New Year Resolution No. 1

Start writing again.

at the end of the day...

Can I be honest
Your writing on your blog is the blandest writing I've seen coming from you.
There's no soul, there's no you.

Maybe she's right. I don't know. I don't think I've figured out the balance between my thoughts and how I want the world to see them. And maybe I don't have the courage to be honest in html.

tightroped

Today up at tea in NCBS someone said to me, "The strangest thing about Gautam is that he's surprisingly normal."

At the time, given that I was sitting amongst a group of nerdy scientists, I suppose I took it as a compliment.

It isn't really one though, is it. The last thing I want to be is plain old normal. I want Me with a capital M.

Problem is, there are enough flavours of 'normal' to go around. Alright, so I don't fit the crazy-scientist bill. But in my tea-time buddy's head, evidently I'm part of some stereotype. Maybe it's Wannabe-Intellectual Who Needs a Haircut. Or even worse, Urban Anglicised Upper Middle Class Yuppie.

That's my catch-22. I spend a lot of my soul-searching time looking for that one spark which makes me unique, which sets me apart, defines me as a person- but at the same time, subconsciously, I mould myself to a whole bunch of stereotypes so that I can belong to a certain group of people that make up my social universe.

I guess the trick is to reconcile these two opposing pulls. Be yourself but don't end up living in a cave, somehow. The thing is, the latter often seems to overpower the former.

my phantom broom.

I've realised that my room reflects my state of mind. And vice versa. If my room looks like a blast scene from a B-grade hollywood flick, that means I'm definitely not thinking straight.

Today my room's spotlessly clean.

the walls I can't find, but can't hide, either.

Up a narrow flight of stairs
In a narrow little room,
As I lie upon my bed
In the early evening gloom.
Impaled on my wall
My eyes can dimly see
The pattern of my life
And the puzzle that is me.

From the moment of my birth
To the instant of my death,
There are patterns I must follow
Just as I must breathe each breath.
Like a rat in a maze
The path before me lies,
And the pattern never alters
Until the rat dies.

Simon and Garfunkel, 1966.

sunday wisdom

When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
-Yogi Berra

Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it is worth.
Wear Sunscreen
Baz Luhrmann (Mary Schmich)

glyco-man

All cells in almost all living organisms are covered with a coat of carbohydrates, serving a variety of functions ranging from recognition of 'self' to complex cell-cell signaling. Some of these carbohydrates belong to a family of sugars known as sialic acids.

Somewhere along the course of human evolution, while we were still 'great apes', one gene got deleted. Not spectacular, as evolutionary changes go. What it means is that our cells have only one type of sialic acid while chimps have two (which differ by a single oxygen atom).

So?

It appears that this is possibly the sole reason that we contract malaria (the Plasmodium falciparum one) and avian flu but orangutans don't. The reason humans suffer excruciating day-long contractions to give birth and chimps finish it off and leave for lunch in half an hour. The reason eating red meat might increase the incidence of cancer. Stunningly (though highly speculative), this may even be part of the reason our brains are what they are. (We have unique brain-specific sialic acid-binding protein expression patterns, one of the major chemical differences between ape and human brains)

All this because of one less oxygen atom.

If this sounds cool (or you don't believe me), check out Ajit Varki and his gang, the guys who've done it all. And the real dirt starts here: Nature 446:1023-1029.