The Great New Year

'Its New Year.. Yay! Lets dance and sing and drink and make merry, 'coz the last two digits on the date are gonna change for the next 365 dates, and then we shall celebrate again!'

My roomie Sriram suspects this New year business, like many other celebrations, is a mere marketing policy. You spend, I spend, everybody spends... on things ranging from food and dresses to flight tickets, phone calls, et al.

Won't things be much better if one could take a vacation as per individual desires?

The Aussies welcomed the New year by dumping tons of poison into the planet and their leader calls is 'an environment-friendly celebration'. Right! And we Indians need not feel so happy, having converted a festival of lights to one of sound, smoke and accidents.

Looking back, I guess my greatest new year eve was in high school when students from all across the country gathered in Bangalore to discuss the importance of values in our education system. I remember we entered the millenium singing songs and meditating. It was surreal... and a far cry from the madness in NY, Sydney, and the like.

Light humour

Got to hear this in the middle of a class on optics in spectroscopy:

Question: 'So, what's new?'

Answer: 'c / lambda'

Incarnating ideas Addendum

My friend Kaustubh Mote observes that the audience completely lost the message of 'Avatar' in the jungles and images of Pandora. He hints at a few parallels between the reel and real worlds that, I feel, are worth pondering over.

One of the main issues addressed by Avatar is that of destruction of nature as we see it. The ethics behind infiltrating into other species' ecological territories are explored from the different viewpoints of the biologist and the army general. The search for Unobtainium in Pandora has striking similarities to that for oil in the Gulf and Iraq. Large scale deployment of men and women, arms and ammunition; an initial appeasment policy followed by a rap on the knuckles and a bloody war to make the avatars stand in line and behave... haven't we seen glimpses of all this over that last decade or so?

Such sensitive issues seem to have disappeared in the complex, mind-blowing visual and 3-D effects. Talk of the snake biting the charmer!

Thanks Mote, this post is entirely due to you.

Science

'Appreciate science for what it is', says Dr. Venki Ramakrishnan, one of the Nobel laureates in Chemistry for the year 2009. Touring southern India for the first time after being awarded the Nobel, he muses rather amusingly on the nearly twenty-fold increase in the audience strength for his lecture after a group of Europeans decided to burden him with extra responsibilities outside his domain. He also stresses on the idea of science being a journey rather than a destination. In his words, 'You can't go into science thinking of a Nobel Prize'.

Without daring to make any comparisons whatsoever, a similar thought was echoed not too long ago by my roomie, Sriram. According to him, people in India (and that includes students of science) have a very blurry vision of what science is about. Most think more scientific research would lead to more applications, and a general alleviation of standard of living. In fact, this is but one aspect of science. A lot of science has got to do with the very pursuit of science, which can be understood only by experience. My teacher in New Delhi puts it simply, 'Science is not a spectator sport. To know it, you have to get in and get your hands dirty'.

To this day, science remains a niche enterprise, with a whopping majority of the world completely unaware of what it means.

Incarnating ideas

What you see is what you believe, or does it go the other way? The netbook on my lap is there, but only because I think it is there. Would it disappear if I refuse to believe in its existence? Or would that amount to running away from the truth? In a world experiencing a tumultous knowledge revolution, the very meaning of reality seems to be changing every single minute. So much so that virtual reality games are selling like hot cakes.

Avatar provided the latest unreal experience to me. Sitting on the same seat, yet feeling like I was transported to another planet, this was one grand celebration of visual imagery and technological excellence. Come to think of it, the plot is a rather simple one: guy meets girl, they fall in love, villain wants to ruin their world, guy becomes hero, saves his girl and a small part of her world, and they live happily ever after. You don't need a James Cameroon for this, do you? Our famed Indian film industry must be dishing out tens of releases with such storylines every Friday. What sets this movie apart is the unabashed use of imaginations, colour and special effects to create a virtual world that the onlooker loves and lives in for the couple of hours that the movie lasts for.

The 3-D effects leave their mark right from the first shot. Be it the flutter of a butterfly, the buzz of a bee, the drone of the choppers, or the jaw-dropping fights between the monsters of Pandora and the protagonist, Avatar is a treat to the graphics junkie, the movie buff and the curious biologist - and am pretty sure Mr. Cameroon must be singing his way to the bank already.

