Clutter of sorts

There's a shock bubu in my sensory cortex. There's too much happening with a deafferenting of sorts.There was way too much travel. My Nashville trip merged into Boston, Reading, Mumbai. I interviewed with Mickey and Farhat for the MSF job.It was a fun thing- given real life situations to work on and stuff to manage. Felt more like an MBA assignment- to deliver food sorties to a camp in Nigeria and manage a depressed health worker, a theiving local mechanic, a broken down truck, an impending strike,ambitious plans to establish another feeding center,a disgruntled warlord who feels ignored. Made me want to start stat. But the fact that my limited period of availability would mean that only a miracle would ensure that I get to go on a mission was a bit of a dampener.Maybe I get to work with them in Mumbai.I should know from them folks soon. But then, the shock bubu - I did not feel so bad to brood on it. In other circumstance I would have. But amma has a surgery tomorrow.

Mhatre ajji died. If anyone had to know what loneliness means...man, it cannot get lonelier than it was for her.She sort of made it into oneliness with Krishna.The ISKCON people came with their drums and cymbals and sang sad bhajans. It seems unreal for me sometimes that someone can crave death so much, and not commit any hara kiri but wait patiently knowing that age or ill health will smite you on the head with the fatal blow one day...and each passing day is not the glory of sunshine and the newness of opportunity, but a long parched longing wait.

Again shock bubu ensured that my ADHD assailed senses did not want to make me mull on this, but to ponder a moment and move on.

Have things piled to do. But they can wait for now.

May the surgery go well.

Life goes around in circles

DC, Hartford, Nashville, a probable Albany, Mumbai.

If you are on a large circle, you never know when you are making a turn.

The earth is spinning while you've been running
You're gonna get back where you've been
While I've been dreaming about the real thing
My reality chases a dream.

Transformer

This was lying in the posts to edit for a long time.
Disclaimer: If you have better things to do( I did not when I started out writing this.) don't read this.If The Matrix is your Gospel truth and you look upon Bladerunning as a possible future career, read on.

Happened to read some stuff about transhumanism some time back, when time ran drearily, and disuse atrophy threatened. Seemed oddballs and kooky initially- a movement that proclaims to help people do 'better than well.'

I had a sticker stuck on the cover page of my school diary- it read, in Comic Sans MS font, "Good is not good where better is expected."I remembered.I read on.

Wikipedia ( funnily Citizendium, for all its refinement has no entry) puts it as "international intellectual and cultural movement supporting the use of science and technology to enhance human mental and physical abilities, and to ameliorate what it regards as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition such as stupidity, suffering, disease, aging and involuntary death."

I am piqued.Who are these guys? Surely they aren't aiming at sculpting a philosopher's stone?! I mean it is good to aim to improve. But how do you itemize it into a protocol or menu?That seems Riddikulus...get some parallax for gossakes.

The World Transhumanist Association defines it as "the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason, especially by developing and making widely available technologies to eliminate aging and to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities."

Wow. So PC!!
Abstruse. As PC stuff usually is.

They aim for convergence of Nano, Bio, Info and Cognitive technologies. I was looking for hard examples. Came up with fancy shmancy names: Extropianism ( proactive evolution), Immortalism( technological immortality), Abolitionism ityaadi. Nice to read. But does not form links beyond sounding sexily vague.There are no examples to see. There is no bamboo microscope or AI based prosthetics for cripples, no Deep Thought on brain mapping for Psy illnesses, rather Bootstrapping on boozed up bombast.

My take is that as a transhumanist you could write a great bestseller, or script a hit TV series/movie.Tarsem Singh ...Cell. Remember? Feed the public on such neuromancing with the quaint, put in the CIA, a Jason Bourne and a rumpunctious hotbod like JLo, plenty of intellectual masturbation ( 'IM', as the surgical twats acronymize) with some of the above words, and you have a pseudoPhodu cheez.

Go through the WTA website, you realize it is really an idea of bringing together all progressive thought into one scaffold of improvement.It is as vague as it is ambitious. Because people never set out to eat and drink to build a beauteous fat cell 2.0, and prefer simple non intellectual fornication to IM. How can you call it a movement?Its rather a way of thought, life maybe.

