I live underwater. I move silently. I am deadly - Last but one

While my fear of water continued unabated, my grandpa bought me an aquarium. And a pair of goldfish. Overzealous (and kind), I overfed the fish and they ended up floating within two days. I spent the next few days ruing this acute loss, with tears, fervent prayers (to forgive my sin) and non-stop rants. Many dead fish later, a generous fish merchant suggested I not feed the fish much and instead try planktons. Desperate to keep fish alive for more than a week, I tried it and surprisingly, it worked! My fish crossed the 3 month mark sending me into paroxysms of joy. A couple of years later, I was the local expert in marine biology (and ecology), dishing out advice to newbies about the best plants to put in the aquarium, the right fish for hot Indian conditions, the cheapest worms to keep 'em healthy, techniques to catch colorful fish in local ponds, suitable breeding environments, child-care and so on. The audience was spellbound and there was a regular stream of visitors to my household to "take care" of my fish.

That is, until Mohan and his brother Balaji bought a fish tank equipped with an air pump. The tube was connected to a plastic tortoise placed under water. The animal lifted its head and opened its mouth to pout little bubbles that merrily danced their way to the surface. Both terrestrial and aquatic creatures in my neighborhood watched this splendor in rapt fascination. And I lost my audience.

While my love for fish resulted in long sojourns to look for fish in the heat of the summer, carefully preserved 10 paisas for buying more and friendships forged on deep rooted love (for fish, of course!), I still hated the water. And submarines.

That is, until...

... to be continued...

I live underwater. I move silently. I am deadly - The Prelude

I dont know to swim. Not that I lack the genes for it - both my father and his are excellent swimmers. Little sis and I would piggyback behind my dad and he would swim across the swift currents created by the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati in Allahabad. And my grandfather used to float in lakes near his house in Mayavaram for hours - sending my father (when he was little) into panic.

It was not for a lack of tutors either - my good friends and dad have thrown me into nearby wells numerous times (I thus made many trips to the gates of heaven thereby making me 'well' travelled I suppose), have taken me to overflowing lakes during the peak of monsoon to catch 'gwara' fish and have taught me at all the swimming pools in Madras. To no avail. I sometimes think they did all this for their own amusement. When I reach ashore, I always catch them laughing and there is always a comedian who will animatedly repeat my swimming actions to further laughter. I labored but refused to learn. Finally, I enrolled in a swimming class at urbana. No progress. They all think I am inept. I differ.

I cannot learn to swim...

1. ... in wells infested with snakes.

2. ...while thrown inside water with both hands held (once it was both legs. in either case, the parties involved later explained it was for my safety. but why laugh while saying that?)

3. ...when water gushes out of the lake so furiously that nearby houses were avacuated (AND the lake was rumoured to be home to alligators)

4. ...when I feel shy in swimming pools and there are desi girls with swimsuits around (I have changed since!)

5. ...when the pretty american blonde instructor holds me by the stomach and asks me to swim (I have not gotten out of that one yet!)

After years of aquaphobia (no, not hydrophobia) , a strange thing happened... Water caught my fascination... Diving became a passion... It is perhaps a manifestation of the stockholm syndrome - we fall in love with our conqueror... And...

... to be continued

Swaha Swaraj - The search and its aftermath

Sometimes, the value of things we have is lost when it exists. It goes, we look elsewhere and keep looking forever, never to find what we lost. One of those forlorn days, it strikes us hard. And then, we blog.

No, I am not talking about my long lost love, my stolen bicycles or my youth. I am talking about freedom -- the pleasure granted by one human to another to work independently without being asked questions incessantly, the privilege of not having to worry about any malicious intent to screw one over the other. And it is this freedom, that I seem to have lost. Worse still, the loss is a forced one.

My advisor left a few months ago. The half-decade I worked with him, I felt like King (it was more like Lalloo since I had unlimited, unquestioned access to the treasury...) -- I could walk into the lab anytime I wanted, spend as much $$ as I wanted and work on whatever problem interested me at that point of time (which happened to be girls occasionally but I never told you I discussed everything with my boss). All good things have to come to an end (I dont believe it). And so, one fine morning, he called me to his room and said he was going to leave (and thus surprised me and I stared at him for a full minute).

Since he left, I have been tormented by the new boss. The last straw was when I woke up tomorning and exchanged 10 emails and wasted precious minutes of my exquisitely wonderful morning (and the lives of 2 others who were cced on) wondering/discussing/answering questions as to why a repair quote was $100 more than what was (wrongly) envisioned by the boss.

Not that I am averse to writing emails -- infact, I love to exchange emails. But its the content that really pisses me off -- perhaps, he could have added a garb of humor (which he is entirely capable of), a touch of grace (unlikely) or even a sentence to laud the world in general for filling our life with unlikely problems (like this) so that we dont have to think about more important issues. Alas! and now, I sit in front of my monitor and wonder, "what if?"...

Then...

Google speaks:

"Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom" - Albert Einstein.

I take this to heart. Now, I have two reasons to graduate.

*RIP*

I's from afar...

