We are young, we learn by screwing up in everything!

Our generation is becoming the biggest screw ups in human history. We set targets, we dream bigger than reality; in the process loose our brains and get sucked into ourselves. Oh wait, how much brain do we actually have? Yes we all probably have the same amount of brain and intellect the previous generation had, but we live such a fast life that we lose focus; we want to do and want to be good at everything. Can we be good at everything? It’s Mission impossible! Unless we are Tom cruise hanging on to a plane while it really takes off, but even these perfectly heroic characters are not a pro in everything. They definitely screw up in something, otherwise we won't have a movie to watch. Whereas we the non-fictional superheroes of our own lives, dream of accomplishing everything. We have heard so many times that we unconsciously influence our mind through what we see, read and hear.

The digital age is imposing on us tons of videos which show people doing amazing things, that’s great. We should appreciate what these seemingly normal humans do. But what we forget is, we influence our brains that we can also do the same things. Not just imbibing one but trying to do all of them. We humans do compare ourselves with others and this hasn’t been a recent phenomenon. During the absence of digital knowledge, the comparison was only with our neighbors and friends; but now with the whole world! People start professing things about happy life, happy working, happy mind and all those (of course I do as well) but we fail to realize that it’s about some sample subjects somewhere on the planet. We considering ourselves special counter-intuitively should avoid us from falling a prey to generalized ideals and opinions. But we don’t, we think that’s the norm and I should try those things. We try one guidebook/ guide blog at a time and figure out nothing works.

The process of rediscovering oneself can be guided but ideas from around us though books or any other form. But letting us rely completely on one set of principle is like looking at a fish in the ocean and thinking all the fishes do and look exactly the same. The smart world brings in a lot of smart and ‘making us less-smart’ things to the doorsteps of our minds. Be it ‘--- got talent’ shows, ‘Guinness world record’, ‘perfect couple’, ‘survival stunts’, etc; we just can’t do everything; less so being good at them.

There is an amazing list of talks on Ted called, “What is success?” . Especially the one by Alain de Botton  called "A kinder, gentler philosophy of success". We cannot achieve everything; if you want a good relationship may be we need to sacrifice some of our workout time. If we want to achieve something in work, we might have to give up on some time with family. There is always a sacrifice, which we choose to blind fold ourselves from when looking at people who achieved greatness and we just admire the perfection in them. Only when we start to admire successful people along with their imperfections, with their greater sacrifices; we will be able to be happy with our lives and strive for a better life rather than a perfect life. May be this idea will someday reduce the dissatisfaction in our generation and help in improving the quality of our lives. 

Probably sooner the better!

Sometimes it feels like, fighting a loosing battle!

• • Being an avid researcher, I always push myself to think counterintuitively. In this case, why is research integrity important? What if there was no integrity in research? A few thousands might die because of medicines which should have saved them, 1000s more may die due to building and bridge collapses, millions may starve due to failed harvest cultivating crops which claimed overproduction, maybe we might have more fireworks in the sky when satellites are launched or we might have all been dead and gone.
    
    

    Importance of standards:

    We always give excuses for not being up to the mark. But who sets these marks? Should we actually even compromise perfection? We as a race have understood from our experiences over the centuries that efficiency is as important as perfection. So we set standards, to bring about this balance. We allow error bars and we empathize with experimental and human errors and try to accommodate them, see the significance of the outcome rather than a black and white approach.
    
    

    Rat race and instant gratification:

    “I need to report to my boss by tonight. So, I don't care about the pH being 7.6 instead of 7.5. All he needs is data which we can add in that paper.” This is just the tip of the iceberg, we know too well that the system we are in today which is based on impact factors and publish or perish culture, is the root cause. We have run too far with it as a community to even turn back and introspect. We think it is the norm, we breathe it, we believe it and we live it. We want every single experiment to be a part of a research article which will be published in a high impact factor paper. So what happens, we go a step further.
    
    

    Breaching the boundaries:

    When a meeting is set for 8 am we sometimes tend to think 10 minutes past 8 am is also ok. Our day to day approaches like this, pushes us to overrule the standards assuming time intervals in readings are ok, removing outliers are not bad and may be just decreasing the control value a bit to reach the magical p < 0.05 is acceptable. By doing this, we ignore the gravity of the effect it is going to have on the world.

    
    

    There are more than a few reasons why integrity is important;

    
    

    •   Most of the research is done using the hard earned tax money of the general public.
    •   The researchers are most of the time paid for all the work they perform, unlike the days when
      scientist worked part time at odd hours to support the research they were doing.
    •   More importantly, the basis of any project is to strive for a better human existence, if the
      research we do is not going to accomplish this due to its falseness; ARE WE DOING JUSTICE TO EVEN OUR OWN CONSCIENCE? 

