Culinary Exploits

Disclaimer- This is NOT a food post.

I don’t even qualify as a reasonable cook. Till the day I left home, my mom, in her bouts of optimism, urged me to learn to cook the basics. And every time, I refused and (mis)reasoned. Not that cooking is gender-specific or status-specific. My dad is a great cook, and so are so many men. My mom had resigned, wisely predicting that a person who loves to eat will eventually learn to cook. And that is what happened, the hard way of course.

For one year, I tried to make what can be called “kitchen accidents” instead of food. When I finally got tired of eating out, I decided one fine morning, ladles and frying pan in hand, that I will learn to cook. Believe it or not, I had never broken an egg before that, let alone cook. I didn’t even recognize the names of most spices. I would sniff the spice and try to remember which dish would mom use it in. I still associate the smell of jeera powder with unripe mango sharbat mom made during the summer. I still do not recognize the pulses, let alone know how to cook it. I started my first day of cooking by adding turmeric powder to pasta. I am sure that Italians are still turning in their graves after that. Eventually, in the process of numerous hits and trials, numerous pan burns and food being disposed in the garbage, I finally learnt to make some palatable curries that saw me through the week. I didn’t have to be a connoisseur of food for that. And now every time I try something new that works, I excitedly call home. My proud announcement of “Mom, I made prawns today” is usually accompanied by a silence and a thud on the other side of the line when dad picks up the phone and announces that my mom has just fainted. Well, not really, but every time, she is on the verge of fainting when I tell her that I cooked something new.

Well, what spices did you put in it? Where did you get the recipe from?

Errr…. I don’t know. I put whatever I thought would taste good in that.

Such are my cooking expeditions. Browse through any cookbook or food website and I’ll realize that I don’t even recognize half the ingredients, let alone have it. So I have finally decided, that these websites are meant just for visual pleasure. If it comes to cooking, I’ll have to improvise with whatever little I have.

However, there are things that I learnt during my cooking expeditions. Like these-

--How well the food tastes depends on how correctly you cut the vegetables. A simple onion can be cut into a dozen different ways, depending on what you are making. And if you fry the onions properly, brown and un-burnt, half of your cooking is done.

--The key to a good flavor lies in the minimum usage of spices. If you are not sure about how much to put, start by adding little quantities. It is better to rectify a less spicy, bland dish than to uselessly try to mend an over-spicy, over-cooked, or over-burnt dish. But then again, it all depends on who you are feeding other than you, isn’t it?

--Green vegetables should always be added at the end, else they fade in color.

--Good food comes from good use of patience and innovation, rather than a lot of spices or ingredients. Especially if you would like to have male friends frequenting your place. They really appreciate it, especially the single ones, given the fact that they eat anything other than textbooks, computer equipment, and office supplies.

--If you are trying something for the first time and are not very confident, cook in small quantities. If nothing, your heart wouldn’t break while disposing it off in the trash can or passing it over to your Thai neighbor as an “Indian delicacy”.

--Cooking is like doing research. Sometimes nothing works and sometimes everything works. But then, it also depends on who you are. If you were Sanjeev Kapoor, I am sure even using turmeric powder in pasta would be cool.

--Writing food blogs may not be a good idea as a distraction from the midnight snacks hunger after all. If anything, the hunger just gets worse.

sunshine

Swerving Past Life

This is not so much as a blog post for my readers as it is a post for me. Years down the line when I am all old and wrinkled and ready to leave, I’ll remember how precious life had been to me.

Sometimes I wish I was dead.

Oh, why do I have to face all this? I wish I didn’t have to live.

Life seems too much of a pain these days.

The next time you say these lines, think again.

Yesterday was a gorgeous sunny afternoon, unlike the cloudy weather that is so usual here. Friday night being the fun night, we decided to do something nice for the evening. I had bought a new sandwich maker recently, and I happily made some sandwiches, threw in some Gatorade, and hit for the beach.

The interstate, or what we call the freeway/highway, had its share of the Friday evening traffic. We were happily driving, basking in the glory of sunshine. My friend asked for a sip of the drink and I opened him a bottle.

What I didn’t realize was that he was trying to take the left lane, and was looking on the left side of the road from his rear view mirror, one hand still holding the bottle. At the same time, the reckless driver to the right lane of us blinked his indicator, and without so much as waiting for us to slow, changed his lanes to come right in front of us.

So here I had my friend driving, still looking to the left to shift lanes, and worse, accelerating a bit to shift soon, unaware that a car was right in front of us. And here I was sitting to his right, watching in horror as the car changed lanes and came right in front of us while my friend accelerated.

The next thing I remembered was me screaming out to him to look in front. In a fraction of a second, he had swerved the car to his left, the screech of the tires as the car skid deafening. Our car had turned a whole 270 degrees, splashing the entire bottle of Gatorade on the windscreen in the process. Like a Hollywood action movie, the car turned 3/4th of a circle and stopped perpendicular to the road.

For the next few seconds, we watched in horror as several speeding cars from behind lost their tracks, and came hurling at us for a head-on T-collision. They came pointing right at us, and either snaked right or left to avoid hitting us. In a couple of seconds, the other cars had either stopped or carefully avoided hitting ours. We finally completed the remaining 90 degrees of the turn, my friend waved his hand in a gesture of thanks to the drivers behind, and we moved on.

I was shivering in panic, unable to stop my teeth chatter. Ever since it has happened, the whole episode has been replaying in my mind- me seeing the car change lanes, screaming out to my friend, and watching in horror as the cars from behind came hurling at us, our car stuck perpendicular to the road. The culprit car sped away, probably unaware of the havoc he had created behind, or too careless to stop. But this incident (better called an accident) made me realize how precious life is. We could have been hit by any number of cars. Our skidding car could have overturned. It could have been a dark, rainy night. We might have ended up with stitches and permanent scars. Or we could have been dead. Or going bankrupt paying car insurance and medical bills for the rest of our lives even if we were lucky enough to escape with a few broken bones.

Instead, every single car avoided hitting us. And here I am talking about a freeway and not some narrow lane where consequences wouldn’t have been this disastrous. The liquid splashing everywhere, blurring our vision, seemed so much like a scene out of a movie. Ask me the horror of being strapped to your seat, seeing every single car coming head-on to hit you, and then swerving past without so much as a slight bump. The whole approximately one minute incident has been replaying in my mind again and again. A one minute that seemed like a lifetime. We could have been in the talons of death. Instead, I am still healthy and unscathed, all in good shape, writing about it to get it out of my mind.

