MorningBytes

forms of life

2008-10-17T06:04:00.001-07:00

October 17 2008

Every evening I am interested to watch some shows on nature or on science, which sometimes blend into one. I had tried to instill the sense of wonder and a need to search for novelty in my kids, by asking them to watch science shows for kids when they were really young.

Watching nature shows is like seeing the life through a camera lens. The life as we perceive is very narrow in focus, some times not extending beyond our childhood perception of what life is supposed to be. Then I look at the life in different forms, in different environments, in different period in history and evolution of organism. It is overwhelming to see the diversities and possibilities. In most of the time human beings were not there, not to speak of me which has a very short existence.

What I see is a very simple goal of the life forms, feed and breed and propagation of the species by producing offspring in huge number, hoping that some will survive to propagate the species. So, they eat and eat and sometime breed. The life of vast majority of people is not very different from those except that most human cover themselves, decorate themselves and kill their own kind. Others usually don’t do that.

The increase in the size of the neocortex might have helped us to think more extensively. At the same time when we think of discordance between the human societies it is appalling. More than 50% of the human beings have no access to sanitation, while some of them are thinking of colonizing the Mars or thinking of building of computers which will surpass the capacity of the human brain. A lot of human qualities such as greed, hatred etc for its own kind developed in parallel with the development of the need for a divine being or a search for a meaning of existence after all.

Then there is the evolution of aesthetic values.

Comfort zone

2008-05-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

Information and knowledge are power. However people do not necessarily embrace it. For example there are toothbrushes made out of bamboo sticks, plastic and even powered by electricity. But availability does not necessarily translate to utilization. People feel very comfortable in their own old ways and don’t feel a need or even feel threatened to move to an arena they are not familiar with or not in control. Indians still use fingers to eat and Chinese use chopsticks to cook. This kind of holding onto the culture, may be personal or little broader is also prevalent in science. Protocols and machines are getting upgraded constantly which can give new information or different information when implemented by the researchers. However, that sometimes pushes people to their discomfort zone and hence they resist, become calcitrant or even become defensive which might lead to offensive and altercation.
All over the world, we see principal investigators having a tendency to hire researchers who speak his or her native language. That may not be biased in nature but an outcome for choosing to be in the comfort zone to interact as language and culture barriers play major roles in science too.

Old wine in the new bottle

2008-05-17T05:55:00.001-07:00

As a new day dawn
So many new things surround me
A day before, they all used to be old
Known, familiar and mundane
Like a spider building a web
Or a bee flying hastily to a flower hub

A feeling sinks into me
As if I am looking these for the first time
I try hard to connect to what I read
In science magazines
And to what I do in the lab or computer
I get lost in the puzzle of designs
Engineering, networking
All automated but with a beautiful
Simple shape hiding all of it

A sense of humility
And ignorance drowns me
I sit and look around
Becoming again a drop
In the ocean of creation.

May 17 2008

Fantasy, symbols and quest for demise

2008-05-16T05:44:00.000-07:00

We love to fantasize, dread and get scared and enjoy it at the same time in movies, even though similar situation in real life or in dream will scare us to death. Fantasy has been with us all the time, from snow white and seven dwarfs to the Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter. We want to forget our reality by spreading rose petals on the bed after marriage. We like candle light to noon’s scorching sun’s rays. We like red balloons and confetti and colorful dresses to adore ourselves or our little girls so that they look out of this place. Often the fantasy is symbolic, in some way we are trying to send a message without being obvious, whether it is a necklace with a cross or a mark on the forehead. Symbols rule our lives and populate all our places, from the man’s toilet to Washington monument. There is some thing we can not live without even though we reject the so called nonrealistic pagan way of looking at life. At the same time there are sports teams with names, cars with names of animals that are mean, quick and rulers of their domains. The names we give to our children do not represent what the children would have liked but the projection of ourselves, our desires, our lost relatives, our infatuations.

At the same time I feel that violence and destruction has been the prime driver for human creativity. One can see that in movies as well as in the weapons of mass destruction in the arsenal of advanced nations. Most of the energy of human beings are used in killing others of the same species and faster and more dramatically with awe. I think there is some kind of disjunction between what we can do creatively and how that creativity is used to arm peoples to kill others and make money in the process. Then where does the money take us and how much is enough to guarantee our happiness and satisfaction?

primitive vs advanced

2008-05-15T04:54:00.000-07:00

May 15 2008
Every day I get an email from Encyclopaedi Britannica about what happened on this day in history. It is so interesting to find out the evolution of human society as recorded by western civilization, that kept good records of their culture. In contrast eastern societies did not keep any record and hence all are speculation, even though they had progressed far in science, philiosphpy, art, music and engineering as demonstrated in the construction of giant temple complexes.

The email also points to the wars, to the injustice and violence done to one culture by another supposedly better and civilized one. To me it seems as if the concept of superiority based on bringing peace, happiness and satisfaction to a society, then the primitive societies were much better than the dog eats dog societies of the technocrats. It is obvious that modern amenities have brought many gadgets to make life much easier to live with, from GPS systems to air conditioning. However are we more content and human than our ancestors who lived thousands of years ago or than those who still live that way untouched by so called modernity?

