Life's Onward Journey...

Hmmm. I was told this by a friend whom i met today after a gap of 4 years. It's a sincere compliment. One of the best one i have recieved so far. :-) I know this friend of mine since my MSc days (will call her Anne for a specific reason). I was a part of a group of 3 (a very closed group). There were 2-3 others in our batch of 21 students whom i was friendly with. Anne is one of them. She can be described as a girl full of fun and effervescence. There was something very childlike about her (there still is). And i was the "serious" kind of person. Our excitement levels and matters that excited us never matched. One thing which was common between us was a high degree of professionalism. So, we got along well in some ways and in other areas we never crossed each other's path. Today when we spent some 6 hrs together after 4 years i felt that she is the same person. But she said "You are less boring now." Then she apologized. I really didnt mind her telling this

Have been thinking about this for quite some time now. Last 4 years have passed so quickly and more than that if i look back to the gone days, i can't distinguish one day from the other. Life has become so monotonous. There is hardly any difference between a monday and saturday or months march and may. The days which are slightly "different" from most of these days are the ones spent in vacation, outings, movies, with a friend or group of friends. Apart from them there are a few other "different" days which don't remind me of any fun. These are the days marked for work related deadlines and work presentations e.g. annual work seminar, causerie, journal clubs, lab meetings, report making, poster presentations, thesis committee meetings....etc. In all there are around 15 x 2 = 30 such days. (15 days which actually are the marked days and 15 days just before these days when the major part of preparation is actually done) Rest any day of the year is same. Yes,

" Mera itihaas bahot lamba hai aur bhugol gol " (My past spans eternity and each time my fate brings me back to the same point.) Harilal Gandhi in Gandhi My Father. This movie is an attempt to bring to light a different aspect of the personality of the man we call "father of our nation". The man who failed as a father. Harilal Gandhi didnt choose to be born as the eldest son of Barristor Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. But this served as only the first step towards the series of unfortunate events in his life. Harilal got a free gift of his father's ideologies and principles. A different kind of a person that he was, he could not accept these principles completely nor could he shrug them off. He never got the luxury of choosing his own path. He just became a follower who later strayed from that very path. The movie is worth watching for the turmoil and helplessness of the character of Harilal. Akshaye Khanna has done a great job. Lets see if a national award follow

"Chak De India" is so far my closest encounter with hockey. Never saw the game, so never got to appreciate it. But at the end every game is the same. A team effort to win. Superposition of different waves so that they are in the same phase. I really liked the movie because it succeeded to depict the spirit of the game. A team can be made only if individuality is suppressed to a certain degree. And only such a team can dream of winning. The characterisation of the players was done well. I can easily remember the name and background of 10 out of the 16 players. What can i say about Coach Kabir Khan? Even if the role was played by K K Menon (i kept thinking about him in the movie), the movie would have been equally good. However, Shahrukh Khan's inclusion did act as the initial crowd puller. The movie is running house-full. SRK has done full justice to the role. People are comparing this role to that of the NASA engineer of Swades. Lets not go that far. Mohan Bhargava will a

Last year was "disaster special" for our lab. One fine morning the -80 degree centigrade freezer was found to be at 0 degrees. The stuff normally kept under frozen condition had thawed. Another fine evening we noticed that there was no liquid nitrogen in the liquid nitrogen storage cylinder. So, another set of cell lines, bacterial stocks, yeast stocks, DNA stocks of the lab were destroyed. The best was yet to come. A part of the hard disk of the most used computer of our lab was found erased. That left my lab mates data-less as well as devoid of experimental material (not completely!) I had an interesting conversation with my brother regarding the lost data. He tried to explain in simple words. He said that the data deleted from the hard-disk was still there though it was not accessible through the normal route. There are special softwares using which deleted data can be retrieved. I asked my brother if the data has been deleted how can it be retrieved. And i found that su