I later remembered how we were having a discussion about our frustrations of academic life and job hunting and stuff. But all these hardships boiled down to nothingness in comparison to the struggle for life. Yes, life is precious. How much, I realize now.

Drive doubly safe. For your safety is as much dependent on other people's safe driving as it is dependent on your safe driving.

sunshine

Shall We Dance?

Acceptance is a very special word, no matter how big or small the thing is. You get accepted into one of the IITs, and you are the next sought after thing in the neighborhood for years to come. You get a call from one of the US schools, and people walking on the streets often touch you to see if you are as real as the other lesser mortals. You fancy someone and the person proposes love. You wish something and the wish comes true. You have spent sleepless caffeinated nights trying to write a thesis proposal and it finally gets accepted by the committee. You send a poem for a poetry contest and it gets published. No matter how big or how small the thing is, it always feels great to be accepted by someone, hugely boosting up your self-confidence in the process. It is the waiting period in between that is killing. But getting a certain YES email or a letter feels so special, it makes the wait every bit worthwhile. Equally disheartening are rejections. But then, don’t all of us move on? I remember how disappointing it was to get so many rejects from the good and not so good US schools a few years back. It always makes you think- What was wrong with me? Was I not good enough? Why me? But one acceptance letter obliterates all the dejection, one good rank in the joint entrance exams makes all the years of hard work worthwhile, one chance to work with some professor you have wanted makes it worthwhile, and so goes for the person you want to live with. It is a different matter altogether that the real responsibilities, the pains and travails of living up to the expectations start later.

A month back, our dance team got rejected in one of the auditions. No one knew why we could not make it. We had our theories though. Some said that the deciding committee was biased towards north Indian folk dance, while some said that they had already decided who they wanted to choose based on personal preferences. Whatever the case be, it felt horrible to be rejected, all the more for me because I did not understand the language and the dance style was not familiar to me, hence I had put five times more effort. I drifted between stages from putting the blame to myself, to my team, to the choice of dance number, and to my luck. When sanity struck after a while, I realized that there was nothing to put the blame on in the very first place. Life was all about getting chances, we win some, and we lose some. After some 6 hours of feeling low and lachrymose, I had moved on.

However, I remained on the lookout for newer opportunities. In a way, I was tired of dancing with my south Indian dance team, neither understanding the language, nor feeling very comfortable with the style of dance. Someone up there heard me, for one of the bigger dance groups in the city were auditioning for new dancers in their team for a few upcoming events. I had been to their dance shows before, that beautifully showcased a variety of dances. However, this was a round 2 audition, meaning that they had already chosen the bulk of the lot and there were a handful more dancers they wanted. I was apprehensive, because one rejection was only so much I could take. If it was something like glass painting or knitting, I wouldn’t have cared, but dance is something that I really cared about. My apprehension about being rejected the second time knew no bounds. I would stand in front of dozens of pairs of unknown, judgmental eyes, and then the music would play and you would be expected to dance on your own while they decided if you were good enough. The music would stop in between and they would say “NEXT” while you would pack up, wondering if they got bored too soon or if they made their decision so soon. And then the wait would be unbearable. Probably you would know some of the other people who auditioned, and would live in the constant anxiety that they would make it and you wouldn’t. Even if you were rejected, you would be tortured to death, reading one of the most diplomatically and cunningly crafted letters- 

“While we were so delighted that you gave us your valuable time and brought your ass on the dance floor, we are sorry to let you know that you have two left feet! It seems you shook your hips a tad too more and your right leg and left hand were not in sync. However, we are sure that there will be other dance groups who would willingly overlook these and accept you in their group because hips and legs do not form an integral part of their dance. We wish you all the best”.

It takes a lot to face rejection. Anyway, here I convinced one of my friends to give me a ride, since I had no clue how to get to that godforsaken, desolate place they had chosen for the auditions. I plugged in my music player into my ears, and shook my hips for a couple of hours in front of the walled mirrors in the gym just to make sure I could still move a couple of my body parts without running the risk of being disqualified for having two left legs and a missing right leg. I don’t know what made me choose to audition to a Hrithik Roshan dance number, not even coming close to his flexibility and finesse, but after a few minutes of practice, when I still didn’t show signs for a slipped disc or a chipped tarsal bone, I decided to give it a shot.

Adrenaline is a magical potion. It can make you do things you didn’t imagine you were capable of doing. It can make you jump from the height of a 1000 feet, being tied only to a rope. It can make you thrust your hands in the crocodile’s mouth just to see if they use their pre-molars or molars more while eating. It can make you stand in front of dozens of unknown people, dancing in solitude, risking being laughed at or being stared at as if you were an alien. And thus we went through this together, me and my adrenaline. At that time, I didn’t care if I made it to the auditions. All I cared about was to be out of there as soon as I could, of course after stuffing my pockets with the little cans of free orange juice from the wending machine.

The wait was bad, all the more since I personally knew one of the judges, and every time I got an email from her, it made me cringe. Email I did get, but from one of the other judges. I read it calmly, got up from my swivel chair, and headed straight for the restroom mirror. I looked at myself for a long time, eyes not showing any emotion. And then I straightened my shoulders, held out my hand to the mirror in that typical ballroom style dancing, and said to the person looking back at me from the mirror-

Shall we dance?

sunshine

My New Found Love

I am glad I got to know him, though I wish I had met him earlier. He has become such an integral part of my life that I cannot function without spending some time with him every day. I would be preparing for an important exam, and then I would sneak out and spend some time with him before I resumed work. I cannot get through the day without chatting incessantly about him, laughing at every little thing he says, every funny gesture he makes, reciting verbatim his one-liners and the songs he sings. Ladies and gentleman, let me introduce you to my new found love, my addiction and obsession, the one and only, Eric Cartman !

I don’t know how a friend of mine got me introduced to him, and truth be told, I didn’t even like the first few episodes of what I saw. For here I was seeing a bunch of 8 year old kids swearing profusely and blurting profanities and farting with such enthusiasm and gusto. But once I got the hang of what was happening I was hooked. I was hooked to the extent that I cannot get through the day without my daily dose of 3-4 South Park episodes. And then we would spend hours ruminating on the new things we had just learned, talking to each other in what we call the “Cartmanish language”, singing all the songs we hear this fatso sing. When we are irritated, we try to clench our fists, close our eyes in that typical “X” and scream “Goddddammit”. I have never looked forward to watching the TV every Wednesdays before this ever since the days of Chitrahaar on Doordarshan when I myself was Cartman’s age. Within a few weeks, I had completed season 1, 2, and 3, and am looking forward to the other seasons. Frankly, it was an interesting discovery to know how I can relive my childhood again at this age. You can see the amount of the crazy-cartman-syndrome effect this thing has had on me.

