Thursday, March 7, 2013

Trip To Asilomar

Much water has flown in the last 3 months and I have not blogged anything for a long time. I feel terrible about it. Not that I don't have time, but my mind is not that calm anymore. It is chaotic. When thoughts pass by, I am not near the computer -when I am near the computer something else takes the precedence.

Today I am leaving for Asilomar, CA for attending, presenting a paper and chairing a session at the Annual OMGN meeting, 2013. This will be my first international meeting after coming to India in exactly about 7 and half months later. What is good about this trip is I am traveling on my own grants, presenting my own lab work!! It feels incredible!!

My last trip was to MAU in December the 14th. After that I made a quick one day trip to Bangalore cMMACs, to avail the computational resources of one of the state of art computing facilities run by one of the CSIR labs. After that I have made several trips, one to attend the Ramalingaswamy conclave at the Raviz International, next to Kollam creek. It was a lovely place and I had lovely experience. I met very nice people there including several of my potential collaborators. My room mate is the soul sister I was looking for. She has similar life experience as I have. We run a parallel life, so we instantly connected. I will be in touch with her for ever!! Then there are good potential collaborators, friends and mentors. It was overall great experience. Photos will come soon....

My next trip in February was to Lucknow, and I visited SGPGI ( where my soul sister is a faculty and she invited me to discuss collaborations). Then I made my next MAU trip to teach metagenomics. This time the trip was special, since I took my parents along. The only bad thing about this trip was we had to travel by sleeper class in train and it was cold. I regret that part!! We all caught cold and had restless time. Other than that, trips via Varanasi during Kumbh time and travelling in a II tier sleeper (that was treated like general class) was not very good, especially when travelling with parents!! I don't think I want to repeat that mistake again. My Mau trip was OK sort of but the major reason I was there is to get the BGA strains and follow up on the grant. I am not sure how things work though. I believe in 80/20 rule, so my 80% efforts can potentially go wrong and I am thinking this may be one  of that 80%. In any case, no regrets! Happy thing is parents were treated well and saw a new place. A new change for them. They stayed with my uncle on 11th Feb night in Lucknow on our way to Varanasi, so it was very good. Again photos will follow soon.

Next was a IICB picnic to a place called Mogra haat, that is about 45 KMs from Kolkata. There was a resort that charged IICB about 10,000 rupees per day. We all had some very oily food and enjoyed nature for sometime.

Now is my next one. I will write more once I am back. Excited to meet my friends Chitti, Dewal...




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