The Deep Cut

I have always been severely judged in the way that I talk. "What is that, a colonial hangover?" I've been asked. When I moved from a city in northern India to the eastern part of the country, my first reaction was "Wow! I can't have spoken secrets now. Everyone here speaks Bengali!" - which blew my mind. I suddenly found myself relatable to the kids in the neighborhood. They spoke the same language, confided secrets in similar tongues in to their mother's ears and listened to similar reprimands from their fathers, just like the 10 year-old me. I made friends - who quickly became my closest friends - perhaps because I connected with them more personally, our mother tongue being the common factor here. Soon I developed a childhood crush on this girl who, among other common friends back then, was the only one who spoke Bengali and we used to go out skating in the evenings, hide together for hide'n seek and row together on imaginary lifeb

The legal system back home in India has gone bonkers over the recent furor raised by some lame sexist comments made by a supposedly sexist scientist at a conference in South Korea. Taking cue from the swift judgment in this case, lawmakers are seeking to sign MOUs with the respective CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Tinder to fast-track the much needed improvement in the justice system of the country. Bright days ahead for the states, won't you say? As those connected to my Facebook profile and worldwide Twitter feed know, life took a darker turn recently for celebrated biochemistry researcher and failed stand-up comedian, Dr. Tim Hunt. But considering that he has bagged a Knighthood and the Nobel Prize in this lifetime, they say that this dark turn is perhaps only a couple shades darker in the array of all the 50 different shades of Grey. He would now retire and dedicate the rest of his life to growing quince trees in his backyard English garden. Or gingers, for the much-neede

These days, I find myself providing strange and quirky examples to elucidate certain   concepts in  molecular biology  to a classroom of 50 sleep-induced, hungover and relatively withdrawn young minds. "Imagine you want to murder someone.. and you want to do it with a knife. Why a knife? Well, because knives are slow and painful and you can see the fear in your enemy's eyes as life slowly drains away.." (Here I paused, to give theatrics a chance)  "..but then I go and hide all your knives away! You come into the room to face the person you want to kill. But suddenly you can't kill him - or her, not to sound sexist - because I took away the only weapon you ever had!" I paused, to let them try to figure it out a little by themselves before I give away the final conclusion of the elaborate example - "that's what EDTA does. It takes away the cation cofactors that the nuclease needs, in order to cleave the DNA. Get it? Get it?" Sometime

Last few weeks have been such a whirlwind that I've been all like Whaaa-?! Okay, so I really dunno and I'm also kind of clueless about what to fill you guys in with.. except.. that suddenly one day I decided to pack up my things back in Kolkata, and shove everything to the back of that giant thing they call an aeroplane (and hop in to like 4 of them - connecting flights) to travel halfway around the globe to this place named Tallahassee, in Florida. Unlike back home in India, where a state-capital city is like a big bustling, marginally chaotic city (usually the biggest in the state), the quiet and slow college-town of Tallahassee is the state capital of Florida. Not Miami, as you'd have  perhaps   thought. Don't worry, same mistake was made there! Nothing could've prepared me for that REALLY LONG journey than perhaps the craziness of American college football (which you get only here, so there goes that plan)! It was something like this: Kolkata to Delhi (2:3

This will be an extremely personal post, so don't go reading into it too much if you don't particularly like the sorts. Remember I warned you! __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ There are times when you feel utterly hopeless. Like whatever you have done, or are doing, would ultimately amount to nothing. That in the whole seventy plus years you've lived or would perhaps live, and all the work that you've done or would do, they would simply not matter in the end. That you would not matter. Your life wouldn't matter, like so many everyday. Your name wouldn't be remembered. You wouldn't be remembered. That however much you've tried doing things against that, you've ended up achieving nothing. How can anyone live knowing that? Yesterday I went to the market to get some eggs, 'Dada, I'll buy the entire tray. We'll be having guests tonight!' I added, w

All my train travels being interesting, I decided to do the extreme this time. Its a screaming 42 degree celsius in Kolkata, and I decided to travel to Bangalore on a sleeper class ticket on the Indian Railways. Yes, I was the original inspiration behind movies like 'Bheja Fry' . The only sane logic in all this was that wherever I would go, the temperature could only dip. I stuffed my rucksack with everything I did not need and a handful of things that I absolutely required. Then I latched a dozen water-bottles to my hand before I embarked on the journey. Immediately, I made acquaintance with an uncle, who asked me what I do. Making no sense of telling him that 'Dear uncle, I am a jobless globetrotter currently, and still so for another 3 months' , I fast-forwarded my story to a couple of months later and told him that I'm pursuing doctoral studies in the field of cell cycle and cancer. He jumped off his seat and introduced his unmarried daughter to me.