For imagine the puzzled expression on people’s faces when I pick up a stick and scream “Respect my Authoritah”, or hum “Stinky bridges” all to myself. My roomie would go crazy if I told her something like, “Aye woman ! Why don’t you go to the kitchen and make me some pie, or go home and make babies?” See a cat crossing the road and scream, “No kitty, bad kitty !” The “big boned” guy thinks that independent films are all about gay cowboys eating pudding. Cartman and group, Mr.Hanky- The Christmas Poo, Chef, Butters and group are my new friends now. I have been looking for a restaurant in town called Casa Bonita. I look at a bunch of kids arguing and wonder “How do I reach these kids”. If you know what I am talking about and have experienced the same level of madness, then welcome to the club. If not, please join the club. For everyone is entitled to a little humor, a little laughter, and lots of craziness in life.

And here goes Cartman online, in its entirety.

“Sweet” !!!, like he would say.

sunshine

Can You "SIT" Through This?

I was half listening to the lecture, half lost in my thoughts during the 8 AM class this morning. This isn’t unusual, since the prospect of sitting through a 90 minute class straight is totally unacceptable to me. The seating arrangement was in the form of a long rectangle with one of its short sides chopped off for the instructor to stand, while I sat closest to him. I was bored to death, feigning interest, though my mind had wandered off to the different theories I come up with. Today, I didn’t come up with a unique hypothesis, but certainly an interesting research question.

What makes people decide to sit where they choose to sit?

If there was a huge hall full of empty chairs such that the number of chairs was greater than the number of people in the room, and if each person was free to independently decide his coordinates, what would cause a particular person to choose where he chooses to sit?

I myself have attended classes of different sizes and seating arrangements. There is this standard arrangement where the teacher is at one end of the room and there are rows of seats in front, so that if you were sleepy or bored, you could always choose the last row for a short nap. And then there was this class I was sitting in where three sides of the room has seating arrangements, the fourth side for the instructor, while the rest of the room was a long strip of empty floor space good enough for a cricket pitch. And then there were rooms more like stadiums and cinema halls where you climbed up and down the stairs to have the seat of your choice.

Keeping all the classroom seating designs in mind, what induces people to opt for certain seats? If it is a small class and you needed a recommendation letter from the professor at the end of the semester, you perhaps chose to sit in the front row, left, right, or center. Even if the course didn’t interest you, you pretended as if it was the second best thing that happened to you after that apple fell on Newton’s head and gave you several extra chapters and formula to learn from the physics text book. If you didn’t care about the recommendation letter, you probably chose to sit in some dimly lit corner of the room, trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible. If it was a huge class with a gallery seating arrangement, you would probably choose to sit at the end in order to see the teacher better, precisely the reason why balcony seats in the cinema hall are more expensive than the rear stall ones. If you have the habit of dangling your legs to ensure proper blood flow to the hind limbs, the first bench is never a good idea. If you had a large ass, the side seats may not be a good idea (God, why am I reminded of someone called Eric Cartman… aaayyeeee !). 

Having said that, if you had a large classroom and observed where people sat in each class, I wonder what the results would look like. Some would always sit in the front while some would always sit at the back. Some would always alternate, left, right, center, front, back, doesn’t matter. Some would not care about the coordinates as much as they would care for their friends. Some would always be proximal to a certain group of people while some would always be at the maximum possible distance from a certain group of people. Some would be undecided and take the first available seat. Some would avoid being close to the other professors in the room who have come to attend the seminar, while some would make it a point to always sit closest to their adviser. Students with love interests are expected to sit close to each other. Students who take lots of notes will usually choose that empty corner to get that extra space, and definitely the front one to see and hear properly. People who wanted some extra attention will usually sit in the front while people like me who couldn’t care less would try to find some godforsaken corner. If it is a class of hundreds, one would prefer to be as close to the EXIT sign as possible. Some people have a favorite seat, a favorite nook or corner where they sit class after class, year after year. They squirm and get uncomfortable if they find someone else sitting in their favorite place (If it is a man called Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory, he will make sure his favorite seat is vacated before the class can even start). Some people are like extra-terrestrial bodies that wander, though not aimlessly, but with a formula not yet known to physicists. If you had a bird eye view of a square classroom, I usually prefer to sit in the geometrical center. It gives me a sense of symmetry, the walls being equidistant from my left, right, and frontal vision.

If there was a study for a year (the class being unaware of it) where some crazy theory proponent like me observed and recorded peoples preferences for seats, would there emerge a specific pattern out of it? If the sample size was large enough, would the result fall safely within a confidence interval? Will the seating pattern be in clusters, scattered, linearly, or otherwise? Would there be confounders and effect modifiers? Who knows how it works. Probably when you enter a large room, a fluorescent lighted signal leaves your brain to your muscles directing where it should move, unless there are certain determining factors like friends, state of interest or boredom, etc., that predetermines a location. If we were to develop a conceptual model on seating, what factors would be involved? Neurocognition? Motor coordination? Evolutionary stable strategy? Social learned behavior? Purely instinct and/or reflex? Networking intentions? A combination of physiological and social factors? I myself have attended a class with a handsome doctor in it when I would come late and strategically position myself so as to be able to see him the best, yet be as unobtrusive as possible. Yeah, even budding scientists have hormones.

I applaud your patience if you are still reading this. After all, it is an age old rant of scientists that people do not understand or appreciate their concepts and ideas. You see, an idea, a random thought is all that it takes, and though the theories you hypothesize may not earn you Nobel prizes, it can certainly transport you to wonderland and see you through 8 AM classes or concepts otherwise considered boring.

sunshine

Morning Sickness

Brain-Hand Coordination-

Class registration menu

Go to list of courses

Select appropriate course

View course details

View class timing

8 AM- 3 days a week.

Hand stops. Brain function goes frantic.

8 AM? Who wakes up at 8 AM on a Monday morning to go to class? Do you know what 8 am classes mean?

No more shutting off the alarm and going back to sleep. Catching the bus at least by 7:30 AM, breakfast or no breakfast. Spending Sunday doing homework and going to sleep at 9 pm.

8 am, come rain, hail, storm, snow, sun, light, darkness, cold, or fog.

8 am means being done by 10 AM and not knowing what to do with the rest of the day. And coming back when people are just starting to go to school.

