PEREGRINATIONS

Life is wondrous. Both in the biological as well as the social sense. There is so much to observe, to understand and to be amazed. To wonder and to ponder. How each piece fits into another. How the cogs connect and translate a cause at one end into effects across the whole scape. How the interconnectedness leads to surprising, wholly unexpected and sometimes irreproducible results. How it all makes sense, whether it's the cosmos or evolution or history or technology, when you can see the underlying web of connections, when you are able to trace the causes to the myriad effects. This breadth of vision is however possible only when you are standing far away and looking at the picture. A picture that comes together from years of study, years of individual jigsaw pieces fitting together. Each piece with its colours and contours and edges are beautiful, but each piece on its own makes such a minuscule difference. So much study has to go into figuring out its position, its role and its c...

Mumtaz does not like reading. Books fill her room; fairy tales, biographies and adventure stories. She used to love sitting with the colourful board-books as an infant, but now at 10, she does not have the patience. She can manage basic stories, but reading leaves her tired and irritable. She loves stories though, dramas with lots of tears and laughter; she loves watching movies and serials, always fascinated by the interplay of emotions and how people work within relationships. But even the lure of a well-written story cannot coax her into reading. She does not do storytelling either. When recounting a story, there would be a lot of details, a lot of inconsequential chatter, but the story itself would not make any sense. The beginning, middle and end would be all jumbled up. You could see all the emotions playing out in her narration; the excitement, the animation, she certainly is a dramatist, but the story would be lost in the telling. Then there are the funny words Hopsital (for ho...

Original, novel, hitherto unheard of, unthought of. Why are humans so obsessed with originality? Have we always been so obsessed? It has been said, by these same humans, that whatever needs to be said has been said, whatever has to be written, has already been written, in the scriptures, with Bible, in the Koran. But there too, the claim is not a denial of originality. It is rather an acknowledgement of ideas once original, once revolutionary. It is only a warning that all original thought has been thought already, there is no more to be said. But it has only spurred humans on, has always challenged someone new to think something new, newer still. Whenever man has journeyed far into new and novel places and reached his island of comfort, there have always been some kids who stood at the beach, shaded their eyes and looked at the vast open ocean and said let’s set sail again, find something new, yet again. From the men and women who tramped across the globe in their animal skins to peop...

  Recently chanced upon a discussion on Twitter about how to present science. The contention was whether writing a paper means telling a story or not. Physicists seemed to think that story is for people whose data is incomplete. That set me thinking. I am a reader and teller and listener of stories. If there is no story it does not interest me. If there is no story to tell, it makes me feel inadequate. So, what's the best way to present science? How can there be any science or economics or sociology or history without a story? Mathematics? Now that I do not have an intuitive feel for. Pure mathematics, I don't know whether it lends to a story or not. But everything else that I can think of tells a story. All that we learn new fits into a jigsaw, a tapestry, of something we knew before and something more we anticipate finding. A past, a present and a future. There is usually a question we had, some findings we made and some new questions raised. Some whats and hows and whys and ...

Having a large amount of data in your hands sounds like a great end to a project in the beginning. By the end, you realize that it was really only a beginning and not such a great one at that. It is like you went to a yard sale and brought all this junk for free. At that time it sounded like a great idea. Now you have no idea what to do with it. As you begin your analysis you start getting these ‘very significant’ changes, large sets of genes are heaving up into a wave and falling back down, or dipping down into the abyss and then pulling themselves up in a joint effort! Wow! There you stand like Columbus, at the helm of Santa Maria, about to discover the new land, full of possibilities, new stories, new animals, new riches. And then suddenly there emerges from the forest a man, then another and then another with that ‘been-here-done-it’ look. They have found, killed the animals, domesticated the plants, built their huts and tamed the rivers. And you gingerly step into the land and try...

Imagine somebody has signed you up for a skydiving experience. You are standing inside the aircraft. The hatch is open. Your guide is telling you to go ahead, jump. Nothing to worry, they will take care of you. All the others have taken the plunge. There is a yawning emptiness in the pit of your stomach. Your heart is racing; your throat is dry. You are barely standing. You take a deep breath, a tremulous smile. Yes, you can do it. You take that step forward. No! You cannot do it. You shrink back. Do they think you are crazy to rely on their words? What if the parachute does not open? What if you can't breathe? What if you lose consciousness? All manner of horrors are possible. Voices are screaming around you. You are a coward! Everyone can do it, what's special about you? You shrink into yourself. You are hyperventilating; eyes darting back and forth. What if one of these monsters pushes you? You feel totally powerless. You are losing control. My daughter goes through this cr...

20100604 used to be my password. The day I started in my new role; as an independent scientist. It was a momentous day. A place I had dreamed to be and then arrived. So it felt then. That was 10 years ago! The truth was that I was quite unprepared. I, in fact, had no clue what being a scientist entailed. All the ‘un-scientist like’ things I had to do. Lots and lots of paperwork, lots of learning of administrative lingo, learning the rules and how to wiggle through them. Lots of arguing with colleagues, shouting in corridors, losing my temper (definitely not part of my routine as a pre-PI), fuming alone in my office, taking the simmering dissatisfaction and anger home. Then learning to lower the heat slowly, finding my own comfortable temperature on the settings, learning the ropes of dealing with the director, senior colleagues, equals, juniors (oh the invisible hierarchy!).  Yes, I was quite unprepared for the students who did not understand the point of controls. Students who had...

It has been exactly 10 years since my first post. 10 years since I accepted that job offer. The person who agonized about that decision a decade ago sounds a very different one from the one ruminating those memories now. But that 36 year old was a realist. And I should thank that younger woman for where I am today, for I think you do really go on as you start. That day, when she wrote that post, all she knew was that she intended to make it work. She had no idea where she was going and she had no idea how she meant to get there. Ten years into the marathon, and along the way the problems have changed, conditions have changed, priorities have changed. Health and wealth have changed, the joys and pleasures have changed, the cause for angst and tears have changed. But this 46 year old is certainly still at it. Making it work. Along the way, there were those who gave up and moved back to the predictable path of the west. The many who survived are as diverse as the country they came into. S...