I see more and more people including scientists turning to the processes established thousands of years ago to eliminate human suffering by means of yoga, mediation, chanting and introspection, thus eliminating the business aspect of health care, which is mostly designed to keep the patient alive and the disease uneliminated, so that there is a long term dependence on medicine that can sustain the drug industry. Of course there are some exceptions such as eradication of smallpox.

scientific means and ends

2008-05-13T06:50:00.001-07:00

Yesterday in the afternoon attended the system biology workshop where speakers talked about different aspects of it, from sequence comparison, to transcription factors being derived from transposons to development in Drosophila. The approaches taken were unique in the sense that teasing out problems depends so much on the thoughts that get into designing the experiments. Analyzing the data without any bias is the next step. Often scientists have their pet genes or processes and every thing seems to lead towards that, subconsciously. Joining the bandwagon is not foreign to science, as fads come and go. Over all approach seems to be to start with a system which is not complicated, like studying bacteria instead of human to find out metabolic pathways. A good model system to work on and a methodology that is easy or straight forward to follow help in the reproduction of the results. However still the data could be mined to get what will prove one’s hypothesis and lead one astray.

natual and manmade calamities

2008-05-12T05:49:00.000-07:00

In the morning today heard about the 7.8 earthquake in Chengdu, called Lina immediately. She is ok. So many natural disasters are now there and also much severe, from cyclone in Burma, to volcano eruption in Chile to tornado in south east states of USA. Death seems so much in mind all the time.

In PBS heard about how USA destroyed the culture of the Native Americans by putting them in boarding schools where they were give English names and were forbidden to utter a single word from their native language and were Christianized. Such a shameful way to cultures without any remorse and still thought to be most civilized.

Destroying another culture has been such a predominant part of a culture’s identity as a better one. Once the temples, statues and paintings etc are destroyed in the name of Jesus Christ or Mohamed or Vishnu, there is no way to get the creation back in track.

I hear and read about war and death and destruction, almost all the time. I see guys in army trucks or otherwise killing other guys as well as kids and women, while women are begging for food for their kids. Some cases it is most sophisticated killing like dropping bombs on people they don’t know. War and destruction have been part of men’s culture from the beginning of civilization, from Greeks, Roman to USA. The major difference is that early days those who choose to fight and die were getting killed, not with the armada countries like USA has kills mostly civilians and injure masses.

I always wondered why people watch sports or any other activities where they are not physically participating but only seeing some one else doing the task, may it be car racing or American football game. There might be certain centers in the brain which make these the audience or onlooker feel as if they are in real the players and executing the action. After the arrival of TV, spectator sports have become one of the major attractions, big businesses as well as cause for obesity and obsession. Intellectual pursuit has been mostly replaced by watching in TV some one playing cricket or golf.

too long and too short

2008-05-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

Often my time is spent in looking for things. I put it somewhere and the action was not mindful. Now I spend hours looking for it, either in my computer or at home, not in the lab any more as I have no wetlab. The amount of time I spend in looking for things as well as organizing and removing what I thought I need but not any more is enormous. Out of the days of our lives, the real time we utilize to do some thing meaningful is very short, unless we add every thing from brushing teeth to talking over the phone as meaningful. Every one has the potential to do great, but in real we either have no time nor the interest to do something. We would rather watch something some one else is doing, be a consumer.

My life is too long when I look in one way and too short when I look differently. Daily incidents of the past get quickly overwritten by the event of the present and the memory often glosses over the past, making it more horrific or terrific. I have almost forgotten most of my childhood, even Amgen days are now seems so distant. When I was going to study at USC in the evening, it seemed as if those days will never end. Then suddenly every event becomes a spec of the past and shrouded by later events.

It is like the children, who were born and now they are adults. During the time they lived at home all the time, they slowly grew up, became teenager and then left for college. Some how it seems as if they grew up with a flick of a switch and there were no intermediates, unless I look at the photos. What happened to all those bodies, the cute toddlers, the naughty boy’s, the adorable girl’s and the teenagers’ when the hormones started metamorphosing the body?

Gene, the scapegoats

2008-05-07T05:56:00.001-07:00

Soon after their discovery, genes have become a part of our social expression in addition to being the darling of research. They also have become the scapegoat for any thing that happens to us, from our anger to the diseases we get. First they were selfish, using our body to propagate themselves. Once we have transmitted them to our progeny, then genes don’t need us and lead us to the path of demise and death.
They were supposed to be the cause of cancer, the oncogenes. They were supposed to be the reason for our mental illness, for our behavior of all kinds, even if we shoot some one for fun, we can always blame the genes, they made me do it. I am not at fault.

I think the more I learn about genes, I feel that the gene excuse is less scientific than thought. For sure we can be predisposed due to certain mutation in our genes to get lung cancer. However if we refrain from smoking and from the polluted smog filled areas, there is much less chance of us getting it. The same is true for how long we live or what we can become. The potential is there, but unless it is triggered by one or more of our behavior, eating a lot, doing no exercise, eating wrong kind of food or being under stress to be millionaire instantly, the chance of genes leading us astray towards our destruction is kind of remote.

