My Way

This post is the result of comment from Vineet. He was telling me today- ‘you don’t write too frequently on your blog’ Later, after working non-stop for 5 hours (it happens once in a while :)), I was just surfing the net when I noticed an interesting article on mental exercise through socializing. I was glad, I found a good proof that socializing indeed helps in making our mind more receptive. I see a lot of my colleagues around me who prefer to sit in front of computer and play games over chatting with another person. A couple of people around my lab never even glance towards me for a weird reason that I may start conversation with them:) I have spent more than 40% of my days in lab without uttering even a single word to people sitting around me. That’s a fact I don’t want to remember in future!! I feel an urge to tell these people that ’see there is a study like this which tells socializing is good’ but I guess, for that also, I will have to talk to them- an event that may never occur because, unfortunately, I am also stubborn:) For the sake of my own record and also for the information of my friends, I thought of posting this information over here.

According to a new study[Ybarra et al], socializing may have a protective effect on our minds as it is a form of mental exercise. Normally, people can be very challenging but fear not- that’s a good thing. Dealing with people keeps us sharp and interacting with them stimulates our brain. In India, people used to have large families which, according to some, worked as shock absorbers for individuals. The supporters of this theory think that the reason for increasing clashes in today’s nuclear families can be attributed to the decreasing number of combined families. It seems the views of those supporters are vindicated by this new study which shows that strong social ties can be associated with lower blood pressure and longer life expectancies. And having no social ties is believed to be an independent risk factor for cognitive decline in older persons.

The same researchers showed that talking to another person for 10 minutes a day improves memory and test scores. They found that socializing was just as effective as more traditional kinds of mental exercise in boosting memory and intellectual performance. And it includes getting together or having phone chats with relatives, friends and neighbors.

Pass it on to those people who loathe communicating(like my colleagues). And for people like me, it is just another reason to leave my workstation for longer time. After all, more mental exercise means better brain and a better brain will give more results…isn’t it?

References
Ybarra O, Burnstein E, Winkielman P, Keller MC, Manis M, Chan E, Rodriguez J. Mental exercising through simple socializing: social interaction promotes general cognitive functioning. Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2008 Feb;34(2):248-59.

My days in Singapore are numbered and there are still few places around that I haven’t visited. For last few months, I had been thinking of visiting some good islands in Malaysia but one thing or other kept me away from implementing the plans. The last week of May provided a perfect opportunity to execute that plan- my boss was out and I had just finished writing a paper. I needed a well deserved break However, had it not been the push from my friend Mounesh, I would have again succumbed to the procrastination. Eventually, I and Mounesh decided to visit Langkawi island that is located at the boundary of northern Malaysia and shares the same stretch of sea with southern border of Thailand. The trip was full of surprises and it will take another few posts to put down all the exciting events into words and sentences. To begin with, I am posting glimpses of Langkawi over here. Put on your headphones to enjoy the video.

Langkawi Trip from V on Vimeo.

I lent a friend of mine ten thousand dollars for plastic surgery and now I don’t know how he looks like.

Emo Philips

Economics is the only field in which two people can share the Nobel Prize for saying the opposing things.

Roberto Alazar

The trouble with morning is that it always comes at such an ungodly hour.

Dominic Cleary

Some people ask the secret of our long marriage. We take some to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner music and dancing. She goes on Tuesdays. I go on fridays.

Henny Youngman

Just arrived in Venice. Streets full of water. Please advise.

Robert Benchley

There is no housing shortage in England today.That’s just a rumour put about by people who have nowhere to live.

G.L. Murfin

People who have heard me sing say I don’t.

Mark Twain

Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

George Bernard Shaw

In Alaska, we have just two seasons- this winter and next winter.

Leigh Wade

Of course, if one had enough money to go to America, one wouldn’t go.

Oscar Wilde

If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.

G.K. Chesterton

This book is dedicated to my brilliant and beautiful wife without whom I would be nothing. She always comforts and consoles, never complains or interferes, asks nothing and endures all. She also writes my dedications.

Albert Malvino

A man finds it awfully hard to lie to the woman he loves - the first time.

Helen Rowland

I don’t jog because when I die I want to be sick.

Abe Lemons

A neurotic is s person who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the person who lives in it . A psychiatrist is the person who collects the rent.

Jerome Lawrence

I’ve got a friend who’s a procrastinator- he didn’t get a birthmark until he was eight years old.

Steven Wright

Medicine is basically the study of various liquids and solids that- either naturally or by force- go into or come out of the human body.

Ryan Anthony

The average human being has one breast and one testicle.

Stephen Grollman

God made Adam before Eve because he didn’t want any advice on that matter.

Patrick Murray

There are 869 different forms of lying but only one of them has been squarely forbidden: thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Mark Twain

I was driving along one day that i saw a hitchhiker with a sign saying Heaven. So I hit him.

Steven Wright

Scientists have come up with a fantastic invention for looking through solid walls. It’s called a window.

