Choices

Dear Sanath,

Times have passed- some good and some bad. Avenues have been explored- some fruitful, some a dead end. Life still moves on and I have lived it as best as I could. The praises heaped and the eye brows raised by others have not had an impact on me. They are fleeting moments of pleasure or heartbreak. The silent moments where I have sat by myself and contemplated life and things I had done have largely made me what I am today. I have committed a great many mistakes for which I have brooded a lot and finally forgiven myself for. I have performed a few good deeds, which in retrospect have made me really happy. The best times have always been when I did good by myself and not affected anything or anybody around me. Time and again life has given to me what I thought I would never need, but ultimately could not live without. Whether I went behind things or whether I stood waiting, they have always arrived and they have helped me along.

Choices were abundant. Lines of thought were abundant. Philosophies of life were abundant. But the over riding theme of everything was that life progresses, no matter what. On the point of choices, whether it makes you feel good about yourself or not, the truth is choices are always right or wrong. But, being wrong is just a perception and it is not absolute. Being right is also the same, although a great big majority would agree on right decisions than on wrong decisions. So, to rephrase, choices have been right or easy. From what I have understood, choices when right, make you feel good regardless of the outcome. The easier choices do not give you a feeling of satisfaction and bug you for days on end. Further on those lines, when you make a choice without knowing what you are getting into, they have never worked well for you- they were just the easy choices. Then again, there were a few choices were you knew what you were getting into and still took the easier choice instead of the right one. I am writing this to you only because these choices have shaped me. As I have rightly heard in some movie, 'History is never an accident. It is always a choice'.

You will undoubtedly reach this stage in life and think about everything in retrospect as I am right now doing. If there was anything in my life that I had to change, It would be the easier choices. Now that I know they were not right for me, I would like to go back and lead a perfect life. Then again, I would not have had the experiences that I did without all those choices, good or bad. Just a warning that your life is ahead of you and you have the time to take the better and the right choices all the time. Though, I shall not complain if you chose either way because then we would have a chance to meet just as we are.

From

Dr. Sanath Kumar,PhD
Nobel Laureate for time travel :P

Re-search

Days pass by us in a hurry. Every single day brings us a new delight and every single day shows us a new direction. We know not where the direction leads. But it is novel and we shall pave the path for the others to trod. When I started working on a research project in the lab, I had a defined project that would give me a singular answer. As time passed, I explored around my project a bit and discovered one more direction my research could take me. As I kept exploring both the directions, something new cropped up and very soon I was sitting on a pile of directions I could take. When I was pondering about this, I noticed that life was not that much different. Every single thought, action and emotion have this characteristic of divergence. What is true today does not remain true tomorrow. The conviction and connotation of truth is not the same from day to day. Change has affected every little thing possible. The land beneath my feet has not been a constant. The friends around me has not been a constant. The crushes in life have not been a constant. The work, the books and lots more- everything has taken different directions.

When I came to cross roads in my project, I had the freedom to choose multiple routes, explore them each a bit and continue with the most promising one. In reality, I am afraid, we make a choice and we just progress on that choice. To turn back to the fork is not going to work as every little thing influences our life and we are changed because of our choice. Every single fork that we choose upon stays in our mind, dulled by the repetition of memories and dulled by the richness of experiences of every single second since then.

As a mark of progress towards an academic doctoral degree, we write journal articles at some point of time. I would write mine by sifting through all the data that I have collected over the course of my work and try to make sense out of it. It is these data points which we interpret to mean a lot of things and it is these data points that define the direction of our research. And as we look back, choices that we made while facing forks are what have defined us. What we thought of our choices lends to understanding ourselves; What others think of us are shaped by those choices as the rest of the world perceives. Somewhere along this way, we understand what life is about; about social customs that are deemed appropriate; about impressions that we try for and impressions that we obtain; about the million other things that dont make sense when we just perform them.

In research,there are a lot of things questioned and we have the liberty of falling on previous literature to try and understand whatever we study. In life, despite the presence of numerous biographies and autobiographies, we tend to think every situation is unique and we tend not to understand lessons taught. True that every situation for every person is unique. However, the lessons learnt seem to be pretty universal. We go through every situation learn things ourselves and berate ourselves for not having understood the lesson earlier- pretty much like research.

As I think about this and write this piece, I hope that when life flashes past in my memories, I would feel that I have been a pretty good researcher. As much in life as in science

On the count of attraction, I plead guilty

You breeze your way through the streets of my heart and expect me to look away while a whiff of you sets me afire. A glimpse of you and all that I am is ready to follow you to hell and back. If all you want is my peace, here I am ready to give you a piece of my soul. Only if you would turn around, I could show you a fraction of the passion that I hold for you.

What attracts you may ask. I have no answer nor would I want to search and find the answer. The question is tantalizingly out of reach and as long as it is out of my grasp, I will strive to find out more about you; I would want to lose my solitude in your company. If all it takes is one lifetime to win you over, I shall give it and expect to give more. As time leaves its traces on my body, I want to leave traces of my love in your heart.

