On being a tall Indian woman....

You would think that I'd be used to the responses to my height by now. I mean, I've had to deal with cheap comments, flabbergasted glances and raised eyebrows for 22 years now.
But every now and then people go that extra mile to remind you that you ARE a freak, you're eight whole inches taller than the average Indian woman, for heaven's sake.
A friend even commented that i seem to have some sort of complex about my height , cause i talk about it a lot. And why not.

As a tall woman, I've begun to expect a few things:

1. Always wear decent shoes, cause the first thing people do, after staring at your neck (which is at the eye level of most men) is scroll down to your feet, in the expectation that you're wearing stilettos.
On a couple of occasions, I've been tempted to scream out to the particularly not-subtle ones-
YES, I REALLY AM THAT TALL. DEAL WITH IT.


2. Prepare to be confronted with inane questions

"How are you so tall?"

or, worse, outrageously off-the-mark guesses as to how tall you really are.

A couple of aunts in Mangalore:

"My, my, you're really tall ,aren't you?"
"How tall do you think she is,
5'4''? "

At which point you yell, exasperated:" Um, no. you're off by six inches"
*gaping mouths*

Followed by


3. People will always think the smartest comment to make is

" Your parents are going to find it really difficult to find you a guy, no? Poor
things."

Take your sympathy where its wanted, pliss.
Contrary to popular opinion, my parents aren't treating my impending marriage as the sole purpose of my existence.
Or atleast until lately they weren't.


4. Prepare to have your name 'suggested' by random aunts whenever any tall guy in your 38-member community is looking to get hitched. Annoyingly random, take it from me. Especially when they don't know anything about the 'boy' apart from his height!!!


5. Prepare to be called Amitabh Bachhan by street scum, and be given the demeaning up-down eye scroll along with it.


6. Expect to have your male friends ask you to walk on the other side of the road, cause you make them look bad. No, seriously. This has happened to me.
On other occasions I've been used as a portable scale for all the growing boys in the colony to measure their increasing heights against.


It's not all bad though.
I get to breathe in the local trains. I always got to sit on the last bench in class.
And I look great in a sari! ;)

Help!

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

As the academic year is nearing its end, most of my batchmates have finally dawned upon the realization that we cannot avoid thinking about the complete lack of data we individually possess.

How on earth are we to generate a thesis one year from now?!

We are all praying for two 'allowances'

1. No thesis chapter should necessarily have anything to do with any other thesis chapter: Most of us have spent a lot of time dabbling in various directions, answering various unrelated questions simultaneously, and it would be lovely if we could include all of it in our thesis under separate chapters. Both the number of chapters as well as the thickness of the thesis would be greatly enriched by this allowance.

2. As we are preparing to register,a bunch of us were reviewing possible titles for our theses.
Expectedly, they will have to be sufficiently vague yet jazzy sounding, such as

• Gene expression in Drosophila melanogaster for the UP dude
• Biophysical and biochemical characterization of proteins for Dr. James Doolitle

and mine:

• Post-translational modifications and their effects on localization in Saccharomyces cerevisiae.

The general nature of the topics is a good indication of the specificity and success of our endeavors in these fields.. :)
Maybe we could throw in a few buzzwords (a favourite of one of our faculty members) such as stochastic, cross-talk, contour, moonlighting types and further up the coolness of our work.

For now we have our daily panic attacks to keep us occupied.

Rang barse?

If so, i didn't notice...
Of all the things that we (at TIFR) played with this holi, coloured powder was probably the least used....Which is why the post-holi scrubbing of skin was a little less painful.
But that does not mean we had a boring holi.

Enthusiasm was running high, as we started planning the 'event' two days in advance....Some folks were apprehensive about participating in the festivities here, as they knew bhaang and a mud pool would be involved. But B. And I couldn't/ wouldn't be curbed- we went to Colaba market and succumbed to the temptation of buying four types of colours, pichkaris and even water balloons from three different sellers. We're suckers for good marketing.

The preparations began in the MSc Housing early in the morning- 9.30 am, to be precise- for Em and R2D2 had to be chucked out of bed to help make water balloons. After persevering for half an hour, and trying various things such as taking away their bedsheets, opening the curtains to let the light in on their faces, and eventually yelling in their faces, we finally got to work...And succeeded in making a mess in the flat. Filling balloons is so much fun. What's not fun is being the only person able to knot them, while five others fill them instead.

My poor little sore finger..:(

Another bit of outrageously bad management was allowing S., a particularly helpful batchmate (who filled exactly six balloons) to carry one half of our balloons down. Within five minutes, ALL our balloons were over. ALL! In the process I also discovered that my aim is as godawful as it used to be a few years ago.

