SoHo

The cobbled alleys waited and watched.

For more than two centuries, it stood testimony to the winds of change that had transformed the shady bohemianism of the mid nineteenth century to the art nouveau of the post war period which frittered away to swanky outdoor shopping arcades and art of living niches in the present day.

In its early days, it fondly reminisced, the cobblestone streets resonated with horse-drawn carriages that ferried the rich and the famous of the day. Hotels and casinos, minstrel halls and plush brothels stood side by side, lit up in the fragrant summer evenings by gaslight street-lamps, embellished with elaborate wrought iron carvings. It was the hub of joie de vivre, spicy and bohemian. Not for nothing was it called the "Fifth Avenue" of the day.

The post Civil War period brought with it an age of rapid industrialization, wherein it witnessed the mushrooming of countless textile industries. The "lofts" then created, would later serve as ateliers for scores of aspiring artists, whose zestful imaginations inspired the art revolution of that age.

In the present day, swanky SUVs drive past and young adults indulge in the phenomenon of outdoor-shopping. But the wrought-iron fire escapes, tastefully adorned street lights and cobbled alleys still remain. And somewhere in space and time, an avid photographer fell in love with its colorful gaiety, while on a shooting spree.

Its life story read like an epic. It had seen lavish times, followed by a century of post colonial industrialization and the great art movements of the mid-twentieth century. The commonality despite such drastic shifts had always been its energetic uniqueness. The spicy bohemia, art nouveau and frenzied commerce all reveled in the liveliness of its vigor. And within it generations cherished the soulful demeanor of the paved streets and its thereabouts. In the portals of history, time moved on.

The cobbled alleys waited and watched.

That surely looks familiar...

DISCLAIMER (for folks who dont' already sense it from the adjoining picture) - What ensues is homogeneous gibberish. Read at your own risk.

The alien kid is ready to sneak in through the chimney of the hood at one end of the room. He is about to undertake a daring journey across the seven bays. Ask why? With dreamy eyes and steely resolve, it says - "Because, it's there..."

Ready. set.. go...

Hey, what's here - that's a red bin with a pirate flag on it..

I hear voices. That sounds human.. no robotic..... hmm human! One voice is speaking Hebrew, the other Hindi... that's surprising!! They are talking to each other and seem to be communicating well...

Watch out!!! Missed the huge crystal that was shot at a precise angle by a whisker... It has just landed on the ground and turned into a serene samurai sword on a yoga mat!! I don't get this at all...

A blanket of calmness enshrouds me as I enter into the next bay...

The temperature drops below anything on the scale to make it the coolest bay ever... There goes a laptop with a robotic arm pricking a tray all over the place. As I make my way through a hurdle of glass plates, I sniff a gun - that characteristic smell of burnt sulfur... Fortunately I have one to defend myself against it..

I hear some voices again.. this time it's just one person... speaking in a language so foreign that the only thing I can sense that he is cursing...

What do we have next? A smile... just a smile!!! where's the rest?? Move on, you bugger!!

Then there's a minefield... a battleground of toxins, baker's yeast and the human cells trying to go one up over each other!!

I can almost see the pot of gold at the end of a tunnel (What's wrong with you??), when a deadly combination of crouching tiger and hidden dragon leaps onto me... Thanks to my alien agility, could take evasive action!!

But now, who do we have here? An unkempt head in flames clad in a white coat!!

I manage to get a glimpse of this burning head. Finally, 'That surely looks familiar...'
Hey Atomic!!

Friend, how come you are here??

That's a long story...

A threatening voice calls out - Stop this complete gibberish and hit the sack boys... you shall know more when the group meets at noon tomorrow!!

Ok ma'm. Good night!!

I hear a baritone clearing his throat in the distance as my eyes decide to change their stance...


Carbide

...

It's been about two weeks since I came back from my vacation at home in the foothills of Himalayas.

It was in this little hometown that I learnt to count using my fingers, to read a wall clock, wanted to break free of the four walls of a play school to wander into the world, met my first interviewer without knowing what he really meant other than a man who dressed in white from top to bottom and had the word 'principal' attached to him.

No sooner I had joined Don Bosco in Grade 1, than I came down tumbling the first flight of stairs quite akin to Jack in my world of nursery rhymes. It was quite a frightening experience to go to a new school and meet an avalanche of people rushing down stairs, fall head flat and end up with a bruised skull.

Thereafter, alighting a flight of stairs was the most challenging thing in school for me. The person who shouldered me through those difficult times was an angelic 'Anglo Indian lady'. She was the 'Lady with the hand' - the hand which I would cling on to for life. As the school bell rang, I would wait for her to appear from the teacher's room and every day for the first two years of my school life, she would take me through the dreaded staircases to the ground floor. She was Mrs. Glashan.

It's now close to a decade that I have left Don Bosco but this is a memory that has lasted untarnished through the shingles of time. I vividly remember her look, her watch, her sarees and her smile. It was in search of all this and more, I found myself at the doorsteps of my school in this new year.

The cacophonous hour of lunch break was on but a gossamer of silence enshrouded me. The familiar school board carried a little note. Mrs. Glashan had passed away in the morning.

The stairs were right in front but the fear of not having the hand to hold me was overbearing. I turned back.

Some losses are irrevocable...

Carbide

Lectures with a twist

The past week has been interesting, on more counts than one. For a change, I attended two lectures, totally outside the purview of chemical biology, or chemistry in general. First, was the evening talk with Henry Kissinger at Caspary Auditorium at Rockefeller. As we lined up outside Caspary well close to 45 min before the talk began, I couldn't help but wonder how long it had been since I had seen serpentine queues of such dimension. It somehow was reminiscent of the long lines near the entrance to Puja pandals during the glorious Durga Puja days or may be those outside ration shops distributing the week's quota of kerosene oil a dozen years back. Kind of odd, the comparison I just made. I know.

