Mumbai Terror Attacks...

Well i guess all of you must be knowing about the Mumbai terror attacks... Now i am deeply saddened and disgusted by the state of affairs, but the point that i want to make is do we really get the significance or reality of the situation. For eg: from all the contributors of this blog, except Vids and Kamy, we all were not in Mumbai at the time. This somehow deadened the impact,softened the blow, somehow buffered it. Atleast for me. Maybe that's cause i don't read any newspapers regularly in Pune and definitely not during exams and that i don't watch news there either. But when i returned to Mumbai shortly after, i understood the gravity of the situation and literally for 2 days there was nothing else i could think about, while in Pune i thought about this for probably 2 hours in so many days, that's all. Then what about the rest of the country??? the rest of the country isn't even from Mumbai to feel anything as hard as we might. And what about the policy makers sitting up there in Dilli?? But this "Geographical Barrier" does insulate and that's not good.

Mentos + Coke == Instant death....????

hi guys!!
hey remember we were planning to do that experiment to test what happens when mentos is mixed with coke?? we've heard of stuff regarding someone dying when he drank coke over mentos...
here's an Excerpt from "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman"

I often had this problem of demonstrating to these fellas (his fraternity frnds) something that they didnt believe- the time when some claimed that if you took asprin and coke you'd fall faint directly. I told them I thought it was a lot of baloney, and offered to take aspirin and Coke together. Then they got into argument whether you should have the aspirin before coke, just after coke or mixed in the coke.So I had 6 aspirins and 3 cokes, 1 right after the other. First, I took 2 aspirins and then a coke, then we dissolved two aspirins in a coke and I took that, and then I took a coke and 2 aspirins. Each time the idiots who believed it, were standing around me, waiting to catch me when i fainted. But nothing happened.

any one wanting to try out the same with coke and mentos????

Lifes weird!!!

Lifes majorly weird at the moment....

Just to bring u all up to date with whats up with me in Pune...

We have sem end exams from 17th to 28th Nov.

Due to bad management of lectures schedule we are getting prep hols from 9th onwards...thats 8 days to study 7 theory papers and 5 Practical papers(Initially we were to have prep hols from 3rd Nov)

I am majorly screwed in some subjects and am getting consistently a downward curve when my internal marks are plotted.

I have not done anything productive this semester.

And after all this i have absolutely no tensions regarding the damn sem end exams though i do have a bad feeling about it!!!

I have to go to mumbai for a day to get my pic clicked for making my Driving licence dunno when will i do that!!!
I have got a new sim card but will use it after my driving license work gets completed... will msg u all the number when i start using it!!!

Well so much for my life!!!
And i just feel its a bit weird!!! for no particular reason....i guess even that is weird!!!
DAMN!!

Beat that....if u can..!!!

-sunday morning --- 8 till 10:30
-under severe dehydarted conditions --- (thats y only 7 buckets of hot water)
-Three fistfuls of detergent (Tide-Jasmine)
- 2 pairs socks
- 2 handkercheifs
- 7 underwears
- 3 tshirts
- 2 bermudas
AND
very wet hands-
A missed C Practical (no regrets about that...)
and a ruined sunday morning...

but beat this count if u can!!!

Welcome to Sajjanpur!!

Hey guys!! I just saw a movie named Welcome to Sajjanpur (by Shyam Benegal) and was thinking about it...
In case u haven't yet seen the movie, do watch it.

The movie starts with the description of the village of how a village "Durjanpur" was renamed as "Sajjanpur", and how the villagers have turned bad (durjan) from good (sajjan). It's a story of a typical Indian village, which is backward in true sense (at least depicted in better way than ne other bolly movie). It depicts the lifes of actual villagers, their daily lives and behaviour.

The movie contains perverts, criminals, bitches, ignorant ppl, naïve ppl, power-hungry bastards. But the way each character is depicted and the way the script goes, u’ll laugh at almost every situation. Punch-lines are abundant in the movie and the use of typical village language n vocab actually tickles u.
One thing that all of us failed to realize, at that point of time, was the actual message that was being presented to us. Throughout the movie, the message that was being projected was that life in an Indian village is pathetic. No. This is not an overstatement actually. The condition is truly pathetic.

