Overwhelmed...

is the word to describe my state of mind now. Today is my last night here at NBRC. People can be so kind to you. The moments when they go that extra mile to help you out, the moment they smile an extra inch to show their genuine happiness towards you, well, i have indeed been lucky. Thank you God! And this comes at a time, when i was telling myself 'unexpect the expected' coz friends i expected to do some things out of some sheer basic courtesy never did it and I felt badly disappointed at that. Life is an irony! Frankly speaking i never thought I would have such a weird feeling when I leave this place. It was not like i can't live without it, initially, like the feeling i had got in ICPO. Initially, the only thing that came to my mind was the isolation. But I could get over it very easily once I ventured out. The whole thing of going out on weekends became a compulsion and I am indeed a proud soul to say that I have not missed even one day of outing on the weekends. All the eight weekends i went out, had the best of fun, and geared myself up for a good week of work ahead like a good girl :)


On the professional front, when i look back, things didnt look so bright in the beginning. The day i reported to work happened to be my mentor's farewell party! Life is an irony! How true!! "Unexpect the expected!! " With all the formalities around of getting the signature from your guide, getting used to the lab routine, i was indeed lost. I had some good friends in the hostel and they guided me throughout the initiation process. Then the lab was a total surprise to me. No wet work at all. My work place was similar to a software company. I didn't touch a pipette during my entire stay here. It was all mental work, and trust me, it was more taxing and definitely gave me a more rewarding experience...


My mentor was really kind, he introduced me to the people in the lab, i would probably say the best lot at NBRC in every sense. These two months have been a time of realisation, a time for myself, to see and to observe, then to probably wish how i wanna be, sometimes how i don't wanna be. Both on the work front and the other more important front called life....

My whole opinion about a career in research has changed for the better, I should say for the second time after my last year's stint at ICPO. It has shown me that research is not just about eccentric scientists sacrificing their sleep, sacrificing their social life, accept only science and get drawn into it so much that it swallows all other passions of yours..... NO! Research is exciting, it keeps you on your foot always,and true, its demanding. But after all, scientists do have a life and that can be a lot of fun. They are indeed social, becoming a researcher doesn't mean becoming a loner.... If you sacrifice sleep, its coz you are driven to a sleepless state by the excitement of work and not just because of stupid deadlines.

And I shall probably take this opportunity to thank the people especially the ones in my lab who have inspired me. I know for a fact that they are not going to read this. None of them even know i blog. So no buttering intended. First, Atul and Pooja.They were the ones who were with me throughout, bore the brunt of my bugging, more so coz i was totally ignorant about neuroscience. They were the ones who helped me through the most difficult part of my project. They were the ones who even told me that i can indeed design an experiment of my own and test it. Something unheard for a summer trainee working for two months. Thank you and wish you nothing but the very best. And it would be a mistake if i dont mention their photography passion. You both simply rock!!!!!!!!

Then Arjun and Sharika. Oh my god! I am sure I am gonna run out of words. The couple we (all the summer trainees) reaaaaaaaaaaly admire, made for each other kinds. well to be frank you have influenced atleast a couple of people among the summer trainees to marry a person in the same field. Okie, now for the more important part, what keeps us wondering is how two people of soooooo much (for want of a good adjective, english has very little adjectives, rather, my vocab is bad!) intelligence can just gel together. People will probably start flying if they had so much of brains. Marie and Pierre Curie are the only couple to hav got a Nobel and here is another potential couple! The task i did for arjun was the most challenging one and really made me think really hard. Happy that it was successful. Sharika, she showed me the easiest and the funnest way to earn in the planet.. And then, Neha, the brainy cute one... The one who taught me the most exciting monkey work. Buddism rocks! lol... Nice time!

Well, it would be wrong if i painted a totally rosy picture. Research can be really frustrating and depressing, in enormous proportions. I could have ended up doing nothing but crying out of frustration every single night. I could waft through all those, just because of one factor - my gang of friends at hostel II. I easily had the best time of my life. Not to mention, one of my biggest achievements so far - waking up until dawn, watching shane west movies. The endlesss talks at the lawn, the walk the talk sessions with gagan, the ultimate goal of combing subhankar's hair, the yummmmmmy midnight snacking (omg I put on a lot of weight that way), time with my stupid roomie ankita. The inspiringly studious purabi, the tamil-gossiping duo me and vaishnavi, the pretty cutiepie of a friend neharika and not to forget, what-a-revelation vishala. Miss you too much guys, the only benefactor from our separation being vodafone! I still wish i had spent some more time with gaurav, divayanshu, ali, anand, sheetal and anupama. But that's how its meant to be. I shall for sure publish in Nature one day, the glycogen cycle that me and ali formulated on a lazy saturday afternoon :)

It has indeed been a great experience after all. My guide, the super cool one, probably the coolest i have ever seen. He always looks at the broader perspective and I believe that is the only way to move forward in research. I realised that the respect you tend to command out of sheer knowledge and intelligence is far better and greater than the ones that any post would confer on u. He has been a true inspiration in every sense....