There are ethical angles ad infinitum. It creates a world akin to the alpha beta Omega craziness of Huxley's Brave New World. A caste system of sorts, of those who want to stretch the limit versus those who want to make two meals a day.

All in all: Keep the font Comic Sans MS on that.Not serious are you?

If I had time to waste, I would have written more. I don't, and hence I end here.I want to use the time to evolve pro actively.

Dance to the music in eternal sunshine of the spotless mind

I used to laugh out uproariously every time I saw his photograph.
Until I came to this Ubuntuised country. Now I respect the philosophy that everyone has a right to be an asshole.I am the wise one( ass hole to somebody else) because there is an asshole like this.Respect everyone, however BORATic he might be.He is the one is responsible for who you are.

I clicked this while we were in Melghat, some 6-7 years ago.Came across this snap( have I posted this already before?) while I was going through old files I had saved on my iPod. It goes like this: Melghat has never had electricity. The last time electricity poles were erected was in the 1980s when Indira Gandhi came visiting.But when she went back, the two warring State Electricity Boards of Maharashtra and MP went back to their pehle tum bickering as to who should be responsible for providing electricity for these suckers.


With all the malnutrition deaths taking up news, the NGOs came to Melghat. They provided solar panels to the villagers.

But you can't, well, give a bushman a fork and knife and expect him to use it the way you do. So what do they do with the solar panels: Watch:

Btw the song they played was Bagh aga bagh sakhe kasa bugu bugu laag tay ..........

Brain waste, funny taste

An article I came across in the JAMA on health worker migration alludes to what they call " Brain waste"- skilled migrant workers are unable to find work in their area of expertise and end up working in unrelated low-paying jobs.

Exotic sounding word.No neurons being tossed into the bin.But compelling on the idea of why people mix up career and life.People have very quaint ideas when they make the switch.

While I must admit at forth that I am no sage on this, I have heard mixed views.
For people like DRK, working in resource poor areas was a brain waste.That its no use working for excellence when you are fighting with red tape and cost cutting all the time. It is funny, none of my teachers have given me negative feedback on that.Not Dilip Mathai, not DRK, not Kaka.
Hardik was honest to admit that its all about money.
One friend of mine, now an intern in MI told me that he came here with romantic notions that what he saw in western movies about a open country and 'promiscuous' lifestyle was true.
"Tab life mein aish karne ka aise lagta tha"

There's a whole bunch in KEM and BJ who think the Mah government is going crazy on bond issues, trying to bulldoze its way through on its supposedly moral high ground, and count it as wise investment to rather spend time and money in making it to elsewhere.

Abhijit said he wants to learn interventional pulmono skills.Charudutt said the same thing when he first came.Learning skills.Lot of things have changed since.

Lifestyle is a major draw.But I presume that means cleaner roads, more taxes, being distanced from near and dear ones,loneliness, nice big cars,safety, subtle racism. It is a mixed bag, really.It is about making choices based on priorities.As Dhiraj says," i would rather be a first class citizen in a second class country than be a second class citizen in a first class country."
No one person is right or wrong here.Just that 'results might vary based on experience.'

Many medical students seem to do so because it is a fashionable thing to do.All the batch toppers are doing it.It catches on as a trend in places like MAMC or AIIMS, where Ramadoss has to address the convocation thus:" don't go away. And if you do, please come back."In my MD batch I am the only one who chose to give my USMLE. In the batch after mine, half the batch is already interviewing.

Renita gave me a totally new perspective: of parents of unmarried girls equating getting married to someone in the US and going there as being an indicator of success in life. I got registered on shaadi.com, just to test the waters and am already put off and shall be deleting my profile.


These are individual anecdotal experiences, a bit colorful,but unsupported by sexy stats.For a more detailed discussion read the WHO fact sheet on this. But I gather, at least from the Pinoy experience, everything starts with an individual experience, an anecdote, a word of mouth, which people tend to trust.Then when things get big, people become numbers, more reliable.

If anyone does read my blog, your experiences are welcome.

Yeah...Mukesh Ambani is the richest man on the earth......so?

Territory size shows the proportion of all people living on US$10 purchasing power parity or less a day worldwide, that live there.

And the Sensex touched a sexy 20,000.So?
More such maps and great stuff at worldmapper.

To give you a sized perspective of things>>>>

Watch the video here....amazing stuff!!!

http://www.micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/