Quest For Knowledge

It was a little over a year back that I started my PhD journey at TIFR, Mumbai, starry eyed with a hundred different ideas of what I would pursue in PhD and what my life in TIFR would be like. I would be dishonest if I were to say that things have been exactly like I dreamt they would be. Having left engineering with an interest in developmental biology, I even surprised myself when I chose a lab working on Cellular Neurobiology over two other developmental biology labs I rotated in. But that’s the smallest of the surprises I’ve had.  Very recently, I had to give a comprehensive exam presentation, what’s called Project 1 seminar at TIFR, on the field that my project is to be based on. This was unlike any presentation I had given in history because I was expected to have read research articles in the range of a few hundreds and know things in the field from the most basic level to the most advanced level, put them in context and understand what it means for my project.  Not sur...

I remember the sixteen year old girl, who would get back from school half an hour earlier than her mom. Her mom, being a Maths teacher for 11th and 12th in the boys' counterpart of her school, would take time to wrap things up after classes, while she returned earlier in the school van with her friends. Half an hour, she would have to make herself comfortable, change out of her uniform, make tea for herself and coffee for her mom and sit together. But never did that happen.  Half an hour later, her mom would come tired from her long day at the school, yet always entering with a "Good evening".  "Good evening! Amma, Tea!", the daughter would reply. Settling her things on the dining table, the mother would go to the kitchen and look at the mountain of vessels that had been kept for drying. Exasperated, she would look at her daughter, "Did you not do anything till I came?" While her mom dug the milk cooker out of the mountain, the daughter would happily p...

This review was part of an assignment I had to submit in my Basic Neuroscience course at grad school, which I just felt like posting just so. "Out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope" is what struck me as I was watching the movie Awakenings. When Dr. Malcolm Sayer (Robin Williams), a researcher by heart and mind, joins a chronic illness hospital in the summer of 1969, despair is his disposition. Despair on being asked to treat patients at limited facilities, with no conviction of them getting better. Through this despair arises hope when he meets Lucy - an old woman who had been seemingly ‘frozen’ for the last 40 years, in spite of which could catch a ball tossed at her perfectly well. With meticulous, yet wild skills of experimentation, observation, and interpretation, Sayer hypothesised that Lucy and several other patients in the hospital are actually suffering from a severe form of Parkinsonism. He proposes that the patient's motor impulses cancel each other ...

Today, I am in a storytelling mood despite having an exam in Cell Biology tomorrow. It’s surprising how the brain works - finding reasons and ways to not work when you need it the most. But I have punished my brain enough, trying to remember details of the cell cycle regulation and cell signalling pathways. Hence, I decided to tell the story of how I ended up in the place I am - at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, pursuing my first year as a PhD scholar. I had decided to pursue research and stick to academia at a very early stage of my college life. With that objective, I also took efforts to make that happen. Working in laboratories, going on internships, staying at college whilst all my family members were at a function. It definitely was not easy. But by the end of the coursework, when the time came to apply to PhD positions, I was confident that my profile would mean something to interested PIs and that I would soon be in a lab of my interest. Then came the reali...

This interview featured in the In Vivo magazine, an in house magazine published annually by the Department of Bioengineering in SASTRA Deemed University. I was in my final year of integrated Masters in Medical Nanotechnology, when my juniors approached me for this interview. I hope I did some justice to the honour bestowed upon me. Do let me know in the comments!  The link to the magazine can be found here .    1. You are right now working on systems biology. What would you say, are your areas of interest along with it? My areas of interest lie in an interwoven web spun by evolution, development of organisms and the study of holistic interactions that occur amongst them. There is a fascinating background behind my motivation to work in these areas. It started with this book written by Dan Brown named  Origin  which raised some interesting questions related to humans’ origin and evolution. A scientist in the plot comes up with a solution in the form of an algorit...

I never thought this would be something I admit in public, but I guess, the incidents that have the most impact in one’s life are unprecedented. So a brief introduction to me - I am a 22 year old Masters student, living what I consider to be a good life. I have all the reasons to be perfectly contented - I study something I actually like, have a beautiful family, and friends who are truly family. To an outsider, my life seems perfect. Hell, it should seem perfect to me. But there’s this saying in one of my most favourite Hindi movies  Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham , “When you look from the outside, all you see is happiness. But the closer you come, the harder will the unfulfillment hit you” So coming to the point - I have been diagnosed with depression and I have been taking antidepressants for over a year now. Countless times have I asked myself the question  Why?  It’s not a  Why me?  It’s more like a restlessness, a despair -  What happened that pushed me over...