so how was the trip?

is what everyone asks... and no matter how many adjectives i say it still wouldnt do any justice to what transpired those fwe days from the 6th to 14th of april...

so i am going to direct people to this blog and then let them work out thier favourite parts...

let me start at the very beginnig.. a very good place to start. [SOM reference :)]

When Dr.Sulagna Banerjee initially told us that there is a conference in delhi which we would be attending, i had my doubts. If anything this was CSIR, supposedly the countrys top scientific concern, why they would concern themselves with us? and i was proved wrong.. thanks to ma'am. After putting up a proposal of annotating the glycoprotiens of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome she selected around 30 people country wide to do the job. Fortunatley i got in! making up for my bio-informatics skills by my talking [incessantly]. With able help from J.Lakshmanan i learnt a lot and pretty much worked all i could on it. We had Madhura Rajagopal from Anna Uni as part of the group too and the incomparable Rajadurai. The Man. When it comes to bioinfo no one can beat him. He is just phenomenal!
so this small band put in thier time, effort and energy and with 20 other people from around teh country finished off quite a bit!
well that was a short sentence.. but whew.. what it encompasses only we know... innumerous mails, invisible chats, annonymous phone calls, hung skype calls, overcrowded gmail chats and soap opera type arguments, fights, break ups and make ups. And Priyansha Singh. :D

After a hundred color coded excel sheets were exchanged, filtered, quality checked, chaged from Xl to XLX to PDF to DOC to XLS and every other format imaginable we suddenly realized that we had annotated close to 4000 proteins! whew. then run a check, get to next stage, filter out the glycosyl related ones, study them and then work out thier fold recognition... and in the middle of all this a colleague from IIT mumbai confirms that one of our hits [rv3242c] is indeed a hitherto unknown glycosyl protein! yay! bingo!

now we with confidence set out sharing our results. and the next thing i know we get a call from Anshu Bharadwaj 'hey Glycomics team! good work, pack your bags. Your off to Delhi!'

Open source, open access and open arms... pretty much sums up the last 2 days here in Delhi as part of the OSDD project which culminated in C2D - Connect to Decode. Have been meeting some amazing people and discussing amazing ideas. My favourite moment was meeting and talking to Dr.Hiraoki Kitano, head of Sony Labs and the creator of AIBO (for all you blinking.. thats that cute robot dog that has natural response and actually mimics a proper pet). A systems biology living legend! pictures coming up soon :)
Also got to interact with the CSIR honchos, SBK, Zakhir Thomas, Vinod Scaria, Anshu Bharadwaj and the IGIB people... all very hospitable people and so motivating. its smiles all around..

the whole day is spent inside historic locations (teen murthi bhavan) .. thankfully as i realize its terribly hot outside! and then late night party out in the grass lawn! :) hey basement? Summer of 69 and Mairi being performed by 8 people from 8 states from allover india with a guy blowing bubbles around us.. how does that sound? :)

well now its Lunch Time! ciao.. :D

6 months of work...2 weeks of preparation.... 20 min of packing (damn i forgot my toothbrush)...36 hours of travel and finally here we are! The main hall at the Jawahralal Nehru museum. last evening sped past in connecting and re-connecting people and faces whom we had only seen online or read the results of! Lots of suprises sprung up! like for example for some people actually thought i was a girl! You can imagine thier forlorn faces when i introduced myself.
well the die is cast now! we all are grinning away and fiddling with our brand nw netbooks! ( which btw i am calling a thightop.. i got mine well balanced)

well for now i am taking a break to acquaint myself with a new friend!
catch you in some time!

Genesis

The beginning

Speak when your spoken unto and what you have spoke, stand by it.... but then this spooks me out! I talk so much that words flow out before i get a chance to think. For me its all about the flow, the fluidity of talk. Dont we all love to hear a well enunciated talk? I remember my very first idols were those who spoke fluently. Prannoy Roy and Neethi Ravindran on tv and Mrs.Rathnam and Mrs.Figredo in school. I used to follow their every sentence, noticing how they talk, the way they pronounce, the way certain words were clumped together and the way the voice flows. Vikaasa school, Madurai was the perfect place for a kid like me. Not only did it provide a niche for me but also the perfect breeding ground for a person who can say he was well-bred! (and well fed too). Then comes along the Greatly Revered Diwakar who instills in me a love for science, a love for studying. I realized that science was what life is all about. Science held the threads of life together.

As time goes by i realize that every word spoken by teh people around me has become imbibed and expresses itself at the appropriate moment and that I am actually actively contributing towards teh growth of science.

Who would ever believe that the little kid running around in green shorts and picking up dirty cricket balls from the s.s.colony gutters will be sitting amongst India's top scientists a few meters away from the seat of parliament. If i were to step out now i'll step right onto the shadow thrown by the dome of Rashtrapathi Bhavan.

It has been a long journey... i still havent reached the destination but then the journey itself has been amazing!

lets see wher it leads... into His hands i leave my life..