Deep Adhya, PhD

In India, it is difficult to find depression among people. Not that I am arguing that there is no prevalence of the disorder there, but in day to day life, it is difficult to encounter more than one or two who seem depressed. My one year in UK has shown me how depression is a lifestyle disorder to be reckoned with in the western world. I am not a traveller, and I will not be able to provide a holistic state of affairs, but the little time I have spent in Cambridge, thoroughly exploring every bit of the little town, I have found more morose people here in one year than I have experienced in India in my whole life! This is indeed staggering. Agreed that Cambridge is a student town, mostly inhabited by a melange of people from all over the world, everyone trying to find their little spot in their environment, to succeed in their work and achieve contentment in life. They are all brilliant people, and they succeed. It is part of their DNA. But are they content? That is a debatable mat...

The birthplace of Aryabhatta to Ramanujan, India has shown that it is crazy about numbers. And, for a country crazy about numbers, cricket has been the best sporting phenomenon to have hit its shores. Not only are Indians crazy about stats, they become berserk when the stats are all in their favour, and that is where Sachin Tendulkar quietly made an entrance. I have no recollection of watching Gavaskar play, though I was born two year before he hung his boots. My baptism therefore, and subsequent induction into cricket started by watching Sachin on the telly. There have been so many tournaments that Sachin has played in, that I have lost count of how many I have watched, and played shadow cricket in the living room during it. I clearly remember Hero Cup though, watching on those flickering cathode ray tube TVs of yonder years. I remember the tension of watching that tournament with my family, hoping with clenched fists that India will win, and that if nobody can, Sa...

In science, nothing also means something. It can be something that has been missed, or something that has appeared at a different point than expected. How can then one write about nothing and get away with filling up a page with words? _ The sweat poured down the back on a winter’s day with slow impatience. Obnoxious odours emanated from the indefatigable obese, giving goose bumps. The underwear stuck in discomfort inside the trousers of the tourist in the dilapidated building while he debated whether the house was haunted or he was having a dehydration-induced hallucination. The legs cramped up and the heart was in tachycardia. The long hair stood on its end, as the hands touched something, sending out a spray of sweat which was slowly running down his hair. The man in the mauve suit had the sniffles. In a sudden epiphany, he discovered that his suit was made of linen which was not at all suited to his physique. A train passed by and the headlamps shone through two o...

I am afraid to say that, the internet is killing romance. The new age of mobile devices, which are so beautiful that their evolution can be considered to be a form of neo-romance, keep us connected or ‘plugged-in’ to such a degree to everything else happening in the world that, our mind is filled with questions and information which give rise to more questions, until the unquenchable thirst for knowledge turns us into the very machines which are supposed to aid us in our daily life. Glorious as the invention might seem, it makes us go down an anguishing process of collecting and assimilating information which, when looking at the whole picture, makes no positively tangible difference to our lives. We all love our near and dear ones and hope that they will remain in the pink of health and will never be inflicted by any debilitating diseases. We are always concerned about our own mental happiness, and interested in our wellbeing as a social creature. This makes us ask sever...

Summer rain was beautiful. Kevin stood still in his tracks, and let the umbrella fall from his hand. The umbrella flew away, snatched by the wind and propelled by the torrent of rain. It landed ten feet away, but Kevin didn’t notice. He worked all week with the efficiency of a mule and the loyalty of a dog. It was Friday, and it was time for him to go home for the weekend. He sat on the grass. He was having a splitting headache from all the thinking he had had to do all month. Although, he was very diligent at his work, he was like a working ant making one section of one tunnel over and over again because every time he finished it, the rain would come and destroy it again. It was a perpetual cycle of creation and destruction which made him question the basic foundations of life. In this state of mind, the cold grey clouds were like a kind nurse, and the raindrops were like cotton pads dabbing his bleeding wounds and cleaning off the grime from the joints of his body. But Ke...

In these times of images, where everything that one sees is in a form of a diagram, the art of writing is slowly becoming obsolete. I am thus going to write about how to reinvent the art of writing. No one is going to read it, because it contains no graphics to illustrate what I am trying to say. But, I would like to first talk about the story of an Indian squirrel. For the ignorant bastards, the Indian squirrel is also called palm squirrel, which simply means, you can fit one in the palm of your hand, which is cute. Squirrels, native to most of the Western world, are the grey squirrels. They have often been seen in animations on television. But they do not fit in the palm of a hand. This is not cute. These squirrels are like big rats with big tails, and if you see one, and you are afraid of rats, you should run! They probably won’t attack you, but when you compare them with the palm squirrel, they are scary, and look like ugly oversized cousins of the harmless palm squ...

You smell so good I could marry you, Cupped in my hands I would carry you, Your magic on my tongue takes my breath away, You fill me with warmth that doesn't go away. Your earthy colour in the cup, Keeps me level through my downs and ups, Strong from Kenya or Columbian fruity, Sitting inside my cup you are always pretty. Why then do you give me such a sweat, And in my mind only create disquiet? Then make my heart think it is so much fun, To babble about, and run, run, run! Do I not pay you homage still, That you make me take the bitter pill? And do I not take all your flavours in, That you have to spike it with caffeine? What cruel injustice this world is, That I cannot drink my coffee in peace, And enjoy the Kenyan or Columbian treat, Without having to drink the decaffeinated s#!t.

