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. :-)