Why do we make self negating choices?

Sometimes I just like to do things that you would not expect from me. When I was little younger I started painting canvases. I struggled but I made my way to two beautiful oil paintings with the help of my sister. In the end it was a pleasurable experience and I learned a lot. There is always so much to learn. Learning how to paint was not only learning painting. Every new job undertaken gives a new perspective to a lot of things in life. My first painting was dusktime seashore. That helped me overcome this fear of dusk (I dont know if they have a word for it - duskophobia?) I had ever since.

I have housed a lean frame for around quarter century years on planet earth. For which I never complained, to the extent I liked it. I have had enough of friends and family saying every now and then - 'You are growing skinnier! Eat something'. So last month went I met nutritionist and started doing weights. Most difficult part of this exercise is maintaining a complimentary diet. Vegetarians always have the protein problem. So if you are looking for protein-atious veg foods I have a lot of suggestions right now.

I never played a musical instrument in my life. Closest I got was when we used to goof around our uncles piano as little kids. After hitting quarter century age Im learning to play an obscure instrument called Didgeridoo. It is fun! It is simple plain bamboo from the tree. What I like most is the simplicity about this instrument. It is nothing but one big column taken right from the tree. Like a pipe. But as Da Vinci says - 'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication'.

This summer at least once I tried playing two different sports. Ultimate frisbee and Softball. Both are games endemic to US. I liked softball much more compared to frisbee. Partly because I fared much better at it than catching/throwing a disc plate. (It is a difficult kind of physics they never taught in m school!) And partly because it is one of the few American games in which no bodily-contact is necessitated.

So here I am making choices which would have never defined first quarter century of my life. I guess there are more things to come.

If you are wondering whats the answer to the question I asked earlier, well I don't know either. I'm on lookout. Till than I will keep going.

Camping

I had a feeling of dejavu when all the people who are graduating with masters degree in this month are leaving town.

Skipped 2 days of work for a camping vacation in Duluth on the 'coast' of Lake Superior. It was fun. But also a bit crazy. We rented all the camping gears and bikes from and then biked 10 miles south with all the load on backpacks. The ride was tiresome but totally worth it. I felt like I lost few pounds in these 2 days ;(
Here is a picture of the stuff that we carried. This was the place we camped overnight. We also went hiking on a part of Lake Superior trail.

Dream

Today I dreamt. I dreamt that  I was teaching to small kids. I was very happy and enjoying my time. Will my dream come true?

Road trip

It is a beautiful morning here. I woke up before sunrise after many days but alas. It is a cloudy day. We are about to begin a long road trip and I have this weird final destination kind of feeling. I want to let it go.
Mt.Rushmore and Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

Grey to green

Winter is gone. Signs of life come back in this part of world. In a matter of 2 weeks everything turned from grey to green. Lush green. Its amazing how fast the trees have grown leaves. Big leaves. Im loving it.

CamBuff

If  you have a DSLR and an iPhone here is a cool stuff to have for 75 bucks. For 75 you can have the cambuff device+app to remotely control any DSLR. Forget about the tini-winie IR remotes. I dont like the fact that it works only with narcissistic devices (read apple products). No android version :( But Kudos to the team anyway.



CamBuff - DSLR wireless control with iPhone, iPad, iPod touch from Buffer Labs on Vimeo.

You can order one here: http://igg.me/at/cambuff/x/530511

Holi

It looks like finally spring has come in Minneapolis. It took end of April for the momentous occasion. And we celebrated it with colours, playing Holi at the bank of Mississippi.
But as is infamous with Minnesota weather another snowstorm cannot be ruled out. In fact next week is not too exciting with sub zero forcasts.
Our weekly group meeting are moved to Monday. Very start of the week is to wind up everything. I think I liked the Friday ones better. You work all week, summarize it on Friday and get done with it. Now I get lazy in the week to do it and weekend takes the toll of my laziness.

NB - This is my 500th post on Blogger!!!

Blizzard

The semester is almost over and as usual Im already falling behind my personal goals.
Why is it that we are always behind our work targets? For once can it happen we are ahead on work schedule? I hope it does.

I think I need to organize myself more. Today morning I had to be in the class I am teaching and, can you believe it, I forgot. It was the same time as group meeting and I did not inform others about it. I don't know why I did it. It was pretty embarrassing situation. It was only after series of successive apologies that I was feeling less guilty.

