Deep Adhya, PhD

I woke up early on Christmas day, jumped out of bed and ran over to my Christmas tree. There it was, the Christmas present! It was a charming pink and white box with blue ribbons flowing down its corners. I gently tore open the ribbons, with nimble fingers. But I was nervous because I never believed in Santa Claus before this day. I opened the box with trepidation although I knew that it was a Christmas present. Who was it really from? Santa Claus? Really? The top opened to reveal a cake! It looked heavenly, a vanilla cake finished with a buttercream frosting and decorated with icing, strawberries and dragées. My right index finger proceeded towards the buttercream as if it had a mind of its own. I resisted at the very last moment, my mind screaming for closure. Who was it from? I threw myself onto a sofa, dejected. I decided to wait for a little while, so that whoever had put the cake at the tree would definitely want to know whether it had reached its intended recip...

Like the horns of a bovine creature rose the wing tips of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and I sat inside the ruminant securely fastened to my seat. It was an elegant sight outside the window, but not so much inside. No offence, but my journey from London to New Delhi on Air India had a mood of riding a tractor ploughing through a dusty farm during the harvesting season. I can’t quite explain the whirlpool of emotions I felt during those eight hours, but I did feel like they were being tumbled in a washing machine. As I sat exasperated, I observed that the atmosphere of the plane was alien to my fellow travellers who were being served with gourmet food, wine and reclining seats, while all they wanted was a heap of rice and a flat surface to sit on and spread their limbs. Everywhere I looked, I found proud Indian sons of the soil. They were the grass-root simpletons who looked like they loved the smell of the earth more than the recycled air of the plane. They were the v...

Yelp: http://www.yelp.co.uk/biz/patio-london Eastern European food is not something that is easily available in stores. Neither are there Eastern European restaurant chains and takeaways. In short, Eastern European cuisine has not caught up in our imagination. Polish, one of the more famous Eastern European cuisine, has a distinct niche in the world, much like Italian art films of the 50s and 60s. It was easy to find this obscure restaurant, thanks to the internet. I would have never found it, if it was not listed on food websites and reviewed by online journals. Although we are in the habit of blaming the internet for all the bad things it has done to our brain, without it I would have missed out on trying the food from this little gem of a restaurant. If not for the internet, I would have missed out on trying out so many other little holes in the wall too over the last few years. The Patio Restaurant , a very unassuming name, and quite hard to find on Google, has an...

Work is hard. It is especially if I am having to sit, stand or run around (and commute) to work. I read recently that one must always sit in the correct posture to avoid back troubles. With the slew of ‘ergonomically’ designed chairs all around the office floor, it is hard to imagine sitting in any posture other than a slouching position, without the help of a sitting coach, if ever there happened to be one. Sitting in the slouching position is supposed to put stress on the muscles which hold the 33 bones of the human vertebral column together. Seems complicated, especially since on most occasions, back pain seems to radiate throughout the back, instead of being localised in one particular spot. If the muscles get stressed, they fall out of position and ruin the balance of the vertebral column. Work is hard. Especially if I am having to go through it sipping lukewarm coffee. There is nothing worse than lukewarm coffee. It not only doesn’t help to soothe the throat or w...

We can’t deny that our environment physical or social has an effect on us. We are after all the supreme species of the planet, who have conquered everything on its surface. We are not particularly well adjusted to any particular climatic condition, yet we find ways to make ourselves, what is that called, “Comfortable … ?” How do we do that? Let’s look at weather. 1. Rain The brain is able to adapt (albeit very slowly) to different conditions. It is ingenious and is able to find ways to protect itself and the body in which it is housed. It wonder for hours when I think of this, and every time I think of it, I get goose bumps. Those of us who live in places which receive a lot of rain, have adjusted our lives so that we can keep doing whatever we are doing without feeling the effect of not being amphibians anymore. We use an umbrella or wear a waterproof, we have built effective drainage and we have devised ways of telling ourselves that the sun needn’t shine all th...

It was a sunny afternoon, and almost autumn. It wasn’t warm, yet it wasn’t cold either. It was the weekend so I lay on my bed trying to blank out any thoughts in my mind, my eyes closed, the shades of the windows drawn, and all electronic devices unplugged. Paedophilia and sexual predatory has become quite a trendy topic of discussion on the internet, I thought. Everybody is talking about it, rationalising its existence and what can be done to bring an end to it. Women in general have lost faith in men, and trust levels are lower than the bare minimum that nature intended to maintain healthy relationships. Men on the other hand, are under so much scrutiny that they need to maintain the image of a catholic priest. All things considered, the media hopes to create awareness about such things so that if anyone finds their neighbour engaging in such activities, they report it instantly and spread the word of caution. And it probably works out well for society, the offender is ...