It means arranging for breakfast at night and probably going to sleep wearing the next day's clothes just to get those extra 10 minutes of much yearned sleep. It means not caring about dress, hair, or looks, and getting into the department still half dazed and yawning. 

It means finishing all the pre-assigned readings by Sunday night, and not waiting until Monday. Which also implies getting the class handouts printed way before Sunday (I currently print it Monday morning).

It means not being able to wave sleepily to my roommate anymore and wonder how lucky I am before going back to slumber?

8 AM? Even for exams? But who will wake me up? 

Seems it is gonna be a tough quarter. Three days a week of morning sickness for the first trimester. No puns intended.

sunshine

Draw-ing The Line

The other day, in one of my contemplative moods while waiting at the bus stop, I looked at my hands, palms outstretched, and wondered at the number of skills I had mastered over the years. I am not just talking about writing that first word “APPLE” or drawing the first house with a chimney. Even as an adult, I have mastered various skills over the years. Though not professionally trained, I have developed a knack of picking up and performing various dances. In my play, I did more of hand gestures than I could ever think. Always a pathetic cook, I have learnt to make a decent meal over the years. I have held the needle, I have created stuff with a pair of scissors, I have tried to make a point with the pen and the key board. I have raised hornworms for laboratory research. I have used the calculator to balance complicated expense sheets. I have done so much with my hands, these short stubby fingers with nails neatly cut. But if there is one thing I regret having not been able to do so far, it is picking up the art of drawing, sketching, and painting. It is not one of those things I’d rather regard as “Who cares” and move on. Quite contrarily, over the years, I have tried picking up the pencil on several occasions and come up with something even remotely coherent, if not artsy. Alas, my high built hopes have been cruelly demolished every time.

It’s not that it does not run in the family. My dad is a great painter, he can paint what rich people hang on their walls. But it seems that the particular genes have not been rightfully passed on to me. My greatest fears in school were those assignments when we had to draw science experiments depicting Brownian motion and Pascal’s law on the left hand sheet of our science notebooks. This was followed by having to draw different human systems, stems and roots, ginger rhizoids and potato tubers for the biology classes. I would look at the better artists in my class and marvel at that extra shade added to the stomach diagram that would give it a 3-dimensional look, those extra few lines in the liver that gave it a shiny appearance and identified it from the rest. Ironically, my diagrams were not bereft of the “Good” and “Very Good” remarks scribbled by the teacher. This is because I always managed to put on a helpless, lachrymose look the night before the submissions when dad would take pity on me and make a few strokes in my copy. He screamed at me, he got impatient, he got mad at me, but at the end of it, he would remain awake late and complete my drawings while I would always excitedly wake up in the mornings with a broad grin on seeing the best photosynthesis experiment protocol diagram in my copy. Dad always went an extra step to shade and give a 3-dimensional effect, that always worked wonders. I hated him getting mad after a hard days office work to stay up and do my drawing assignments. But over the years, he gave me hundreds of those beautifully drawn things I preserved and showed off in class proudly for ages.

When I finished school, dad sighed in relief to have been relieved from his duties. But alas, God had different plans. I took biology, and had to draw 50 times more this time. But this time, dad made the rules clear. I could bug him only on weekends, not more than 2 drawings everyday. I just could not appear with pencil and paper and expect him to start drawing. However this time I had a better plan. I started to do outlines and little bits of stuff of the drawing before I showed it to dad. I would draw, let’s say, the head of the fish or the tail of the rat, show it to dad, and exclaim more to myself, “Naah, this is not half as good as what dad draws”. He would take a look, start erasing things, and would redraw things for me. I still remember I had to draw a mouse one time, and he drew such an animated version of it, all dark and hairy and real, that one look and mom had almost thrown up- Yuck ! Even the tail looked so real with the rings that one would feel like swinging it by the tail.

So dad bailed me out through my torturing drawing assignments while I earned goods and very goods. But I never really learnt how to draw. It’s not that I never tried. I tried emulating simple sketches, carefully noticing the way dad held the pencil and made strokes. I also realized that I was not that bad in seeing something and exactly replicating it. But I had no imagination, no creativity. You ask me to draw something as simple as a caravan and I would end up making something that would look like a cow without a tail. With time, I told myself that there are only certain things I could master, and I had to live with the knowledge that I could not excel in everything. But then I would look at a certain painting in wistfulness, marveling at the brush strokes, the paint and the water color, with the signature of the artist scribbled below illegibly, and wonder if I could ever learn to draw something as simple as sketches showing different facial emotions. I looked at the art teacher in school with all jealously, amazed at the way her hands moved with speed as she drew fruit baskets and vegetables and flower gardens for the kids. One visit to my friends home and I gaped in amazement at the huge paintings she had drawn and hung on the walls that gave her house such a “rich person’s house” feel to it. A simple flower vase with flowers. Faces of different women waning into the background colors. The plumage of a multicolored bird.

So what reminded me of this? I was at the hospital earlier today for some bill settlements, and while I waited for someone to attend to me, I looked at the different paintings on the wall with the same feeling of wistfulness. What caught my attention particularly was a certain framed picture that had dozens of hearts, each unique and drawn differently from the rest. Every heart had a different color, a different pattern, and I was amazed at the creativity and the imagination of the painter. For a while, I wondered about the idea of making a life painting and hosting art exhibitions instead of studying cells and molecules. Perhaps I could use my creativity and learn to draw different patterns on the DNA, draw weird looking cells with star patterned cell walls, and weird looking red blood cells and mitochondria. I think I will give it a try tonight by sitting with my pencil and paper again, trying to replicate simple patterns of shapes and emotions and moods. But something in me tells me that I’ll again end up drawing vegetables that look like lamp shades. And just in case people can’t even understand what I was trying to draw, yohoooo !! I can always call it modern art.

sunshine

Trying new things

A few weeks back, I opened my eyes to the glorious sunshine one morning to exclaim, “Shit, I will be turning 27 this year!”. I scurried to the bathroom mirror for tell-tale signs of greying hair, wrinkles on my face, or even a receding hairline. But everything looked fine. However, I now felt that my life-wicker was waning while I did the same mundane stuff over and over again. Nothing was wrong in my life, not an extra pimple on the face, no degenerating hormones or dystrophic muscles. But the very thought of spending a life analyzing health impacts of metals on humans was depressing. So I decided to try something new, something exciting.

