PEREGRINATIONS

Let’s talk about love. Nothing new. It’s all around, in the air. In a scientific institute, which is as near a bio-bubble in everyday life as can be, we all see the tentative overtures of love, the distracted state of early love, love in full bloom and then sometimes the broken hearts mourning their loss, all through the lens of the frustrated guide or joyful friends or annoyed lab mates, depending on where we may be placed at that particular phase of life. So, one wonders why love stories are not written about love amidst the test tubes. I was pleasantly surprised to recently discover two separate books on this topic. Both set in biology labs, both poles apart from each other in their treatment of the topic. The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. Hazelwood is a cognitive neuroscientist (with all my googling I was unable to figure out where her lab is!) who, near the end of her PhD, got frustrated and decided to write romance novels in a science setting. Love Hypothesis, her first bo...

April is Autism Awareness Month Priyam was the life of the party at the day care centre. A bright-eyed boy who captured the heart of the caretakers and played with abandon. Sometime after his second birthday, all this started changing. He stopped playing with his toys, he seemed more interested in organizing them now. He stopped talking, not even responding even when called by name. He stopped smiling at people and making eye contact. Then the rhythmic movements started; rocking his body, banging his head or repeatedly tapping on the table. One day he banged his head so much that when his father came hurriedly summoned by the caretaker, there was a trickle of blood running down his face. That was his last day at the centre; they refused to keep him after that.  Nancy was different. Growing up in a family with siblings and grandparents, she was used to people. But outsiders were studiously ignored. She heard all the questions and comments, but never acknowledged them. Loud noises, r...

I still remember walking down the as-usual deserted Inman Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts and suddenly pulling up short and looking around as the smell of my mother’s sambhar surrounds me! At that moment I would have given anything to get a taste of that sambhar! But I knew there were no Indian households in the area. I knew none of the sealed double-glazed windows in the vicinity could be the source of the smell. I was, in fact, having an olfactory hallucination. Oliver Sacks, one of the most prolific neurologist-writers who through his writings let us look inside human brains through the eyes of his patients, said, while talking about his book Hallucinations, ‘We see with our eyes, but we see with our brains as well. Seeing with the brain is called imagination’. When I sit and stare into space daydreaming, I call that imagination. Michelangelo hanging upside down under the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and visualising the hand of god reaching out to man; I call that imagination....