Convergent Lines

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

It was a strangely eventful last weekend, one of those that just urges words to form in your head, turn into sentences and knock wildly until you finally let them out. So I guess I’ll have to put down what went through, or at least the part where it all began—my trip from Lausanne in Switzerland to Kaiserslautern, a small town in the middle of nowhere in Germany. It was going to be my first experience in the Eurail and I was excited for more reasons than one. The first leg of the journey didn’t disappoint at all, from Lausanne to Basel, the two and half hours left me gaping out through the gigantic window panes as the train sped past the Swiss countryside. The pristine beauty of the scenery around was unprecedented. Meadows rose from the railway tracks and climbed up the mountain slopes which seemed a stone’s throw away, and the vast expanse of verdure was interrupted in between with lakes and streams gushing by. The small stations in between were quaint with and vividly colorful wit...

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 ...

Another semester gone by, in the usual uncompromising way that leaves one to wonder whether it was indeed four entire months it had lasted! But this time, not without a couple of delightful intermissions—decorating memories like wild flowers on the barren highway. Midway through autumn, after three colorful days of Durga Pujo it was time to set off. On the road and in the air, with my parents and my uncle, a week and a day on a much-expected sojourn in Kerala. From Kochi to Allepuzha, it was a soothing, if not unforgettable experience. The smell of history in the streets of Kochi, the untainted verdure of Munnar, the serenity of the backwaters—the waves of new sensations left a handful of pretty sea-shells to savor. The prettiest of them all, the one with the shining pearl, was Kanyakumari—the tip of India’s giant ankle that is worthy of its crown. First up there was a visit to the much venerated temple of Kanyakumari. The smell of its damp, old walls, the incessant smoke from burn...

October is here, and so are the Commonwealth Games!! It is arguably one of the best things that has happened to India in recent years—yet it just can’t seem to find a way out of the headlines, and for all the wrong reasons! When was the last time the front page of your daily newspaper did not sport a story on how the games have turned into a scheme for generating “common wealth” for a select group of individuals? So, given the situation, what can I, an educated young man, far away from the disquiet and the controversies surrounding the games do about it all? Well, at least I can think, and often it is at this basic level that people falter—when things happen thick and fast, they forget to think. So I was thinking… and the first thing that became clear to me was that the media has made a meal out of the entire thing. I mean it’s not that one should shut his eyes or turn a deaf ear to all the audio visual evidence in support of everything that has been going wrong in the Games. It’s just...