I’d heard that my university friends were performing a classical dance for the opening of a new South Indian temple and were looking for another dancer. I speak or understand no Tamil, but I found myself for the rehearsals, inwardly rolling on the floor laughing when I heard the lyrics (which I understood nothing of). Having danced to tapori songs all my life, a classical performance was not what I had expected. Nothing had prepared me for a chance to dance Bharat Natyam to the song “Margazhi Thingal” in a temple. Most people I know perform after years of classical dance training, and the little bit of dance I had picked up was due to my interest in Bollywood. Yet the choreographer had immense confidence in me, no matter how long I took just to get my tripatakas and ardhapatakas and the other mudras right. Not just was the song alien to me, there were parts in the song where there were no words at all, but the tei-yum-dat-ta’s and the Jatis. I do not know if ignorance gave me the courage to go classical the first time in front of an audience, but here I was with a mini jasmine garden on my head, kohl-laden eyes, my limbs painted resplendent red with the red highlighter as a substitute for aalta, my mind vacillating in between controlling the ticklish sensation and wondering how very dermotoxic the highlighter would be. When I sent pictures, my family back home thought that I had dressed up all classical and hired a photographer to take my pics just for kicks.

 

My group wanted to perform to another song. It was a far cry from the Bharat Natyam I was religiously practicing. It was full of hip jerks and ovary-dislocating pelvic thrusts. For the next few weeks, I danced to songs that I did not understand with friends whose language I did not speak. I made my own version of the song in my head, making strange words out of what I understood. Imagine the fun you have dancing to something you do not understand, especially when the dance moves looked like milking cows. Someone even told me that I looked “authentic South Indian,” whatever that meant. Again, it wasn’t an earth shattering, but I think I did well. I was also able to get out of the lethargy that prevents you from trying out something new, getting pally with a group of unknown people from different backgrounds, no matter how trivial or unimportant the act or the effort itself was. I danced to kumbida pona deivam and yammadi athadi.

That summer, I also registered for level 1 salsa classes with my roommate and her boyfriend and completed it. I tried my hand at some bowling, thanks to a classmate of mine from Pakistan. I went to a bull riding show in Tacoma last month, starting watching (and liking) South Park, and went for a dance audition for another group last week.

sunshine.

Sunshine And Sunrise

I just realized that I am more of an outdoor person than an indoor person, unless of course you put me on the dance floor. I also realized that though planned hanging outs are fun, surprises are way better. How do you feel when you are woken up on a weekday by the shrill ringing of the phone? You either expect an emergency call from your folks back in India, or you expect some jerk from a different time zone in the country playing a prank.

So, wanna see the sunrise?

Yeah sure, in your dreams, said a very groggy and irritated inner voice. A very sleepy me: What? When? Now? Well, okay… (still trying to figure out of it is April 1st)…. How long will it take you to come over? (Mentally calculated some 30 minutes of extra sleep)

Well, am right in front of your house.

What?

A very groggy me jumped out of the bed like the jumping jack out of its box, brushed and washed face and put on her slippers in record time, and in the next two minutes, was headed for the beach to see the sunrise in her pajamas and chappals. The sky by the sea had just started to change hues, and by Jove, this is one of the better sunrises I have seen. It wasn’t a big deal in India, but with the screwed up weather and the equally screwed up work schedule and lifestyle here, waking up at half past five just to watch the sun rise is definitely a big deal. And for the next few hours, we were happy people, whiling away time listening to the chirping of birds as they flew in a V-shaped herd, excitedly watching and waving at the train that snaked along the nearby railway tracks, and listening to the roar of the waves.

Like I said, planned trips are always great, but there is something about being woken up from sleep to be told that someone is waiting right outside the door, and the prospect of seeing the sun rise in pajamas and chappals has an amazing appeal to it. I would prefer it over wearing stylish dresses and high heeled shoes to a party. Absolutely anyday.

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Shells

I am an avid collector of seashells. There is something about these lifeless remnants of calcium carbonate from the exoskeleton of mollusks that never cease to fascinate me. Have you ever looked at them closely, observing the ridges, the patterns of rings, the different shades of colors? Like fingerprints, every shell is different from the other one, even the one lying the closest to it. It is so much fun digging your hand in the wet sand after having targeted a particular shell embedded in it, visible only half way. There is so much mystery involved in how big it would be, or how colorful. Sometimes your eyesight deludes you into picking up something that was nothing more than a half split and discarded groundnut shell. And then I jump excitedly when I find two little shells jointed together at their tips. It makes me think of the life that was nested within it, popping its head out occasionally to feed itself or move or see the world. The shell protected it from danger, from adverse weather conditions, giving it the luxury and comforts of a protected existence. And then the life within it died and was washed away, leaving behind remnants of hard rock to live a life of loneliness and solitude till it is either picked up by a collector like me, or vanished into the elements of the earth in anonymity. If shells could tell stories, have you wondered what would those autobiographies look like? Subjected to the sun and the moon and rain, being washed away by the sea again and again, tossed back and forth from the sea to the shore, so many of them all lying lonely, discarded, disjointed, witnessing hundreds of generations come by and go?

I have often wondered how long shells last before the elements are degraded back into the earth and recycled. What gives them their distinctive color and size and patterns? Is it influenced by the environment, or by the genetics of the organism? How can one determine the age of shells? If there was life on other planets, would there be seashells too? There are hundreds of questions I ask myself when I look at a shell. Like people spend hours looking at old photo albums and reminiscing about happy memories, I spend hours, looking at each and every shell I have collected. Back in India, I have thousands of them collected from different parts of the world, neatly dated and labeled in transparent jars. How it broke my heart to leave everything behind. When a friend was visiting Europe and asked me what I fancied from Europe, I’d asked the friend to collect as many shells from as many different beaches as possible. So my collection included shells from the beaches of France, Spain, and Italy, not to mention dozens of beaches in India. My greatest collection were these hundreds of little conch shells in Vizag that housed the hermit crabs, and our home stunk for days while I boiled them and cleaned them.

So what got me thinking about shells, of all things? The weather has been darn good for the last 2 weeks, and after a day’s bunking classes and coming early from work, me and my roomie decided to go to the beach. Now the beaches around here haven’t impressed me a lot in terms of their shell collection. I wasn’t even expecting shells in a beach that is no more than 2 feet wide. But there they were, tiny pieces of black and white jutting their heads out. They weren’t pretty and all looked the same, no beautiful ridges, just tiny lumps of black and white and grey. But even before I knew, I was crouched on the sand, collecting these little shells with both hands, as many as I could, stuffing as many as I could in my pockets and socks. A few hours later, I was a happy kid, running gleefully on the beach. I put my prized collection in a transparent container and placed it on my study table, in between pens and pencils, for me to see them whenever I look up. Now these shells do not run the risk of being lost in anonymity, washed by the waves and ending up being nobody while no one knows them. They can live with me to be marveled at by people who visit me and see them.

