Long lost memories

Long lost memories of a bygone day
Don't you come haunting me, don't you come this way
Long lost memories of an erstwhile night
Don't you come haunting me when befalls the twilight

Long lost memories of many hours spent
Don't you come haunting me, coz' then I may repent
Long lost memories of those moments when we were alone
Don't you come haunting me, when I am on my own

Long lost memories of those silent exchanges
Don't you come haunting me, reminding me the hold of those quiet gazes
Long lost memories of those special words once said
Don't you come haunting me, don't make me wish they'd remained unsaid

Long lost memories of the dreams envisioned
Don't you come haunting me, and professing they were simply illusions
Long lost memories of a joyous heart
Don't you coming haunting me, now that its torn apart

Long lost memories of when I could make a claim
Don't you come haunting me, forever my soul to maim
Long lost memories of the one who deserted
Don't you come haunting me, you too leave me just as he departed

Drug captives

On Sunday 280 youngsters at a rave party organized at Sinhagad were arrested by the Pune police for when caught taking drugs. The drugs seized (as reported in TOI, 5th March) from the spot were phenylfine hydrochloride, marijuana and charas. Those arrested include students, IT professionals and air hostesses. Some of them claim that they had gone to the party because of their love for trance music which was to be played there. These are also the people who are pleading innocence on the pretext that they didn't know who was organizing the party. Why should they have gone there then?

It is shocking to find parents not believing their children having done anything wrong inspite of all the evidence proving otherwise. TOI states that friends and family were found sending to those held inside the court. The seriousness of the incident hasn't even dawned on some of the captives who started singing, clapping and dancing once the judge left. What is still worse is seeing the young populace of Pune defending the offenders. On NDTV the reporters went around asking people what they thought of the incident. One boy who looked like he was still in college said that everyone does drugs at this age and so it is alright!! Then while a girl acknowledged that such parties are held in Pune, another one openly confessed to have consumed drugs!!

Everyday I get this impression that people are no longer bothered by the repercussions of their actions. When driving a car some are always in a hurry to overtake. When crossing the road they do exactly the opposite and literally walk in slow motion without looking to their left or right. Instead of wearing a helmet for protection they'd rather protest against it. Instead of enjoying holi the way it should with colours they prefer to go and get drunk and drugged.

This incident reminded me of a scene from the film Page 3 where a group of cops and journalists bust a similar party amidst a huge cry of complaints from kids who intoxicated are merrily revelling. It was such a different world from what I see every day. The Pune arrests have only confirmed its existence.

In a country where so many die of hunger it is sad to find those blessed with wealth wasting money on something which is only going to harm them. I pray that a few of these guys and girls if not all have a conscience pricking them to learn from this experience... to help keep drugs away from them forever.

I hate sad endings

Looks like Garfield too hates sad endings like me... but of a different kind. :))))

Angst against NCL

Yesterday I saw a skit which was performed during a cultural programme held at NCL. The skit was titled Munnabhai Chale NCL. On the lines of the Sanjay Dutt film Lage Raho Munnabhai, our Munnabhai decides to learn about the goings on at NCL in order to impress his sweetheart RJ Jhanvi. In doing so he along with Circuit unearths all that is wrong in NCL: the lax security at the gate of the scientific institution, the smelly bathrooms with water leaking like a shower, the unhappiness of a scientist at finding his junior winning the coveted Bhatnagar Award, the easy going attitude of the Safety Committee who are satisfied as long the experiments are being carried out while wearing lab coats and goggles, the frustation of a student on not being able to get his PhD degree even after putting many years of hard work, the disgruntled researcher at not being able to acquire the much needed chemicals for his work or getting them but not in enough quantities and finally his annoyance at the variety of applications forms to be filled and him being sent back and forth between the stores department and purchase section.

During my nearly three year experience at NCL I have found reasons different from the ones mentioned in the play for venting fire. The terrible food at the canteen has always been a cause of complaint. Then the poor accomodation facilities that are provided to the students. Even here its the PhD students who somehow manage to get a room in the hostel while the Project Assistants (PAs) are left to fend for themselves. They have to stay as Paying Guests (PGs) which is very expensive and considering the meagre salaries that we get its very hard to manage. For some life is still harder because they also have to take care of their families back home.

When a national level scientific institute is in such an appalling state what must be the condition of the not so well known organizations? How do you make students stay in India? Why should they not choose to go abroad? Almost all of my friends who are employed in India but not pursuing science earn within a month what we would be able to save in a year if we didn't spend one rupee of our salaries. And we at NCL work as hard as any of them.

Its very easy for scientists with their good pay packets to say that doing research is its own reward. Let them stay in a two room flat shared by six others for which a deposit of 40,000 rupees has to be paid even before you've started getting your first pay check of 8000 (which used to be 5000 for PAs until a year ago and even less before that). For some students even getting that amount is a long time away when there is no position available in the group they join and so for many months and on occasions even for a year have to go without any income as they are simply Guest Workers doing research out of their own will. Let the scientists also work 24x7 on industrial projects that don't even allow you to publish papers and which you can't include in your PhD thesis. Let them work in an uninviting lab with broken chairs and tables which can't be replaced with new ones because of the Director's orders not making it possible to do so until renovation begins. Let them eat the drab lunch at the canteen everyday. Let them after a day's hard work return to a room where you have to sleep on the floor and truly live out of a suitcase. Not only the PGs but those staying in the New Hostel face the last problem because there are no cupboards in any of the rooms!!