All said and done, I have not still made up my mind on research. Its a commitment for a lifetime, not like switching between political parties. I don't still know if i have it in me to do it. Badly in need of help on that front. Nevertheless, the balance has tilted a lot in favor of research and added to the existing confusion in choice. Well, did someone say, the more the merrier ?

P.S: I am publishing the draft almost ten days after i wrote it. Also, I would like to reiterate : this post is not to thank all those who helped me or to mention all those who inspired me. I know for sure, these wouldn't be read by the people i have thanked. Obviously, they would benefit better by devoting this time to reading a paper in sciene or nature. All I wanted to do was to capture the moment for future, freeze the feelings in time. There are people who influenced me to a great extent and dont find a mention in this post. And there have been moments of fun, so many that i can't probably sit and type down in one post. And this post, is just the tip of the iceberg!

BIOTECHCELLENCE FEVER!!!

Quite literally so. It turned out that I had a bad fever during btx (for people who dunno, btx is the shortened version of biotechcellence, a national level technical symposium on biotechnology with international participation, conduced by the 6th semester students of Centre for Biotechnology, Anna university) that played a bit of spoilsport. Coming to the event, here are some of the afterthoughts that flash in my memory when I think of btx-09..

To start with, the highlight of btx this year..I remember reading these lines somewhere:

“There is a pleasure in the pathless woods..
There is rapture on the lonely shore...
I love not man the less; but Nature more...”

Yes, Biotechcellence-09 went green! 10.5 lakhs, hundreds of colleges, 300 papers, a huge response just in proportion with the huge expectations, an explosion of innovative ideas… by any yardstick, it was indeed one of the best of department symposiums ever. Given the amount of planning and preparatory work that was involved, all of us in the class had been very very eagerly and anxiously waiting for Feb 19-22nd.

The preparation for btx would probably take up a longer post for me to blog about. As far as I was concerned, I was shuttling between committees, though officially I was in scientific affairs. What I did was in fact a very negligibly small portion of the work, compared to a lot of other people, who put their mind body and soul into it. I did a bit of sci affairs work (full credit to suman, though), a very little bit of sponsorship, a bit of competitions. The best was for the online quiz, for which apoorva and me prepared most of the questions. It was probably the most interesting of all the works I did for btx. I shall post the questions in this blog soon. The response was good too and that was the happiest part. Many contestants were actually kind enough to congratulate us on the work. Nothing like it!

On Wednesday, the 18th, we had a hands-on workshop for CBT iians conducted by eppendorf. The workshop was good to say the least. We did real time PCR and it was a good learning experience, as we really ‘did’ it, ‘hands-on’ unlike many other workshops. Then there was some last minute work as usual and the day ended…

The next morning was the inauguration. I was just hoping biotechnology and pharmacology actually work - in the sense that my antibiotic worked along with paracetamol to bring my fever down. It perfectly did! Not for nothing is medical biotech being touted as the next big thing! I woke up on the right side of the bed, and yeah, I remember the day for the saree more than anything else. There I was, quite guessably, in a blue saree. Saree in my view, is probably one of the most feminine and mystifyingly charming clothing the world has ever seen. Yes, it is indeed very uncomfortable and doesn’t let u to be the least tomboyish you wanna be, but it is indeed a wonder clothing. Coming back to the symposium, the chief guest was Mr. George, chief advisor to the Department of Biotechnology. The VC was present and so were the other dignitaries along with the Exnora chairman, Mr. Nirmal. We at Btx had really worked hard on the eco friendly aspect and it did pay rich dividends in the end. There were some ambitious plans being made by the policy makers – here the VC and Mr. Nirmal - about making Anna University a zero waste institution and all that. Would be great if biotechcellence provided the beginning for such good ventures. At least, it would be remembered beyond the 4 days, if all of these plans work. And then there was the ‘tribute to 14 years of btx’ that was released on the occasion
So, biotechcellence-09 started with a bang, a prelude of what was in store for the next few days. Probably the most tiring work I indulged in that day was covering up the bamboo dustbins with eco friendly sheets for easy clearance of waste. Quite funny. The food was good too, and I still feel sorry for having indulged in that ice cream that day coz it added to my sickness and I couldn’t attend the next day’s events.

The next day.. Practically the first day of btx.. And this annoying irritating fever, cold stopped my enthusiasm. The antibiotic didn’t do any good and rhinovirus got the better of my immune system. I decided to skip the day’s events and be fit for the next two days, which according to me were more important given the fact that the video conferences and the culturals were scheduled on those days. I did miss being there, of course. It was really frustrating to sit at home and do some work of putting up banners at the venue over phone. As usual, it was my friends who came to my rescue. From what I heard, though everything was really worth attending, there were two things I missed the most. The first was Dr. Yamuna Krishna’s lecture. Her research is simply mind blowing from what I had searched on the internet. Incidentally, she happened to be the first person who accepted our offer for a guest lecture at the event, that too in a very kind manner. When I saw the pics and from what I heard, I missed watching her in person, too. Apparently she was the coolest (actually the hottest, dressed up wonderfully in formal wear) among the guest lecture circuit. Somehow, women wielding power never fail to impress and inspire me, however small their reign and expanse of power might be. And here was a woman, standing tall with her achievements speaking for themselves, still, cheerful and down-to-earth like anyone else. Sure, women on top are always hot, in every sense of the word!

