How not to start a talk... or maybe: how to grab everyone's attention right from the beginning, but annoy your main funder while you're at it.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for this opportunity to present my work to you.

Let me begin by saying something a little bit ominous. But don't worry, I'll follow it up right away with something much more reassuring.

This is the sort of study that makes anyone who does not actively work on it cross-eyed with boredom, it will make them roll their eyes at the total waste of NIH money, it will even go to the extent of making them swear upon their mothers' (or grandmothers', if the mothers are alive) graves that they will never, ever work on a project remotely like it.
But on the other hand, if you happen to work on something similar, you might find it a bit exciting.

Here's my promise to you today: that I will try my very best, my utmost to make the next 30 minutes mildly interesting, and who knows, may be even exciting, to the 99.9% of you who don't work on this stuff, who will never care about this stuff and who don't see even the remotest point in it.

Let me tell you what I'll be talking about. I'll begin with the our main tissue of interest (hurray for this tissue! Who doesn't love it?). After some background on how it regulates its function, I'll go forth to the basic premise of this study. Why we did what we did and why we thought it would be a good idea.

This is a difficult study- you have no idea how much we struggled to get the samples we needed and the fact that we have had so much difficulty publishing this stuff should tell you just how much we struggled to get even the samples we did. Reviewers, darn them, just don't like unmatched samples from random patients.

This is also a really expensive study. So, I hope you will understand, at the end of my talk, why we spent so many hundreds of thousands of dollars doing it. And why I spent more than 2 years trying to make sense of the ginormous terabytes of data it yielded. But I hope to convince you, by the end of my talk, that it really does make sense to do it this way, that there are serious biological phenomena that can be understood from the analyses that we have done.

Hmm... so, right, aims and objectives of this study.... well, let me be frank here. We didn't really have much of an aim to start out with, or any hypotheses. It's like a fishing project really. We hoped, when we did this, to get something interesting that would help us diagnose... anything, really. But I do have one section of my analysis that is hypothesis-driven. So that's something.

I won't bore you with the multitudinous reams of analyses that I've done on this data. It would go against my initial credo not to let you get cross-eyed with boredom. So I'll just share some small snippets of relatively interesting findings.

I will conclude this talk by telling you a bit about our future directions. Some of you might consider this mostly hand-waving, driven less by evidence than by fervent desires and fervid dreams. But I can assure that we do have some preliminary data, in the pipeline, that supports our initial findings.

So, let's begin!

Why women read romance novels

Yes, of course because they want an escape from their real lives. But why do they want this escape?

a) In romance novels, the heroine is always appreciated by the hero, by the middle or end of the book if not right in the beginning, with the promise that he will do so for the rest of their lives. No matter how much or how little she actually does, he always thinks she does a huge lot and is always impressed.
b) The heroine has help- she is not juggling the work of teacher, nanny, cook, laundrywoman and housekeeper in addition to her day job. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could all afford that kind of help?
c) Heroine (or hero)'s hard work always pays.
d) Good sex. How nice to be able to imagine a world where there is always a turn-on and always an orgasm!
e) Refer to (b) again. And again. And again.
f) Oh, and heroine (almost always) has great clothes.

Plan to Become Fitter

a) Park car a mile away from lab and walk between car and lab. Target speed: 1 mile in 13 minutes.
b) No elevators; only stairs
c) Cut down on desserts.
d) Play TT everyday with husband.

Frustrated

I like writing. I like science. And I like scientific writing.
Why, then, is it so hard for me to type up the results of the projects I've been cranking away at and make a decent paper out of them?
I have a story, I have the results, all I need to do is get them on paper in a semi-interesting way.
But no, my words are wooden, the story is all in my head and whatever I write makes no sense to anybody else reading it.

And I only have about 2 months to go to write up my 3 papers and submit them! And this paper is the easier of the lot! And I haven't even begun working on writing up the other two!Yaaarrrggh!

Deadline-driven

Some people are self-motivated. They wake up at an hour they set, they plan their days and they stick to their plan. I used to think that I was one of them, in moments of especial self-delusion. When a small voice at the back of my head would raise some doubts about the veracity of such beliefs, I would pinpoint some specific instances when I would have made a plan and stuck to it, or invest some small incidence with special significance to prove this point.

Last week, the daycare/preschool place put into effect a strict rule (no more gentle guidelines, for tardy moms like me) that kids have to be dropped off by 9am or will no longer be allowed inside the place. If you who know me and have even a small idea of my kid-dropping-off schedule, you will understand the utter shock to the system this rule was. I have routinely been dropping off kids anywhere between 10am to noon at daycare, precisely because I could. On the infrequent days when I schedule a morning meeting, I make a special effort to drag myself and the kids out by 8:30am, but that's fairly rare. All my meetings, experiments, deadlines usually are kept during the latter half of the day.