The failure of decades of misplaced priorities and the determined few; can they change this world?

History has taught the human race that failures are not just lessons for one person or a generation but for everyone across generations. We seldom learn, seldom choose to learn and fail to learn from our failures as a race. The wars of ancient Greece till the wars of this day all portray one appalling human quality, greed. However hard we try to flush it out of the human memory; it rejuvenates in a new form. The truth is; we always look for more returns, more money, more land, more food and more of whatever is known to us. Smart phones and tablets share the same features from hardware to software (with minor variations) but we want them both, when we already have sleek portable laptops. If you ask young ignited minds their thoughts about a better planet; we are always assertive. We aim and dream to leave behind a better planet, but only through the means which will make us prosperous rising above the populations. We have come too far forgetting what got us where we are! We cannot achieve our goal of leaving behind a better planet by revolutions in information technology or in politics or innovative business models or anything which is materialistic; but only through leaving behind a legacy which creates more ignited young minds, only through efficiently passing the knowledge we gained to our next generation . When all the brilliance of the young minds are lost to the commercialization of this planet, how can we claim to have successfully passed the baton to the future generations? When we complain about brain drain, shouldn't we think about ways to stop it draining out of the entire education system? We as a generation have forgotten about this big responsibility of becoming and grooming educators.

Shortsightedness of our long term plans of a confused generation!

7 years ago in March 20^th 2007 final day of our public exams the last day of high school. “Machi (the way of calling dude in Tamil Nadu), all the formalities done now where do you see yourself in 5 years?” asked one of my friends Krishna Prasad standing outside the school gates. We were all like ok that's not the best question when you had just finished one of the craziest exam series which will literally change our lives. (At least that's what we thought at that age.) We were all like this and that bla bla bla going around the group.  Reality strikes harder than a fabulous exam results and it struck our lives in 3 months and most of our futures changed.

2 years into college and we had the same question and the weird guy to ask the weird question this time was me. Talking about the future is always exciting even though we might be the dumbest person in the group. Everyone was like again bla bla bla bla again. It all looked so cool that day not realizing what exactly we were talking about.

Our life’s choices become drastically different influenced by the circumstances of the day, to state the least daunting pressure on the choices we make. Everyone’s perception of life changes as we grow we all wanted to be pilots one day, then astronomers, may be a social activist, then a crazy scientist, a teacher may be, the list goes on as we get influenced by the amazing people we experience in our day to day lives to the people who motivate us through the news we hear. But where did things go wrong? Why suddenly every one of us just started working in the IT/services industry (at least in Madras and in India) and whatever the local influence was. Yes, it is intelligent to adapt to the demands of today but are we missing the point?

Weren’t we fighters? Aren’t we explorers? We always talked about fighting to figure out our lives and not taking no for an answer. Will this generation be content with the choices we are making with our lives? This doesn’t end there and that's the worst part of the problem. Some of us follow our dreams, break away from the system and explore. When I went back to research after working in IBM for a year my parents asked me what you are going to do, I told them a PhD, a postdoc and then become a professor one day with so much confidence. It all began there…..

We all see successful people like Professors and Scientist being a Graduate Student and we walk like zombies just following the trail. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. Finish PhD, post doc, tenure.. This is the only thing which runs through our heads as a grad student. (If you are not a Grad student and if you thought we think about amazing experiments all the time no you got us completely wrong) Education was to help us explore the world, to apply our knowledge to try and make it a better place; just think about it. 

The first answer which comes of a student these days on the very first day of school about a question of life after graduation is, “I want to get a decent job with a decent salary.” Then the other answers starts to come like, “Want to find a nice life partner.”  Bla bla bla.. but most of the time we don't get to hear something like, “I am going to put the knowledge I gained to help solve the problems in my community.” The closed we get is like, “I am going to cure cancer or AIDS.”, if we are Bio students.

Looking for a well-paid job, a life partner, curing cancer, etc. are all ok but shouldn't this be an offshoot of a much more primary goal of figuring out what we what to do in life to put it more bluntly, FINDING OUT THE REASON FOR OUR EXISTENCE. Shouldn't we be following our heart rather than just going into a degrees with pre-set goals and just becoming a prey to our goals. We always complain that we don't have the freedom to choose what we want to do in life due to family pressure but are we still making the choice we really want even if we manage to break away from the system? Are we just too short sighted just flowing successful people rather than trying to be successful ourselves in our own ways. 

Success is always very subjective word. If we are satisfied by the choices we made all though our lives and die as a content person, we will be the most successful people ever to walk on the face of the earth. Will this generation be successful or regret the lives we lived?

