I saw The Namesake last night, and it brought some memories rushing back to me. I remember feeling the same things when I read the book. I also wrote something back then which I wouldnt dare let anyone read, lest they drag me kicking and screaming to the nearest shrink. But a few psychotic episodes and therapy sessions later, I no longer fear the couch. So here it is. If you find it too morbid, here's what I have to say. Nobody asked you to read this. (Did you get that one, Marie??)

MORBIDITY
Before my father passed away, I often tried to imagine what his death would be like. My mind was filled with dark images of unsurmountable vacuous pain. Pain that one fears because there is no tested way of handling it. Pain that seems indelible and ever-strengthening. But when it happened, when I lost him, my reaction was quite different.

Losing someone close to you is quite like an out-of-body experience. Death brings out the robot in us all. Our body and mind switch to cruise control and we find ourselves surprisingly unaffected by the morbidity that surrounds us. Your mind still works logically as you plan the events of the day ahead of you. You pay attention to trivial detail as you prepare yourself for what you thought would be the worst day of your life. You wonder which of your friends will come and meet you, which ones you'd rather not meet. You engage your mind in remembering exactly how many years and months have passed since you last saw your mother's second maternal cousin who is standing before you. You also wonder, "How long before she leaves?" It must be about lunchtime in school now. Do your friends know why you didnt show up at school? Do they miss you as they joke and laugh and go about their routine? Aren't you glad you weren't in school when he died? Imagine being excused from class in the middle of the day because your uncle has come to take you home. And he didnt come alone, he brought bad news. Why are people looking at me funny? Am I doing something rather uncharacteristic for the situation I am in? Is there a universally accepted 'right thing to do' in such a situation? I wonder what it is. May be I should start by not looking so nonchalant.

Then kicks in the remorse. You wonder why you have not yet collapsed in tears. You wonder why it matters so little to you that someone is dead. You curse yourself for not remembering the last words you said to him. Or the last ones he said to you. You try to dig deeper into your memory so you escape all the recent horrors and reach back to the age of innocence. When you were six and your whole life stretched out before you, as did your dad's. Back when he was a hero to you. He still is, but for different reasons. It drives you crazy that you can't remember what he looked like when he was healthier, happier and (I hate to say this), morphine-free. Try as you might, none of those memories can replace the recent ones of suffering, pain and delusion. Has his entire life been reduced to his last few years in my memory?

You still havent made the connection. His death implies that you will never see or talk to him again. You will talk 'of' him for decades to come, and thats something. But its never enough. What does it really mean that he no longer exists? You never thought you'd struggle so much in understanding the implications of losing him. You thought you were smarter than that. It's only when you see his unmade bed, his clothes neatly folded in his closet, his favourite chair at the dining table, his crutches (which lay unused for the last year of his life), his wife, mother, father and other daughter; that you begin to appreciate the void he left behind. And then it hits you. Thats what death is. Like an electron hole, it has no meaning by itself. Its just the absence of life.

CONFLICT

I am ashamed to tell you this. I signed up to walk for the Walkamerica 2007 organized by March of Dimes. I did this walk last year too. And although I had many complaints about how it was run, I sure slept easy that night. But dont get me wrong. Thats not what Im ashamed of.

The plot thickens. On April 29th, Chris Cornell is performing in Austin. Entry is a mere 25 bucks. I bought tickets only to realise in a bit that Im double booked for April 29th!! Neo-nates want me to walk for the march of dimes. But I want me to scream my head off 10 feet from temple goodness. What should I do? For most of you, there wouldnt even be a conflict of interest. "Do the walk!!" you will exclaim without hesitation. But I'm inclined to drive to Austin, sample the 6th street vibe on a Saturday night and top it off with a sunday spent in the midst of Seattle's best (not coffee). So sue me!!

THERE IS A GOD!