Today's thoughts, May 6, 2008

2008-05-06T18:48:00.000-07:00

20 000 people might have died due to cyclone in Mynamar (Burma). Death is ever present and comes due to so many different factors. Death is teasing us every day in different accounts in newspapers, TV and online. Still we think it will not happen to us or to one of our loved ones.

Injection of a twist in the normal thinking process leads to eye opening of the mass and hence the recognition. Many have been recognized and appreciate long after they succumbed to death. But how that recognition benefits the deceased?

We fail to see most of the time the obvious. Every thing that looks familiar will cease to be that once we look close and hard enough. The simplicity hides the complexity and the ingenuity in common things or beings we encounter all the time and ignore its importance. It could be either or man made, such as a paper clip. Just think about the ingenuity behind those inventions or designs. We take fingers for granted. We don’t think about how effortlessly we are able to talk, even sing, unless we encounter some one with a defect, who can not speak a word. As long as we are not unfortunate enough to lose function of any one those, we ignore its importance and the complex engineering that has been in place to make us functionally active.

What does attract our eyes and our attention out of myriad things and phenomena that we conveniently ignore every day? What makes a girl heart throb and a picture that is worth thousand words? There has to be a common esthetic yard stick, a common beauty yardstick in our brain to make us agree in choosing what is beautiful.

all creatures large and small

2008-01-24T05:19:00.000-08:00

The diversity of beings in the world is amazing. The evolution as such is a tinkering process, trying out small changes at one time to find out if it can survive. Some thing that is lost in the translation is the evolution of higher organisms, is that each organism as a specie, is capable of survival, adaptation to the changing environment.

Higher organisms have better brain capacity, so that they can carry out additional functions. But they are not necessarily better in the game of survival. Every being from unicellular to human have the basic engines to eat, grow, propagate one way or other and communicate with their kind and also with the environment.

Trees are amazing as they have very few needs and withstand a lot of insult including cutting of limbs. Each organism is fittest in its own way. Otherwise there would be no amoeba or crocodiles any more. Some organisms have better sights than us, better hearing, better tactile response and motor action. Some insects can jump 10 times or more of their body length. Some organisms like fish and bees can change sex when needed and have eggs develop without fertilization which we can not.

Her (Julie's) Prayer list got longer

2008-01-21T06:22:00.000-08:00

The limits around us
Surround us

Sorround her
Like the layers of an onion
She can only think of you
And without the blink of her eyes
Connect you and upload all her wishes
To give her a hand
If you have one
To be patita paabana
Again and again
To heal the aching bodies
The aching stomachs
The aching hearts
Of all your children
By visitng us

as avatars

As mother Teresa
As Gandhi

As Martin Luther King

And
As others

I am too ignorant to know.

Dawn to Dream about the Dearest

2007-02-14T07:57:00.000-08:00

Today morning opens the door
To a quiet and quite mysterious winter day
Outside so surrealist
Thanks to snow and winter mix
A perfect time to close eyes
And think about you

Or
Rather
Think about us
Where we started
How we fumbled
Into the vortex of ecstasy
Jumped over hoops
To live and let live

Our paths
Cross and crisscross
Merge and diverge
After a snow storm in June
We walk again
Hand in hand in soap bubbles.

We walk on rose petals
Spiked with cactus thorns
We drink nectar from the flowers of deadly plants
Eat fugu sushi in golden plates
To be together
To enjoy again
Today
The Valentine’s day.

Spring cleaning

2007-02-12T05:22:00.000-08:00

In my childhood
I learnt to do daily chores

In the morning
To brush, to go to toilet
And take a bath to clean my body
Every week I clean my clothes I use
And so often I clean my bed sheets

We dust and vacuum our house once a week
And go through my mails every day
To clean up the unwanted snail mails
Messages in Outlook and in mobile phone
On a regular basis
I get rid of old files from laptop too

and update the software bundles

So quickly,
My desk becomes a mess
So I clean it regularly and file documents
And once in spring
We have a garage sale
To get rid of what we don’t want
But we did or thought we did
Once upon a time.

I always forget

To clean something else
My mind
That has accumulated

Stuff for generations
From my childhood believes

To traumas, nightmares
To what my parents said to be true
To what my society taught me to be right
To what my old books said to be state of the art.

With time every thing has changed
But I never bothered to look at my mind
To wake it up from siesta
To question

The validity of my believes and thoughts
To update them
Or to delete the obsoletes.

My mind
Remains a storehouse of fossils

An old banyan tree trunk
Of all I wanted to survive in the past
But may be hurting me now
Still
I do not dare to remove them
And confront my own inadequacy.

Temporarily in Phase

2007-02-09T05:39:00.000-08:00

Like a Tibetan prayer wheel

Every thing repeats

Twenty four seven

From my heart beat

To the musical overtures

Moon’s wean and wax

The glorious sunset follows

The picturesque sunrise

The winter roles into the spring

That jumps quickly into the lap of the summer

Which hibernates in the den of the winter again

Every thing repeats

From cell cycle to earth’s serenade around the sun

As if the world is running on a treadmill on a spot.

On the other hand

Only the change is the signature of permanence

Gone are the days of the manual type writers

The slide rules

The black and white TVs

And fountain pens

Every body is looking at the LCD screen

And typing awayIncessantly.