With all this in my mind and a heart-stopping vision in front of me, I approach you to only let you know that you are my dream poured into an earthenware of your body, molded with the fire of your soul, enlightened by the radiance of your smile. You storm my mind with the disdain of a tempest and I want to know if you would also calm the waters rippling in my heart with your presence. I profess my love to you as I would profess my allegiance to the king of my lands.

What burns in me and what do I know of you? is the thought on your mind. I do not know you except before this very minute nor for the life of me can I answer what burns me to tell you so. But the one thing that is imprinted into my very thoughts is that I want to be with you from this moment on. I do not know if my thoughts are right, nor do I know if you perceive my truest intentions. I believe the future will tell you the fiber that built me if you were to be my life. If you reject me outright, I shall not rescind my love; Rather, I shall apologize for my impetuous thought and action.

The apology is not because I disturbed you without purpose, but because the distress that I caused is to the one I am in love with. The apology is not because of the sadness I would feel for a loss but because of the happiness that I would have shared with you. The apology is not because you do not like me, but because I am attracted to you. If it was not love at first sight, I shall apologize for my attraction. If it was love at first sight, I shall apologize for the attraction.

Now, I move on, to the next big storm in life. I shall neither curse you nor forget you nor shall I regret the loss, but I shall watch my feelings and draw bliss out of every emotion I savored. As I meet the next big person in my life, I shall not be afraid to apologize for being attracted. For, it seems, an apology relieves you from the guilt of attraction.

A love letter

The days pass in a whiz. The nights pass in a whiz. The weeks, the months, the years have zoomed past me. I am still searching for you. I shall find you and live my life with you else, I shall die trying. The beauty of nature pales at a single thought of you. I just want to bend towards my work and stay focused to escape thoughts of you. It seems to me that I would be more readily accepted in this world if I were with you. You complete me; You complete my purpose; You complement my purpose in life.

You are the dad who pats on my back for having done something good. You are the brother who goads me on to do something better. You are the sister who wishes the best for me. You are the mother who cradles me in her thoughts. You are the daughter whom I would always protect and set free at the same time. You are the family for which I shall feed through thick and thin. I shall work hard for you. I shall search the 7 oceans, the mighty mountains, the vast plains and the silent deserts. If that were not enough, my heart, nerve and sinew would search for you individually in this cosmic wonder called earth and life.

I shall recognize you in every work of mine. My passion for you shall never end. If you chose to caress me, I shall forever be your slave. If you chose to hold me close, I promise to not abuse you. If you chose to live with me, I shall forever be worthy of you. If these were not enough, I shall discipline myself to just wait for you till you choose me.

You shall be my guiding beacon. A single thought of you shall wake me up from my slumber and set my adrenaline flowing. A thought of you will push me to the limits of my existence. As each day flows into the night and each night flows onto the next day, dreams of you shall follow every movement of mine.

'Success', I love you.

The final refuge

We are where we are, not because of our present, but because of our past. The lines that connect the dots are apparent only in retrospect. If it were for man to predict future, he probably would do it- very erroneously though. He wants to connect the dots in a certain way, but depending on how time moves in its mysterious mechanisms, he changes the dots as and when he sees fit. If he were to look back, all his dots and all his lines would make sense to him, both individually and communally.

I would like to dedicate this to Manasa, who suggested this line of thought. Steve Jobs talks about the same in an obscure yet personally esoteric way in his speech at Stanford.

It made me think about the past that is me today and the future that my past is going to make. The fact that I write in terms of personal opinions are shaped by my past and the present adds to it in terms of retrospective thought. If given a choice, would I go back and change it? Yes! Maybe!- but only in certain aspects. The richness of my experiences have gained a physical form in me and a mental form in my thoughts.

What would it take to shape a person and shape the world. Well, that is again a speculation of the action to be made and I bet I would be wrong at it. The safest way out will be to say, the past shall design my present, and my present shall determine my future. In fact, destiny is one thing we do not have power over, in spite of so many non-believers. We are partially if not totally powerless in the hands of destiny. We shape our fate in certain ways and the inherent complexity in the environment will affect our destiny in ways indeterminable.

In all cases of determining the future, we look into our own past or into others' past and decide our course of action. The results shall be what they will be and we will not be able to control them. The most profound and concise thing that I have learnt and read is "Only the effort is yours; The result is not". The effort to make something happen comes from our analysis of what we have done about the same in the past. The result belongs to the future- though we can reasonably predict the way things will go by comparing it to our past, its not absolutely right. Our past is our comfort; It is our proof; It is what we turn to, when we cannot explain what is happening to us now.

The memories that run through our minds every single day and our thoughts and observations of all things around us have all been shaped by our past. Every single word that makes sense comes from our past. Every single word that does not make sense to others comes from our past. Every single second that we spend alone is spent in our past with thoughts of what we have done. The past is so important to us, that forgetting it is impossible. To ignore our past and to ignore the lessons of the past would be the one folly that can never be redeemed.