There is a God, and he loves me!! Just when a turnaround seemed impossible, it happened. All those hours spent counting interneurons in my knock out mouse embryos and testing the statistical significance of trends in the numbers, may indeed bear fruit yet. Someone once told me that roughly 95 % of all data generated in basic science laboratories is left unreported. That may be because somebody beats you to it, or that the data just don't form a story that people want to hear. In rare cases, it may be because of inter-lab politics. I was about to write a eulogy for one such piece of data I painstakingly collected, but easter saw its resurrection. It may just see the light of day, as a tiny graph in a paper. A figure thats costs us 600 dollars to get published :(

I am beginning to recollect what its like to discover something. To know something nobody else in this world knows (hopefully). To know that I helped push back the boundary of darkness even if it was by mere inches. To know that one day, if we can treat paraplegics with cultured motor neurons, someone may feel the need to induce repressors of the tetramer prompted by my discovery. I know... seems really small in the scheme of things. One small step for mankind.

Jorge Cham

This one is dedicated to his genius. I'm sure a lot of you have never heard of him. And if you have, you probably heard something like, "So, is it pronounced whore-hey? Or just George?" Others will know him as the creator of phdcomics.

Next time I have a grad school-related setback, I should remember to go straight to Jorge for help. I struggled with my recent consecutive scoops for quite a while. Then I stumbled upon these:

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=789

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=794

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=795

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=796

In a matter of minutes, Jorge did what several hours of therapy with friends didn't achieve. (Sorry, DP. You know you're the best!!) He just gets me. I can't believe I blew a chance of meeting him. If you're wondering what to get for my next birthday DP, buy a big roll of wrapping paper. I hear Jorge is a largeish size for an Asian (This reminds me so much of Maria's gift-wrapped Rohan.. hehe)

Career student.

Yes, its true. I wish to be one. I think there is something seriously masochistic about wanting to be a student for life. The horrible hours, the low pay and the lack of life. Then why do we do it? For me, its simply a combination of fear of the world outside and an interest in science that is narrowing down perpetually leaving me too specialized for the world outside. As long as I am safely ensconced in my lab, surrounded by familiar clicking and whirring noises, with only fellow nerds for company, I am happy. I wonder how long this will last though. One day, I'm sure I will want a different life. But there's a good decade between now and that time.

I am sure this comes as a shock to those of you who were with me during those years of wondering before I came out of the academic closet. I openly confess, I am a nerd.

But think about it some more. Doesnt this explain it all? The hours spent (voluntarily) in the Honours library at St. Xavier's College (not reading dirty limmericks, DP), the evenings spent at marine drive discussing some wonderful natural phenomenon, the obsessing over a greying Oxford scholar (may the blind watchmaker bless him), the moments of exhileration over a new discovery (when you know something that nobody in this world can claim to know, even if it is the fact that an hpr null B. subtilis mutant is still repression competent), and the pride I invariably felt when someone called me a geek (that's you, Marie).

This tells me that I should hang in there when the going's tough (like now, for example), since deep down I am the nerdiest of the nerds and can take the insults of this career. And when I am overwhelmed, there's always Spaaten and salsa. In that order.

Spring is in the air!!

This is the first time that I am witnessing the American obsession with weather up close. I have so much to learn! I can not believe I've lived most of my life not knowing that spring officially begins at the precise moment of vernal equinox, which this year happened to be 8:07 PM on march 21st (I think). The locals waited with such anticipation for the clock to strike 8:07 that I half expected the snow to melt, flowers to bloom, fresh leaves to spring out on bare branches and butterflies to emerge from cocoons all over the world, all in the time it takes for you to say 'aaarrrgggghhhh'.

Having an official start time for a season seems as preposterous to me as buying an incredibly sexy sports car on your 40th birthday knowing full well that you look just as ridiculous in it at 40 as you did at 39.

Explain to me why people wait for the official first day of spring t0 wear yellow, or go for a walk, or take anti-allergy medication. Time, tide and pollen wait for no man, I say. If you chose to trust your calendar more than your heart, you missed the day before spring which in my opinion was just as beautiful and fresh as the first day of spring. Also, how do you explain waxing eloquent about the joys of spring and screeching upon finding a beetle on your sleeve at the same time? I have a friend whose idea of communing with nature is speeding past everything in her car with her window rolled down (just a crack, lest those motherf*$&@ing bugs got in). She needs to watch the news to find out what the weather was like the day before. So guarded is she against all things natural, that she hops from her home to her car to her lab, so she doesnt have to know what the temperature outside is.

I guess, back home in Bombay you dont have an option. You can't get away from the weather if you tried. The weather is all pervading. It is in our homes and in our hearts. It brings with it not just flowers, rain and frangrances but also bugs, sweat and the flu. The monsoon for example is heralded not by the news channel but by the inexorable march of songbirds and cholera along the southwestern coast.