Instead of tuning the monstrous radio

I listen to the music online

Calling India does not consume a day

Or cost an arm and a leg

I don’t even need a phone

To call some one overseas.

My tiny tender baby daughter

My ever sleepy baby boy

Are all grown up and on their own now

The thunderous voice of my father

Is silenced for ever

My baby sisters’ kids have babies

Youth of my mom and even mine

Can only be seen in photos.

The eternal rhythm

Of birth and death

Of heartbreaks and ecstasy

Of gaining and losing it all

Of soprano and silence continues

Ignoring the job that time does on all of us.

Wild Flowers of the Paradise

2007-02-03T05:57:00.000-08:00

In so many different colors you come
In so many shapes
In so many places of the earth
Buds on thorn bushes
Or in stunted tree trunks

So many places you blossom
In the middle of the desert
On the neon lights
In dark alleys of Mumbai
Or in front of the temples
On noisy street corners
Where people spit

Your petals wilted
Darkened with the shoot
From the passing cars
You struggle to get away
From the ants and flies
Not inviting many monarch butterflies

Some times
I see you on TV here in America
Before and after effects
Of some one’s effort
To dust up your petals
Sprinkle the plant with little water
From the plenty they get
By showing your miseries again and again

Wild little flowers
You have no say
Where you rise
Where you blossom
Where you disappear
After bearing the seed
To perpetuate
The wild flowers of the paradise.

Babru
February 3, 2007

Sisyphus's Dream

2007-02-01T05:16:00.000-08:00

Every one chided me
Don’t sit there
Do something
And I did
Read all the books I found in the village
Played soccer and volley ball
Ran on the tracks
And wrote poems and dramas
Even acted a little as a child.

As a student
I was busy
As a worker
I am really busy
Exhausted when I come home
To eat and do more work
And then sleep
With the thought
Tomorrow I have so much to do.

In my dream
I am working too
Stumbling on my ways
Due to mishaps and limitations
Working and working whole night
To wake up exhausted
And start my day again

I am on a treadmill
Twenty four, seven

Then I read
“Don’t just do it
Sit there”
That was strange to me
But some thing different
So I did
I sat there closing my eyes
Watching my breath
Calming my nerves

But my mind was the autopilot
On a whirl wind trip
Ruminating my past
Inspecting my fears and desires
Entangled in the web of confusion
I was lost in my self
I never knew
‘Just not to do something
And sit there ‘
Could be so hard to do.

Finger Prints of the Force

2007-01-31T04:54:00.000-08:00

The most powerful goddess
Severed the head of the demon
To annihilate him
But behold
Every where a drop of his blood fell
Another demon arose.

You, the immortal
Not deterred by the calamities
That fell on earth again and again
The strike of a meteorite
The ashes of Vesuvius
The land slides of Mount St. Helen
The mudslides and devastating floods
That strike again and again

Slowly and surely
Your finger prints appear
In the molten lava of volcanoes
In the ever spreading Sahara desert
In the tsunami touched outer banks
Between the stone slabs of Angkor Wat
In the tiny cracks in the middle of the high ways
In the crevices of high rise parking structures

From the deep down frozen landscapes of the artic
To the hot springs deep on the ocean floor
To the decaying flesh and oil spills
Your finger print declares
I am omnipotent
I can be omnipresent
I am here for ever
Alive.

My long lost lover

2007-01-29T05:52:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time
Before the logic over ruled my emotions
Before the knowledge stripped of my feelings
There you were,
Far but very near
Omnipotent but tender like a new born baby
Invisible but omnipresent
You were in my home
Looking at me
Smiling at me.

You were my mother,
My child
My beautiful lover
I wrapped you in best clothes
Put gold jewelries on your neck
Woke you up in the morning
Gave you bath and breakfast
Lunch and dinner
And put you to sleep
And wake you up by singing
I never ate any thing
Before feeding you first.

In my own language
I yelled at you
Cajoled you
Fought with you
Did not talk to you like an upset lover

Then as I became wiser
Sophisticated, intellectual
Analytical and advanced.
You left the earth to reside in heaven
And me in this distant world
Scared of the hell
I prayed and asked for your blessings
For my salvation
No more a lover,
Or a son, or a daughter
But some one down trodden
Doing penance for my sins
I am not aware of.

Connecting the Dots

2007-01-28T06:48:00.000-08:00

I woke up in the morning
And saw my self in the mirror
Then saw my face
Oh my eyes
They looked kind of swollen
May be I inhaled some dust particles
That bound to the receptors on my cells
Aroused my neutrophils
Where all the proteins
That can talk to each other
Interacted and sent the signal
To produce the edema

I told about the edema to her
Who told her friends
And they told others
And lately every one
In our community knows about it

Now I am afraid
That it will spread to all people in our state
Or even to the whole country
And may be to the whole continent
And every one in the world
Will talk about it in the chat rooms.

In the evening
I gazed to the sky
And thought about
My little abode earth
Serenading the sun in the Milky Way
And galaxies and galaxies
Make up the constellations
One after another
As if there is no end
To this cycle of creation or destruction

I am in the middle of
This manifestation of being alive
From the unfathomable vast universe
To the atoms in the micromolecules
All in order
All in place to do the right thing at the right time
(most of the time)

Every thing appears
as if made to precision
By some one
Or by some thing
Or by some force
Larger than the universe
But smaller than an atomic particle.

