Thursday, March 21, 2024

A milestone

 Today, I submitted my first ICMR grant. To me, it feels like an enormous milestone that should be marked in some way. I had immersed myself in it for weeks... working on it a bit at a time until two days ago when I pulled a couple of all-nighters and finished it up and submitted it this morning, a few hours before the deadline. 

Why do I feel this sense of accomplishment? I may not get the grant (though I certainly hope I do), and this is not the first grant I have written.. what is so great about this one? Perhaps it is because ICMR is the Indian equivalent of the NIH and the grant I wrote is like the R01- a large, complex beast with expectations of depth of theoretical knowledge, technical expertise, practical wisdom and broad research experience. All the grants I have written and won thus far have been smaller: short, innovative, gives you money to tinker and flash but does not give you the sense of putting down roots. 

The grant I wrote was also different in another significant way: it was not a discovery project in fields I have received traditional training in, not a business innovation pitch which is something I have learned to do in the past few years, but in a field that I have long yearned to enter but felt like I could never crack:  in public health implementation. 

A decade after leaving academia, I submitted a grant to the pinnacle of Indian academic research organizations. I feel good about it.  

Do I feel good because I want to be thought of as an academic research scientist? 

I think not. Just look at the richness of my life:

During this decade, I have gained experience in so many things. I have learned to stand only on my feet, with no organization and no institutional structure to protect me, no expectation of a predictable salary and no automatic legacy of authority. I have built my networks from scratch, I have stumbled and fallen and clambered up; I have starved, struggled with insecurity and feared; I have brought on people, trained them and let them go. I have built my reputation as someone cheerful, energetic, endlessly optimistic and ever-willing to befriend, be helpful and collaborate. I hope I also have built a reputation for integrity and transparency. These are not things that I have inherited from old mentors or from institutional pedigrees. These are values I cultivated after deep questioning and practiced even when it may not always have been easy. 

Would I have been able to do all this in the protected surroundings of an academic institute? I like to think I would not.

I feel a bit battered and bruised. But I feel stable, like I have put down roots. I know that things that would have swayed and shaken me a decade ago do not faze me as much anymore. I know that there is no ideal world, but only the serenity and confidence we build for ourselves. I remember my father like that- as someone who faced the world with the confidence that he had seen things that scared him but faced them anyway. And as someone who knew what he stood for and was like a tree-solid, stable and strong.  

It's funny that an ICMR grant makes me think of him. But perhaps it is the knowledge that I have come really far and maybe that much closer to him. 

I want to highlight what I read recently in a book called "All About Love- A New Vision" by bell hooks. She shared the definition of love that made most sense to her: Love is anything that leads to your or another's spiritual growth.

Let me spend the next decades living this- let me love my children, husband and family such that they feel enabled in their spiritual growth. Let me grow in mine. And if my spiritual growth includes a component of grant writing that induces such a deep sense of wonder, gratitude and peace, then let me acknowledge and embrace that.

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

Anticipation

What is it about the quality of silence after you zap a mosquito that's been buzzing around near your ear? 


It is like the waiting void... like the ghost of that mosquito is going to appear and start buzzing again. 

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Sudoku and my PhD thesis

 Recently I had an epiphany about Sudoku. 

As a novice or even a competent player,  I used to focus on individual cells.  If a cell can have 9 different possibilities for its identity at the beginning of the game,  the challenge is to reduce the number of possibilities for each cell to exactly 1 (ideal), 2(solvable), 3 and above (may not be useful). 

The whole reasoning is deductive and reductive- bringing down the number of possibilities through logic. This works well for Easy or Moderate levels. But in advanced Sudoku puzzles mere deductive logic does not enable you to solve the puzzle. For these, you can get up to a certain point with deductive logic, but then, will get stuck. This is the time when you have to zoom out. You can no longer focus on individual cells, but the puzzle as a whole.

This is where the tricks of the Phistomefel ring and Y/X wings come into play. The only way one can even think about using them is when one takes a whole-puzzle approach, inductive approach of building up based on the deduced possibilities. The switch in thinking has to happen at a particular time from deductive to inducive logic.