Richard Feynman

It is squirms, it’s biology; if it stinks it’s chemistry; if it doesn’t work it’s physics and if you can’t understand it, it’s mathematics.

Magnus Pyke

A friend of mine once sent me postcard with a picture of the entire planet Earth taken from Space. On the back it said “Wish you were here”.

Steven Wright

There is theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states this has already happened.

Douglas Adams

1. City with the most Rolls Royces per capita: Hong Kong.
2. State with the highest percentage of people who walk to work: Alaska
3. Percentage of Africa that is wilderness: 28%
4. Percentage of North America that is wilderness: 38%
5. The world’s youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.
6. The youngest pope was 11 years old.
7. Iceland consumes more Coca-Cola per capita than any other nation.
8. First novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer.
9. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a  letter is uncopyrightable.
10. The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of old when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
11. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history.
12. • Spades - King David, Clubs - Alexander the Great,
    • Hearts - Charlemagne, and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.
13. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
14. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
15. Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them would burn their houses down - hence the expression “to get fired.”
16. The phrase “rule of thumb” is derived from and old English law which stated that you couldn’t beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
17. An ostrich’s eye is bigger that its brain.
18. The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds.
19. The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the “General Purpose” vehicle, G.P.
20. Life emerged on earth about 3.8 billion years ago, but sex did not evolve until more than 2 billion years later.
21. Mosquitoes do not bite, they suck.
22. There is no risk of lead poisoning if you stab yourself (or someone else) with a pencil because it contains no lead—just a mixture of clay and graphite.
23. The practice of burying the dead may date back 350,000 years, as evidenced by a 45-foot-deep pit in Atapuerca, Spain, filled with the fossils of 27 hominids of the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.
24. Somniphobia is the fear of sleep.
25. Who invented relativity? If you are guessing it was Einstien, think again!!. Galileo hit on the idea in 1639, when he showed that a falling object behaves the same way on a moving ship as it does in a motionless building.

Some memories die hard!! I have vivid memories of the wonderful days that I spent in my school. The memories that include me and my friends are mostly on the nicer side of nostalgic scale whereas the memories that have only me and some teachers often tilt towards not-so-nice side of that virtual scale which I invented in last line. With this, I don’t mean that all of my teachers were boring and frightening at the same time. In fact, quite a few were amiable and I was very close to them. Maybe it is not the fault of teachers that they become so frightening at times. Perhaps it is the system that should be blamed. You know how the things work in schools. A lot of homework was pushed down our narrow throats, we were asked to recite the lines of verse and, later, to decipher them, we were made to mug up most of the hard things(at that age, almost everything looked like greek and roman) and if that was not enough to send us dizzying, there were expectations from parents to score first position in class. How many first positions can there be in a class? All except one are bound to get disappointed. I know, those teachers will tell me that it was their hard work that saw me through:-) Anyways, the point I want to drive at is not how they did or didn’t actually make my school days heaven or hell. At the time of those struggles with teachers, I always wondered why can’t someone make a school where they teach us in a nicer way. I didn’t have the exact details of how that nicer school would like, since I was just a kid and, at that point in my life, I used to live in a wonderland where things just happened by magic.

Today I came to know how exactly that ‘nice school’ would look like. I was watching a TED presentation by  2008 TED Prize winner Dave Eggers who creatively engages with local public schools to create a better environment for students. He talks with spellbinding eagerness about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open similar kind of centers. By the way, Dave Eggers is an author whose first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Since then he’s written two more novels and launched an independent publishing house, which publishes books, a quarterly literary journal (McSweeney’s), a DVD-based review of short films (Wholpin), a monthly magazine (The Believer) and the Voice of Witness project. You can visit his website for more information: Once Upon a School.

And here is the video:

The last 21 months of action packed drama is culminating in an anti-climax now. I had thought I would be able to breathe easy in the end but, as usual, reality turned out to be otherwise. I am now beginning to write my thesis!!! This beginning is not merely a singular point on time axes, rather it is a set of many beginnings that occur in parallel. Like the beginning of thought process that will lead to thinking about starting of thesis writing, the beginning of a short period that will see less work & more sleep followed by lesser work and deep slumbers, and last but not the least, the beginning of the showdown on a battle between a humble student and a higher authority(a battle that was sprinkled with praise and admonishing at different points in time) for last couple of years. There are many more beginnings but let them remain unheard!

With the beginning of my term’s end in Singapore, I am feeling uneasy. A nagging thought keeps troubling me, ‘why shouldn’t you stay in Singapore itself?’. But then life will become stable and a stable life will be as boring as the recent Bollywood movies. There will be color and people but substance and surprise will be missing. In the light of these facts, I prefer to go along with Robert Frost who seemed to have read the minds of people like me well ahead in time and wrote so beautifully :

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

A few days ago my first blog crashed taking a couple of posts and a few pages down with it. But life moves on and here I am, with another site!! Let’s see how long can i go before another crash takes everything away with it!!