Creations and the creators

2007-01-24T05:02:00.000-08:00

Theories and speculations bound
About some thing that happened
Billions of years ago
When the universe was apparently created
Or
Millions of years ago
When the spark of life ignited
or
Even thousands of years ago
When god created Adam and Eve
And gave man the power
To rule the earth, the sky and the ocean.

Inside a really old extra large pond
Larger than the largest aircraft carrier
A miniscule fish speculates
About the person who dug the pond
And seeded the fish and why.

I wonder more about
The creations people do every day
The poets, the musicians, the painters
The scientists, the engineers and the cooks
The force that drives them to create
The pain of giving birth
And the patience for nurturing it
And the determinatin for protecting it
From an early demise

I wonder about
The talent that gets wasted
Due to lack of education, scope and support
Or just misdirected adventure into nowhere
Or just inertia of not doing any thing
but becoming normal human beings
The consumers.

Creation
An incessant current
flowing from odd places
From the mind of nuts,
Ugly, sick, bipolar or depressed human beings
Or just weird mad artists or scientists
A flow that they can not control
But produce and produce
Until they are summoned by the creator
To come home.

Invocation of Zeus

2007-01-22T09:18:00.001-08:00

More than thousand years ago
You were banished
From the heart of the people
No one could worship you,
No more invocation of the gods
The rulers of the harvest, wind,
sea, love and romance

Instead
People became the worshipper
Of the son of God
No idols but icons
No deity
No divinity
No mystic connection
To the power of the nature
That gives us life
That sustains us

Nature became an object
To study and use its power
But with no reverence
The magic of mythology is swept
Under the carpet of technology
And innovations overwhelms us
But no more invocations.

In the midst of all my stock options
In the midst of all my databases
Emptiness pinches me like a stomach ache
I want to connect some thing, some one
Beyond the walls of my limitations.

Samsar mahasagar, the bondage

2007-01-20T02:35:00.000-08:00

Before you came
You were not there in mind
Now
There are no moments
Without thoughts about you
The further you you are
The worrier I get

All my efforts
All my sadhana
All my actualization
Appear as to love you
(Even if I never say loudly)
To care for you
To make your life little better than mine

And when I hear you smile
When I see you for a while
I feel I am in heaven
Even while faring in the turbulent sea

With time you changed
I changed
The relationship changed
But we are yoked together
For ever and ever.

The Killing Field

2007-01-19T05:22:00.000-08:00

Yaksha asked Yudhisthira
“What is amazing?”
Yudhisthira said
“Human beings see death every day, every where
But can never think
That will happen to them personally.”

It is hard to imagine certain incidents in life
Like the death of our parents, siblings and children
And still harder
To imagine our own demise,
Even though that is a given.
Birth comes with the guarantee of a death.

Every morning
The world offers me in the form of news
Death and more death
Mud slides in Philippines,
Boat disasters in Indonesia
Mine disasters in China

In USA
about five people die in car accident per hour
Not to speak of how many died in Vietnam by bombing
Nor die now in Iraq, thanks to our tax dollar.

We killed
And still love to kill our kind
In the name of God
Or in the name of race or tribe or politics
In old west, Europe, India, Japan, Cambodia, Yugoslavia
And Burundi

Like a drop of water on a taro leaf
Life is so fragile
Nature's fury
in the form of earthquake, cyclone, tsunami, hurricane
Drought and flood
Added to the constant human effort
To kill more and more faster and more painfully
Transforms this world to a killing field

Moments are for ever

2007-01-18T05:01:00.000-08:00

When I visit India
It appears
As if I never left home
The dirt, the noise and the nosy people
Become familiar only after a short while.

My USA life becomes a dream
As if I was never there at all
Even I can not properly sketch the road I take to work
And once I back
India becomes a dream again
As if I had a long sleep and just woke up
On my own bed
Only the photographs remind me of the reality.

Spring comes
with flowers
On every nook and corner of the trees
Summer comes
And erases all the pains of the winter
Fully dressed green trees
The fun fairs and festivals
Appear as if they are there for ever
But not really

Then the winter creeps in
Welcome by naked plants
Shivering mornings and
Show case snow flakes on the window shield
And inside my heavy duty jacket
I feel as if the winter is for ever
And will never go away.

My mind
A mesh of wishes, wistful thinking
The meadow of past pains with the stream of delicious dreams
That come true like soap bubbles
I am a pawn of my mind
Appearing as it wants me to appear
Glossing over the past and
Thinking as if the present is here for ever.

Establishment of World Order

2007-01-17T05:17:00.000-08:00

Just before the big fight
Butterflies swarm
In Arjuna’s stomach
And Krishna comes to his rescue
Providing the essence of all knowledge to him
So that he can kill his relatives, teacher and all
Because it is his Dharma
His duty as a warrior prince
“Death is assured when we are born.
So, why worry?”

He continues
“Whenever the virtue is in trouble
Whenever bad guys torture the good guys
I, the omnipotent God, take birth as a human being
To protect the good guys
By killing the bad guys.”