"I decided to sell my Hoover ... well it was just collecting dust." This was a one-liner by Tim Vine at the recently concluded Edinburgh Fringe Festival which was voted as the best joke of the year. This line provides instant gratification. It causes one to laugh at the insane relationship a hoover can have with dust, other than well, collecting dust. The line is all but 65 characters in length, and well within tweetable limits. Similar one-liners that are usually associated with comedians, have become quite the rage nowadays with the advent of twitter’s 140 characters policy. But question is, has the attention span of human beings reached such a low that any bit of text not as succinct as a precis and greater than 140 characters seems so verbose that one is compelled to turn the page or hit a different link? Let us take the case of cricket, just as an example. Just this week concluded the test series between India and England. India lost the series....

Chapter 1 What I am going to write about is a subject which has been done to death, because it involves the internet and how it has played mischief with the aspirations and expectations of ordinary human beings. I will start my mockumentary by introducing an average joe, Sam. Sam is a typically developing, healthy individual with no known mental or physical disabilities. He is born to a middle-class family, is quite talented, and a potential leader of the future. He has scored good grades at school, excelled at college and has been vastly regarded as a success story by all people around him. He is not too adventurous, and likes friends. He hopes to give back to society what he got from it, get married, and raise the ideal family. He is starry eyed, and buoyed by the confidence vested on him by his immediate society. He steps into the world to leave his mark on it. Chapter 2 There is a huge debate these days between those born into the age of the internet ...

Moses was born in the Land of Goshen, destiny’s child, who would grow up to save his people. Well, not really! This is not the story of the Moses born in 14th century BC, but rather of a namesake born in a more modern world closer to the 21st century AD. Act I Moses is 10 years old, and he is very happy. He has his whole life ahead of him. He can be anything he wants to be. Act II Moses is 20 years old. He is an adult. He can take decisions for himself. He is going to set everything right. He will be all that his predecessors could not. He has the potential and believes in the science of the cultural evolution of man. He believes in how one generation always learns from the mistakes of the last. He knows that he will avoid the pits in which his ancestors fell trying to shed light on the unknown. Act III Moses is 30 years old. He feels naked. He feels like he is out of control. He feels like he is not being able to restrain himself anymore, and that by some unkno...

The learning process is never a pleasant process for human beings. After all, we are not machines that we need only to be input with information, and voila, we have learned something new. The human brain is more like a coconut. To get something in, one must first drill a hole. The drilling of the hole itself, is so painful that remembering the thing that was inserted becomes a breeze after that. Then there is the problem of being filled up to the brim. Once the full capacity is reached, even drilling a hole does not help. Often in these circumstances, drilling might only spray out whatever information there was, creating a real mess. The limitations of the human mind, which has often been alluded to as the ‘human condition’, is manifested in how we live. How we live, and why we go through all that we really do, however mysterious it might appear later, is all supposedly part of a greater plan of God, or evolution, and which has nothing to do with increasing the general happ...

Jim was special. He was his father’s son. His father was a famous industrialist. He was very industrious. He believed in true human capabilities, the kind of philosophy that the Western world was built on. Jim was special. Everybody told him so. Funny thing was he never felt special. He never felt like he had the ability to work miracles. His expectation was that if wise people around him thought he was special, he must really have some special powers to make things happen. For a long time, he kept asking this question to himself. He tried to magically obtain good grades at school, which never came. He tried to solve social problems, which were never solved. The more he took on these challenges, the more he was convinced that he was not special. But he was special. The fact was that the people around him were too myopic to understand his talents. What Jim needed was experience. He needed to go out into the world and see it through his own eyes, hear it through his own ear...

Everybody is concerned about the world economy. There are very rich people in the world, and there are very poor people. Economists are worried about this gulf in wealth distribution, and are trying various means to ‘bridge’ this gulf. But while the world argues about the inequality of wealth distribution, it is unaware of a certain other inequality which is being created very rapidly, and poses a danger to the evolution of the greatest thing that ever happened to the universe – the human brain. This gulf in the ability to think for oneself has never been equal, but while it used to be like the undulating plains of England, it is slowly growing into the dangerous mountains of the Himalayas, with colossal peaks and deep and dark valleys. But why is this happening? It is progress, the very driving force of human civilization and intellect, which is now bearing down upon us to make us more dependent on things other than our own brain, and although it is impolite to say that it i...