After squabbling with kids who wanted to use our bucket of coloured water, (or should I rephrase that as: after Saki bullied the kids who wanted to use our water) we decided that some others who had asked to be personally invited from their hostel rooms should be poked out of sleep too, and moved towards the hostel. We were inadvertently also moving towards THE PIT.

We almost sneaked into the hostel unnoticed. Almost. We were spotted, there was some general yelping, and the girlies ran up the stairs. I was of course, the last one, and was caught, interestingly enough, by my namesake! I pleaded to my friends to not leave me alone, but they had long gone. The solitary friend who tried to help was caught too, and we were dragged to the pit. Of mud.

It was all very organized - I was asked to sit down quietly and not protest, and assured that if I did so it would be okay. A whistle was blown, junta kicked mud onto me, I swallowed a fair bit, rolled about in the puddle, and was escorted to a pipe to wash my face. All done in about two mins. Not that bad at all.

I reminded myself that as a kid I actually enjoyed playing in muck, so I should really not overreact. Now that I think of it, it was entertaining to watch each of us being taken, one at a time, lambs to the slaughter. For a change, it was all taken in good humour, and I don't think anyone was left feeling very unpleasant.

The shocker of the day was spotting a faculty member (who has recently joined our department) in the bunch of boys kicking about in the muck. We were wondering whether to put colour on his cheeks, or to go with the general theme and apply mud instead. We opted for a bright, luminescent green. A minute later he was dragged into the puddle in the centre and given the treatment himself.

My only regret is not getting my hands on Bhaang. :( I'd really like to try some, and was looking forward to an opportunity to do so here.

Home, home again..

I like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones beside the fire

Ok, so there's no fire at home, but the emotional equivalent of one- my parents are beginning to remark on how less time I'm spending at home these days.

My mother actually said "oh, you remember that you do have to come home once in a while.."

Cannot deal with the parents getting sentimental- I suppose it is worse now that my brother is no longer living at home...
It has probably also been precipitated by the sudden social life I seem to have developed over the last two weeks...Five outings in ten days- Not my style at all.

First there was the orkut meet at Toto's, where the lot of us finally got to meet Desi_grll....Or as I will refer to her from now- Satya Claus. I was, of course, trying to continue staying off alcohol, (as it had been only two weeks since my resolution) and therefore the butt of all jokes that evening until I left. Sometime before I left some smartass decided to play with his girlfriend's mace/pepper spray, and successfully emptied out half of the pub, leaving the ones who stayed back gasping for breath..The smokers being the first to choke!

Missed out on meeting eh_donia and Kaustubh, though I did manage to meet eh_donia four days later, when the bunch of us went to Starters and More to watch Satya Claus sing. No, croon.

After overcoming the initial embarrassment on realizing that I was probably the grubbiest person to ever walk through their doors and being asked to 'kindly hand over my bag', I was able to eventually sit back and enjoy the ambiance, and more importantly, the music.

Got home at one thirty that night.

Then there were the two outings with a videshi friend, a boy too, so the parents were terribly thrilled.
And then there was dinner with the old pals from Xaviers.

All in all, too much for mummy-daddy.

All play and no (successful) work makes Kate very badly prepared for her labmeet next week!

Update on the canteen boy.

I've been seeing him around a lot more since I last wrote about him.
Thrice a day, on an average.
Which is a good thing, obviously. :D

I'm amazed at my own interest in him. I've always scoffed at women from school/xavier's who went beyond swooning over random hot men and actually claimed to have real feelings for boys they didn't know the first thing about.

How can you call one-sided feelings love? People have told me that they'll 'never love someone else' despite receiving no reciprocation whatsoever from the object of their affection.
I need to be reassured that my attention is well-received, before I can throw myself further into a relationship.


My labmates are trying to figure out who the hell I'm talking about, but I've promised to tell them only if anything ever comes out of it.
Rather silly and juvenile, isn't it? And fun!

Stabby (a senior) has promised to follow my stare around the canteen..:P

Intrigue is what is keeping this going, I'm assuming. I'm sure the fact that I barely know anything about him is greatly working in his favour. :)

Not much else to keep myself occupied with, in any case.
Wicked IFAs be damned! They offer wonderfully irreproducible results, magically working on the first occasion, and then refusing to do so on the following thirty five occasions.


I've been alternating between cold and hot experiments all of last week - protein preparations in the cold room (a walk-in fridge) and radioactive yeast in the hot lab.
And playing hide and seek with the boss-lady, of course.

Some things never change.