caste makes it a great watch. Everything very cleverly done. Acting, editing and music (especially of Dedication) is awesome. Both are about love, so those of you who are allergic to such movies, stay away. These are not romantic comedies though. Pretty neurotic stuff lies if you dig deep enough. Almost forgot to speak about One Week. Good one again. Don't pass it. Another one worth watching is The Shadow Dancer. Claire Forlani is delicious.

RIP

Even though I didn’t grow up listening to Michael Jackson, something snapped when I heard that he has passed away. The media frenzy over his death was quite expected. But all those heart-wrenching statements, teary appearances and effusive blogs seemed so fake.

I didn’t grow up listening to his music. I think he was a craze in 80’s (before that, I wouldn’t know)…One summer afternoon, I caught Anand grooving to MJ’s hits and that was how I was introduced to MJ. Needless to say, Anand was the butt of all the jokes for the next few months. The closest I came to listening to his music was just then, when I hid behind a table to bathe in the brilliance of two-left-feet disorder my brother suffered from. The performance would go on but for my loud uncontrollable guffaws. I snatched the cassette cover from him and was greeted by MJ’s black leotard avatar. He seemed like an alien, with his face covered with a curly mop of hair, and his skin ghostly white, accentuated by the psychedelics. I could almost picturize him in front of me. It was nothing like what I’d seen before. He seemed like a spirit in the human form.

I followed his story in the past few months. I couldn’t help it coz it was splashed all over, even in the Indian media. Wouldn’t like to imagine what it would be in the thick of it. Unbelievable. Would you like to read about your life expectancy in the papers? Daily speculations about how long you are gonna live with the morning coffee…there wasn’t even the faintest trace of concern or sincerity. It was almost as if these vultures were waiting for his death so they could collect their bytes and bask in the glory of their 4” wide columns.

And then you catch the same bunch of guys mourning as if they’ve lost someone dear. Assholes…Gimme a fucking break!

I think I thought...

Tough…I can already see the writing on the July wall. It’s been tough and I am grateful for this warm-up coz as I see it, it’s just begun. I wish I had more time to analyse and write, and spend more time on my slides, but as a friend said, improvement is never ending. So maybe deadlines are THE solution. To finish the job and move on. Apart from finishing on time, and hearing from everyone that yes you did finish on time (clap, clap), I am uncharacteristically lured by the increment in scholarship that I will get if I meet the deadline. I’ve said this before, and I am saying it again, we are grossly underpaid. Then I look at dad, grandma, grandpa and keep shut. Seems like a series of thankless jobs. But then that just means many who are doing interesting work are underpaid. Doesn’t justify my low pay-check. So I grumble anyway. And so yeah, money and accolades have been acting as carrots dangling in front of me to finish this off.

You may call me mercenary and praise-hungry. I don’t mind. I have always been mercenary and according to me, scientists need to love themselves and their work unapologetically coz most of the time, they are the only ones loving their own work. Corollary of that is whatever praise comes your way, lap it up. With cool shades. May not come ever again. Anyway, so I don’t mind someone attributing me with those adjectives. Honestly though, I wasn’t like this. Earlier, I would never ever ever ever think of work in terms of money or praise. I sought them in other spheres of life but didn’t think of research in terms of money or praise. So yeah, I have grown up and probably grown up for worse. Coz the moment you start thinking of your work in those terms, all the negative annotations of ambition will start creeping in like insecurity, professional jealousy, jack-knifing your colleagues, and I am absolutely clear that I don’t want to tread that path. I would like to believe that it’s just a phase, probably brought on by the colossal pressures of thesis submission and the importance we attach to it. Hopefully, I will steer clear away in the future. So, yes, I wouldn’t like to mix work with money or fame. Work is work, and should be done with a professional finesse without any thought about the perks it will bring. Geeta says the same too…Karmanyevadhikaraste, ma phaleshu kadachan…

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We are in an age of consumerism…and I get baffled when I see even ecologists fitting the stereotypes. Consume without a thought for future. This is a dangerous trend. I don’t want to sound patronizing (and cliché), but I seriously feel ashamed of the legacy we are leaving behind for future generations. ‘Today’ is the IT word these days, and philosophically thinking, a very nice concept - do things without worrying about the future – but when coupled with consumerism, it’s going to give rise to a very risky and perilous existence. My heartfelt admiration goes to people from our grandparents’ generation who may appear thrifty and frugal but know the exact value of resources. And exactly how it should be spent or consumed. Their actions may not have the support of thoughts and the actions may have at times arisen out of some other needs, nonetheless the outcome is praiseworthy.

BPM

I've realized just recently how potent a poem can be. If done right, a poem says so much more than a work of prose. Something in a verse form that makes it a literary dynamite if done right. So small, and yet so much to say. I was discussing about poetry with a friend of mine and I remembered how I completely abhored poetry in my growing up years (except the works of Kusumagraj and Chandrashekhar Gokhale, both of whom in their own ways revolutionized the Marathi literature). I thought of poetry as a very pseudo form of expression. Also a form which is very processed, and maybe that's why less appealing. Also poems and verses were for sissies. But I think the fault wasn't just with me. Many of the poetry books that were lying around the house were absolutely pathetic. Every other person in our circle had tried her/his hand at it sometime or the other and the house littered with these souvenir copies. I didn't realize that these were below average poets who just went for the art of verbal minimalism to appear someone that they are not. Their work didn't seem real. It was all so fake.

These adolescent presumptions disappeared one day as I bumped onto some hidden away tattered copies of Bhavani Prasad Mishr's poems. I picked it up solely because the book seemed to have been published by a professional publishing house. Also coz he was grandpa's friend, everyone talked about him so much and he was held in great respect by everyone in the family.

Many of his poems were incomprehensible. I just couldn't understand what he was trying to say. But the ones I understood, made me realize that this is not some fake poet trying to recreate the renaissance magic. He was simple, his choice of words was apt, and that he was giving a new meaning to whatever he was touching...even the most inane things in day to day life had been given a new perspective. I fell in love with his writing.



I wrote everything that I liked in the notebooks I kept.

I was 12.

One of the first poems that I read was sarvamsahaa, meaning one who endures everything. I am putting it here (hopefully without violating any copyright laws).

सब कुछ
तुम्हीं पर नहीं है निर्भर
भाई सूरज.
यह रज भी एक चीज़ है,
सारी सज-धज
उसी में से अंकुरी है.
धुरी पर अपनी
वह घूमती है,
तुम नहीं.
निष्क्रिय हो याने तुम
सक्रिय वह है.
प्रिय है इसलिए
वह तुमसे ज्यादा
तत्त्वों को.
पानी उस पर
बरसता है
बहता है.
वातावरण छाया की तरह
उस पर छाया रहता है.
ठीक हो तुम
ठीक है तुम्हारी गरमी
मगर
नरमी उसकी भी तो समझो ज़रा
क्या कर सकते थे तुम
होती नहीं अगर
होती नहीं अगर सर्वंसहा हमारी धरा!

- Bhavani Prasad Mishr

All I can think of these days is about food and sleep. More so about sleep than about food. Even in my sleep, I dream about sleeping...