Not to mention that I do maintain a calender. So let today be the day since when I started doing things on a daily schedule. And let tomorrow be the day since when I stopped giving up on it.

And tell you what. It is April 18. Eight'o clock in the evening. It is still some sunlight. And it is still snowing cats and dogs. We had a severe blizzard last one day. Too bad.

30 great opening lines in literature

Adapted from Telegraph article. Im listing down only the interesting ones. You can read full article at telegraph page.

--“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice (1813)

--'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (1878)

--‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’

George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

--"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

J.D Salinger: The Catcher In The Rye (1951)

--"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticising any one, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)

--“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”

Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis (1915)

--“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”

Samuel Beckett: Murphy (1938)

--"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking."

Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye To Berlin (1939)

--"All this happened, more or less."

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five (1969)

Happy Holi

Sometimes I just spend time sitting on my office desk thinking about things. What if I hadn't left the country to pursue PhD? Had I been able to help Mom's illness better? It torments to think why we did not pay some serious attention to it much earlier. Probably we did. Met different doctors and nobody could do much about it and we just got used to it. Once the problem exacerbated, it demanded more care than ever. I was not around and couldn't guess whats going on. Had I been around could I have made a difference? I don't know. But in the hindsight I can say it needed more attention. Its funny how much you can analyze things in the hindsight

Coming back to the topic, Happy Holi to all my readers. No holi for me today. We may have a holi party in next couple of weeks.

Every Holi I am not at home reminds me of this one picture. Few years back I framed this picture and gifted to Mom on her birthday. She still cherishes this gift, specially on Holi.

End break

So finally I got to see the Atlantic sunrise in the morning. It was really beautiful. Picture will say the thousand words to you.

We had a flight in the night but we needed to leave early because of the 180 mile drive. But before we ended the vacation came the most amazing moment of the trip. The one hour snorkelling excursion. The beautiful underwater creatures were as colourful as they show in discovery channel. Let me tell you guys it is not a post camera edit in those videos. At one of the places the sea bed was very shallow and I could very clearly see the barracuda waiting behind a big rock to ambush a group of smaller fishes. I waited a bit to see the hunt but the game would take longer than I could stay there.
Those pleasing images are itched in memory like photographic images. I did not have a waterproof camera to take the images but you can catch something similar on google. It will take a long time for these images to fade from my memory.

Half break

The first half of the break gone. Actually more than half. Two days in city of Miami were good. The Atlantic ocean is majestic! truly majestic. First day was just hanging around the south beach, collecting some sea-shells and pebbles (old habits die hard). While walking on the beach I met a very interesting old man. He was Vietnam veteran and interested in history. Talked to him at some length before my buddies called me up. It is good to know the perspective of someone who had been to the down and dirty. He said his job was to fly small glider plane to be shot down by Vietnamese. This helped locate their positions.
Now I am in Key west which is southernmost tip of US. Im home blogging and rest of my team is club hopping. I want to get up early tomorrow. If I do I will be lucky enough to witness sunrise in the morning.

This is Atlantic Ocean as seen from Miami beach around noontime. Majestic, isn't it?

Break

After a long time Im taking a break for 4 day trip to Florida. I was not sure if I can go for it or not. It is in the mid of week. I will miss a lot of work that could have been done in this 4 days.

Lisa cane

Hello. Meet my new roommate Lisa Cane. I bought it from my lab at Saint Anthony Falls Laboratory to its new home.

I hope we can get along well and it enjoys the stay.

More work

Hi all. It is been long since I took some serious time to blog. Blogger is getting a miss every time I surf over internet. Not wrong to say that I was quite busy. First wrapping up the project I was working on plus starting new project. Secondly mom's health and India trip.
Okay. Whatever I do not want blogger to be second casualty of heavy work schedule. Facebook being the first one. But facebook didn't serve any purpose either so it had to go. Did it?

