Sunday, May 13, 2007

My friend in a marathon…

Sun is setting. It was a long run. Suffocating, exhausting and lactic acid had built up to maximum. Whole body is aching. Now there is a distinct feeling of “mind is out of body” and legs are running as if they belong to some one else. Mind has stopped responding to the pain. What lays inside which is making him to run and reach the goal. Long back his fellow marathon runners have reached the stadium and even they may be taking rest in Olympics village. He is more than 6 hours behind the leaders. Only difference is he is running with a broken leg. He is running with a physical disadvantage but not the mental one. Now he is near the stadium. It is almost dark. Except his team and his girl friend none are left on roads. Lonely figure enters the stadium. His long evening shadow reflects his limping movement. Huge stadium. As he expected, none were there in stadium; but not empty. There were few waiting for him. Claps followed him as he finished each lap in the stadium, as he collapsed near the finishing line, there was a standing ovation with claps echoing the giant stadium reflecting the will to win over adversity. This is a story or a similar one I had read long back in some magazine (may be Readers’ Digest) .
Recently my friend finished her PhD. When she finished her viva and called us I remembered the above story. That was a long run for her. “Six and half years” is a long run. She collapsed many a times. She got up and ran again. She reached at last. But what she gained? Similarly, that marathon runner what he gained, there was neither gold medal waiting for him nor any newsagents. Then, why they have to finish? They would have left it somewhere in between?………This quality sets them apart from ordinary crowd.
She took a problem, which was very difficult to solve in her lab conditions and setup. There were many more troubles. She has to find out protocols, she has to look into results, which were of worth or not. One experiment led to another with some exciting results but ended up in several dead ends. Again she has to find her way out of maze with new set of experiments. The problem she had chosen involved laborious and toxic procedures. She had to handle lot of solvents, which were allergic to her. Now this allergy made her research (running) much more difficult. Often she wore a mask; and a lab coat. Lab coat had many holes because of acid spillage; she washed and kept even that coat as bright as possible. She worked in cold room, lot of moisture deposited on her spectacles, she cleaned it in-between and continued working. At the end of the day many times we had lot of discussions on her work. Each one of us suggested one or other methods. Poor girl, which method will she do? For us, it was easy to suggest but she has to do it! At the end of the day she has to travel back home more than an hour in Mumbai traffic, she always took last bus available (8.30pm) and she took earliest bus available from home (7.15am) to come back to lab, even in weekends!!!!. I remember the day of Great Mumbai flood. The water was entering into the lab. All of us are running here and there. She was busy in protecting her lab books. When we were back in home she was worried that, if water level increases, she may loose all the data of five years. She was anxious; called the security people to make sure that water level has not increased. They were safe. She fiercely guarded her chemicals and instrument, not because she is selfish, but because some one may misuse it, and her work will be delayed further. (These are only glimpse of her hard work and dedication.). Her delayed work and frustrating times easily would have led her to manipulation data but she never compromised with scientific integrity.
There were so many moments, just like last lap of marathon, compiling the data and writing the thesis. She had to bother about writing, printer, paper and binder. All of us made her more anxious by asking her, how many chapters got corrected. She answered us patiently, but she was restless. Many sleepless nights were put into thesis writing. Finally it was over. But referees took long time to give their opinion. One day her viva was over and was awarded PhD
That was the day we waited for her, it was very late. In our stadium, her PhD batch mates, her class mates were not there they were gone long back She is the lone runner, but we were there to congratulate. It was more than an hour we waited, after that she turned up, but none of us showed any irritation instead all of us were congratulating as she crossed the winning rope.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
( Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken (1915))

Saturday, February 10, 2007

An appeal to my friend - read Kannada……..

An appeal to my friend - read Kannada……..