After a long day at work, I was munching pineapple topped pizzas at the local pizza hut. Benevolent (and empty) as they usually are at 10 in the night, I could choose my own channel on the large television. I flipped through entertainment channels where anchors with excited, shocked and fake look expressed wonder at the revealing clothes, susprise at secret liaisons and dismay at non-public personas; past sports channels that made a habit of selling games where there was a lot of walking on a grassy field with trees and little shot-playing, where most of the players just stand and watch while the hitter gets ready to tackle a ball that is thrown as fast as possible, where a bunch of crazy fellows try to mow down another equally crazy bunch in their quest for ball possession (actually, I ought to confess that I like American football).

Increasingly disturbed by the lack of a suitable channel to hold my interest over dinner, I finally stumbled upon history channel that showed something interesting about the civil war... no, wait... the next in line is discovery. And DC was showing some spectacular animations of life on other planets as scientists imagined them.

Most of it was quite unimaginative -- a beetle that makes cat sounds and can swim underwater, a video-game like monster whose nostrils are extended and let out its breath backwards (cross between an elephant's and an ant-eater's nose pointed rearward), a mini koala with an ugly face and claws in its hands to climb trees rapidly, a group of animals which move quickly but keep fighting with each other and so on.

One particular creature was brilliant though. The planet in question is a barren landscape with very little water. There was some moisture on the ground but it was not replenished regularly. Hence, trees found it hard to survive until they struck a symbiotic relationship with an animal! The trees grew on the back of the animal -- which buried itself in sand. The animal was HUGE -- so the trees can comfortably grow on its back. The animal absorbs the moisture and donates it to the tree. The tree makes food and sends it back to the animal. Once the moisture ran out, the animal just got up, moved to a better location and buried itself.

These organisms were designed to replicate all that we see on earth. The basic components of life -- the sense of touch, smell, sound generation, vision and hearing were mixed and matched with the ability to maintain symbiotic relationships with other organisms to create these supposedly new extra-terrestrial species. Most of it lacked novelty, they were unimaginative and failed to challenge the minds of the viewers.

There are other organisms, even here on earth, which use sonar (bats) to navigate and ultra-low frequencies (whales) to communicate. Before we figured out sound waves, we would not have imagined anything like that. So who knows, there are organisms which use bio-generated radio waves for survival? How will they look like? Are there other senses we are unaware of (because we cannot detect them?) -- these are questions I would have liked tackled. To answer them is a large undertaking but hey, they could have atleast tried.

Now what of organisms which have figured out other senses or can do things which are utterly unexpected? I dont know what they could be. I could only come up with organisms which can transform themselves from a mass of matter to a long thin rope, quickly, to help them slip past cracks while predators approach; or of organisms which have cleverly learnt to convert sand into glass and stick them on their bodies to reflect the surroundings thus camouflaging themselves; or of organisms which can rapidly reduce their body temperatures while predators approach so that they freeze immediately and become unfit for consumption. But as Darwin predicted for the case of the Malagasy orchid, if this organism exists, there must be a predator with the patience of a rock to wait until our fast-freezer thaws back to normalcy!

"I" am an organism that inhabits this planet. Are there others elsewhere in the universe? I am certain there are organisms far away pondering about the very same question, searching for us, waving at us and wondering what we look like; Maybe, their world is dark, and they have not realized the beauty of it all; maybe, they are explorerers like us fantasizing about a ship that can travel faster than light through black holes and across universes hoping to come across one like them, longing for that one lonely embrace from beyond the galaxies. Whilst in these moods, I feel the universe to be a lonely place without too many friends. Isn't it?

This and that...

"Why do we 'retire' to sleep after we are tired?" -- Ironic

"Sometimes I think growing up is a process of stacking up your wardrobe - we just add more garbs to our personality" -- Profound

"What are you thinking?"
"Nothink." -- Wordplay

"RSS motto: Ling - feelings without the fee" -- Stupid

Pun of the day

P was interviewing at Sify. She describes the interview to B when...

P: The manager is not deft at handling things. He dropped his pencil on the floor while writing. There was a lot of confusion in that room because the cubicles were too small and there was not enough space for him to bend and pick it up.

B: I suppose, there is no room for error in your company.

David and Goliath...

Summer is a time of immense fun in yours truly's household at Madras. My naughty cousins decend on to my house with the singular intention of accelerating their growth. Since they exceed a critical mass, they are on auto-pilot and need no guidance. The grown ups are only too happy to get rid of these adolescent pests which happily play cricket, bully neighborhood kids, spend their time in arboreal adventures, create a trail of destruction and for good measure tutor little kids to follow their path five years down the road. I singularly miss these occasions but I hear most of what happens. Here is a snippet:

My sis, pappu (yet another bored university student), is about to sleep while my cousin bro vichu is sitting at the dining table watching a happy lizard wagging its tail on the wall , muching on something that is obviously not healthy. In a fit of inspirational rage, pappu wakes up in midsleep, lands in front of him armed with stationery and starts scribbling:

"Give me wind. I wish to fly.
Give me light. I wish to shine.
....
Give me your hand. I wish to hold it for ever."

Satisfied with her creativity, she asks vichu (in 10th std),
"What do you think about it?"

Vichu does not think much about it but keeps his opinion to himself and instead asks her in the politest of voices
"Can I write another line?"

She slides the paper and pencil toward him in great expectation. With a flourish, our dude delivers:

"Give me an eraser. I wish to get rid of the previous lines"

thus frightening the lizard and creating a warzone out of a tranquil pillaimar household.