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!