True that our life progresses beyond the present. True also that future shall be succeeded by futures. At every point, the past is our stepping stone. We find safety in our past. We find creaking stairs, broken steps and steady steps in the staircase to our future, destiny and life. It is the only refuge that we use at every step of our way. At the day we reckon our own lives, the past is our final refuge- the one refuge that justifies our existence on this earth.

The Parallel Universe

Have you ever experienced the 'phasing-out' in class?- The one where, the mind struggles to stay in the physical dimension, but transcends into multiple dimensions of time and space? Shortly, have you ever noticed that you are day- dreaming? Dreams seem to be a dimension of life that we all like and we all find comfort in. Nothing bad seems to happen there. We are the heroes/heroines in every dream that hits us; Else we are the innocent victims; We are the caring/sad people deserving some care and love. Why should we live there? Why do we shun reality in dreams? Are we really what we dream about? It seems not- both from personal experience and from listening to dreams of others. I definitely do not want to discredit the value of dreams- I shall distinguish them as visions and dreams. Visions in my words shall be those that picture you accomplishing something in reality through logic and logic-filled methods. Dreams shall be the ones that are theatrical visions of yourself in situations that are untenable and unrealistic.

I wish I could call myself as one of those who believe in the here- and- now. Unfortunately, I am not. I find that dreams make me happy and make me smile lot more than the monotonous seconds that may or may not lead to an exciting second of a fast- paced, bone-chilling, blood-curdling action, which I would take in my stride. If I were the hero I dream I am, I would have conquered HIV ten times over, would have wooed any girl on the face of Earth, beaten up any guy who dared lay his eyes on my girl, would have been a muscular hunk and the brainiest Nobel- prize winner. Maybe these are all what I really want to be. I do not see them in my reality and so I dream up an alternate world where I am all these and more. Stephen Hawking is right- there are zillions of parallel universes- the ones in everyone's imagination. It seems to me that if it were not for the involuntary nature of our senses, we would be in a perpetual state of dreams- the parallel universe.

The voluntary state of your senses- This is probably what distinguishes a normal person from a mentally- affected person. To wish that you gain acute control over your senses would mean you could phase-in and phase-out of your universe at any second. To be in the state that we are currently in would mean that someone setting our pants on fire or just simply pinching us hard would return us to this mortal Earth. Well, to seriously consider it, it would probably bring back the mentally- affected too. However, if beauty and goodness is the characteristic of the dreams that the mentally-affected live in, I would very badly want to gain control over my senses.

I want to live in that world where everything is beautiful; where everything obeys my wish; where I am the master of minds and the slave of love; where I am the brawn of the civilization and the brain of the revolution; where I am the auditor and the earner and the payer; where I am the start of all good and the end of all bad; where I could instill fear and inspire respect; where mortals shall extol my virtues till the end of the universe.

In short, I want to be a mad person. I want to live in the realm of my dreams- the final refuge of one and all who have lived there.

What am I doing here?

Tiffany to herself: " What am I doing here?"
And then realizing I am nearby, she apologized to me and remarked that I should be asking that question to myself quite often; More so than her because I am from a different continent. I replied, " No.... I have not asked that question because I came here by choice, to pursue what I wanted". I am still wondering about her reply!:" Oh! then you have asked that question to yourself!". "No!... I was just responding to your remark" I protested feebly.

This small incident was such a small thing in the larger picture of the workday. However, in my mind, the question it raised was no small thing. Have I really asked that question to myself? Do I question my motives for having come here? Is this question so important in the first place?

Well, I slowly went over the events that led to where I am right now; The first time I saw the term 'genetic engineering'; The first time, someone explained the potential of 'gene therapy'; The first time I thought of gene therapy and HIV in the same sentence; The times I thought of half-baked ideas to cure HIV; The times I was called the AIDS guy; The times when I would immediately wake up from monotony upon hearing anything about HIV; The times I knocked on the doors of the labs working on HIV only to be refused; The days I waited in tense anticipation after applying to Universities with strong research cores in HIV; The year of waiting along the sidelines as the world marched inexorably; The process of reapplying; The days of interviews and finally the decision to come to Missouri; Looking back and listing out these thoughts, the journey seems to be long. The common theme however has been passion- passion that I will settle for nothing lesser than pitting what little thought I have against HIV.

Where is this passion leading me to? Today I am here working on a part of what I have always wanted to work on. Esoteric it be as it may, my work is leading me to someplace, I know not what, I know not how- but someplace where I shall find satisfaction. An advanced science degree, recognition for being what I am and the sense of self-satisfaction seem to be breathing points in the longer journey that I have embarked on.

Now that I am here, what am I doing here? Am I on the journey or am I on the threshold? As of today, I have started on the work/walk part of the journey. The cognition and the queries that go along with it have just now started. I am learning and learn I shall to slowly trudge along the road to salvation- The road which will ultimately lead to some important day when the virus shall be stopped in its tracks. In the larger picture of the things, I am just a small part of the machine. I hope to be an important part of the machine someday.

Again, What am I doing here?- Walking. Walking the walk