From the trees of Pandora to the streets of Bombay, movies have come to be one of the strongest means of affecting opinions and actions across the globe. In my brief stay outside India till date, there have been numerous occasions when I have been quizzed on the authenticity of Slumdog Millionare. That one movie seems to have brought India closer to the world than anything else I can think of.

At the end of the day, a movie remains the manifestation of but one person's vision (or lack of it!). It is the power of cinema that magnifies this vision and brings it into the minds of millions across the planet, influencing ideas and ideals.

Snowy day - Dec. 9 '09

It has been a day of quite a few firsts here in Madison.

The first snow storm of winter'09.

The first time in twenty years that the University has closed down due to the storm. (Madison is known to work relentlessly come what may, and it is common to see people reporting to work in spite of minor illnesses like fever, flu, etc)

My first step into a foot and a half of snow, my first snowball fight!

The first online class I attended. This was for a homework discussion that happened on an e-forum this morning. Though incoherent on a few occasions it was interesting and we managed to gloss over our work alright.

Do check out the photos to get an idea of what Madison and I look like today!

D. C.

A long weekend close to Thanksgiving celebrations meant I could fly out of Madison to Washington D C to meet my sister Vedha, Arun and little Rishi (my nephew). Stopping over at Ashish's place for a night was also good fun - catching up about school days and how he used to spread all kinds of rumours about me, speaking to school friends and eating awesome food.

The sub urban city of Leesburg, where Vedha stays, is just off D. C., inside the state of Virginia. It gives a small town feeling, with large open spaces, sloping roads and beautiful houses, like her's. After a sumptuous Thanksgiving lunch, I had a short nap, only to wake up to Rishi's puzzled looks about why I was the only guest refusing to leave his home. It took some convincing for him to accept me and my presence over the next three days :)

The Air and Space Museum, a part of the Smithsonians, which we visited the next day, was huge and really well managed. I particularly liked the section on the Japanese and German bombers. The facilities of guided tours, and random oral demonstrations, gave meaning to our time there. Otherwise, a visit to a museum gets reduced to a mere walk in the park.

The next morning, a short ride on the Metro took me to the heart of D C. Bright, sunny and really windy, it was a perfect day for walking around the place. Add to that my friends Pallavi, Abhilash, Abir and Rachna, who came over from their universities for that day, it sure was gonna be fun. Our first stop was the Holocaust museum. Three expansive floors dissected every detail of events like Hitler's rise to power, the Nazi atrocities, and the victory of the Allied powers. As is customary, every visitor is given an identity card that tells the real story of a person who lived during the Holocaust . I was Herman Klein, a Jew from Czechoslovakia who was deported to Auschwitz at the age of 16 but escaped certain death when American troops liberated a concentration camp in Dachau, Germany.

Walking through wagons used by the Nazis to hound off Jews to concentration camps, listening to audio recordings and watching videos of Jews being persecuted... all this was spine chilling. We came out of the Museum after a good three hours - some shaken, some depressed... everyone quiet. It was a gripping experience, just like I had imagined.

Our next stop was the scene of the gatecrashed dinner (so much so about security, does such a thing even exist today?)- the White House. The house was being prepared for World AIDS day, while the area right in front of the House was buzzing with anti-war, anti-racism demonstrations, tourists, cameras and the press. To get a decent look into the monuments around DC, you better put on your walking shoes. Parking is expensive and hard to find, and the monuments seem close but are actually quite a walk away from each other.

The Washington Monument, built in memory of the country's first President, George Washington, towers over every other structure in the vicinity. It also gives a scenic view of the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol Building and the White House. Our final stop was the Museum of American History, where we managed to hover over the 'Science in America' section in an hour. Walking through the beginning of chemistry research in the United States of America (at Johns Hopkins) all the way through the Manhattan Project up to the current thrust on DNA sequencing, this section did a neat job of presenting science to the layman. I also came across a few witty quotes (see attached images). Each Museum is a world in its own and one can spend a whole month by just visiting the Smithsonians.

A nice dinner at American Flatbread, with pizzas baked in a brick-oven, and using organic ingredients, wrapped the DC visit. I flew back to Chicago next morning and got back to a cold, rainy Madison by evening.

The past week, like most other weeks, has zipped past. I am already staring at a couple of exams and the end of this first semester in graduate school. Phew.... time does fly!