And lets see after facing all of this and much more how happy they feel every Monday morning about entering the gates of NCL.

What makes any field attractive is the satisfaction and money that it fetches. And currently doing science in India is not providing either of that.

Its not enough complaining to oneself. We students have to raise our voices if we want our grievances to be heard and addressed. A student body such as a Research Scholars' Forum has to be formed and every person doing research be he/she a PA, JRF, SRF, RA or a Guest Worker should be its member. Monthly or bi-monthly meetings can be held say in the auditorium where students can speak up or if the need be annonimity may even be maintained. Every meeting must be attended by the Director or Deputy Director, someone high up in the Administration and the Student Academic Committee. The actions taken in answer to the questions raised should be followed up in the successive meetings. Improvements in conditions at NCL and outside must be assessed on a regular basis.

I am sure lot more can be done. If any of my fellow NCL researchers are reading this and are in agreement with my views then we could jointly do something in this regard.

Someone has to take a stand.

Why look at others everytime? Why not the one starting it all be us?

What chemists want to know?

Here are some excerpts taken from an article that appeared in the journal Nature (volume 442, pages 500-502, 3 August 2006). The article talks about what questions are yet to be answered by chemists.

• Physicists do not shy away from promoting the big questions that drive their field — how the Universe began, say, or what governs the behaviour of space, time and matter over scales from the atomic to the cosmic. Biologists, too, are happy to point to Erwin Schrödinger's question 'What is life?', which they are attempting to answer by unravelling DNA and mapping out the structures and interactions of proteins. But what of the third basic science in the curriculum? To judge from the scant attention chemistry gets in the public media, you could be forgiven for thinking that it is a discipline whose time has passed, its grand puzzles all now answered. Does chemistry have any big questions left?

• The strongly synthetic character of chemistry sets it apart from the 'discovery' sciences such as physics, biology, astronomy and the Earth sciences. "Chemistry creates its object," as the French chemist Marcelin Berthelot wrote in 1860. Many chemists still see this creativity as one of the field's strengths. "It makes chemistry able to set goals of a type most other sciences cannot hope to attain," says Ron Breslow, an organic chemist at Columbia University in New York and a past president of the ACS.
  

• The downside of this focus on making stuff is that chemists can be portrayed as inveterate tinkerers — tweaking the molecular world to satisfy their curiosity, sometimes for fun and sometimes for profit. And it makes it especially hard to see where industrial chemistry ends and academic chemistry begins, because important practical challenges provide the motivation for much academic creativity.

• No one would deny the importance of applied and industrial chemistry. But if chemistry's questions aren't so much about what we can know but about what we can do, does that make it a form of engineering — a quest for particular solutions to particular problems?

• According to inorganic chemist John Meurig Thomas of the Royal Institution in London, it is in the nature of chemistry to be a science of particulars. One can identify general principles of chemical bonding, for example, but what often matters is how these are enacted and modified in specific molecules.

• "I take the view that most of what is interesting in science is now chemistry," Whitesides says. He argues that even some of the key questions in a field as apparently remote from chemistry as astronomy, such as 'How many Earth-like planets are there?' or 'What is on Saturn's moon Titan?' are fundamentally molecular ones.

• Only chemists know how truly difficult it is to engineer atoms and molecules — something that many other scientific disciplines rely on. If room-temperature superconductors or synthetic bacteria are ever created, it will not be physicists and biologists who make them. And if chemistry is chopped up and parcelled off to other disciplines, there will be no training ground for those who achieve such mastery over matter.

  It would be wrong, moreover, to suggest that the heart of chemistry — rational synthesis — lacks intellectual appeal. Some argue that, rather than trying to understand the world, chemists are attempting to understand all possible worlds. "Chemistry has a useful aspect, but that is not the basic science," says Breslow. "The basic science is clear once we realize that the limited examples of molecules and reactions that nature has supplied are a microdrop in an enormous bucket compared with the wonderful chemical world still to be created and examined."

• "There is no Holy Grail in chemistry," Hoffmann admits happily. "Occasionally some are held up for public view," he says, but they are just "gimmicky candidates for the chalice". He adds that in a fundamentally creative field, the satisfaction comes from the chase, not the catch. "My natural philosophical disposition is not to work on big questions," says Hoffmann. "I like working on many detailed small problems in this wonderful chemical garden, while keeping my eyes open for the connections."

The six big questions of the field that some of the leading experts came up with were:

How do we design molecules with specific functions and dynamics?

What is the chemical basis of the cell?

How do we make materials needed for the future, in energy, aerospace and medicine?

What is the chemical basis of thought and memory?

How did life on earth begin, and where and how it might begin on other worlds?

How can we explore all the possible permutations of all the elements?