The daring young man on the flying trapeze

I told Grandpa that I’d be stepping out of the house for ten minutes to grab a copy of the Saturday issue of The Mint yesterday morning. It was 9:20 a.m. Given that the newspaper vendor isn’t too far off from home, I should have expected myself to return home by 9:30 at max. But things turned out a bit different.

I returned at 9:30 p.m instead, and had my folks worried stiff in the meantime. I could have used a mobile phone, but never mind.

I won’t go into the details of why the delay happened, but I will tell you that as I stepped out of the gate, Navneet came and we went to CTR to grab breakfast. Later, we headed off to Palace Grounds to catch the 1 o’clock show of Gemini Circus. The Matinee Show – that’s what it said on the ticket.

The only other time that I probably had such a mixed bag of emotions was when I finished watching Forrest Gump. The other occasion happened yesterday when I walked out of that tent before the show ended. You’ve probably been to a circus before. It was certainly my first time yesterday. The trapeze artists started off the show, and were quite an amazing bunch of artists; reminded me of Popeye’s tune “The daring young man on the flying trapeze”. The crowd was mostly school children in their Saturday uniforms led by the teachers, some with whistles. There were the moms and dads scattered in some seats feeding their tots curd rice out of a tiffin box. Most of these kids wanted popcorn and cotton candy anyways.

Without boring you about the string of performers and what they were up to, I’ll get down to what I really felt strongly about. It was the clowns. There was this brief 10 minutes in the 2 and half hour show where this big clown and this other midget clown had a dual act. Here I was, 23 years old, and not finding any of the clowns’ jokes funny. Two rows behind me were some 60 odd seven and eight year olds that were ROFLTAO (…Their Arses Off). How come the two of us were so far apart on the same thing? Many years back, I would have most certainly ROFLMAO at the clowns’ slapstick humor. But not today. I’ve watched way too many sitcoms and comedy flicks, and mastered complex sarcasm so well, that now; a simple and straightforward joke made by a clown that a child can get seems to shoot off tangentially to my thick skull. I was per-occupied in analyzing the costume of the jokers, and how it could have been done better.

As we stepped out of the tent, we saw the 4 elephants and 2 camels that were part of the show chained to nearby posts. Not too far from them was a traffic cop conversing with the organizers of the circus. Navneet still believes that the cop was there to write out a No Parking ticket for the misplaced elephants and camels. I think he was trying to get his way in without having to pay for the ticket. You know how these cops can be, right?

Most of us didn’t do much for New Year's

Before the scent of New Year’s fades into the stench of the rest of 2010, let’s take a look at what most of us almost did for this New Year’s.

I can only speak for the self in here. How does one have that perfect New Year’s celebration? I completely subscribe to the view that the night of Dec 31^st should be a special one. The reason behind this is more attitudinal (by now you do realize that the word attitude keeps popping up in this blog for more reasons than I can see).  Anytime there’s anything special about anyday, I just have a different attitude about it. Dec 21^st, for example is a special day in my calendar. So every 21/12 serves one purpose: what was a I doing last 21/12? Where will I be next 21/12? In several ways, that in itself is a good check to keep one’s goals and purposes on track.

And on the same grounds, I believe that New Year’s should be spent doing something special that you wouldn’t have otherwise done. That need not include getting wasted.In high school, New Year’s was spent strolling down the well lit but packed M G Road and Brigade road at 9 in the night. Until some drunken buffoon decided to get adventurous with an unsuspecting lady and the cops intervened to disperse the crowds. We went home and watched television. In college, New Year’s meant gathering around a camp fire with beer and boiled potatoes, and prophesying the fact that girls’ hostels in years to come will not have curfews atleast on New Year’s. What a pity!

Back in the new city, we started making plans for Dec 31^st in the end of November.  We decided to head off to Goa for the new years: every person’s dream budget-new years! But alas, they told us we’d have to choose between sleeping in postboxes, or paying an arm and a leg for a room in Goa. Neither of it happened. We tried getting to Gokharna, a tourist town in coastal Karnataka. They told us to try our luck in 2011; all the rooms were booked. We also thought of Pondicherry. But the mayor of Pondy himself came down to my home, showed me the finger and told me to shove it up and left. I’m not going back there in a while.

That feeling of self pity loomed large over us. We weren’t going to do anything for new years. With that submission, I woke up the following morning to make the ceremonial phone calls. Turned out that most people I knew hadn’t done much either the previous night.

As partners in guilt, things will hopefully be different in twelve months time. But if you do have a party, call me.  

A Brief History of Bad Breath

That’s right; bad breath. That’ll be the theme for this post.

When was the first time in human history that man first started brushing his teeth? Why did he start this at the first place? Did he do it necessarily to keep up oral hygiene, or did he get started on it because early woman demanded it of him?

I don’t know why they started it, but I’m sure glad that one day someone was wandering in the woods. The guy probably broke off a twig and stuck it in his mouth and lo and behold, the dental care market was born. We’ve heard tales from Jataka where neem twigs were used in the early days of dental care. In fact, it is still used widely in several parts of rural India. People then (and even now) used mud to clean their teeth. How then did we evolve from twigs and mud to Sorbitol, Sodium Silicate and 0.04% Methanol in mouthwash?