Today has been day #4 of dropping the kids off to school before 9am, and I can clearly see that I am, to most extent, rule- and deadline- driven. Unless acted upon by an external, implacable force, I, alas, tend to stay at rest and simultaneously tend towards disorderliness, thereby combining both the first law of Newton as well as the second law of Thermodynamics.

What's utterly surprising to me is that how easy this transition was- I am not scrambling in the mornings, the way I used to when the deadline was not there; instead, I find that I have time to wash the dishes, and give the kids a bath, along with breakfast and packing lunch. How utterly strange!

Perhaps the rule makes me plan out my mornings the previous night, so I am no longer disoriented and trying to create a plan while getting everybody ready as soon as I wake up.

It's a bit sad that I apparently need an external somebody threatening to punish me before I can get my act together. But hey, at least the job gets done. And now I have a new insight into myself.

All this reflection, all this self-obsessed blogging all these years, and I find that the person I know the least is the one closest to me.

Today seems to be a day for profound insights.

Things accomplished in 1 month

We returned to the US on 15th December 2014. We have been insanely busy since then, preparing for our move back to India.

Do you want to see a list of all the things we have done? Prepare to be blown out of your mind!

1. Varsha : Renegotiated contract for postdoc to end in March. Hurray! Did anyone think I would ever be done being a postdoc or a variation thereof? I certainly never did!

2. Ram: In the process of renegotiating contract to end in May/ June.

3. Ram: Set up all the components and pulled in all the people to tie in research, teaching, global health and continue collaborations in the US with proposed clinical activities in India

4. Varsha and Ram: wrote up a 30 page (30 pages!) business proposal for Ram's clinic with the help of Varsha's dad and Ram's cousin.

5. Varsha: is preparing Ani for the Indian educational system (a pox on cursive writing!)

6. Ani: despite grave doubts, is willing to be prepared for Indian educational system

7. Varsha: has cleaned up a MILLION vomits on various surfaces since the kids caught a stomach bug. Feels like she has vomit-smell and vomit-feel permanently etched in her brain.

8. Ram: Got in touch with real estate agent for selling house. Process has begun! May it get completed with the least headache possible.

9. Varsha: Figured out main components of WHAT SHE WANTS TO DO IN LIFE in India! Has started the process of gaining credentials in a radically new field which feels great and right for her.

10. Varsha and Ram: outsourced the job of figuring out how to ship stuff to India to another of Ram's ever-helpful cousins.

11. Durga: Is realizing that she needs to help out her mom more. Has begun to try to put on her own diapers and clothes. Also carried her lunch boxes to the sink for me to wash and keep ready.

Ha!

Sri Ramakrishna Arti

This is a song I had heard for the first time in 2013. It is called Ramakrishna Arti and was composed by Swami Vivekananda for his guru, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa.
It is a hauntingly beautiful song and at least for me, it stays in my head because I find the tune completely unpredictable.
The type of classical music from I am familiar with is called Carnatic. This is the system I learned when young and have listened to nearly all my life. I don't know the theory or much of the history to this system, but to my mind, Carnatic music follows a fairly rigid structure. There are raagams, or "patterns" of escalating and decreasing notes and when you sing a song, the tune has to follow a particular pattern. I guess all music is like that, but in both Carnatic and its north Indian counterpart, Hindustani, the patterns are given names, such as Hamsadhvani raagam (song of the swan "pattern") or Mohini raagam (that which dazzles the mind) or whatever. So if I were to tell you that the raagam for my song is Mohini, no matter the lyrics, you would be able to figure out the general tune of the song.
I am also a bit familiar with Western classical music, having hung around people in my old lab who listened to it often.
This song, however, falls completely outside my area of familiarity. When it began, I started reciting the words aloud expecting that the tune would ultimately fall into some familiar pattern, but it didn't. The tune rises and falls dramatically and completely unexpectedly. If I were to draw it out, it would look like hills and valleys, punctuated by hillocks. Then there are the long drawn out last syllables, always going on either a bit longer or shorter than expected.

I think one of the reasons why it doesn't fall into an expected pattern is because of the number of beats: each line to this song has 12 beats, whereas most Carnatic music pieces have 8 or multiples of 8. So do most Western classical pieces. The 12-beat system really threw me off. I think that's why I find the timing of it so confusing and always end up feeling like Mr.Bean.