Deep Adhya, PhD

A fortnight ago, Cambridge experienced an evening of heavy rain, lightning and thunder. When I shared this with friends not from Cambridge, they heard me out and tried to be nice. It was clear that they didn’t believe that it could have occurred - a five hour long thunderstorm in a region more famous for being one of the drier ones in the country? The BBC failed to predict it, and if the Gods were the BBC the clouds were them playing a match of rugby. Ordinarily, on a dry day in a desert this would have been a blessing. It was like a perfect murder, no one believed it because there was no evidence. The weather forecasters said, “Clear sky,” and the minor local mishaps did not reach the press afterwards. I became the victim of a twisted celestial game of hide and seek, like a true detective solving a crime, he knows what occurred but does not have proof to show because the villain was really good at covering his tracks. In retrospect, my life has turned into a game of cat and ...

INT. OFFICE LOBBY Office social in the evening, with lots of booze around, and many people talking to each other. A I am doing a PhD because ... You know ... I was doing my Master's and I really got interested in neuro. B Ya, me too! C Same here. (They both get a drink and start mingling in the crowd.) D Wow! I am here because I couldn't get into med school.

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...

Oft I have been perplexed by the energy crisis that is going to hit us. Oft I have dreamt of a device to produce oxygen from water. In my most stimulating episodes of daydreaming, I used to dream of a large factory which would be equipped with genetically engineered micro-organisms. These little machines would be cultivated in large scale to produce oxygen from water. But I was not satisfied. I did not day dream about chemical equations. I was not aware of technological advances which would make it possible to create oxygen from water without having to be plugged into an energy source. My aims were inclined to oxygen production and clean energy. The concept of biodiesel enthused me for a short period of time. But here again, I could not figure out its economic and practical viability. With a global crisis of agricultural land and food production demands outweighing supply I was hard pressed to think out an innovative way of biodiesel production. I thought of ‘vertical plantation’...