New year reminders: Listen, Read and Reflect

By
New year, new blog? Partially, yes. I started blogging in my early 20s and now several years later I find my perspectives have changed and seminal experiences since have shaped my worldview. A change in voice, texture and content was perhaps inevitable. For those who liked and followed my previous posts, there will be occasional creative pieces, but this re-imagination is a reflection of where my thoughts and creative energies are distributed at present. In my very first post, I had written about poetry and its power to engender a complex feeling or an unprecedented insight about life. Great art and great science both tend to reveal novel truths about our existence. Perhaps these two complementary forms can converge along the lines that adorn this page to deliver deeper insights to reality.

2019 is upon us and it is the time for new year resolutions. I have never been one to make up and adhere to these, but we can use this time to remind ourselves to be mindful of the little things that matter in life. Getting back to the basics, so to speak. Listen, Read and Reflect.

Listening is perhaps the most valued social skill today. Everywhere around, we find people vying for attention in one way or another, desperately trying to be heard. But is anyone actually listening? Our constant endeavors to project the most perfect version of ourselves on social media contaminate our real-world interactions. For once, let’s honestly express who we are, what we feel and facilitate others to do the same. So, listen. Thoughtfully, without distractions. Let real, deep conversations flow.

I like to read. I always have. Yet, a few years back I had to forcibly drag myself back into reading beyond academics, having completely lost touch of the habit in the first few years of my PhD. I’m glad I did that. I find well-read people are generally more interesting to talk to, more open-minded and have a deeper understanding of the world. Notwithstanding the pressures of being an early career scientist, I want to continue to read books, to indulge in the slow, deliberate flow of ideas that gradually unpacks page by page. For those who would like to get back to reading but think they do not have time, you most likely do.

Reflection is one of my favorite words. To reflect is not only to ponder, but literally, also to see yourself in a mirror. To reflect is to periodically inspect the story you tell about yourself, the image you project to the world, against your real self. Too often, our decisions and trajectory of life is determined not by who we really are but by the separate selves we conjure up to exist and fit in the real world. Growing up, I used to spend a lot of time in this small room with large windows in our house in Kolkata. I would often stare out of the windows-mulling and processing thoughts and ideas, throwing them at the world and carefully picking up the pieces it left behind. Perhaps we all need to find our window to the world and let the sunshine or the rain sweep over us and reveal a reflection of ourselves against the backdrop of the world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Biotechnology in India: the placement hurdle

By
This post is a legacy of me being a student of Biotechnology at IIT Kgp till not so long ago. After all the time myself and my fellow students at IIT Kgp spent thinking about this particular topic, I try to analyze here why it is so difficult for a biotechnology graduate in India to find a proper job in the industry that promises so much. The huge stake Indian biotech giants like Cipla and Ranbaxy have on the global generic drugs market is a major contributor to the hype around the Indian biotech scene. But when you look closely, you realize that although India is famed to be the “pharmacy of the third world”, there is very little home-grown innovation and discovery happening in this field! Not to downplay the achievements of Indian pharmaceutical companies, generic drugs manufactured by them are indeed the only medicines affordable in much of Asia and Africa. Taking advantage of India’s weak patent protection laws, Indian companies have thrived on manufacturing and marketing ge...
Read more

The Fragrance

By
A strange feeling swept through him as the car drove past the familiar gates of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. The sun was about to set and the mellow chirping of birds filled the crimson late evening sky. The car drove through the newly laid roads, past the famous landmarks and all-too-familiar turns and finally stopped at the gate of the newly renovated guest house. Aniket stepped out, took off his shades and looked around. A gentle breeze had started to blow. He closed his eyes for a moment and inhaled deeply.  A strange aroma filled his senses, something that he always associated with this place. What was that smell? He couldn’t tell exactly. He took his small trolley bag and rolled it along to the reception.  “Your name, sir?” “Aniket Bhattacharya” “Room S4” It had been ten years since he last came here. Or rather, ten years since he had left this place. He still remembered the day when he finally left the campus. He remembered how a small c...
Read more

Contemplations during 10 days in silence

By
Recently, I finished a 10-day Vipassana course, which is in short, an intense, immersive course in the ancient meditation practice that has supposedly been passed down from the Buddha himself. To appreciate how intense and immersive the 10-day retreat was, let me tell you that it involved giving up all the “distractions” of modern life including cell phones, reading and writing instruments and even all kinds of communication with fellow meditators. It aims to simulate a few days in absolute solitude, practicing meditation and spending all your waking minutes with your own thoughts and consciousness. This mental exploration was quite grueling and extremely difficult at times, but it also came with its share of revelations and realizations and finally, a sense of discovery into an omnipresent yet vast, unexplored realm of one’s own existence, the realm of the mind. One of the remarkable realizations for me was the level of learning I could attain while following a disciplined trai...
Read more

Reincarnation

By
Vishnu woke up, startled! His head was spinning, throbbing with pain. It was one of his dreams again. He sat up at the side of his bed, head down, resting his hands on the edge of the mattress—trying to make sense of it all. Why was he having these premonitions? Or at least, it seemed like premonitions at first. Now, with each passing day, it felt more like something which had happened before—something he’d experienced that had been etched in his consciousness forever. The scary part was that he couldn’t figure out what it was. It was like a distant horizon that kept moving further back as he approached it. Like a never-ending tunnel with light at the end of it—tempting furtively but never giving in to his quests. And yet it was slowly engulfing him like a giant black hole and bits and pieces of his mind were being sucked into its deep abyss. There was something at the end, unmistakably omnipresent—and with every dream it was becoming clearer! There was something deeply intrinsic abo...
Read more