Sounds very interesting
As if the solution to a problem
Is the elimination of the troublemaker
No transformation
No metamorphosis needed
Just getting rid of him, physically
Cutting off his head by an arrow
Or vaporizing him by a laser beam
Or even nuclear bombing the city he lives in.

This view resonates
In our cultures
In our history
And in our thoughts
As expounded in myths, in stories, in science fictions
And in TV shows
Superman, Bionic Woman, Spiderman
And the star wars
Return of the Jedi

I wonder
Why there is no
Alternative to shock and awe
Establishing the world order by carpet bombing
I guess
Not every one can be Valmiki after all
Or
It is easier to eliminate than to transform.

Eat and be merry

2007-01-16T02:28:00.000-08:00

There was a big feast
After my father’ death
I think the largest, I have seen
Hundreds of people from the villages
Came to feast
Many I did not know.

We also had a feast after my marriage
But smaller in scale
Only family members and relatives
from both sides of the aisle came.

Still smaller was the feast
When my daughter was born in US
Only close friends came with small gifts

Birth and death
Intervened by the ceremony of
Legalizing the process of procreation
Are the land marks of our existence
Each one celebrated
The coming into life
As well the good bye

Each time
It is a feast
As if the road to the heart
Is through our mouths

Of course, that is the fact
No wonder
My wife toils for hours, even days
Cutting
Cooking vegetables, fishes and chicken
And I clean dishes
Before invitees come for dinner
Usually at Indian standard time

They come
They eat and eat
Snacks, main meal and deserts
And praise her profusely
You are such a good cook
No one said to me
You wash dishes so well

All her efforts
Disappear in few minutes
To be purged on the other side of the tube next day.

And I ask like a fool
Why are we so food centric?
She thinks I am a real nut
What kind of question is this?

We are not alone
Wherever I went in the world
People are celebrating life by eating
We eat and eat
Until we can not eat any more
And let others celebrate our departure
By eating.

Living in Heaven

2007-01-15T06:42:00.001-08:00

I wake up to the melodies of the world
To the soft music on the air
To the giggles of a small girl
To the songs of the cuckoos
To the soft sound of the sitar and violin

I wake up to the magic of the sights
To amaze at the daring display on the eastern sky
To see me in my lover’s eyes
To sip the vibrant color of the murals and frescos
To marvel at the tulips with so much to show
To feel the loftiness of each word in a poem

I wake up to the magic of the smell
Of the evening roses, of primroses
Of the hot spicy dishes
To her enticing aroma near by
To the scented fresh air of the burning incense

I wake up to the magic of her touch
To the warmth of the monsoon rain drops
To the closeness of the melting snow flakes on me
To the snuggle of my baby girl
To the kiss of the spring breeze

Alas
Great men and birds are known
Only after they are gone.

Cluster bombing

2007-01-13T06:53:00.000-08:00

You are wrong
If you think that
Only America and Israel
Use cluster bombs

They have been used
For thousands of years
And being used every day all over the world
But actually for creating things
Making sure that the future survives
The uncertainty of chance

Every year
Pine trees lash out cloud of spores
Sunflowers smear the bees with millions of pollens
Fish and turtles lay out thousands of eggs
Males flood the love passage with millions of sperms
And mushrooms go ballistic

Out of these millions
With the chance worse than once in a blue moon
The progeny strolls
To bear the burden of the selfish genes

After work
I open my mailbox
And get bombarded with solicitation and coupons
Lots of mails I did not ask for
Telling me
The more I buy
The more I save
And I am not alone
Every mail box is filled with them too
And lately
My email inbox with one GB space
The favorite arena for cluster bombing

In the land of possibilities

2007-01-12T05:11:00.000-08:00

Long long time ago
When Vietnam in America meant Vietnam
I landed in the cradle of possibilities

I came from a land
Where every thing was defined
Which hand to use for writing
Which hand to use to eat
And who is senior and
Who can have a future and
Who will be servant for ever.
Every thing decided by birth and Karma

Every thing was already defined
The pencil was brown
The chalk was white
The car was Ambassador
Dinner and lunch were rice and curry
And the newspaper was Samaj
And dance was Odissi.

Every thing in life was already defined
I go to school, then to college
Then get a safe government job with extras,
Get married to one I don’t know
And have kids immediately
Raise the kids and then retire
Read Geeta for my salvation

Now
In the land of possibilities.
Any thing was possible
With no particular sequence bracketing what I can do
I can have kids before marriage
Have no kid after marriage
I can go to school after retiring
And I can dive into myriads of possibilities
What to do in life to actualize

In the land of possibilities
The limit is my imagination
What to do in life
Where to shop and what camera to buy
What to eat for lunch and dinner.
To whom to be friend with
and what to do for pleasure.

The world inside me shudders
At the chance of exposing myself
To myriad chances
To be some one great in life
Or lose it all and be a homeless
In the land of possibilities.