So what would you rather do? Observe the change in seasons first hand? Or have a stuffy meteorologist tell you when it is alright to have a little spring in your step or a hint of a smile on your face?

WAR CRY

Don’t let the title mislead you. This is not about Iraq. And to those who are familiar with the things that interest me, this is not about genetic arms races either. This is about the X chromosome declaring war on the Y chromosome. Yes, it is true and is the principal reason why the Y chromosome is a teeny tiny stub of a genetic afterthought compared to the X chromosome. This has been happening for a long time too. Women may LET men believe that they are stronger and can push us around, but that is a superficial view of reality. Peep inside your cells and you will find the X chromosome holding a smoking gun, sniggering to herself.

Why, you ask is the X chromosome proving too much for the Y to handle? Well, did you never realise that 75% of all sex chromosomes are X? It follows that an X chromosome is twice as likely to find herself sharing a house with another X chromosome. (If the sex ratio is one, two thirds of all Xs are paired with Xs whereas no Y is paired with a Y). This allows for a characteristically feminine practice: conspiring against the Y by sharing notes on how to take him down. The result is the piece by piece demolishment of a bewildered Y who has never seen another fellow Y in his lifetime. Y has responded to this devilish dismemberment (no pun intended) by trying to be inconspicuous. He, like most men, is capable of living on just clean boxers and a Mach3 (sometimes just the former). The less junk you gather around you, the easier it is to make a fast escape.

And women wonder why men have issues with commitment.

FREE WILL

There is no denying that we as humans are far different from our closest animal relatives. Bearing testimony to this is the fact that I am sitting upright and using my dexterity to type out sentences which will reach (potentially) thousands of my kind across the globe within seconds. We think and hence we are. But is that all? Can all the ways in which we differ from the rest of the animal kingdom be attributed to our higher cognitive powers? I believe we are different less because we think, and more because we choose to bend some laws of evolution. By exercising free will to guide our lives to a goal not shared by our selfish genes, we seem to have broken out of a cycle of existence which governs all other living things.

The proponent of the selfish gene theory, Dr Richard Dawkins, now made famous by his foray into the world of religion (unfortunately) is an extraordinary scientist. In an age when the boom in scientific output was fast making it impossible to come up with novel theories of the same scale as Darwinian philosophy, Dawkins postulated a simple theory based on intuitive deduction instead of experimentation. He succeeded in making scientists look up from their reductionist persuasions and take notice of evidence from millions of years, left un-interpreted. The beauty of the selfish gene theory lies in its elegance. All of us at some level can comprehend that animals are nothing but vehicles for something more lasting, more resilient. Religion often turns to the concept of a soul, to try to explain the seemingly futile nature of our brief existence. Dawkins chose to attribute it to the more tangible units of heredity, genes. Our bodies are nothing but brief rearrangements of entropy instructed into existence by our genes. Thus, our genes achieve immortality while we as merely their vehicles allow them to stay ‘alive’. And as all things that form and hence must perish, we spend our entire lives making sure that the genes we bear are passed on.

This theory becomes easier to accept when you summon examples from the wild. A salmon swimming upstream against all odds to find a mate and die immediately after mating is an extreme example. Here, the direct correlation between reproduction and mortality makes it an atypical example. We as humans can not accept it as something that is applicable to all living things. An example closer to home is that of ageing. All living things age. We do so because we spend our resources into maintaining ‘youth’ in our reproductively active years. Once we are no longer capable of multiplying, our bodies start to accumulate damage. Our job’s been done and we must make way for better mating machines. Disturbing as that sounds, we do not have much trouble accepting it as truth. To sum up, the selfish gene theory dictates that consciously or otherwise, all living things live to mate. In short, life is procreation.

But do humans follow all the precepts of this brilliant theory? What was the last time you measured the success of a friend in the number of children he/she had? In our formative years, we put ourselves through struggles to make something of ourselves. Do you know anyone who, after their first child was born, threw in the towel and decided, if they died the next day, they would die happy? One can imagine our previous generations resting on their laurels after starting a family. But it is fast becoming insufficient for humans to subject to the will of their genes. We choose to carve our lives independent of the bounds of heredity. We choose and hence we are.