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Science Fo(u)r You…

Mingling with different cultures is a great way to learn new things. Everyone of us brings unique things, that makes a cross-cultural study environment such a diverse and rich learning experience. Last week was the Chinese New Year, and the group in our class was discussing and reviewing the following paper-

The Hound of the Baskervilles effect: natural experiment on the influence of the psychological stress on the timing of death (DP Phillips, GC Liu, et al, 2001)

I haven’t referenced it properly here, but that is okay. What I found interesting in this paper was the fact that Chinese and Japanese people consider the number “4” unlucky. “In Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese, the words DEATH and FOUR are pronounced almost identically”. It seemed funny to me at first, but then again, aren’t there similar notions attached to the number 13 by many people? What was more incredible was the fact was the finding that on the fourth day of the month, cardiac deaths were significantly more frequent than on any other day. The paper discussed experimental designs to test the validity of the finding. Much to my amazement, the hypothesis did have substantial validity, the mortality peak on the fourth day of the month being called the “Baskerville Effect” (After the hound of Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Evidently, the deaths are mainly due to chronic heart diseases, reasserting the proposed hypothesis that cardiac mortality increases on psychologically stressful occasions.

Now what does it translate into from a layman’s point of view? That more people die on the 4th of any month compared to the other days, just because the way the words “four” and “death” is pronounced is similar? Apparently that seems to be the case, though in not so much of a cut and dried way. It is more of a cultural phenomenon with unpleasant associations, and it seems that the number 4 evokes discomfort and apprehension in some members of the Chinese and the Japanese population. “Some Chinese and Japanese hospitals do not list a fourth floor or number any rooms 4. Mainland Chinese omit the number 4 in designating military aircraft—an omission said to result from the link between “four” and “death”. Some Japanese people avoid travel on the fourth of the month, and some

Chinese patients are apprehensive about this date. Aversion to the number 4 is also evidenced by Chinese and Japanese restaurants, which avoid this number”

Four and death have similar pronunciations in the native language. However, the pronunciation of 13 in English is not related to death. This apparent lack of “linguistic link” may explain why English population shows no peak in mortality during the 13th day of the month.

Personally, I didn’t really want to shrug off the hypothesis till there were stronger evidences to disprove it. It might sound incredible, but incidences happening a certain number of times in a distinct pattern changes intangible beliefs into science, provided of course there is a suitable logic to back it up. My Chinese friends were reluctant to speak about this issue on an auspicious day, which in itself showed their strong beliefs. They did accede that most people strongly associated the number four with death.

Now, I hadn’t heard anything like this before, and this got me thinking. I personally have some strong associations with the number 4, not that I am a believer in numerology. I was born on the 4th day. For quite a few years, my roll number has been 4 in school. My name starts with the 4th alphabet. I thought I had found true love when I was in class 4 (don’t even ask me about it ! I still know the guy !). This is the 4th city I am living in. I don’t even have any issues with the number 13. I had applied to 13 US schools a few years ago, and my family had some qualms about it. I wasn’t trying to prove a point, 13 happened accidentally, and I let it remain that way. Big deal. I don’t really have issues with numbers or alphabets as such. However, your perspectives and comments would make the discussion here all the more interesting. If you are looking for the paper and are unable to find it, please drop me an email. It's past 4 am, and I must sleep now.

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(Role)ing On The Floor Laughing

Some professors have this amazing way of teaching in class. Slideshows, video clips, whatever works. I remember my days in India when a conch-shell bespectacled prof would come and make us write notes for a full two hours till our biceps threatened to fall off. If the prof was especially a woman, she would hold the bunch of brown papers back from the days of Akbar’s rule so close to her bosom that any unsuspecting individual would suspect she was holding confidential FBI reports. Anyway, things are different here, and professors device new methods to ensure that people like me do not doze off in class. Sometime back I was in a class on asbestos and lung cancer, and the prof spent an hour’s class passing samples of asbestos in different forms so that we knew what he was talking about. And no, he did not hold the asbestos samples close to his bosom like the confidential notes in the previous case.

So I am taking this class on the health of mothers and children in developing countries, and we had already spent a few classes looking at the live videos of childbirth. While my fellow mates stared in amazement and excitement, I clenched my hands together, almost on the verge of passing out. Trust me, it might be very touching, but not really exciting to see clips of childbirth, especially when you have a history of passing out every now and then.

This being done, the prof told us that the next class would be spent enacting a skit. There would be a particular maternal health situation and the students will take on different roles to present a short play. Now this was a cool idea, since although we were not very clear about the scripts, we were told the various roles people would have. There would be big officers from the government agencies who are involved in policy making and implementation. There would be renowned doctors and skilled birth attendants. I mean, all these roles would be enacted by different students in the class. So after class, the teaching assistant came up with her list of who was gonna be what. Though it seemed like child play, suddenly I was very excited at the prospect of participating in this play. You see, barring the “scared of bloodbath” part, I have always thought that being a doctor is a cool thing to do in life. So even if not in real life, I could at least act the role of a doctor in the play.

Teaching Assistant (TA): So X, Y, and Z are gonna enact the role of policy makers from the WHO. (X, Y, and Z do a somersault in joy).

A and B will act as representatives of the World Bank (Same reaction, more somersaults ensue).

P, Q, and R will be health workers (I started to wonder when she would tell me about my role. Which by the way I was sure was going to be that of a doctor).

C and D can act as birth attendants.

G and H will be nurses.

K, L and M would be doctors (What !!! I am not a doctor? Then what am I? A sinking feeling started to dawn on me).

Anyone else remaining?

I raised my hand in anticipation. The TA smiled. I started to breathe easy.

TA: Oh yeah, we forgot you (She looked at the list in her hand).

I: So what will I be?

TA: You’ll be the patient.

I: What? What patient?? (I was already disappointed).

TA: A pregnant patient.

I: Ohhh !!!!!! (Suddenly, my world had become very dark).

TA: We are dealing with health issues due to multiple pregnancies here. Developing nations need to know the harmful health effects of producing too many children. You will be the woman on her 5th pregnancy who already has four kids.

Everything had suddenly gone irrelevant for me. Pregnant with the 5th child, of all the roles? I don’t know why, but all I was reminded of was the white rats in the labs that reproduced in litters. If each of our lives was a movie, I am sure everyone was the protagonist, the hero and the heroine in their own lives. I did not care about the “pregnant” silence and my “labored” breaths as I refused to take the bus and walked back home instead. Punning was the last thing on my mind, believe me.