I realized that this was my failing in my PhD thesis and really, in understanding the field of Immunology as a whole. I could never understand why cellular biochemistry when algorithm-ed in neat flow charts didn't actually work the way you expect them to work in real life, when you have live cell cultures, live infections and a mixed population of cells. There is a deductive logic that one needed to use to minimize the possibilities of the biochemical reactions and reduce that to 1 process with multiple components. Then we have to realize that just because CD8 T cells play a particular known role does not mean that that would be the only role they would play in real life, with evolving parameters and variable interactions with other cells- for predicting how such a cell would respond to such diverse stimuli, an inductive logic is needed.

Inductive logic is not typically taught to Immunologists or indeed, biomedical trainee scientists or graduate students. But this switch between deductive and inductive was probably what was missing in my PhD years and why I struggled to make consistent sense of the information the world was throwing at me.

     

Tuesday, January 9, 2024

Windfall

 One person's petty change is another person's windfall... 

Or maybe it's the same person at different points of time. 

Sometime in 2022, I had barely any money in my bank account...a couple of hundred rupees... and the company account wasn't faring too much better,  I think...I had earmarked funds for salaries and didn't want to touch that amount for drawing an advance or something. 

I had sufficient funds in my metro card so could travel around, and had access to good food at home (and knew that if push came to shove,  i could always ask the man to transfer some moolah to my account,  but wasn't ready to do that yet) so I wasn't suffering by any means but the pressure of my nearly empty account was on my mind.  

And all of a sudden,  I got a notification that some 2000 rupees had been deposited into my account as an honorarium for some talk I had given.  My heart leapt in joy.  Such bliss, such gratitude and such warmth towards the world!

I think the biggest thing I have learned from my experience with entrepreneurship is to never take money for granted, and, simultaneously,  never to get too attached to it.  


Friday, January 5, 2024

Lazy Saturday

 Sometimes, it is nice, fuzzy and essential to forget about the never-ending to-do list of life, sit in a comfortable chair lit by the morning sun, watch insects fly around lazily and let one's mind wander.

This week has been busy with household related duties. My in-laws are here inviting people for my BIL's upcoming wedding. Naturally, this means that I cannot buy cereal and then tell the kids to take care of their own breakfast but that I have to cook, clean, do laundry and keep the house kind of clean. This takes a lot of effort and planning and I am rather amazed at myself for having done this reasonably well. But I am also really tired and ready to go back to my slothful ways. Too much efficiency and productivity are not good for one's mental health.

I decided to expand my thinking and brain this month and read about stuff that might normally makes me uncomfortable. As part of this, I am reading a book on polyamory:

As anyone who knows me can attest: I am the Undisputed Devourer of heteronormal romance novels.
I started reading LGBTQ romance when one of my favorite authors, Courtney Milan, wrote a MM romance novella in an anthology called Hamilton's Battalion and I adored it- it was outright the best story in the entire book. And after that, I discovered many other writers whom I enjoy reading and who write about MM or FF romance: KJ Charles, Cat Sebastien, Alexis Hall and more. One of the best books I read last year was "A Rake of His Own" by AJ Lancaster (the protagonist is a gardener).  Also, nowadays, even in regular, non-romance SciFi/Fantasy books, homosexuality or bisexuality has become very normalized and so one reads it, accepts it and moves on to the rest of the story- it hardly warrants more than a mention. 

But the one basic aspect that all these have in common is that they all have one couple- one human (or near-human, depending on what genre you read) having  an emotional and intimate connection with another single, sole, one human.  I did not realize just how completely I believe in and how strongly my entire foundation of life rested on the one person-loves-and-marries-one-other-person dogma until I came across this book called "More than Two". More than Two talks about the possibility of one person loving many people who may love many other people. Honestly, the first paragraph of the first chapter made me deeply uncomfortable: the authors describe how a guy works, goes home to his wife, who has her boyfriend who lives with them, and how the guy and the boyfriend hang out and are friendly and once in a while the boyfriend brings home his other girlfriend and they are all friends. 

