Deep Adhya, PhD

When we were in high school, I was the shy guy in the group. It was a boys’ only school. Some of my friends had girlfriends. Others didn’t. I didn’t. I always felt like I was missing out on something. But I didn’t really want girlfriends. I just wanted to have some friends and some good experiences that I could share with my friends. All I ever did was study. I was made to study. It made me depressed. I was the only child. There were only my very neurotic parents who never had any patience for anything that didn’t appeal to them. They were begrudgingly married to each other by their ambitious parents and they had decided they were going to take out their grudges on everyone in the vicinity. They didn’t like each other. Not one bit. All their emotions were buried six feet under the ground. I don’t know what happened in their lives that killed their emotions. They didn’t like emotions. They didn’t like anyone who showed emotions. That included me. So they tried their best to keep me fr...

‘Caveat emptor’ is a legal term which means, “… the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made.” In this information age where random words welded together into sentences are broadcast around the world more often than farts are broadcast through a room, the validity of the words need to be deeply scrutinized before believing. I have known this since the beginning of the internet, but before now never been able to put a name to it. I first heard this phrase on a news show where a woman TV journalist lashed at a woman victim of sexual abuse, who thought the TV journalist had a funny hairstyle. The said victim was accusing Aziz Ansari for acting weirdly and inappropriately on their first date. The incident brought about a lot of negative press for the accuser, and her credibility was being questioned, because said accuser was not doing justice to the #MeToo campaign by being mean to another woman and potential victim to ina...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

“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...

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...

I don’t know why I couldn’t wait to install Windows 8 on my laptop. My laptop is almost three years old and had windows 7 working quite fine for that whole period. Sure, I was getting a bit bored with Win7, and Win8 was like an enigmatic temptation which I knew I would succumb to eventually, with time.  Win7 is like your honest housewife who is always able to get things done in the way you like it. For most, it is the mundane things like writing a document (like this one) or editing some images on Photoshop or most importantly surfing the vast empty space of the internet which keep us occupied on the PC. Win7 does that very well and with lots of gusto and resilience as never before seen. Then why Win8?  Win8 is akin to giving your wife a makeover to make her more attractive, yet not at the cost of losing any of her functionalities. So now you can have a hot wife cooking your meals and washing your dishes, and you don’t even need to peek into the menu of your neig...