19 till I die

Usually, acknowledging the existence of an underlying coherence in the vast unpredictable universe brings me humility and gratitude. Being brought up in a Hindu family, the images, stories and prayers we heard as children bring me personal comfort. No fundamentalist rationalist/atheist or Hindu will claim me fully as one of their own. I'm fortunately in a place in life where I can say that I don't care. Religion to me is deeply personal. Ironically, I have seen that sharing the experience with a group though is more powerful than most human experiences can ever be. History, though is one long testament to how that experience has been subverted for political and commercial gains. With that out of the way, let me say that during my teens and twenties I so strongly believed that any connect with any deity is so personal that going to temples is meaningless. If God is everywhere, why does anyone need a single place of worship? However, in my in my mid twenties, when I went to a tem...

I genuinely enjoy being a scientist. Apart from the thrill of finding things out, witnessing people enter the lab as novices and leave with experience and growth is a massive perk of running a scientific team. Not everything is rosy. I've overseen 17 master's theses, i.e. I've seen my share of talent and the void. What I'm about to share is new and unpleasant. This is about a project assistant, who I will call Raju here. He spent a year going through the motions, not contributing to the lab's progress. Three months ago, I asked him to leave the lab, leaving enough time for him to find his next step. We had committed for a year, which ended last week. And this is what happened yesterday: Raju first sent an email with only one Word file attached to it and no subject. I looked at the contents. I took it to the lab to show them how not to write a statement of purpose. The contents of the doc suggested he has extensive experience addressing stemness in C2C12 cells. That ...