And more stories like this.

I am just like, what?? How does this even work? Do these guys actually get anything productive done in their lives or do they just keep on working on all their emotional and communication issues?  WHY would anyone want to complicate their lives this much? Just the dynamics of this makes me terribly goggle-eyed and almost anxious.... having two people get along together and reach a state of relative contentment and happiness is hard enough... now you want to add a few more? Jeez.

I have progressed to about mid-book now and the more I read it, the more I realize that the principles given in the book are actually quite universal: communication, acceptance of one's emotions, identification of fear, realizing one's triggers. And it is making me reflect and question and think. 

So my realization about myself: I may state, that as a biologist, I think that monogamy is an unnatural state- it makes no sense. Our own ancestors, the primates, do not engage in monogamy. Neither do most species in the world, even those that are considered to be monogamous (like Sarus cranes, for example).

But as a human living in our current society, I am so deeply attached to the idea of monogamy or serial mono-amory that I was finding myself utterly discomforted by the book. So, perhaps I am a bit of a hypocrite... , but maybe there is hope in me since I am sticking with the book, despite all this discomfort, and am realizing there is more in common with my version of hetero-monogamy than I had previously realized.

Also realizing that maybe I am a naturally monogamous person who does not feel the need for multiple loves. And  this does go against my biologist brain. But a good part of me is quite relieved to realize that this is also ok. And that some people may feel the need for multiple loves and emotional connections and that is....hmm... that is also ok. It may not be me, but it doesn't mean that it is wrong. And presumably such people thrive on complicating their lives and maybe it just feels complicated to me, but not to them. 

My New Year's resolution to read books that make me question myself and grow is clearly working well... almost too well, one might say.

I think after this, I might pick up a book on caste, another topic that discomforts me greatly.

But before that, I quickly downloaded Ali Hazelwood's Check and Mate, a standard boy-girl romance which is funny and sexy and it's like drinking a large glass of cool water on a hot day. So refreshingly straightforward and predictable. Phew. 

Saturday, December 2, 2023

Birding in Germany

It's been about 2-3 weeks since my return from Frankfurt. Professional work aside, it was a really good nature-immersion experience. Two sites comprised the bulk of this immersion: the Palmengarten in Frankfurt (Palm Gardens) and a small part of the Black Forest where I hiked in Baden-baden.

Weirdly enough, my urban birdwatching experience in Palmengarten was many times richer than the one in the Schwartzwald. There was a stretch in the Palmengarten, tucked away at the very border between the gardens and a small public road, while walking from the children's playground to the tropical greenhouse, which yielded the richest density of urban birds I have had the fortune to experience. 

It reminded me, in some ways, of the tree outside a hotel room in Gangtok (the hotel was called Mt. Himalayan and the room overlooked a farm). Early in the morning, around 7am, that tree was inundated with hundreds of birds- warblers, redstarts, tits- it was a breathtaking sight and utterly overwhelming. The number of birds was so high and they were so active that it was impossible to focus on any one of them long enough to identify. 

My experience in Palmengarten at one point was like that- the sheer diversity, number, activity and unfamiliarity made it near impossible to do much more than to take down brief descriptions and hope to God that they were sufficient to identify them afterwards. This was also the first time I felt the need for more technology in my birdwatching: I desperately wished for:
A) a voice recorder to take down descriptions because I couldn't move my eyes away from the birds for fear that they would disappear. 
B) a camera to be integrated within my binoculars... why are there no devices like this yet? I don't want a camera with binocular-vision, I want binoculars with a mini-camera. There is a subtle, but important, difference, I feel.


The stately entrance to PG- don't these trees look rather eerie?


This Mallard duck was taking a bit of a snooze:


So many pretty flowers like this one abounded- even in the cold!


Hello fall colors! 