The entire movie is full of examples verifying so. (I don’t know whether I’ve described the egs properly or not. The best thing would be to watch the movie to understand them)

1. a case of rape n murder of a minor by son of powerful person was addressed without even mentioning those words. The entire sequence actually sounds funny when u see it in movie.
2. throughout the movie the pervert mind of a guy manipulates an innocent girl.
3. widow remarriage, though accepted by family, was still unacceptable to “society”. The way that incident ends is horrid!
4. an independent girl is being forced to marry off to some bloody dog, just becoz she is “manglik”.
5. an innocent man standing for elections of Sarpanch is removed from candidature just becoz opponent idiot wrote a letter to Collector saying tht tht guy is a spy!! And they believed the letter contents… Also would like to add that the innocent guy was a muslim. I hope u understand my point.

All these incidents were shown in a very light manner. I mean we all were like laughing at the situation.
For the villagers, all these incidents weren’t really a big deal. Like in the 4th case, the entire village was there to see the girl get married to tht dog, n when she tries to run away, the entire bloody village runs behind her to get her back.

Till the movie neared the end, I didn’t understand the actual meaning of the movie. But when I saw that girl running to save herself, a thought just ran through me. This is just a movie. The actress is supposed to run off. But in real life, this isn’t what happens. The marriage takes place. The girl is wedded off to a dog. And all that just becoz she was born such that she was “manglik”!
I don’t know whether the rest of the gang even thought about the movie after we left the hall. Majority of them didn’t really like the movie.
I initially hated the movie too, but luckily didn’t walk off in interval. I’m happy I sat through the entire show. I’m sad that unfortunately the movie was based on reality. Each aspect that was shown is an issue in itself. The dark sides of society have been portrayed in a very subtle manner.

Welcome to Sajjanpur is an excellent movie; but only if u understand the hidden meaning behind it. Else to an otherwise ignorant person, the movie will either be a comedy or a crap or waste-of-time sort of movie.
Had the movie been made on a serious note rather than as a comedy, it may have had a deeper impact on people, but definitely the number of ppl watching it also may have reduced big time. I feel so.

Get This Update...

Things are going from bad to worse here in Pune...
It has started getting unbearably boring... get up in the morn, do the loo and assorted activities, go to coll, come back, eat and sleep, repeat this loop infinite times...
Plus it has started getting real hectic now... we have 6 hours pracs even on sundays plus 2 tests every monday... and loads of assignments... the lectures start at 8 in morn, end at 6 in eve and we leave lab by 8 in night after which theres hardly any time to play NFS and reboot my system...
Which leads me to the grave point that i have completed 78% NFS Carbon and am seriously scared what will i do after its complete... its like life ka maksat khatam untill i get the promised GTA San Andreas.... So am savouring each and every race that comes up, and spending huge amounts of cash in upgrading the looks of my Nissan Skyline GTR (Which is already fully pumped up under the hood..)... I lead a Hard Frugal Life...
Inspite of this i am glad to inform that as a class we are bonding real well... cause in between lectures, assignments, pracs; 11 of us find the time to get caught playing name place animal thing cinema menu and surname in the lab during practical hours; bunk half the pracs cause we guys decide to borrow girls ka scooties and go for cold coffee break in the afternoon, and yesterday i.e. sunday night 4 of us went for cold coffee at 10 in the night and returned at 1 after having a blast...who cares about the maths ka test that we gave today...(BTW hum sab ka accha gaya...)

So life moves on.... the novelty of a new place and new city is wearing off... theres very little intellectual stimulation so i look forward to meeting sups and Watve sirs lectures every tuesday... I have explored quite a lot of the city thanks to eterno!!!
Am going to give 8 episodes of Duck Tales that i have on me lappy to Sups tomorrow, i watch loads of movies here.... all on me lappy.... so thank god for Wipro NoteBooks!!!...

Neways...cheers and keep posting here guys!!!

P.S. I miss u guys immensely on some days.... on other days Pune Bioinfo Crowd rocks/... sometimes i day dream that we all are in Pune only and that u guys will be coming just round the corner of bioinfo centre and gimme a surprise or something!!! :-( .... Somehow the day always goes real bad (sad?) after that... so i try and not do that in the morning ka lectures...!!!

New Developments.........

