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..

A day after the dooms day - marking my 5th month stay in Kolkata

I am increasingly aware of my scantier posts in this blog site, but nevertheless, it is never out of my mind. Every time  I have something interesting happening, I wish to blog, but time does not allow me. Today I am marking 3 days short of my 5th months India and Kolkata stay. Yesterday happened to be the dooms day and ironically in some TV channels movie 2012 was playing. I watched this movie with bewilderment/ amusement and boredom and finally slept. It is time to have a good laugh over all these things, especially on future predictions.

About a week back I happened to visit a place in UP called as Mau MaunathBhanjan. I have never heard of this name before, but the organizers of the meeting said that they will send a vehicle to the airport, that will  take me from Varanasi to Mau. It is about 130 KMs from Varanasi on the treacherous road. I will blog more about the place later in my blog, but I would like to talk more about the return journey, where I was packed into a first class compartment in a train. My co-passengers were an old retired professor and another very interesting person respectively. He was an astrologer with 10 rings on 10 of his hand fingers. He also looked strange. The moment he boarded the train he made few calls, presumably to his clients. The summary was what they should be doing in coming days to get over a certain obstacle. He initiated a conversation with the retired professor - the other co-passenger. As expected, he started with, you seem to have some problems in your family. When the guy nodded his head in negation, he immediately changed it to "problem in your brother or sister's family". After that I went to toilet, did not know much about what conspired between the two. After I came back about 5 minutes later, I saw both the men bonding very well. I said to myself, he may have convinced him that indeed he can predict future and knows history. Do you think there is any science that can tell with exact precision on what is going to happen?

While talking, he mentioned the Ashrams he is running, his foreign tours and his life style. That convinced me that he is a man of means. When a fortune teller become rich, you have reason to believe that there are many people who believe in him. Here in India I have found a dastardly trend with people - talking about fate and luck. While it has been an integral part of the culture, people have very little faith in the work they do or the hard work they put in. If someone is materially successful or failure that is invariably because of luck or some other person rather than he/she herself. Good happens - fate; bad happens - fate... Now result is the fortune teller becomes very fortunate in this process. This is a very dangerous trend when people rely on fate rather than their own ability. This may appear as a simple innocent belief, but it is not. You open the newspaper, you will see someone somewhere kills someone else, because that person is doing black magic on them. Some people also commit unthinkable act of human sacrifice, some even rape their own daughters in the belief system is that, that is going to change their fate. People, please wake up, it is you alone who can change your fate. It may be more difficult for some people than others, but it will work out, if you put in your 100%. Hope at least one person changes after reading this post... Have a great day!

Sold another house in 5 months time

This is events of our life time! In last 5 months, we sold 2 houses, one in USA and one in India. The house we sold in US was bought during Jan 2008 and we finalized the deal on 26th June 2012, merely after 4  and half years of our stay. Here is a link of the photos made into a video of our Texas home. We left our house in US on 4th July and checked into a hotel till 23rd July before we finally boarded a plane to India permanently.

The Mumbai apartment was our first house that we bought with great deal of difficulty. It was around 13 years ago and we were still studying. The loan both soft and hard was overwhelming to manage. It costed us around 11 lakh rupees in 1999 and most of the money was in form of a bank loan. When I saw it for the first time, I fell in love with it. It was a cozy compact house with an area of 414 sq. ft. as carpet area. Sounds awfully small, but in Mumbai in Goregaon, this area is considered large for 2 people. The flooring and kitchen slabs were granite and marble. Although I bought it with my sweat, but could stay in that house only for about a year. I got a job in Chennai and Bangalore and left for the place. My husband lived one year more till 2001 and then we never had chance to stay there. I made extra kitchen storage space while I was  there.

This November 27th, we visited Mumbai and signed the dotted line in the property office transferring the apartment to a couple about 12 years our junior. I said to myself, this is the right age guys to buy a new house... So, summing up, looks like in a span of 5 months we have released 2 houses that we acquired over a period of 9 years. Good going!!

Today marks the 4th month of our Kolkata stay

Today marks the fourth month since we came back to India and Kolkata. I have been documenting my life ever since we came back here and it looks worth it. It helps us analyze our activity and whether we are doing things right or not.

I am now happy that life is somewhat back on track. Smaller things that makes me happy is; we can now make copies of the documents at home and at work too. The frustrations are still fresh in our minds when we landed here, and for making copies we had to run around places. The second most important thing is now we are back into our workout routines. The gym in the apartment complex serves well. I can run for 10 mins and do trademill for 40 mins followed by little bit of weight training. Although it is not as rigorous as body pump, but still serves the purpose. We have started doing yoga and pranayama. I can do zumba at home too and download music from you tube for new songs. So, I would say in a way things are going well.

Work wise few students are listed to register under me for their Ph.D program in December and I am working on their project proposals. Hope, once that is back on track, I can focus on my own work. My server is in place, and most of the software have been installed. Now I have to get back into completing my papers that were left in lurch.

Teaching and collaborations are in right speed. Met few collaborators and now finding some new ones on the way. Teaching Ph.D course work at the institute, and lined up for teaching NIPER as well as in a Post Graduate college. Then there is a workshop that invites me to deliver lectures. I am extremely grateful....