The answer to this complex question lies at the intersection of a historical time line and biological evolution. In the early days, humans were sparsely populated across a geographical stretch. Just like all animals, humans too have a personal space (or bubble) around them. As dogs go around the block leaving their excretions to demarcate their territorial space, so do humans. Public urination is proof enough.

So when humans were fewer in number, they had relatively bigger personal spaces. As we got good at mating, the per head availability of space reduced, and consequently the size of each of our bubbles shrunk. This was about the time when early woman refused to sleep with early man any longer unless he started his day by biting away at the neem twigs. As more and more people came inside a given territorial boundary, they started interacting at closer quarters and began heavily encroaching each others’ personal spaces. By this stage, even early woman was sucked into biting away at twigs and sediments. Very soon everyone was at it. The common denominator of society was set at brushing when you woke up.

Unlike other evolving social trends, oral hygiene demands a person to stay a cut above the rest in order to smell ‘better’. If I have good breath and you have good breath, then we both don’t realize that the other has good breath because both of us now operate at the same level. But if one of us has good breath and the other has bad breath, now you can tell the difference. This perfect imbalance spawned the market for the tooth paste and then the tooth brush. (Truly speaking, the story of the tooth brush and the tooth paste is a chicken-and-egg problem. So we won’t go into that one.) Now the whole world started using a toothbrush and toothpaste in the morning. To get ahead of competition, some guy started brushing twice a day.

You see, the story could have ended there. But in order to stay ahead of the rest of the pack, I have filled my toilet shelf with the latest battery operated toothbrush, a tongue cleaner developed by NASA for its astronauts, a 5-in-1 toothpaste that squeezes out of both ends of the tube, a set of dental floss so fine it can pass though the two syllables of ‘Hello’, a bottle of mouthwash with a higher percentage of alcohol than absinthe and a self invented, patent-pending mouth spray so strong that even a whiff in your eyes can cause permanent blindness.


Good luck to the rest of the world!

The underground constipation versus the overhead overflow

One of the pluses of growing up in a city is that you become adept at English. In most cases, kids in school and through college end up picking on at least one other language besides English and their own mother tongue. The educated section of the western world usually holds the Asian population in regard since most Asians can speak at least 2 languages fluently. Many Asians might speak up to 4 languages. As you know, we don’t think it’s a big deal to bump into someone who can handle four languages in India. But to the rest of the world it’s a colossal mark of mass intelligence of a certain geographical pocket; almost like Russians are good at physics, or Koreans are good at math or any of that. It was out of such a train of thought that several jokes emerged, the least of which being: “What do you call a person who speaks many languages? Answer: Multi-linguist. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Answer: Bi-linguist. And what do you call a person who speaks one language? Answer: American.(well, British and Australian too!)”

Besides the blip-on-the-radar jokes about the English language, there’s no getting away from the fact that English is really what makes life, business, politics, restaurant menus, instructions on condom packets and everything else in between easier to fathom. Yet, in some strange way, there is a big portion of the Indian population that seems to think that it can somehow remain divorced from the Victorian Language. Now we both understand that trying to change someone who isn’t willing to change is like dancing with someone who isn’t willing to dance. It’s called wrestling.

I haven’t tried the English lessons on Tata Sky, but I can say from here that probably the easiest way to get good at English is to first start by being bad at it. That is, I’m assuming, you haven’t been used to speaking it from the days of your kindergarten. Common self-help techniques to learn English that people resort to can be put in two boxes:

The underground constipation: Don’t let the word constipation mislead you into thinking that somehow this one method is bad. This technique usually encompasses reading lots of books and working away at Wrens, Martins and Norman Lewis. It is very important, but this method entails learning the language in isolation. While this might help you say words like ‘incorrigible’ and ‘preposterous’, there is no way you’ll be able to marry the knowledge with the comprehension and its use in day-to-day speech. English really isn’t about saying big words.

The overhead overflow: This is the playground where the real learning happens, and yet most English speaking aspirants never step into it. It is that space where you communicate and talk and exchange information with people who speak better English than we do. The law of physics never falters and a certain degree of osmosis happens between the people exchanging ideas. Over a period of time, hanging around with the eagles actually helps us soar higher than we could have if we continued pecking with the hens.

I write this not as a master of the language, but certainly as a long term student. The words lucid and pragmatic have been giving me a tough time off late. So, if we can somehow find that balance between the underground constipation and the overhead overflow, our ability to communicate in English would be up several notches.

A Nobel for the attitude

I’ve got friends in universities in the US and Europe who are lucky enough to have a Nobel Laureate take the lecture from 11 to 1 on Tuesday mornings and another Nobel Laureate take another class from 3 to 5 on Thursday evenings. While that’s not the case in our IITs and even in IISc where I currently work now, we do have the occasional celebrity from the science community come in every once in a while to lift our heads above the water.

Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year for his work on the ribosomes structure at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.On Tuesday, 5th January 2010, he spoke at the IISc Centenary Lecture at the J. N. Tata auditorium at IISc, Bangalore. The talk was titled "From Baroda to Cambridge: A life in science." Click here to read the story from the press.

There’s no dearth of role models for students in science. Text books are awash with Linus Paulings and Neils Bohrs. As Dr.Venki (as he likes to be called) himself pointed out earlier in the week on a show on NDTV, the nature of science is universal. Intellectual property can flow (and usually does) with relative ease as the matters of the mind cannot be contained by judicial laws. This very nature of science has meant that scientist role models are not in shortfall, and that their country of origin is almost seemingly inconsequential. The DNA doesn’t care if the discoverer was Irish or Japanese.  

The first half of Dr. Venki’s talk was an autobiographical one. He had slides on the screen, and in talking about his journey through school and college in Baroda, he frequently had pictures of his teachers and made references as to how each one played a role in impacting him. He was heavy in challenging the premise of performing ‘a pedestrian PhD thesis’ and in doing 2^nd and 3^rd grade research that are marginal increments of existing knowledge. However, he did add that making fundamental breakthroughs in Physics at this stage was definitely very unlikely. 

The second half of the talk encompassed decoding the ribosome structure at the MRC Laboratory in Cambridge. As one of the 14 Nobel Laureates in his department, the unsaid rule among researchers there is  that if one cannot answer the question “Why are you doing (researching) what you’re doing?” you probably shouldn’t be there at the first place. “We are not in the business of generating information and data. We are in the business of understanding and advancing our knowledge”, he said.

I’m not sure if I understood the part about the ribosomes, but I sure learnt that a constancy of purpose is very important in one’s career, and that even a Nobel Laureate gives credit to those who have gone out before him and created that pool of knowledge for the rest to work on.  

For Dr. Venki’s Nobel Lecture, check here. 

Mother Earth

My good friend Shweta Soni writes this gem of a poem on the condition of our planet. Very well written, but more importantly the point is made loud and clear.

Mother Earth

Once there lived a beautiful woman
A beautiful woman, the Mother Earth
But today she is in misery
All alone with her sufferings and dearth

And who is responsible for her condition
All her own sons
A mother who gave them so much
has to her rescue none

In place of her green forests
she sees today the forests of stone
and the cold blooded inhabitants
they have no heart, only bone

There is no water to be found
only blood flowing everywhere
'coz if look for violence
you can easily find it anywhere

The word 'Love' is forgotten
by all and sundry
The streets are full of
people who are hungry

But it's not hunger, it's greed
driving everyone mad
Greed for money, greed for power
through a means good or bad

But her sons are all indifferent
They care no more for their mother
A mother who is hurt but hopes
they'll wake up some day or other

Let that day be today itself
Let us all fulfill our duty
And pledge together one and all
To return the mother her lost beauty.

Peek over the pail and look down the road

So this is the year they were talking about after all, eh? At the turn of 2000, tech futurists went to work thanks to all those advancements that were happening. The real visionaries spoke about the year 2020, and the short-sighted (pun unintended) ones kept themselves occupied with 2010. It was all over the place, remember? Somehow, 2010 (or the turn of the decade as we call it) was expected to be this tipping point in everything that cocooned the human imagination. They said it all – ranging from high rates of diabetes to back to back economic recessions to selling real estate on the moon. Somehow, in 2002 (or 03), 2010 seemed liked this year that was way into the future. For some of us it even seemed that it would take a really really long while to get there.

But then, here we are. It’s 2010 and it doesn’t feel very much different than it did when they made those predictions, really. The undeniable fact however is that the world today looks very very different from the one 7 or 8 years ago; maybe even 3 or 4 years ago. Probably because we’ve come to accept change living day to day that we don’t realize it! The futurists were right. Well, at least some of them were. So i find it hard to digest when people say "This is what i am, i can't change." Sorry bud, don't tell fibs.

So the deal-of-this-coming-decade as I understand is the (seemingly obvious) fact that we’re going to remain logged on to the internet twenty four bar seven. Logging on-and-off is out; staying logged on is in. This means we’ll all have a smart phone in our hands whether we like it or not. Balckberries ain't just for the C-suite guys. If some one had told you in 1999 that you’d OWN a mobile phone ten years from now, you’d have probably thought that the guy had lost his marbles. But trust me to trust the tech pundits on the blackberry thing.

Expect two other things this decade:

Number one:- Expect drug companies to shift towards producing preventive medical treatment moving forward over the traditional curative medications. People and insurance companies it seems are more into fixing the tap before it leaks. If you're planning on studying medicine, at least be sure to learn nutritional medicine really well.

Number two: - If people are going to stay logged on to the internet 24X7, much of the money in the world will move into cyberspace (accelerating the already building trend). How does that help you and me? This means that if we can figure out a way to get a slice of this internet money pie (monetizing blogs, tweets so on), we can effectively work at our careers because we like it and not because we have to. Which means, expect to see people in their twenties retiring before their parents do. And expect billionaires still in high school. Forbes will just have to put out a trillionarries list eventually.

Until then, sit back and have a meaningful year ahead. Take care of the years, and the decade will take care of itself.