The Homecoming

By
As the sun broke through the night beyond the faraway mountains and its crimson rays kissed the deep verdure of the foothills, Riddhiman felt a new dawn emerging within him. The beaming headlights that were guiding them as they sped through the night were no longer necessary. Like a sole caravan through the desert, the blue Honda City was making its way through a lonely yet enchanting tea estate. In the morning light, the whole landscape looked surreal and mesmerizing to Riddhiman—for a moment he could forget his anxiety and marvel at the beauty that lay around him, lamenting as he had done on many previous occasions, the fact that he didn’t come here at least once every year. Dooars, as the region was often called, indeed opened the doors to his senses. By now they had entered a small village right outside the tea estate. A distinct burning smell greeted them followed by the sight of a few torched shacks and roadside shops. They had seen a few of those during their journey. And a co...
Read more

Reflections on a dew drop

By
It was a reasonably warm winter afternoon in Minneapolis (by its standards) when I left my apartment for the airport to embark on the long journey to India. I stood by the stairs for a moment and reflected upon how the last one and half years had flown by and how I had begun to think of this place on the other side of the world from where I grew up, as a new home. It was also that strange feeling of going from one home to another that took me back in time five years ago. It had been again on a winter afternoon in Kharagpur, albeit without the snow and not nearly as cold, where whilst travelling to the station on my way home to Kolkata I had for the first time experienced that feeling; when I first looked back and thought “I will miss this place”, even though I was only going home. I realize now, that feeling is the making of a new ‘home’, the consummation of a new relationship. Settling down in a new place and calling it your home comes with a lot of emotional upheaval. It’s like...
Read more

Half a dozen strings...

By
Testing times, and it’s been pretty busy; lots of thoughts wandering my mind—disorganized and diverse, fighting for space—I’ll let them make their own music… Yesterday was bhasha dibosh (language day). I couldn’t resist writing the Bangla expression, because the essence of this day is so emphatically linked to this language. It was in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) that a great movement was started in protest of Pakistan’s declaration that Urdu should be the official language of East Pakistan as well. This movement was unique in its objective, no material gains, no bridges to be made, no factories to be shut, no wages to be increased, just the fundamental right to speak the language of your choice, the language of your birth—which is so innately ingrained in each one of us. Bangladesh hosted the opening ceremony of this year’s cricket world cup only a couple of days ago, and in a country that owes its birth to this language, what more fitting way to begin the auspicious occasion ...
Read more

3 Lessons to Lessen the Burden of Misinformation

By
In the past few years, and more acutely in the past few months, the propagation of false information, propaganda and misleading content through the internet has reached unprecedented levels. Certainly, the Covid-19 pandemic and the ensuing storm of news, information, ideas and conspiracies has brought into focus how difficult it is for a lay person to sift through the cobweb and understand the reality of any sufficiently complex situation. As a scientist, I’m used to looking at new information with skepticism (I invite those of you who think scientists are always in agreement with each other to listen in to our lab meetings or conferences) and I find myself increasingly using a few simple, yet profound concepts, to filter the information stream and help understand the reality. Correlation does not mean Causation : This is the idea that even if two variables appear to go up or down in sync, it doesn’t mean one is caused by the other. Often, there’s a hidden factor that controls them bot...
Read more

Rain Dance

By
It had been raining since late night. Sritoma woke up to the sound of mellow rumbling of clouds and rain drops whispering outside the bed-side window. The incessant rain through the night had metamorphosed the sultry summer night into a cool and pleasant morning. Sritoma, 15, stared outside the window with sleepy eyes soaking in the flavor of the early morning rain. “Toma! Are you up yet?”, Anuradha’s voice from the kitchen brought her back to reality. The morning was supposed to be beautiful, but instead it seemed shrouded in gloom. A lot had been going at home since the last two days. Dadu was ill, very ill, more than he had been all these years—compounded by his whim not to be taken to a hospital and “left to rot”! Finally, they did manage to coax him to a nursing home, but by then he was too weak to protest. And then there was this man….“Come, get your breakfast dear! How much longer would you take to get out of bed?”. Sritoma pulled herself up. It was a virtual holiday. It had...
Read more

The cost of cheaper medicines

By
Healthcare around the world has evolved—revolutionized so to speak. But availability of quality medicine still remains a distant dream for much of the third world. Right to healthcare is regarded as one of fundamental rights in a progressive society. However, the escalating costs of the latest drugs developed by pharmaceutical companies render them out of bounds for the poor. For them, generic drugs are in many cases the only medicines. Generic drugs are non-branded drugs, out of patent protection, which can be manufactured and sold by any company provided they ensure that the efficacy and the administration routine for the drug would not change. Naturally, generic drugs are much cheaper than their branded counterparts. Apparently, it would seem that generic medicines provide the answer to the problem. But sadly, that is not the case. Reality always reserves a little bit of irony for the uninitiated. It is imperative to understand that generic drugs do not appear out of nowh...
Read more