Alive and kicking back in the lab. Check out the lab blog for pics of India and Nepal in the next few days. Compiling my pictures now. Tedious work as there are so many.

Flying off to India tomorrow at 9am. Will be in New Delhi from 11 to the 16th of November then to Agra to visit Taj Mahal on the 16th to 18th. On the 18th, I will travel back to New Delhi to catch a flight to Nepal and will be trekking at the Annapurna mountain range from the 20th to the 30th November. Then I will make my way to Chitiwan National Park at the south of Nepal to see crocodiles, ride elephants and see wild rhinos. Will fly back to Singapore via New Delhi on the 2nd of December and hope to restart blogging on the 4th.
Until then, I doubt there will be any posts here. Don't miss me too much!

Why is it that only at this last week before I leave that I find there are so much to do and rushing like mad? Suddenly everything is happening around me and I’m short of time.

 

Sorry cant do that, I got this and that to do this week. Yes I know I won’t be around for the next month but this is really important.

 

Or is it just that I become more conscious of the passing time when there is a break coming up.  Then when there is a sudden stop to a flowing river, you feel the pressure of the waters building up.

 

But I’m really excited about the trip. Because there is some element of danger in it. Its India, for crying out loud, what were you thinking when you signed up for this. You could get mugged, killed, kidnapped, whatever. Oh erh… if you don’t come back, can I have that cute paperweight on your table?

 

Got to kill 10 mice on Thursday. Not a nice thing to do. That’s why I don’t give my mice names, Jinny names her fish. If I can’t tell one mouse from another, I don’t see how she can tell one tiny zebrafish from its neighbor.

 

My paper for the journal got thrown back at me. One editor still making my life difficult. Really don’t know what to do. They are asking for too much. Yes, the suggestion is valid and worthwhile doing but it won’t add any impact to the final conclusion. I have already spent

nevermind…

 

I am getting tired more easily these days. Must be age catching up on me (my grandfather laughs at the background). Or maybe I’m eating too much, yeah, you should see my drawer in the lab. The no eating sign is on the door, not my drawer.

My university somehow got the traveling Nobel museum to pay them a visit for 3 months and staff get to go for free. So I went and took a look at what they had. Besides the regular displays of who won in which year for what, there was this interesting built up from scratch little theatre that was surprisingly soundproof from the outside. Once inside, it’s a dark box with 3 large screens that played short movie clips about a few Nobel laureates and their lives. I found this the most interesting and sat in one of the two boxes for more than an hour watching till the disc repeated. Will go back next week for the other box. Anyway, in the first installment, there were a few clips that caught my attention. Actually all of them were good. Let me recall. The first was about BII, Basel institute of immunology that was open for only 30 years but was a hotbed for nurturing Nobel winners. 3 came out of that institute in the first 11 years of its establishment. The scientists there think that they should work hard and play even harder. Next was a clip from Cambridge which is another institution that churns out award winners but the people in that place thinks that its tradition, environment, and hard work that produces brains (by the way, it was originally built a Bible college). There is this weird rule there that only allows you to walk on the grass if you are accompanied by a fellow from the university. A clip from the university where James Watson (the guy that first showed the world how DNA looked like) is now working came next. It interviewed the Nobel winner and a delivery man. The winner said that all work and no play improves creativity. You put your heart mind and soul to it till you breakthrough in the problem. The delivery man says that the people there have no life, are weird, work terribly hard but only1% make it to the top and the rest not getting the deserved credit, and are very focused. It was a funny clip actually, one second the camera showed scientists in a serious experiment where a nanometer mistake could lead to a failed experiment and then the next moment the delivery man stacks all sizes of boxes onto a trolley to deliver and one falls off from the middle, hits the ground and rolls a few times; he reaches out to try his best to make sure the others don’t fall off while one limb reachs for the fallen box. It really makes you think – should life be that serious?

There was a clip for some group that fought for the banning of personnel land mines and another on Tagore, the Indian who won the Nobel Literature award. They interviewed kids, students, scholars, people on the street, and all showed admiration for his work. Singer, poet, artist, architect, writer, aristocrat but lived a simple life, humble, charitable, honest, spiritual. Then the last question was ‘what do you think his reaction will be to be placed on a pedestal like this?’ and the lady answering it was tongue tied, repeating all over again how great his work was and how kind he was. There was an awkward silence before she said ‘but he deserved it’.

Courage is not the absence of fear but rather going ahead with your plan in spite of fear.
You don't need courage if the matter you are pursuing will surely turn out ok. You dont need courage to believe that the sun will rise from the east tomorrow. The very fact that you need courage tells me that that plan has a chance of failing and, more times than not, the probability of failing will be far greater than the chance of success. That's why gamblers are courageous people, they throw their money in even though they know that chance is against them. But life is a gamble; like it or not. You plan next week's activities not knowing for sure if you will open your eyes tomorrow morning. You enter a relationship and trust people who may one day backstab you. But there is a difference between being reckless and being courageous. Everyone has their own limits and borders set and sometimes we psyche ourselves up so much that the life we live borders between courage and insanity. That's where we need to know balance and how to achive it. And to know at which point the scales tip, you have to know yourself and you have to know the friends around you who know your capabilities.
Some people will do insane things to live life on the edge and make every breath count. But push it too far and they are history. Why even live if its gonna be dull? The other end of the spectrum belongs to people who keep to the middle lane so much that all they see is black tar their whole life. Why kill yourself when it's not your time?