Leslie was born out of wedlock. Her father was the King of Murberg, and no one really knows who her mother was. She was tired of the politics in her father’s court, and did not want to be married to his treasurer. The King said it was customary for him to decide upon the affairs of his children, and that their destiny was as much entwined with that of Murberg, as his own. Leslie wouldn’t hear any of that, and decided she was going to escape. 1. The Escape The kingdom of Murberg wasn’t very big. It was more the size of modern day Monaco, without the money and wealthy people in it. One could walk out of Murberg in one day if all the roads were fine. But that was where the hurdle lied, and it was precisely that enigmatic hurdle that helped maintain the sovereignty of Murberg against all fear of invasion. The beautiful castle of Murberg was surrounded by an inpenetrable moor, and a legend that no one could cross that moor alive. How the Murbergians managed to live without tra...

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” If that were true, there would be pictures of skies, clouds, trees and people to show what the earth looked like just after the rains. There would be no romantic reverie into the unpredictable nature of Nature itself, or the peep into the weather forecast to conscientiously plan the day ahead. Beautiful as it may be, a picture does not have a beginning or an end. It is the sum total of two dimensional space to be treated as liked by the observer. A picture is rarely ever read, and the significance of it strikes only at an unconscious level, very seldom at an intellectual level. The result being, one seldom learns from it. Thus, a picture can say that the trees are green, the roads are clean, the people are carrying umbrellas and the skies are dark, with no sign of the Sun. What does that mean, expect for the fact that it is how 'a rainy day' looks like? On the other hand, when one writes that a south-easterly ga...

I love the balcony. The tiny platform, projecting from the wall of a building, supported by columns or console brackets, has seen many a tale unfold for mankind. My own house in Calcutta didn’t have one, but the rooms that I lived in subsequently, had balconies. When I was working near Delhi in an ad agency, I lived in a top floor room having a west-facing balcony floored with marble. I spent close to six months in that room, throughout autumn, winter and spring. After that, I lived in institute accommodation in the middle of a wilderness about fifty kilometres from Delhi. The campus was surrounded by hills in all directions, and was a sight for sore eyes from the monsoon season, through winter, till spring. I exclude the summer months as it is difficult to distinguish this place from the Kalahari Desert during that time. In this place, I lived on a first floor room with an east-facing balcony for two and a half years. It was in Gurgaon, bordering Delhi in the South, that I...

We are human beings. We are a species of animals just like any other, with no particular goal in life. We have an enormous, yet useless brain which is prone to having grand ideas when left to itself. These grand ideas, once implemented have given us what we love to call progress and a pseudo-evolution of lifestyle. Over the past several hundred years, the human lifestyle has gone through such enormous change that we have forgotten that essentially we need to survive, and that even if we don’t, nothing in the universe will ever change. But the lifestyle changes have brought changes to our expectations from life and have successfully instilled in us a false sense of self-importance which is nothing but a sugar-coated device of certain kinds of humans with more greed, to enable them to keep living their luxurious lives. Thus, when the primitive side of us does occasionally rise up into our conscience, like a ghost, we simply deny its existence, scared to know what it mig...

In the movie ‘Full Metal Jacket’, the character of Joker is seen wearing a helmet with the words ‘Born to Kill’ and a vest with a peace button. He is a war journalist and believes in the duality of human nature.  How often have we seen nations going to war to preserve peace? Small nations declare war against large nations to leave them in peace. Large nations declare war against small nations to maintain peace within. Small nations declare war on their neighbours to prevent disruption of peace, and large nations declare war against large nations for the same reasons.  But, the willingness to go to war at the drop of a hat is just the end result of the natural indecision that each and every human being goes through.  Human beings love other human beings, but they also hate them. But this ability of one human being to show extreme love and extreme hate for another fellow being brings mutual respect between the two. Often, the fine balance between love and h...

Grace Are you done washing up?  Jim Almost! Just one more dish left.  Grace You could have done the dishes later. We are in the middle of a movie.  Jim There! I am done.  Grace Well?! Come on now!  Jim My hands feel rough and uneven like the surface of the moon, and dry. Let me just apply some cream, and I will be right there.  Grace You know, I think you are showing symptoms of OCD.  Jim This is no OCD. This is necessary. I have dry skin. If I don’t keep it moisturized it will soon start cracking, then bleeding, then God knows what.  Grace Then it is your dry skin that is giving you OCD? Case in point, you don’t get dry skin if you do not wash your dishes. In fact, you will get dry skin if you do. How about that?  Jim Then who will do my dishes? I will have to do my dishes anyway, if not now, two hours later, or tomorrow. By then the crumbs will have proudly ...

Jim  I can’t believe I am stuck in this project. I am giving it all the intellectual contribution any human can possibly give, yet I feel like I am the only one who cares about fixing the sinking ship. This is awful. While I tug at the various strings to tune up my project my boss seems to be only interested in cutting them without taking a glimpse at the problem. Can matters get any worse?  Grace But, you are not as unlucky as I am. My boss is only interested in improving her relations with people. By people I don’t mean just colleagues, but the whole lot of people including cab drivers. You should look at her display of pity for the cab drivers. Any human being in his position would do anything to appease and get the hell out.  Jim Don’t be so sure! My boss doesn’t go to the extent of praising cab drivers, but that may be because you don’t see too many females in that profession. My boss is a spider at the middle of his web, and we, his subjects are ...