Hey guys, hope everybdy hs finally adjusted to their new environments and are doing good. The new development in my life here is tht v hv been allotted our dessertations (FINALLY!!!!!!!!!!) I hv Prof.Chattoo as my guide ! I hv not been gvn my dessertation topic as yet, n knowing the trend in GRC(i.e. Genome Research Centre ) where i will be doing my dessertation, i wont be gtting it very soon, atleast a mnth more 4 me to knw exactly wat i will be wrking on ! Bt in general the work in the lab goes on on the rice blast fungus, Magnaporthe grisea. My seniors are working on the silencing of important genes by RNAi n antisense approach which will affect d viability of the organism. My project might b on similar lines......... So for now m gonna read up as much as i can and hope fr the best !

SciAm pdf

hi guys!!
if u are looking for SciAm pdf's, check out this site.
this user has about 50+ SciAm pdfs in his "Science Magazine" public-folder
quite a many of them are recent editions (2006-2008).

http://www.esnips.com/user/rohitjhawer

his other folders also have quite interesting e-books n papers.

hope this link helps u all.

My expts with fig tree

hi all,
My project with figs n wasps firstly beging with me going to the tree. There r 3 fig trees in all, so i go to each tree one by one for 3 times for observations at diff. time. Let me clear one thing - I dont need to climb on the tree. Only on 1 tree i climb that too not at a great height (but a bit risky). One is having ladder on it so i be on ladder n the last tree can be observed fron terrace of a deppt.
So after i am on the tree , i do scan sampling of each tree to see the no. n type of wasp ( pollinator , non pollinator- 3 4 types) , what r the wasp doing. Remember one thing - thr pollinators go inside the fruit(syconia) whereas the non pol. oviposit from outside with long needle like ovipositors( these r harmful to the tree.
Then there are many types of ants (oecophylla n technomermyx) on the tree which predate on these wasps n there r many strategies these wasps use to escape from them. Also there is one ant ( Mermycaria ) which tend to some different organism ( hemoptera) to collect honey dew.
In short i will collect all these data for each fig on each bunch on each fig tree 3 times a day ( very tiring ) n finally will pool all the data to get some conclusion.
Simultaneously i will be doing cuticular hydrocarbon extraction, volatile extraction, n analyse them with GC-MS. Also i will be doing some bioinfo work to build a phylogenetic tree. All this in the next 3 weeks. So not sure till what extent i will be able to go, but beleive me nowadays there is lot of burden with the mid sem also approaching n freshers party too. I have not yet started with anything in theory with all focus being on the project.
I dont know how much of it u understood bcoz it toof me around a week to understand all this. You know what- I m the only person in the class with a project. All others r just learning the techniques. Bcoz of this they get time to conc. on theory. I think i will have to manage myself now
One request to sid- pls invite all the members n ask them to post the work they r doing currently n request all of u (except sid n kammy) pls post sumthing

PANKAJ !!!!

Pankaj..... dude i badly wanna know how u r doing sitting up there in ur tree with ur wasps and figs........... so update us man!!!

Twitter...

I had 8 hours of lectures today with a 1 hour break in between and i slept for 5 hours yeaterday night and am dog tired, but knowing u guys will read this up makes me feel good instantly which is why i am blogging myself away!!!

(Technically this is not a twitter, but who cares???)

Pandora's Hole: A Mud Volcano !!??!!

One fine day about a year and 3 months back, a paddy field in indonesia caved in, revealing a large hole. Soon mud started spurting out of that hole. Is this werid....??? Well initially the hole was vomiting 5000 cubic meters of mud per day. That hole is still, as i type, excreting mud and now at the rate of 150,000 cubic meters per day!!!
An area of radius 10km is submerged under that mud including villages, factories, schools everything. 11000 people have already been evacuated. And There are more people and villages in the path of this mud.

Is this an isolated incident?? Weird as it may sound it is not and such mud volacanoes have been obsrved in the past. However this volcano takes the credit of starting before our eyes and is the largest of em all!!!

The mud it throws out is 70% water and comes from a depth of more than 3 kms under ground. The mud is actually a mixture of ground water and sediments from below, even fossils have been obtained from that mud.

So what triggered it??? Scientists are still not sure. 2 days before eruption the area witnessed some tectonic activity and in a near by area an earthquake was recorded touching 6 point something on the richter. 1 day before the eruption there was an accident (rather an incident) at ground zero. An oil exploration company was drilling at that very site looking for oil and they wanted to drill through a limestone block, however as they were drilling they experienced a kick back. Now generally at such depths pressures are very high and so to balance outside pressure the dril bit has pressurised oil inside it. If for some reason the outside pressure increases drastically the drillbit recieves a kick back. To counter a kick back the pressure inside the drill is increased even more, and thats what they did. Now as they were removing the drill bit they removed it a bit too fast which meant that there was a vaccumm created in the drill coloumn.

