Trip to Mau - 14th Dec 2012

This post was long due. I wanted to document my trip to Mau, that is about 150 kms from varanasi airport. I was invited to teach bioinformatics in an ICAR lab in Mau on sequence analysis, sequence assembly, primer design, gene prediction etc. As lately I have started enjoying teaching, could not say no. Started on 13th December to Varanasi on a Indigo flight which was late by few hours. That would mean my arrival time in Varanasi is shifted further. Knowing the road conditions and night time, everyone was extremely concerned in my family. But the experience turned out to be a good one. Dr. Singh (the person who invited me to Mau) had sent a student to accompany the driver to fetch me from the airport. That student was a freshman starting his Ph.D work on nextgen sequencing. The roads, as imagined, was severe, but somehow the driver drove the van at a very super-fast speed and it took approximately 3 hours to reach the guest house. The arrangements were perfect. Room was very nice and everything was almost arranged perfectly well. Although that was not enough, students were always on call.

Next day we had breakfast on the beautifully manicured lawn. Food was served. I started off with my lecture series and the audience were awesome. Needless to say, girls were the best. Lunch was served and I was taken on around to visit the departments / labs. I was thoroughly impressed by the setup. The lab has everything you name. A central facility, a cry-preservation center, sequencers, central microbe repository facility etc. The next day I had just half a lecture then I started on my return journey from Mau to Varanasi by van followed by train to Kolkata. In Varanasi station, I had some time and was wondering if I could sit and do some work. But to my horror, that station is in such ran shackled condition, that there was no place to sit lest do anything. Overly crowded, dirt adorned the station. The waiting room was also horrible.

In any case, I managed to grab some lunch and was trying to do some work, to which my network did not support.

One more interesting thing about Mau was the students. I wanted to take some pictures, but as it goes, it is we, who always carry our cameras and request someone to take pictures, but in this case, I did none of that. There were 2 students, one held my bag and the other took my pictures in her nice camera and send it to immediately. It was overall a great experience, which I was out of touch for quite sometime now.  

Rule of 80/20 in Life

I read somewhere about a management principle that governs every ones life in some way or other - that is the rule of 80/20. This rule means that 80% of your efforts will yield you 20% of your total result and 20% of your effort will give you 80% of your result. Think about it. If you look back you will find the paper you have worked very hard on has not given you the score you expected but surprisingly you get good scores from another paper that you spend least time on. This may not be the right example, since more or less I get what I expect from my work exam wise. But overall in life exams and scores don't define everything as such. In my work life, I have experienced this a lot. I spend a lot of time in a paper or a collaboration which fails to bear any result, but all of a sudden out of no way some collaboration that I most desire happen just like that effortlessly that is much more rewarding than the ones I was chasing after.

Look around and you must have met someone whom you think is quite lucky in life, just gets everything so easily. In this case, we just see the 80% of his/her reward out of his 20% of work. But we don't see the 80% of the effort they must have spent that would have just yielded 20% of output. Life is fair after all.

I have tried to collaborate with A, B, C, D and most of them failed one after the other. But there comes this collaborator X and Y that I would have chased after all, and there you go, they come forward and extended their hand without my own initiation. I am in a happy position now after knowing this 80/20 principle of life.

Our recent Ramalingaswamy conclave meeting was a very successful one for me. I met a number of people that I always would like to work with and I want to make it happen... More on this meeting is on my lab blog: http://computationalgenomicsiicb.blogspot.in/2013/01/second-ramalingaswamy-conclave-in-gods.html 

My recent trip to Bangalore

Recently, I had chance to visit Bangalore after 11 long years. My flight was suppose to reach at around 8.40 PM and I must say I was little bit worried because it was night and my destination was about 50 kms from the airport. Not to mention I was flying in AirIndia since it was an official trip. I kind of had a love hate relationship with AirIndia. When I was in US, I even fought with some travel agents to book tickets in AirIndia despite their warnings. But, lately since it is mandatory for us to travel airIndia, my love for the airlines has vanished. My last Lucknow trip was memorable since I ended up coming in the majestic dreamliner, that was nice. But this time, what surprised me was the timing and professionalism of the airIndia staff. It was just about right. They started off at the right time, served food and were very well behaved. The best thing about the majestic maharaja, was the leg space and passage space. Indigo airline on the other hand, is extremely narrow and when the person in front of you bends back for sleeping, you gasp for breath. Another thing I noticed was a lot of Passengers of Nepal origin from Kolkata to Bangalore and vice versa – was there a pattern? Don’t know whatever may be the reason.

Now coming back to my airport to guest house trip. It was more than pleasant and I must say I would not miss US for this. There are KSRTC cabs from the airport, and you get an easy ride through the employees helping you to get into the cabs. The cabs are uniformly sized and very well maintained. The roads were almost built like highways of any other developed country. I passed through Hebbal, where I lived once upon a time, but I failed to notice anything that was there before. This place has completely changed for better. Kudos to the government!! I was put up in NAL guest house which is right next to Leela Palace. Guess what the room rent is just Rs. 25/- per night. The room was big with 3 beds, large enough for a whole family. That is the advantage of being a govt. servant I thought. Meals, tea and everything else is subsidized.

Finally I went to work on 10^th  Jan 2013 to cMMACS lab that is located in a place called Belur (just 5 kms from the guest house). I took an auto, and it costed just Rs. 50/-. This time I liked everything about Bangalore. Just wondering what it will take to replicate this model in other cities. My new found home Kolkata needs to learn lessons from this.

I could do some stuff in the institute, but because there is no ssh and sftp access, file transfer is a big pain. There were JRFs and SRFs, that I was put to work with to get my installation done. Although they are extremely good, but they don’t talk. That is the big problem! Here in India people know their business but don’t know how to present their work. I had very tough time communicating with those folks. But nevertheless, could do some work. I was trying to compare them with their US counterparts. They in this place will be so pompous and talk so much..