The talk, or rather the question-answer session began and we traversed through issues ranging from the Vietnam War, Yom Kippur war, the US-Cuban relations of the dormant 1960s to current US diplomatic decisions in Afghanistan, the emergence of China as a nation of increasing economic stature and US environmental policies. Despite the fact that he's well into his eighties, Dr. Kissinger addressed each question with an eye for detail and a staunch belief in diplomatic logic. At the end of it all, you couldn't help but admire the man for the strength of his beliefs, whether or not you agreed with him.

The other lecture was by Sandra Faber, an astronomer and astrophysicist from UCSC. Titled "A Room with a View: Perspectives from Earth on the Cosmos", the talk was interspersed with rare images of galaxies, star clusters and the cosmos beyond, as taken by the Hubble telescope, in an attempt to study the Universe as it was, right after the Big Bang. As she went on, one couldn't help but marvel at the gigantic scales, both in terms of time and space that defined such studies, and how remarkably different they were from the angstrom level eye for miniature detail of the structural biologist.

Interesting..... tasting a different flavor. :-)

An attempt

My first snow in 2010

Snowy Friday noon
Icicles on empty boughs
White pin drop silence

Times Square all by myself

Dazzling bright ad world
Solitary monologues
Alone with coffee

68th Street, Lex Av

Presbyterian crowd
The 6 train lurches forward
Grimy grayish rails

Southern Avenue

Sunshine through green sieves
Dahi Phuchka by VP
Yellow cabs zoom past

Gariahat market

Colorful wares 'round
Constant gay cacophony
Lost for words am I

The teen who didn't want to let go

The last time I visited India, I barely got the time to blog. Home after six months meant long afternoon siestas, sumptuous machher jhol lunches, talking on the phone ad lib and meeting old friends and as many relatives as you can! Now that I have returned to colder lands, I have the time to reminisce, with a fond remembrance and a tear in my eye.

Despite the much awaited warmth of the Kolkata winter and the welcoming smiles of the family, something didn't quite strike the right note. True, there was Dahi Phuchka at VP, steaming coffee over endless chats, the usual bohemian markets at Gariahat and the stream of bookworms along the gullies around College Street. In fact, Doi Bora at home never tasted better (this must be the aftershocks of realizing that sooner or later, one does have to cook one's own dinners! ) The Sunday blogs in TOI were never before read with more laze (the kind that typifies Kolkata Sunday after-lunch 'I-have-all-the-time-in the-world'). And yet, I felt strangely out of place. Alienated in my own home.

For one, everybody around me had something more to do that just sit around and chat. Or run an eat-sleep-chat-outings cycle that I was kind of wishing they would join me in. The people who stayed year around in Cal actually had work. What was I thinking? Baba left for lab even before I had properly woken up (read, 8 am), Maa had her school students to worry about, Bon strode off to college, cell phone and notebooks in tow and most of my friends work, even on weekday evenings and weekends! Somehow, every time I went home, I pranced back to age 18, when I had just left. Within me, the just-leaving-teens soul still wanted to go for long family vacations or watch two movies back to back in the neighborhood theatre. But Inox, would its exorbitantly priced shows wouldn't allow that. And suddenly, people around me did not have the time to laze around for a fortnight in a hill station far away.

Kolkata symbolizes school life for me, but for my friends, it has come to mean much more than that. A sizable fraction of them went to college in the city of joy and quite a few of them ended up working there. Understandably, the city has different connotations for them. In fact, some of them were married and had understandably, a higher degree of commitment to attend to than me, the vacationing-jobless-I could have endless pots of coffee-24 year old. I guess its high time I realized that and moved on. May be then I can enjoy, without getting taken aback every time, and ending up feeling blue. Sigh!

Reminiscing my Malgudi days...

It's been almost two months since I've been thinking of this post, but then as always, there's that "something" which prevents me from actually putting finger to keyboard! It all started when I went for the Notes of Hope 2009 program organized by ASHA. As the distinctive tones of the violin stalwarts from the Lalgudi school of music started to mellow my senses, I was suddenly transported to days past. The violin-mridangam-ghatam magic was familiar, and I was already flowing back in tune with their expressive bani.

I was back loitering the streets of R. K. Narayan's Malleswaram, the refreshing fragnance of the jasmines coalescing with the whiff of freshly boiled corn wafting past. The evening prayers had just begun in the innumerous kovils...the mild pitter-patter of footsteps on a rainy day..as the Adi Tal resonated through Thyagaraja's lyrics, I was reminiscent of the first time Deepu had guided me all the way through my first steps experiencing a Thyagaraja couplet...of the tepid bitterness of Coffee Board coffee on a vapid Wednesday noon after futile battles with staying awake in the Total synthesis classes...there was the Summer of 2006, complete with Monoda's smile, bike-rides in the rain, more interviews than I cared for, dabbling in retinal hyperpolarizability, and late night Tea Board addas!

The violin notes took me through the gullies of the city I forgot to appreciate when I was there...relationships broken over friendships forged...CTR dosas...bisi bisi sambar vada...Prof. Guru Row assisting me and Dipsy through a wayward crossword...the music reached a crescendo as I mourned the fact that the one person I was so keen on, would in fact never learn to play the violin...really, Bengaluru, I never thought I'd have to say this, but I already miss you!