The last two years of every undergraduate student's academic life are riddled with some tough choices, hard facts and prominent decisions. It is the time of life when every student faces the dilemma of choosing either higher studies or finding a suitable job. Whichever decision they choose to pursue, it changes their lives in more ways than they would have   themselves  prepared for. Ask me, I have been through this terrific phase only recently. It has really been a tiring last few months for me - searching for courses, contacting the faculty, sorting universities made up nearly the whole of it. During the last few days in college, we had picked up on an anthem of sorts - assorted few lines from songs (such as the one below; selected few lines from 'What If' by Coldplay ) and movies that reflected of the difficult quandary we suddenly found ourselves in. This quandary is only supposed to be the parts and parcel of the growing-up phase, the prospect of which we always ha

Its only natural, given the current state of affairs, that I promise to finish writing this post before ushering this New Year in and watch myself fail miserably. For  the delay , I beg your pardon and show the middle finger to the judgmental ones among you all the same. Christmas is long over and a change is in the air. Scientifically speaking, the day is getting longer than the night, which is a bad thing to happen to people like me! No, I'm not an Orc. Just an insomniac blogger with a self-proclamatory good taste in music. Well, where am I going with this anyway? Oh yes, change. The whole second half of last year was about welcoming 'change' and adapting to it. Lets start with a change in the playlist, shall we? 'Daughters' by John Mayer, now!

'Are you pissing?' That particular sentence from 'Life of Pi' brings back memories. They are the 'not-so-worthwhile' snippets and clippings from our mutual lives that I have decided to keep. And now that they have resurfaced, I'm going to force them upon you guys. You see before I start writing something, I think of you. And then I desperately try to bring out the essence of a memory that has left me, or is leaving me in a slow, painful process. The feeling is akin to be retiring to an armchair in old age, and staring out of the window overlooking the misty garden in winter. It is a soothing feeling and a grievous one too, both at the same time. Once I begin to write about it, it occurs to me that this is going to be a rare post. In a way that it is partly gender-specific. Men may appreciate some aspects of it more, while the ladies will have to do a little bit of guesswork and bank on their imagination out there. But it is in no way, a sexi

Well this is awkward. Come fall, I’d be graduating from my university, unemployed, and suddenly without any sense of direction. Till this point in my life, I always knew or at least had a sense of what I was going to be doing next. After middle school, there was high school. After high school, there was college. At college, after Bachelors there was Masters, something that we bypassed. And now that I’m graduating, I suddenly find myself standing at crossroads. Yes, I know I’d rather be going for a doctorate in biological research. For me, its going to be a matter of intellectual and personal satisfaction. But it’ll also mean a sudden headfirst entry into the world of ‘Publish or Perish!’ Am I competent enough? I’d better be. ... Anyway, I'm more concerned with saying my fond farewells to the people I've met here over the past 5 years. Graduation,  in reality,  was such a pain in the arse. My body despises me for what I've been putting it through everyday. M

‘I can’t see me loving nobody but you For all my life When you are with me Baby the skies will be blue For all my life’ Don’t look at me like that! That’s one extremely sweet song by The Beatles. (And now imagine me, puppy dog eyed!) There, you’re doing it again… This is a special song – for it’s the one that was always on ‘auto-play’ whenever I came across her. Her is (rather, was) one particularly tall, straight haired, fair, dark-eyed girl in my college. Was-? No, she isn't dead or anything like that, she just passed out (in a non-medical 'passing out' sort of way) - a senior, from an unrelated department. Always the one to be noticed dressed only too nicely: simple, nothing flashy, yet trendy. Earthly, yet bright colored kurtis on a pair of dark colored leggings usually. She had a mole on her nose, to the right side. Small one, but prominently pretty. Jet black eyes, with a sharp gaze about it. Even her teeth were set too perfectly! But the thin crazy str

I'm writing this while looking up at the semester end exams, which is by the way, laughing back at me, prowling alongside the guillotine.. Well, what to say, I'm in terrible hurry to write this off (for I cannot help, NOT to update this regularly!) so dear readers, please understand.. Y'all must've undergone this moment sometime in your life, the one I mentioned in the very first line of this post? Exam fever! Yes, its difficult to digest that the days of semester 7 are done being counted. But well, it has had its moments.. So, lately what have I been doing, apart from this bloody Neurobiology thing, that is? I've been playing outdoors, a lot! And following IPL, 2 lots! And socializing with new friends, 3 lots! Its cricket season in India (and I'd like to find the guy who did that - nominating summer as the cricket season overthrowing the earlier one, winter - and no, name someone apart from the now-bankrupt ex-Man of IPL, he's suffered enoug

Aah! PEACE!! The entire hullabaloo about the Bong New Year has come to an end at last.. The one good thing about it will have to be my swift retreat to 'my-kind-of-music!' - Poets of the Fall, Chris Cornell and Beatles ruled my Tuesday. Trying to get Fossils out of my head ASAP as I just cannot stand the weirdness that Rupam Islam bestows upon the contemporary Bong population. However, some songs are indeed good, if sung normally, like the one we performed - Hasnuhana - Oh! and how the people danced and hooted for us.. \m/ The event was great, considering the general audience liked it. However we, being the organizers, know the various faces of it and whom we'd like to skin alive and whom we'd like to ask out for free lunch and stuffs along the same lines.. At one such moment when I was fuming at somebody who maybe didn't even matter on the entirety, a small blitz of yellow ran past me, thus spilling my Juice   on me  (that for some reason I had decide