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And Thus Said Barker

In the course of researching for a paper, I came across a very interesting concept. In the present day when a number of diseases ail us, it might be worth considering this theory. With the progress of biomedical sciences, we have been successfully able to combat a number of diseases to a great extent, if not totally. Not many people die of small pox, chicken pox, or cholera these days unless they live in extreme poverty and stressful situations. Yet a number of diseases that were not in extant even a 100 years back are now on the rise (diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, strokes). Most of them are directly related to our lifestyle, like a persistent period of improper diet, lack of exercise, stressful living, etc. So in theory, the prevalence of these diseases can be substantially lessened if we lead a healthy life.

So what new does the Barker Hypothesis say that we don’t already know? Eat well, sleep well, exercise daily, don’t stress out, and there you will stay healthy. But wait, the Barker Hypothesis throws a different light to the situation. Also called the Fetal Origin Hypothesis, this is what it says-

Apart from the lifestyle we lead, what we suffer from as adults could depend on what we were exposed to in-utero (in the womb). In other words when we were in the womb, if we got exposed to certain chemicals, drugs, metabolites, etc., we could be more prone to suffering from certain diseases in the later stages of life. We might not show any manifestations of it during our childhood or even in youth, but as we progress towards mid-life, we are prone to suffer from a number of diseases.

In other words, what we suffer from during old age depends a lot on what we were exposed to in our mother’s womb? That’s correct.

So what diseases are we talking about here?

Parkinson’s disease. Cardiovascular disease. Heart attacks. Male reproductive malfunction. You just name it.

Exposure to the pesticide DIELDRIN during pregnancy is predicted to cause serious health concerns to the fetus, increasing its risk of suffering from Parkinson’s disease. Though Parkinson’s disease is a disease of the brain and the neurons primarily concerning the elderly population, experimental and epidemiological finding suggests that the process of neurodegeneration begins much before. Thus developmental exposure to dieldrin causes persistent change in the dopaminergic system due to increased susceptibility to Parkinson’s disease. In other words, if your mom was exposed to pesticides when she conceived you, you in your old age will be prone to suffer from Parkinson’s disease.

Exposure to DIETHYLSTILBESTROL (DES) (a clinical agent) in pregnant women caused cervico-vaginal adenocarcinoma in their daughters. The carcinogen (DES) was taken by the mother, but the cancer appeared in the offspring and that too, only after the onset of puberty.

It is interesting to note further that women who were not themselves exposed to DES in-utero may have altered reproductive tract function if their mothers had been exposed in utero. This meant that maternal ingestion of DES during pregnancy could not only alter the reproductive capacity of the woman exposed directly with the fetus, but that the alteration may be passed on to another generation (the so-called DES granddaughter effect). So lets say your mom was exposed to pesticides and you were fine, but your daughter is at the risk of having reproductive anomalies just because your mother was exposed to pesticides and you were a silent carrier.

These effects are not just related to exposure to chemicals like DES and Dieldrin, but to biological factors (like undernourishment of the fetus leading to lower birth weight) as well. It goes like this. Fetal undernourishment in middle to late gestation leads to disproportionate fetal growth, and causes coronary heart disease later in life. This means that if your mom did not eat properly when she was pregnant with you, you are at a risk of developing coronary heart diseases when you are of middle age. Human studies have shown that men and women whose birth weights were at the lower end of the normal range, who were thin or short at birth, or who were small in relation to placental size have increased rates of coronary heart disease. Evidences and research findings show that coronary heart disease is associated with specific patterns of disproportionate fetal growth that result from fetal undernourishment in middle to late gestation. So undernourishment during pregnancy could make your child prone to having heart diseases and health related disorders later on in life.

Talking about low birth weight? Did you know that exposure to phthalates like DBP and DEHP could cause fetal low birth weight? And how might women be exposed to these compounds? Through the use of make up, nail polish, perfumes, creams, and body lotions. Although the cosmetics industry have come up with a lot of their own arguments, it still remains a fact that usage of perfumes and cosmetics with phthalates in them increases the chances of delivering low birth weight babies.

I will not go into the complicated mechanisms of how these happen, but would like to clarify certain things. All these findings include working with animal (mainly rodent) models as well as human models, and there is scope of a lot more research. Secondly, there is nothing concrete like a cause and effect relationship. Exposure to certain substances only make us more prone to suffer from certain diseases, doesn’t mean everyone in a population will start showing similar effects. We are all different, and in the complexity of this lie the beauty of biological sciences. But the take home message should be clear. We should definitely be more aware of the stuff we are exposed to, more so during our child-bearing years. For what we are exposed to could also affect the destiny of our future generations. I don’t mean be paranoid about the situation and take extreme steps to ensure you live in an axenic environment. That is not possible. But it doesn’t harm to be more conscious about our own bodies, health, and environment. No matter what, we will always be exposed to certain unwanted substances, and despite everything, our immune system will always devise new strategies to cope up. That is what evolution is all about.

For people who are interested in further readings, just google “Barker Hypothesis” and you’ll find the rest. Stay healthy, stay safe.

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Be My Guest

The host becomes a ghost when you can hardly see her. At least that is what my friend preferred to think. A friend back from my days of India, we made it to the US together. So I was delighted when a few weeks back, she called me up to inform that she was visiting me for a week. I don’t usually get many visitors, certainly not someone taking an airplane and travelling all the way to see me. Needless to say, I created a table on a word document, put the dates on the left, and made a list of all the things I had planned for us.

Now there are certain phases you have in your academic life when things don’t go the way you want them to. It doesn’t happen all the time, in fact most of the times, a grad student’s life entails nothing a lot more than the optional chore of attending a few classes, spending a few hours in the lab, and then the compulsory chore of chilling out with friends. At least that was the way things were with me. But then my advisor came into the picture, we got a few demanding projects to work on, and the rest is history. To cut a long story short, the last few weeks have seen me spending early mornings till late nights in the lab. Monday through Sunday, 7 days a week. Christmas, New Year’s, and any other holiday you can think of. Of course I am not the only one, my advisor has been at work too, strategizing new means of kicking my ass, but yeah, that has pretty much been the picture. I don’t know for how many days straight I haven’t seen the sky getting dark. I come in as early as I can, and when I get back, it is dark and raining. I see everyone going home, but no one in the lab has seen me go home in the last few weeks. And it was very nice of my advisor to drive me home last night. That too at 1:30 am in the morning (oozing with sarcasm).