The second thing I missed was the project design event. There is a reason behind that. It was apoorva and me who framed the IDP problem for it, with the help of Dr. Ramalingam, our professor. It really felt great that so many people could take it so seriously, work on it day and night and come up with mind-blowing solutions to it. Really honoured and humbled.
On the 2nd day, there was the videoconference with Mr.Narasimhan Sudharsan, from Yale University who talked about riboswitches, followed by an array of interesting events.
The highlight of the day was the quiz, conducted b V.V.Ramanan of ‘the Hindu’ fame. Though the audience wasn’t as great in the finals as much as in the prelims, the quality of questions made up for it all.
Then it was time for the most awaited event of all, the Culturals. So we went to ‘Green Park’. Had a blast to say the least. Our performance of ‘desi girl’ turned out to be a disaster. It was quite good during the practice sessions, but bad luck!! The worst part was that, I was on an overdose of antibiotics just to sound good, without signs of the bad throat infection, but alas, my mic didn’t work and nobody heard me. We couldn’t hear the karaoke track on stage and ended up making a mess of the song. Thankfully, nothing sounded too obviously wrong as the mood was really upbeat and nobody really bothered about the quality of singing. It was indeed a great feeling when the ‘making of btx’ was screened. BP easily deserved an equivalent of an oscar for that athmika scene alone and hari as the cinematographer and eco-friendly ghajini was simply awesome. Though all the performances were indeed good, it was the song medley and the dance medley that all of us were waiting for, and obviously the ones that hogged the limelight. One thing worth mentioning was the stage decoration and that disco lights. It was superb.. party environs plus a dash of biotech.. just perfect!!
And yeah, the farewell for seniors was good too, with the candle lights and all. Must have been very nostalgic to them. Somehow I just hate to even think of seeing myself at the receiving end just a year from now. Okay let’s reserve that for another post. Back to the scene of action.
After the dinner, (which my fever didn’t let me enjoy to the fullest), I had a good ice-cream with strawberry sauce, (my first ice-cream in btx09), immediately followed by paracetamol and roxid-150! I didn’t want to miss the final day too. The day finally drew to a close. Time really flies when you are happy and when you don’t want it to.

I pushed myself out of bed literally the next day and I had forgotten my fever. I rushed just in time for Mr. Palani’s video conf. That was probably the best lecture of the whole of btx. He was the head of labeling dept of Invitrogen, USA. I shall find time to post more on the content of the lectures some time later. The basic technology was called ‘Click-it’. Awesome applications! It was followed by a host of events. Short films event was good. Met a couple of friends from other colleges, whom I had met in other symposiums. After the spin-a-yarn event, (Japesh had been going around with a heavy blazer all through the hot day just for the sake of that event! Poor guy! ) it was time for the valedictory function. The speech by Mr. Sundar was one of the best. Very interesting concepts and innovative ideas indeed! I actually wasn’t very much into it when I was distributing all those pamphlets with soluble films made of bio-based and bio-degradable materials. I thought of it as just another sponsor-tantrum. But Mr. Sunder was kind of the perfect marketing guy, who was quite convincing about almost everything that he talked about.

All good things come to an end, and so did Biotechcellence-09. (Completely out of context, this is probably why mega-serials are bad-coz they never end). All of us were quite happy with the way everything turned out. The faculty said it was ‘the’ best and that we left nothing more for our juniors to innovate. Probably they were generous enough, but still, nobody can deny the fact that, every single soul in 6th sem had worked for it in his/her own way, in whatever small or big magnitude possible. And that in totality contributed to the success of the event. Indeed, success is sweeter when rejoiced as a team!
To me, what made it so special were the little things - they made it all the more interesting- mud pots instead of plastic mineral water cans, the soft board with comments, the eco-friendly dustbins, Re.1 for exchange of plastic to paper bags, the disco lights during the culturals, the quirky volunteer cards, the bamboo sapling and pot painting mementos to the guests…. I can go on and on… and of course, some of the most interesting of ideas that couldn’t be implemented for some reason or the other - The energy producing eco-friendly machine, the eco-friendly mascot (arvind was the unanimous choice, obviously), using shankar-mahadevan’s NDTV green anthem as a theme (the tune composed by pritika actually suited the mood better, so we went with it), to quote a few… I wish the fun had lasted longer… In all, 4 happy and eventful days etched evergreen in memory..
Curtains fall!!!