With a grain of salt

2007-01-11T05:04:00.000-08:00

My Princeton professor said
Take it with a grain of salt
Of what you read or hear

This iconoclastic statement
Amazed me
Destroyed my inner assurance
Of the facts,
Of the truths
Of Gods
Of science
Of the concept of heaven and hell
Suddenly every thing was amorphous

For me
Philosophers
Scientists
Poets
Were living gods
What they say was the truth
To be believed and revered
Not questioned

Now
As l listened to him
As I followed him
As I read the methods they used
And analyzed their’s data myself
Before reading what they think it means
My perception of me and my world
About the inner working of the cells and mind
All got struck by a fly swatter
So many theories of creation after all.

My professor was right
Every one’s inference might be the fact
But check it out yourself.
Trust but verify.

********************
imagene
January 11, 2007

War of Worlds

2007-01-09T05:29:00.000-08:00

In the heart of Sahara
I was wishing for the rain storm

There was no forecast for it
There has been none for many years
But I desired it any way

With all my believes
I kneeled down in front of my icons
My rain gods,
Indra, Chaac, Tlaloc and Zeus
With all their power
They can make it happen
Wherever they want
Whenever they want

With the gentle kiss of the incense
I woke up in a different world
Where clapping of thunder
Welcome the monsoon goddess
In snow white outfit
On her cat walk from the head of Shiva
To appease the amorous frogs

My trance was broken
By the sand storm blowing onto my face
But I did not want to open my eyes
And be away from my saviors
My believes and my imagination.

The bride in the bright red dress

2006-12-30T04:28:00.001-08:00

Slowly but surely
The bride in the bright red dress
Between the two big lanterns
Opened her eyes
And looked
The rain had stopped
Even though you can hear
Lagging drops fall from the leaves
The sky was clear
It was not a scorching hot summer’s noon any more
The evening moon has just crept in
Like a tiny smile on her face
She looked again
The stars
The breeze
The flowers
the clouds kissing the sunsets
The ripples on the breast of the lake
All seemed so familiar
But as if white washed
Given a new color
A new flavor
To make her a young bride again
New hope
New breath
New way to greet the world
With no tears but hope.

She wonders
Why am I doing this?
For whom am I doing this?
Where does it lead?
Why for this intimate stranger
Should I smile?
Dress up
Take care of myself
Why should I
Change my life’s course
Because never he will be mine
I was better off in my cocoon.

Then she looked
The stranger was not an entity any more
But her own breath
In her each gait he touched her
In her each smile he kissed her
In her each word he whisperered to her
I am yours.
He was there
Always
A part of her
An integral part of her
An eternal spirit
Of the bride
Between two red lanterns.

Dancing inside a cell

2006-12-29T04:21:00.000-08:00

You are so beautiful to me
I know
Many will not agree with me
Your nose
Your eyes
Your lips
And the body’s contour
Are so common,
So ordinary
Still
Out of thousands
When I see you
I know it is you,
My dearest.

In you, I see
The thousand avatars of roses
Of maple and oak leaves
Ants, elephants and tarantulas
Strawberries and sweethearts
Mangoes, oranges, durians and beautiful women
Desperado and diwanas
I see the signature of the cosmic dance
The marvels,
The limits
The scope of possibilities
The exuberance of flow of life
That makes each of us unique
Just like you.

Parallel Universes

2006-12-28T04:36:00.001-08:00

As I walked
Universes passed along me
Cars on autobahn zipped with a speed of 150 km per hour
Besides the chickens strolling on the dirt road besides the cow pasture
People in 747 jumbo jet cruising at an altitude of 40 000 feet
Waved at the teenager bride in a bullock cart
With preying eyes
The bare breasted women in Nice doing sunworship
Glanced at the widows in Varanasi praying
In knee deep water.

As the naked kids played
The soccer ball made out of newspaper
On the dirt and muddy field
The space probe to the Jupiter and beyond
Sent photos to JPL lab with dazzling color

From the safe height beyond the radar detection
The B2 bomber dropped the cluster bombs
On bare feet naked kids collecting cassava roots.

As the automated machine
Read the brain waves
And as the expression of thousands of genes got
Computed in few seconds
The time sat for eternity in the shade of a mango tree
With the boy with a stick tending his goats.

As the night fell
The crickets took over the world around my home
Never knowing the rushing sound
Coming from the speeding cars on nearby freeway
People rushing to nowhere
In parallel universes.

Spider Web

2006-12-27T06:02:00.000-08:00

I am the predator and the prey
Consumed in the web of life.

This web is mine
My own creation
Out of my inner feelings
Perceptions, dreams and nightmares
This is my world,
My thirst (trushna)
My desire (kamana)
For me to cherish and flourish
For my ecstasy and tears.

I travel on the road
I made with my strength
Limited by my fears of unknowns
My castle and my prison
Guarded by invisible barriers
I put in place
For me not to escape
From myself

Scary Thoughts

2006-12-26T04:15:00.000-08:00

I would like to fill up my moments
With something to do
Watch TV or read something
Or go to parties
To talk about things
That I can not solve any way
We just talk and talk
Eat and eat
And laugh and laugh
Having a good time after all.

It is scary to think about
Time without those
The moment of silence
When I have to face myself
One on one
And confront the question
What am I doing any way
For the last so many decades?

It is nice to be aloof
From myself
Pursuing something
Easy to do
Needing no discipline
Or sacrifice of desire
Just following the protocols
Of living as I am supposed

In the midst of this good life
Something pokes me from behind
Where will these all end
When I go away for ever?