The unfunded project about density current that I was working on was a short one. Probably not going to be my thesis topic but it was interesting piece of work. It did generate some beautiful imagery. We are working to get something publishable out of it. I will post some of it here if it actually gets published somewhere.
First up is a conference abstract due within a month. Then shoot for a journal paper. It would be good to have some creditworthy work under your belt. I am kind of excited about it but not too excited because I haven't started writing anything. Next month or so will unfold the details.
The semester is going a tough because of the TA course of which I have little idea. It takes usually more than what I am paid for. But that's the nature of things with Indians in most of the world :D I am not complaining.
I have a bunch of lab reports to grade. Self goal was to grade them by saturday and then have Sunday left to recreate. Reality is there are only 13 minutes left in Saturday and I havent started yet. :( Too bad.

I've also started going swimming once every week. Not as frequent as I would love to but lets say any non-zero frequency is much better than not going at all. I think Im  improving bit by bit every week. (Just have been two weeks so far :|)

Work

However much you may work it is not enough. That is grad school. There is always a feeling that you are not doing much.
Is there any cure to this?

Are you a doctor?

Are you a doctor? What kind of doctor?
Apollo clinic claims to provide;
"The best clinicians in their fields. A commitment to the latest technology. A caring and compassionate approach to customers and families". I fail to see its validity and request you to help me understand the veracity of the above claim in view of the following experience.

My mom was a 'customer' of Apollo clinic Allahabad since  last 1.5 years. She has been a regular visitor and went to him with the shortening of breath problem among few others like allergy to pollen,dust, cold, loss of sleep, severe coughing, etc.
She was being treated for thyroid, which she seems to suffering since a long time. But the respiratory problems never alleviated. And this week she went to Artemis hospital in Gurgaon and almost immediately she was diagnosed with COPD (Chronic Obstructive pulmonary Disease) at severe stage with severe lung damage as well as ABPA. Do you see here how miserably has the doctor failed here? In spite being a regular visitor for over 1.5 years and reporting respiratory problem all the while it was detected only at severe stage. I mean come on. COPD is not a disease which happens to 1 in million or something which is very new. This being a chronic problem means there is no treatment.Only thing we can do now is to stop it from worsening and learn to live with it. You can't imagine how helpless I feel. I thought that amidst the era of burgeoning scientific progress diseases

Who is responsible for her condition? My Mom? Because she consulted a doctor who seems to be incapable of either treating or referring to an able person? Or the doctor who did nothing to stop the development of a chronic disease under his watch? Or the authorities who thought he is fit to provide consultation to patients?
I need answers to above questions and request you very humbly to respond to them within a week which I think is fair amount of time.

Winter

Winter is here.We had around 10 inches of snow in 36 hours last weekend and everything outdoors you can fathom was covered in white.It is gloomy weather everywhere. Only thing you can see outside is grey, gloom.
Winter has never been a nice time for me. At least not in the last two years. Things havent been going 'great' work wise. I booked a ticket to India few months ago but it doesn't look like I will make it. Back at home Mom has been diagnosed with severe lung damage. Its COPD. For some reason even after continuous consulting with doctors it went away undetected and was allowed to get worse. After religiously following the doctor for 1.5 years if this is what you get, COPD at severe, stage then what's the point?
Right now I am furious. And dejected. And helpless. And don't know what else. I have been reading a lot of stuff over the internet about COPD and it is not exciting. Where did we go wrong? Sometimes you just fail to appreciate the positiveness in life. And it is this time right now. How can you keep up your spirit when nothing seems to be going right? I am out of ideas. But I am fighting.

Alternate profession

While I was working in a corporate job I found everything elusive and I and a friend of mine used to compare it with farming a ground and how the later is so fulfilling job. What do you need end of the day. Grow your own food. What better than that? Like run your own company. You may joke about it. Even think about it. But to do it is whole lot different. There are 2 persons I read about that made me go back to this thought (far from action).

First one was a few days ago. A white collar employee from Delhi turns to turmeric farming. Catch it here.

Second and more amazing. It is about about this postgraduate rickshaw wala It takes a lot of guts to come face to face with the urban survival challenge by choice. Obviously it didn't go down well with the family and asa they heard about it they wanted him back in house. The motive was interesting. How many of us can do that?
The Hindu article. The gentleman blogs here.

Happy Diwali

Happy Diwali to all of you. I had to wake up early today to take part in pooja proceedings back home through video conf.
It has been a long day today. Another long day awaits tomorrow. Good nighty!