A day filled with action...

Some days go by when you smile in the end thinking "my time was well spent". Indeed today is one such rare day - I can vouch for that as a successful day. I have shifted to my official quarters on 8th of April and 9th 10th a trip was planned to Shantiniketan. Upon my return I headed for Ahmedabad followed by Mumbai. Hardly there was any time, for me to set up the new house. The physical allocation of objects to the places have already been done, but my aesthetic sense did not get kick start until today. Of the loads of work that remains to be done here, one more task that was always existing as a priority but shifted back in  the queue is the checkup of our new car! And learning driving in Indian cars and roads. I decided to take driving lessons and my trainer comes at 5 AM in the morning. Today was one such day, when just before leaving the house I casually grabbed my purse. But later remembered that I forgot my cell phone. To that I thought, well I will not need one... Today was my second class. It is needless to mention that in my first day, it was tough I could not get the vechicle move more than 2 inches. But today I was very comfortable with gear and clutch. Then we realized that the car  needs fuel. So, we entered a gas station and filled in diesel. Bam, after that the car would not start. This problem existed earlier also, and we were taking it easy, now it was in its most severe mode - it did not start at all... I am not sure about my affiliation with god, I love to believe in karma, but then, all of a sudden I felt the urge to pray and request god to start the vehicle. It worked before most of the time, but sigh this time it did not. I thought damn, god is not going to help me, now what to do. Now long story short, I called my husband who  made several phone calls. It was 6 AM in the morning, so obviously much help was not available. But miraculously, he found the customer services number that can tow your car for free if it is under warranty. Now they arrived towed the car to the dealer and did the machine checkup. But we were planning to schedule a car checkup earlier for this saturday, but they said , no it is not possible. But now it seems the car went forcibly for a checkup on saturday and that to we did not have to take it. That was the best part of it. I bought some plants, placed it in my sun room. Bought certain essential things of the house that was pending for a while. We posted 2 important documents that was also in thje todo list. The post office is just 10 minutes walking from my office and I got a call from flipkart guys that they are waiting at the office to deliver the product. I thought what a great timing!! I received my solar lantern ( a very cute one), got my nameplate, got names printed for the lobby and post box.Now this is called as the time indeed well spent and I am really very happy about the whole inconveniences, troubles amidst the silver lining that made the day a very happy one:-)

An Incredible Trip to ShantiNiketan

Shanti Niketan is located near Bolpur railway station about 150 kms from Kolkata. I have already visited the place twice, ever since I joined IICB. Part of the reason is, one of my professor with whom I collaborate is an HOD at the Biotech department at Viswa Bharati. He has the largest algal collection in India and I am very interested in these tiny photosynthetic organisms since nothing much has been studied about them. They have great potential as nitrogen fixers and biofuel producers.

April 9th and 10th are the 2 days we kept for visiting the University. I took my entire group along, some working in this project and some not. It is noteworthy to mention that my students had a blast. We took an 8.30 morning train from Howrah to Bolpur. I forgot the train name though. It took about 4 hours to reach there at 12.30 PM in Bolpur railway station. My professor had also invited me to speak on nextgen sequencing for the Msc. biotech course work. I was felicitated by none other than our Institute directors sister, who is also a professor at Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics and a visiting faculty at Shanti Niketan. One thing to note here that it is customary to say sadhu in  the end of a talk rather than clap. That is a culture at Shantiniketan. My stay was arranged at the picturesque Ratan Kutir and my students stay was arranged at the Purbapalli guest house.  In the evening, I had a meeting with my professor and the students and he introduced me to the organisms one by one with their proper history. It was really amazing the way he has kept them and collected them. In the evening I had the opportunity to have a talk with the VC of Ravenshaw University. The next day early morning, I got up to attend the prayer in their prayer hall, that remains largely closed through out except for every wednes day in the morning at 6.30 AM. There is a nice banyan tree under which Ravindranath Tagore used to meditate, that is protected quite well. On 10th there was an Oriya Literary meeting, where they formally introduced me and I had a chance to meet with VC of Shantiniketan. It was incredible feeling to be among the learned. Meanwhile, my students had good time taking pictures of themselves in many poses (courtesy facebook). At about 12.30 PM we returned to the railway station and took Shantiniketan express back to Howrah. From there E1 bus back to Jadavpur. I must say it was a really really nice fun, crispy productive trip. Looking forward to getting good results...

Listing is important in Life

It was great to meet all my near and dear ones in the US and I truly had a great time!! Chitti's special dosas and cookings is simply awesome. Dewal's house, her vegetarian dishes and the movies were the best things I enjoyed. The walk by the small railway station, the snow laden soil, the jumping fence will stay with me forever! Well all good things and bad things passes away with time...
I have been back from the US about 10 days back, and still the jetlag passes over me on and off. But the best thing about the trips is you get to get up early which I was struggling with for quite sometimes now. I am in a much happier space right now. Early morning getting up (Thanks to jetlag:) warm water with lemon followed by crispy chai then yoga/Zumba as it comes..
What works for me best is to make a list of action items and strike them off as it goes. It gives a incredible sense of success and feeling when all my action items are struck. In my new lab space, situation is different. I am sitting on the drivers seat, where I am responsible for lots of things including the finances, the science part, the trouble shooting part, the teaching part. It is overwhelming at times, but I am sailing through. Being a manager is not easy. Earlier, I used to think managers are just a waste of everything, but jobs getting done is the managers responsibility. The most important thing as a manager is to be patient and persistent and stay cool. I have learnt it the hard way. I have to keep following up on items that I would not like to. Sometimes I get to the nerves of the people by repeated following up or you can say over following up... Any chemical comes, equipment comes, whether the item is perfect, whether the quantity is OK, whether the payment is processed are all my job to oversee. So, folks if you are transitioning into being a manager, you are entirely in a different territory and lonely! You are on the other side of the fence. Be prepared to be gossiped, to be criticized, to be mis-understood, but never ever take any of these personally. Just focus on your goal and keep moving...

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...

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..