The iNaturalist app tells me this is a Shelgoose:


Nitish, my colleague, friend and temporary Mitbewohner tells me this is called thatha poochi in Tamil and iNaturalist corroborates, calling it "Old Man's Beard"...close enough translation.









The most common birds in urban Frankfurt- the common blackbird



:
Common moorhens like this one were almost as common to find as humans, ambling along the various walkways of the gardens


These Egyptian geese were among the first exotic birds I saw at the gardens.  




   
These are both different species of tit. On the left is the Eurasian Blue Tit. On the right is the Great Tit- found in large numbers in urban parks in Frankfurt as well as in gardens in Baden Baden. Check out that little stripe down in the middle-almost like it's wearing a tie! RHS pic from Nat Geo.



The Eurasian Jay- what a striking creature! This bird kept fighting with both crows and blackbirds. Saw at the top of a large tree in the children's park at the gardens

This bird gave me goosebumps when I first saw it- this is the treecreeper. With its curved beak and sharp claws it crawls up the side of trees, looking for insects. This is only the 2nd or 3rd time I have seen this bird in my life, the first time being in the Himalayas (McLeodGanj)

The common linnet. Almost as common as the European Robin!

Oh you beautiful creature! This is the Great Spotted Woodpecker





The Long-Tailed Tit... what a tiny beak!Must be the smallest beak among all the birds I have ever seen!



The White Wagtail... I don't recall much about this bird, frankly.

This is a provisional identification: This is a willow warbler. It looks like a few birds I noticed at the gardens, but I can't be sure. Pic credit: eBird


In Baden-Baden, while hiking all over the place (I think I hiked 5h in total! I was almost light-headed with hunger by the time I returned to the town!), these birds were there simply everywhere- on the sidewalks, on roads, on trees lining the roads etc:

The male Eurasian chaffinch. The female is a duller brown/olive green. Pic credit: eBird

My eBird checklist is here. Ever since I got a certificate from a group called The State of India's Birds for my piddling little checklists, I feel compelled to create them. So, it's doing its job in motivating people, clearly. 



Finally, since we are talking about Germany: check out this flagon below. 



No, it's not a German beer... but a large steaming cup of Eritrean Tea!

Pic credits: Those that have not been credited are either mine or Wikimedia Commons

Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Farewell to October 2023

 Phew.... I am grateful to have come out on the other side of October 23 with my inner peace shaken, stirred, altered but ultimately intact. If my inner peace were a tangible thing, it would be a different color and perhaps texture, but the weight and shape of it might be the same. Perhaps it is a bit smaller than it was, but I think it is more precious in its current form.  

When I am many, many years older, I will look back on this past month and know that this was the month that challenged me the most in my perceptions of myself, my place in my family, my relationship to God, my understanding of dharma and what I can hold as mine and what I cannot. 

I also know I will forever feel proud of myself, for having handled the things I handled with grace, courage and honesty. This month forced me to think through things most people never have to face or question. And I floundered, stumbled, cried and crawled my way into a new understanding and a new peace.

The succeeding months may come with their own challenges and their own heartaches. But I think I will be able to handle whatever comes my way. And for the first time in a month, I am curious about these challenges rather than terrified. 

When next I am faced with a bolt out of the blue, may I remember this feeling of peace, joy, gratitude and curiosity and not mire myself in recrimination, anger and resentment. May I embrace my fears and my vulnerabilities and not try to shove them away, no matter how frightening they may be. 

A few things that have helped me immensely are the following:

a) Brene Brown's Atlas of the Heart 

b) Brene Brown's TED talk on Vulnerability

c) Chaturvedi Bhadrinath's exposition of the Mahabharatha

d) H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

e) My conversations with my friends Jhun and Shiv

f) Khalil Gibran's writings

g) Writing, writing and more writing- the only way I am able to understand myself. 

I need to thank the man for forcing me to confront my biases, implicit expectations, unspoken and swept-under-the-blanket feelings and assumptions, and to approach my relationships with him and the kids with intentionality, meaning and purpose.