We create the world we live in

2006-12-25T07:40:00.000-08:00

Christmas day is a wonderful day
The wishes, the gifts and the decorations
Helping us to create the world we live in.

Many times
That might sound odd
Impossible
So many forces drag us in so many ways
We become puppets
We surrender to survive

At the same time
We try our best
To make the world we want it to be
And live in it
Like immigrant homes
An oasis
A tiny reproduction of the home away from home

We think of festivals
Twinkling lights, dragons and saints
We create gods in our own image
Out of clay, marble
Stone or plastics or paintings
Make them beautiful, serene
We give them power to protect us
Like Ganesh
From the horror we can face
in our daily lives

We create myths
Helena, Leda, Vishnu and Siva,
The garden of Eden
The spirits to guide us
The force to protect us
As superman
Bionic woman
Spiderman
And
Durga

We burn incense
We become born again
We find Satan or saviors
In the same person
And we pray and fall prey
And live
In the world we create for ourselves.

An early morning thought

2006-12-24T06:58:00.001-08:00

SMART
(Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely)

The dreamland scenes
A mixture of my wishes, nightmares and fantasies
Evaporated as I opened my eyes
To start another day

Still on the bed
I kept thinking
Where did I start?
And where am I going
And does it make any sense at all
To live another day
In this earth,
In this paradise of creation
To create something
Self actualizing?

My inner river
Does not flow freely any more
Once I got educated
Got a job
Got a family
But dammed by duties
Responsibilities
Social etiquettes
And money I need to make

Still in the midst of all these demands
My inner uniqueness
Has to express somehow
To make the life worth living
For another day

The show goes on

2006-12-23T09:10:00.000-08:00

The crumpled petals
Take their last breath
In the evening of demise

The old deceased woman
A collection of bones
Awaits for the cremation

The dear’s remnant stinks
After the satiated tiger sleeps

Death and decadence rule
The dark corridor of living

In the crack of the concrete highway
Two leaves of a tiny plant smile
The passionate rose buds
Wait patiently to spray their aroma
On unsuspecting bees and butterflies
With iridescent colored wings.
The tiny baby girl blossoms
Becomes the dancing peacock at the sight of the rain cloud
The gait of the newly born deer
Erases the trauma of an untimely death.

The show goes on
Even though
We
Mere objects for the decoration of the universe
The plants
The animals
The flowers
The jewelries
Paintings and sculptures
The soap bubbles in dazzling colors and shapes
Lose it all and return to oblivion.

anticipation

2006-12-22T04:26:00.000-08:00

Before we met
There was anticipation
Lots of it
Dream, dread and what will I do?
All combined in an amazing swirl.

Then suddenly you came
With very little fan fare
The moment became etched
Like the germination of my youth
Like the birth of my daughter
Like the growth of my children
Like the death of my father
Like my automobile accident
It just became part of my life
And then it was over

Still the moment
Stays as fresh as ever
In my mind’s sky
Undiminished
Untarnished by trickeries of memory
Unshaken by the storms of time
As if we are meeting right now
For the first time.

when does life begin?

2006-12-21T05:16:00.000-08:00

When does the life begin?
This big debate
Forgets to take into account
The unbroken continuity of a life force
From parents to off springs
Through sperms and eggs
Or otherwise

Like small rivulets coming out of a river
Either making it to the ocean
Or dying in the desert
Life propagates
Often in the process
Becoming the food to sustain other living beings
Like cauliflowers and carrots
Crabs and even cows

Or just passes into oblivion
Like millions of sperms
Millions of pollens
Millions of pine or mushroom spores

Out of those millions
A few make it
Like the acorn
That does fall in the forest
But not on a drive way
And joins the relay race of life
To pass the gene to the progeny.

life, an incredible machine

2006-12-20T19:56:00.000-08:00

Oblivious to me, so many things are happening around me. The oak tree in front of my house is shedding leaves as a signature of fall. At the same time there are so many acorns on the drive way. Each of them has the capacity to give rise to a new oak tree, but they don’t. Most of them will perish or be food for some animal. Inside each there are two tiny cotyledons, surrounding a tiny stem and a tiny root, waiting for the water to germinate. I feel bad for the end of the acorns this way. But that has been the pattern of living beings any way, producing a lot, hoping that some will be able to propagate the species.

I started as a botanist, looking at petals of a flower, looking at the phylotaxy (the arrangement of leaves) and sometimes peeping inside the structure and seeing the cellular organization by staining with various dyes. Then moved into looking the life at the molecular level, sometimes forgetting that the molecules eventually work together to build the structure. Now like many scientists I am looking at life at the structural level, how things have been put together using bioinformatics tools.

The complexities and the precision of cell cycle, proliferation, differentiation, conception, embryogenesis demonstrate the ingenuity of creation. Even at the molecular level how different molecules work in cohort in clock work fashion. Without out knowledge or intervention, stimuli from the environment use our sense organs to send impulses to the nerve terminals to start action potentials via afferent nerves to the right places in the brain to generate right response via efferent nerves. Billions of synapses act together to run every thing smoothly for most of us for most of the time. We carry on this complex complicated machine from our birth until death. By the way, do you realize that the death is also a programmed process?