Scientific openness...

We talk a lot about having an opened mind, having a transparent government, striving for an open society and the list for openness goes on. Yes, transparency and openness are not actually synonyms but they are degrees of openness itself. Something which is transparent doesn't mean that it is open to everyone and it holds good for a few scenarios, such as the government where a lot of intelligence reports and other high security information are maintained; and it is justifiable. But sometimes absolute openness is essential. 

Sometimes, human evolution doesn't go forward, one such area is knowledge sharing. One aspect we humans pride over other living creatures is the collective knowledge which we have accumulated over the past thousands of years. For example, making fire wasn't just learnt and forgotten but it was just passed on and on and even till this very day, we use the same cave man technology to create fire using abrasives. These are very different from protective instincts which is also kind of genetically driven like a mice being scared of a cat (like human beings afraid of lizards and cockroaches :P :P) but this is not knowledge.

When humans started to accumulate knowledge 1000s of years ago, they were very open, they drew/ wrote on walls and just passed the knowledge to everyone. In the times of the great scholars of the Greek and Roman Empire a lot of philosophers though scholarly, took to the general public to profess their knowledge and ideas. As centuries went by, the scholarly started to isolate themselves from the society and started to form their own class ignoring the others. This led to a certain drift and the bridge of knowledge transfer between the scholarly and a general public started to crumble. There has been a great deterioration in this process from a day where scholars were the once who were able to explain big science to common man; to this day were scholars are the ones who talk with scientific jargon which the general public could never understand.

There has also been a paradigm shift in the way scientific knowledge is treated, from the days when science was free and just pure knowledge to a day when everything in science means money and business. I read this title somewhere but it hits the bull’s eye, “Knowledge not shared is knowledge wasted”. Today, when more than 60% of the world earns less than 2USD per day, an average scientific article could cost around 10-20 USD. We are talking about knowledge explosion and all those things these days but; in reality it is knowledge implosion. We generate so much knowledge but we prohibit people from reading it and just because it is not open to everyone, the knowledge which is generated is just becoming obsolete and useless.

This cocoon which someone initiated thinking that a butterfly will eventually fly out of it one day, is strangling the same beautiful creature to death. There are some positive signs though in the recent past, leading scientist have come out in favor of openness and are pushing for greater knowledge sharing. They have created platforms of open access of scientific articles and a lot more people have started to appreciate the fact of openness. The irony in this is, we receive the money to do research from the general public in the form of taxes but totally shield them from the knowledge we generate out their hard earned money. Thus far except the warriors of open access, the larger scientific community has been silent spectator on this sad truth.  

The illusion of every moment

Life is a marvelous gift; if there could be a better gift than our life itself is our perception. We live our lives at a pace where, we are unable to really enjoy living our lives and rare so appreciate the power of our human perception. It is how we perceive things really drives our day today living. It starts with thinking its 10 am in the morning when you wake up but when it’s hardly 9am to thinking that a stranger you just met might have a crush on you.  It all lies in the power of our brain and the complex biochemistry (which no one really understands) which drives this 1500g of crazy stuff inside the skull making us the dominant beings on the blue planet (or this is how we at least perceive human being as).

Let me start by just giving you a simple explanation of the complexity of perception. Once, I and a friend of mine were deeply introspecting on our mere existence; he brought up the point of perception. He explained it this way, “When we are young, we are shown different colors on a board and pointing at specific shaped objects which scientifically have different wavelengths are taught this is red, blue and green and so on. How can we be so sure that the red color which the teacher is pointing out and telling is red is the same color the student is seeing through is eyes?  What if he sees it as some other color and perceives it as red? “. Of course, we have scientific explanations to colors, like red is 625 (nanometer) nm and so on but still, how can we be sure what the other person’s brain is seeing when showing him/her a picture which absorbs just 625 nm wavelength light?  He can just be seeing the 625 nm as a totally different color and believe all his/her life that it’s red.

This illusion of perception has been the basis of many ideas and theories but more often than not these were just far away from the common man and his day to life. But the fact is, it actually is an integral part of our life. Say for example, every ordinary person spends so much time thinking about what other people would be thinking of the words he/she uttered or the actions performed.

When you start walking along this path in your thoughts, you feel like you have gone crazy; you just start to think, how much you could have been tricked by your senses all these years; whatever we consider as sensory organs; eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin. Probably the perception of seeing something is the most easy to explain. It is not just about colors, it can be expanded to every single thing starting from landscapes to people. How can we be sure that we look the same way like we see ourselves in the mirror every day?