I was born and brought up in a small village of Karnataka. Kannada is the vernacular language, and I studied the same. That is my mother tongue too. There was no TV for entertainment. Only some village play, cricket and yakshagana ( a type of classical dance form). My grandfather had a small library in-house, called Sadhana Pustaka Bandara. Many books were there to read. I started reading with Dabu, a cartoon strip published in Kannada weekly Sudha. Later I read Kiriayara kana in the same magazine. By the third standard, I upgraded myself to read Chandamama it had great series like Moovaru manthrikaru, Rakksakolla, Papanna, many more stories. In between, my aunt left a trunk full of Amarachitrakata before they left for Algeria. It was great to fun to read from that, however many of them were in English, which I couldn’t read but I glanced through pictures. By the fifth standard, I was reading novels. I remember my first novel. It was entu koleya bhanta, by Narasihmayya. I recall that day, it was in May end, a day with heavy pre-monsoon rain with lightning and thunder. It was a great thrill to read that book. Later, I read many books by this author. Soon after, I shifted to thriller authors, some secret agent Mahesh; he had a knife Raja and a pistol Rani, so on so forth. By the time I reached the eighth standard, series Kannada translations of Telugu novels were available. They were very famous, especially of Yandamurivirendranath, Malldi. I could recollect few of them, duddu, duddu, beladingala bale, kappaanchu biliseragu much more. They thrilled me, and they are like Sidney Sheldon novels. But most of the time these stocks would be over, nothing to read, so I stared reading books from my grandfather's library. He had a great collection of Shivaram Karanth and many Bengali novels in Kannada. I read all of them. I liked Gora ( Tagore), marli mange, kanndiyalli kandata. One of the most excellent books ever read is Krishnavatara by Munshi, translated by Siddvanalli Krishna Sharma. Great book. I don’t know about original, but in Kannada, it is most wonderfully written. Many of the above books I may not be able to read now especially thriller fiction. But Krishnavatara is an all-time great book. Must be read in Kannada to enjoy the language.
I have a friend who is a voracious reader. He devours books whole. His reading range is vast, thriller to philosophy geography, freedom fighting, partition, filmmaking, economics and much more. Like me, his mother tongue is also Kannada. All these days he read only in English. English has vast literature; he must have never felt the shortage of literature. Maybe there was no need to read Kannada books. English books satisfied all his intellectual thrust. English is a great language, ever growing language and all language books are available in English. So why to read Kannada? Well, I am not a Kannada movement activist to tell around you should read and write only in Kannada. In fact, here in Mumbai, I am the most random member of Kannada organisation. Moreover, I  do not believe in this kind of enforcing a language or bias towards one language. What is the logic behind reading Kannada book? Each language is a representative of a culture and suitable for that culture and can be best expressed in that language. There are different words for certain things, which are endemic to that region. There is no translation for these words.
Well, forget about all these things. Tell me is it possible to translate D.R Bendre poems to English?, how we can impart Daravad kannad into it. How I can translate words like
“Antina nantu” it would be “sticky relationship” ha ha . How can I translate Dibbana . It is next to impossible. G.P.Rajratnam’s Rarnana padagalu, with a great flavour of Bangalore village language. The beauty lies in the voice of locality.
So friend, why don’t you read Kannada? Let us give a try. Start with simple language book like Krishnavathara . Read few pages per day. Carry this book everywhere so you may tend to read one or two pages while drinking coffee in some Dharshini. Maybe Krishna or Bhima take you away to Dwaparayuga . Just like, it happened to me when I started reading English in Readers Digest. Sometimes just I got carried away and for a moment and just forgot which language I was reading in. Let us take a fascinating novel like Hamsaraga or Thirugubana by Ta Ra Su. and travel around Chithradhurga. Maybe sometime you should know Masti. He achieved a significant level of simplicity in writing. But sometime back, you had told me you don’t like something put simplistically. But here is a simple, straightforward narration except for the complex relationships they handle.
I am here, expecting your call, someday you may call and tell “Batta, I finished with this Kannada book and it was a great experience to read”.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

Relationship

We belong to a group of animals which live in groups , I mean social animals. That has led to great success of our species create and destroy what we want collectively developed relationships. ( antina nantu -- DR Bendre)they are strange never remained same with circumstances it will change, some time these relations look like very stable and strong and bring out wonderful things out of us. Same relationships can be spoiled in no time , with a simple comment or listening to some one else.Relationship is like a cast iron; very strong, you can not bend it but if it falls down it will break. When relations sore, I feel like a single animal instead of social animal ha ha.We cant live in isolation, we need relationships, at the same time we need maturity to understand strength and weakness of relationship to get it going. At the end of the day the great social animals like us are also individuals; we live together but we don't think together nor our brains don't express emotions similar to given circumstances. This further makes it much difficult to understand your fellow human being. A bomb blast --- "ho no" , one says, another- mera train ka kya hoga , so we cant expect second person to as sensitive as first one. But we always try to look for the people who responds like us to given situation and we will appreciate it. Relations strength vary with age also. A teenager finds everything his or her friend doing is right, once hormone levels go down many differences surface--- after all we are animals most of our days actions are controlled by our instincts so we bark like animals instead of think like humans. So relationships are need to be handled with much care and maturity-- failures are there but we need relationships to go on --- to see the bright side of our social engagements. Keep looking for good relationships for difficult time--