It has been hypothesized that the drill bit actually cracked the limestone bedrock inside which was a pressurised chamber of gases, water and sediments. The partial vaccuum created inside coloumn further accelerated the process of fissure formation and by next day the gases had blasted ways through the earth above to create that hole in the field. The company obviously blames the earthquake and the labels this as a natural disaster. However there is evidence that drilling might have been the cause, though it hasnt been proved conclusively. None the less the company has paid up around 400 million US$ to people in damages for their inconviniene, property and bought all land covered by mud. The company is keeping all its drilling data secret, which is crucial to find the real cause of the phenomenon.

Access to the site is restricted by the govt, but the mud is a bigger barrier. Structural studies have been carried out using sonar and the dimensions of the hole and some of its branches have been deciphered. As a solution the govt is planning to drop in 300 strategically designed hyperdense concrete balls which will decrease the rate of flow and buy time to move people and property.

Scientists are having a ball (pun not intended) since such a rare phenomenon is happening beore their eyes but as the indonesian PM has reminded people are suffering!!!.... only 12-13 deaths have been reported dead that too due to accidents involving heavy equipment, no one has died cause of mud.

This data typed in here is a personal recreation from a news article in Nature (forgot the month, 2007) and may not be 100% accurate. For more information visit - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidoarjo_mud_flow
Material here is to be cited at your own risk though i will be very happy if you do!!!

(I am posting this here cause i want ur views on it)

My life currently

Well since this blog has been created i take the oppurtunity to post something about my life during pg....
Initially disappointed with not being admitted to PUNE for chem i thgt i lost it...then being admitted to RUIA was filled with some skepticism in my mind but finally i went thrgh everything n now my PG is in full flow.....really full flow..
We all were first instructed to search through the theories for our practicals as we wont be provided with the manual for practicals and we have to make one on our own..Of course with the help of practical incharge.
Chem dept has a book bank which includes small collection of only those books which are important but are less accessible through the library n yeh I m the incharge for it!
Recently Biochem dept was shifted to JC above the mic dept n MSc lab has been completely shifted to F21 that earlier was the Biochem lab. Our balance room would be vacated soon, with all balances being shifted inside the lab.The room will then be converted into study room as Mam wants to create good study atmosphere for us students.
Now a days i reach college by 9.00 for which i leave my house at 7.30(i get up at 6.30) n my practicals start at 10.00 am.They end at 1.30 n we get some time to have lunch after which we all rush to Somaiya for lectures on MONs,TUES,WEDs while the rest 3 days we r in Ruia. Somaiya buliding sucks big time. During the lectures the foul smell from the Toilets reach our noses in the class rooms...benches are bad..If one wants to sit straight then he cant write on the desk until he bends forward. Professors are execellent!!!!!! Our university does have a great faculty n i mean evry word of it. Its just the Univ pattern that stops them from delivering more...On last saturday we had an organic lecture by prof from Jhunjhunwala n to tell u from the heart i had the best organic lecture of my life!!!!He taught us basics which included drawing resonance structures n many more.The beauty about Dr. Shastri was that he stuck to syallabi but taught us every basic thing related to the topic...we have other profs also about whom il mention later.......
The lectures get over by 6.30 evening n after that i come to college n sit with siddhesh helping him in the course of DIAC of which he is the Coord...i sit with him n study which i have never done in my life...On the first day I sat for 1 n ½ hr without a break..Thats amazing for me atleast.So now its that im turning into a Nerd n i am enjoying it!!! i leave the college at 8.30 in night n reach my house by 10.30 pm tired n exhausted both physically n mentally.Lets see how far this reading process goes as i get tired a lot these days n dont want to fall pray to sickness n bad health....Im also the coord of my team i.e Infrastructure n so i share these responsibilties, though im a bit dormant in that stuff now.....
Well thats about my life currently...Its tough, hard, exhaustive but enjoyable...Truely im INSTITUTIONALISED!!!!!!

Stay in Touch

Community blog... where people can come together and say what they want to say to each other and the world.... This is definitely a nice way to keep in touch... So guys come on over and have fun !!!