This also goes very well with smells and sound. Just sit back and think about the smell of a rose or jasmine; do you think the other person who smells the same flower smells the same odor? Or say a dog barking sound might be interpreted in a different way by every single ear. This can just be the pure basis of our differences in liking something or someone. Everyone perceives everything in a different way; so, why do we even have to think about how we look in others eyes when we are not really sure how we look in the mirror through our eyes is our actual self-image.

So every single moment in our life is driven by this basis of perception. It is left to us to be optimistic or pessimistic; it is left to analyze our lives the way we want to; it is left to us to be joyful or depressed; it is left to us to be critical or gullible. EVERY MOMENT IS OUR OWN PERCEPTIONAL CHOICE!

Creativity the never dying spring...... The Birth place of Science as well...

The technological advancements in an era are the fruits of the great minds who envisioned it. When people thought that the most useful things on the planet to aid them sustain a living were wood and stone, there was the birth of the Iron age. We might speculate that those were accidental events like the fire sparked of flint stones, but to make iron spears and bars from iron ore, would not have been an easy joke.  There would have been people who thought about it day and night.

In every era there were milestone discoveries and inventions like iron; electricity, electric lamp, steam engine and aircraft to name a few.  In these cases did people have manuals or guidelines to have them produced? All of them where the products of human imagination. I am not going to debate on who invented what or how, the fact that they were made from nothing makes them so special. I guess no one is less imaginative than any other. It just the matter of how we train our minds from an early age.

To prove that everyone has awesome creative or imaginative powers here is a demo.

“‘Isn’t it that the miss universe? Oh my, I forgot her name.. .’ whispered Daniel almost putting his mouth into Sam’s ears. Sam jumped in excitement and shouted, ‘Miss universe, where? Where?’ On hearing the scream, the modest beautiful young lady wanted to get off the place and moved swiftly towards the entrance. She moved out of the shop so fast that she stumbled over a smart young man near the entrance to the shop ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. “

Now since you don't have the rest of the extract it’s left to your creative skills but you can find what I wanted to say in the story a little latter in the blog.

If you ask me does this above scene have any relevance to the content of the blog? Yes is the answer. The information presented here are like the facts present in a given area of research, so discovering or inventing something is like completing the scene.

“‘Isn’t it that the miss universe? Oh my, I forgot her name..’ whispered Daniel  almost putting his mouth into Sam’s ears. Sam jumped in excitement and shouted, ‘Miss universe, where? Where?’ On hearing the scream, the modest beautiful young lady wanted to get off the place and moved swiftly towards the entrance. She moved out of the shop so fast that she stumbled over a smart young man near the entrance to the shop. The young lady felt really bad for crashing into blind man and apologized. She helped him to get up and get a taxi. “

I know that was such a bad scene that I cooked up, but the fact is there is so much major information which is unknown in a given area of research so considering all that into the creative outlook, will help us solve most of the problems of the present age.

If you are still not convinced that you are creative enough to write a better scene than I did, I just have one question. How did you manage your parents when you played till late night at school and went back home late?

Even I really wasn’t convinced when people around me always said that when we are facing a problem we are sitting on a gold mine of solutions. I always used to murmur, “You fool, you should have my problem then you won’t be telling all this crap to me.” At one point, I realized they were correct and I was totally wrong in the way I saw the problem. I am not telling this just because I got up one fine day and found an answer to every single problem I have, but it’s because when I think of a problem now, thousands of possible answers just start running across my mind.

Those magical words, Why? What? Where? Who? How? Why not? What if? Most importantly the last two, can make so much difference to the way we think.

Have we thought how those crazy people in the 16th did and 17^th century, found out that the Earth was spherical and that the Earth was going around the sun?  Of course they had good analytical thinking, analyzing facts about the shadow on the moon and all those stuff but they never had satellites capture pictures on the solar system. It’s mind blowing amount of imagination.

I wanted to write about this after mulling over the fact that there haven’t been great inventions or discoveries that have come up in almost half a century. It can be speculated about what I say as ‘great’.  Newton’s laws, Edison’s lamp, Darwin’s origin of species, Einstein’s Relativity theory and things like these which are indisputably great landmarks in science.  

Something ground breaking has to happen other than the wars which are a regular happening these days, which will go down in history as the accomplishment of this era. I am not downgrading the imaginative powers of this generation which has produced the most number of learnt people on the planet than ever before. We are creative but our imaginative powers are just focused in so much available information and are trying to make minor changes here and there and want a Nobel Prize for it. We are allowing our powerful mind just to think within this range which is very safe to play with in science. We need to take our focus off this information and climb on it to have a better view of the universe around us, which has so much to teach us.

If we change our perspective towards science, not just work for a Nobel prize but work for a society at large we might have much better milestones to talk of from this present age.