Sounds incredible, huh! Seems like I have been on the verge of making some path-breaking discovery, or the spirit of Einstein has possessed me? Naah, it is this stupid deadline, and the constant urge to make sure that funding did not run out.

However, for as long as my friend was staying with me, I tried my best to be a good host. Certainly not by the standards of how my family would host someone back at home, but certainly my own way. For a record, I actually started to rebel and take the 8 pm bus home. I would be home by 9, and then we would start to cook. I made sure that I cooked at home most of the days. It’s not that I am an exceptional cook, but most places would be closed and most friends would have made other plans by the time I reached home. Now I am not the cooking type, but that one only thing I did for her in the whole day gave me such satisfaction. We would chat incessantly while she chopped the onions and I heated the oil, and man, it was such fun.

Mornings would start with me waking her up, making some coffee, and that’s it. Soon, I would be running for my classes, and she would have plans for the day. And while she got ready and I got late, I would sneak out of the house with the note neatly tagged on the fridge. This note contained the bus routes for all the places she had planned to see that day. Yeah, you heard me right, barring Sunday, when I finally decided not to report to office (my advisor did come to work and as a protest, I refused to pick up my phone), my friend has been seeing the city on her own. And she darn well did a good job out of it. She didn’t whine or complain, she rather sympathized. And know what, she saw more of the city in a week than I have seen in a year. She went to these places that I have just heard of, but never been there.

After she left, I was reflecting on how good a host I have been. Certainly she had no problems with me working and she seeing the city on her own. She didn’t even have problems making tea for me while I worked or cleaning the dishes when I ws too tired to do them. But I thought of the way I had grown up seeing guests being welcomed at home, and I am sure ma would disown me if she saw what a ghostly host I have been.

Now many people have been guests at our place. But when it was a close friend, the person would have better places to sleep than on a mattress. I don’t even have a bed at home, not that I am too poor to afford one, but I have never had the need to. So my friend slept on the mattress. I did volunteer to cook every night we did not eat out, but it was nothing grand. Dinner rather consisted of something that I can quickly concoct without getting tired, and not the elaborate dishes mom spent making all day. So there was no home cooked biriyani and chicken kebabs, there was the simple bhindi masala and potato curry and stuffed veggie omelets and my customized raita with loads of bean sprouts topped with crushed potato chips. Dinner was served in disposable plates (my friend suggested that) so that not much time is spent doing the dishes. Certainly a far cry from the ornate sets of china we were used to having in whenever people visited us. While mom would spend the day showing people around, and dad too would take an occasional leave from work, I kept working half the weekend. The only thing I did was call my friend from office every day to make sure that she was not lost in the streets of the city and what time she was hoping to come home. And then I would usually come home much after she did (I gave her a set of my home keys), make coffee and some dinner cooked in 30 minutes, and eat in disposable plates. Even the day she was leaving, I had a deadline to submit in the morning. So I arranged for a cab, gave her a hug, and that’s about it. No seeing her off at the airport, no parting tears and no farewell gifts (mom usually made this farewell caramel pudding for everyone). What more, when she was leaving, I told her “Come again”, and though my “come again” was heartfelt, my insides laughed at me sarcastically at the “come again”.

It made me realize how different our lives become in a different country. My intentions of “atithi satkaar” were still with all my good faith effort, but circumstances did not permit me to take either a day off, or to show her around and cook well for her. What more, I got late on my way to pick her up the night she arrived at 10 pm, just because I was busy finishing off the grocery that I haven’t had the time to do before. I know she was totally fine with it, and perhaps I am feeling a little more than my deserved share of guilt. But mom and dad back in India failed to understand why it was so difficult for me to take time out of my schedule and show her around. I am so glad she came, as I did not have to go back to an empty house for a week. But all that I did was more out of my need for seeking company and reinstating my sociable instincts soon to become extinct.

Anyway, she reached fine and told me that she had one of the finest trips here. She loved the city, loved the places she went to, and loved the bhindi masala I cooked. She is hoping to be back in summer. Only I hope that I am more with the what you call “Aantorikota” (whatever that means in your language) and have more time for people in my life then. Sob!

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Calendars.

I was skimming through the newspapers while waiting for the food to warm up in the office microwave when my eyes fell on a bunch of calendars with the departmental name and logo neatly imprinted. And while my food warmed, I was transformed back to my childhood days for the next couple of minutes, to be interrupted only by the beep of the microwave.

Calendars. Diaries. Every January saw our homes piled up with these two things. In fact, I am still fond of collecting diaries, and it broke my heart to leave dozens of them never written on back at home when I moved here. But calendars are a different thing altogether. It used to be great watching the old ones from the walls vanish, to be replaced by new pictures. The worship room had that single paged huge Dey’s medical calendar every Bengali home wall must have had. The holiday dates would be marked in red, with the huge cross logo right in the middle of the page. And then every neighborhood mistanna bhandar (sweet shop) used to gift the usual smaller calendars with the photo of Ma Kali. The designs, photos, and the fonts changed every year, but the subject always remained the same- either Ma Kali, Thakur Ramkrishna Paramhansa, or Baba Loknath.

But then, dad used to get a totally different kind of calendar from his workplace. Scenery. Birds and flowers and bees. Great photography. Pics of sea coasts and sunsets and the ripples on the water. The picture of a bee on a flower with every yellow and black stripe on the bee’s abdomen distinct. Then there were snow mountains and forests. Those were the kinds where at the end of the year, I took a pair of scissors and went snip snip, cutting all the pictures I liked and collecting them neatly. Not Ma Kali or Baba Loknath, but pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Florida beaches and the jungles of Africa. What more, they made excellent paper to cover books. So while I hated history in school, I made sure that the best pic of my favorite flower was used to cover the history text book. I guess that kind of made me less averse to touching my book every day.

The one I was holding in the office kitchen had every message written all over it- about conserving forests and protecting nature and aiming for a cleaner environment. Who uses calendars these days by the way? With the advent of mobile phones and Google calendars, who even needs to flip through the pages of a calendar to see what day was it the 15th of the last month?

But then, even now when I see a stack of free calendars somewhere, the heart somersaults in joy and the hand feels like picking up a copy for myself. They never really make their way to the walls, they just get lost somewhere in between the pile of books and newspapers. But somehow, someway, it brings back all the childhood excitement of flipping through the pages, to find one new picture every month. The only difference is, I no longer collect or hold on to the pictures at the end of the year. I just go get myself a new calendar.

sunshine.