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I like reading autobiographies, biographies of people I think are worth looking upto. When the heart and mind is marred by problems in everyday life or worries about major things in future, when all you see is some depressing hopelessness, it's just inspiring to know that there have been people in flesh and blood who have gone through much worse hardships in life but stood strong and achieved great things. So I've read quite a few ones of those. These are humans with varied palette of personalities. Some are eccentric, some are intellectual loners who have shunned themselves away from the world, some seem to be normal or more correctly have achieved the art of maintaining a good public image irrespective of their personalities. But one thing these people have in common, or at least I think they do, is the strength of the human spirit. If one can withstand so many storms without losing it or hurting others/themselves there is must be something called as 'immunity' or strength of the will. Reading about such stories gives a similar feeling you get when you look at a huge mountain standing tall in front of you.

Nice song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9x6l3gl-brQ&feature=PlayList&p=12EAFCAF37A3A170&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=33

Why do celebrities wear dark glasses?

If you are a reader of celebrity 'news' (aka gossip) or even the general entertainment section of any news bulletin, you might have noticed that the majority of the celebs are pictured wearing dark glasses all the time, even on a dark winter evening. I always used to wonder why? So here are some possible reasons I have come up with:

1. Its a fashion statement

2. They get paid for it

3. To protect their eyes from flashy press cameras

4. To hide their face with no make up (which is rare)

5. To hide their red swollen eyes due to overdose of drugs or because they were stoned last night

6. To avoid eye contact with strangers

7. To hide true emotions/vulnerabilities which are often reflected through the eyes

8. One crazy person started it and eveyone else is following the trend

9. All of the above

These days I get very irritated with the overuse of chat/internet language in English writing. I do it as well, often due to carelessness. It has become a habit to type in shortforms like u, shd, cd, wat, dunno etc. and during some over-sensitive moments when I just a need a small reason to get annoyed, these badly distorted spellings really prick my eyes. Why are we in so much hurry to type that we spoil the language most of the time? Although, this is mostly true for casual conversations, it would feel good to read a nicely written correct sentence, which is a rare treat usually found in scientific journals.

Another forgotten thing from the past is writing, with an actual pen and paper. I like writing with hand and thankfully everyone in my lab takes notes from the ongoing experiments and writes down everything in the lab notebook. There obviously we don't write essays, it mostly consists of protocols, how much amount of which reagent we used and stuff like that. Apart from that, I hardly write anything at home, except for the occasional grocery list.

Couple of weeks back, TIME had published pictures of beautiful hand-written letters in cursive. Though cursive was regarded as the style used only for handwiting and books were (are) usually published in manuscript, cursive went out of use long time back in order to maintain uniformity in reading and writing. Now, I would also mention that its more fun to read anything books, journal papers, newspapers, magazines on a paper rather than reading them online. But sadly, I can't mail you the copy of TIME lying on my coffee table.

Life with Tom

I have seen some pretty good movies in past few days. both new and old. New hindi movie by Vishal Bharadwaj, Kaminey, was very good on absolute standards not only better as compared to other bollywood movies. By the time we were finishing discussing about Kaminey and how its style resembles a bit to a Coen brothers' movie or a Tarantino flick, QT came up with this new masterpiece 'Inglourious Basterds'. I was lucky to watch it on the day of the release and as expected it was very good...has all the things Tarantino has done in Pulp fiction and Kill Bill plus it has WWII background. But the history has been distorted a lot and it can get away being considered as Tarantino's imagination. Brad Pitt was simply amazing, he has pulled this funny typical very southern american accent very well...the ending I felt was a bit too dramatic for my taste but a big movie, big story has to end in a big way, so it did. The company for this movie was interesting, my friend suggested we sit in the 4th row inspite of being way ahead of time, the reason for this being, 4th row seats enable us to drown ourselves completely into the movie, forgetting all the disturbances around :) I found this concept pretty amusing and it actually worked :P A bit hard on my neck but those seats are the best if you want to 'drown urself' in the movie :)

Anyway, other good movies I watched were 2 days in Paris and 8 and a half. 2 days in Paris is a goofy independent romatic comedy mixed with lot of sattire and it was pretty cool. 8 and a half, as I had imagined from the reviews was too artistic to the point of being a bit absurd at times. Its concept is pretty good, a famous director facing a 'creative block' is pressurized by the world around him to revive his moviemaking art. He faces severe depression failing to do so and randomly travels in his dream world. The movie demands viewer's complete attention as its hard to draw a line between a dream sequence and reality. So overall its an art film by Federico Fellini.

Apart from watching movies, luckily I had got a chance to meet/talk to many friends in US and India. So it was nice getting in touch with them :) Hoping to have some more fun before the summer slips away...

btw Happy Ganesh Chaturthi to all :)

Cheers

My parents got their visa and are visiting in 3 weeks. I have been waiting for them to come here for over an year now, but finally its happening, so I'm pretty excited :) We as a family haven't travelled anyplace nice for many years now. I have been out for 10 years, my brother was closeby but all of us together hardly got any chance to do long distance trips as we used to when we were kids. My father loves to travel...a lot! but too many things were holding him back because of family, job and life after the retirement, he is the most excited one for this trip. He told me names of some places in PA, CT, MA that I have hardly heard of. Now I know what he used to do spending hours reading and collecting maps from all over the world. So he has also suggested what route we should take in order to cover most of the places conveniently. I guess those particular genes did not make it to me, otherwise I won't have such a horrible direction sense. I used to get lost in my department building for first 2 years! Anyway, during their stay hopefully I will also get some fresh air away from my micromanaging advisor, although she is currently vacationing in Italy...

Work has been tough yet sparingly satisfying for past few months, I really need some family time now!