"Seven Blunders of the World" by Mahatma Gandhi

"Seven Blunders of the World"
1. Wealth without work
2. Pleasure without conscience
3. Knowledge without character
4. Commerce without morality
5. Science without humanity
6. Worship without sacrifice
7. Politics without principle—Mahatma Gandhi

I came across this today. Well, quite depressing, because last 4 are quite common across the world and second is not that uncommon.

TED Talks

Here I am having enormous amount of work to complete before March end and I am completely drowned in listening to all the TED talks. Its a great treasure. Everyday I come home from office and listen to some of these talks. I came to know about them few months back but forgot in between. Now 3-4 days back, found the link again, I am going on watching the videos. It is magnificent experience to listen to some of the best people in the world not just in scientific area but also in literature, social work, etc. I wish I will do something so that someday I can also be speaker in this conference.

Fighting negativity

Though there have been some moments of happiness, I am in negative frame of mind. The negativity is going on increasing day be day. I am not anywhere close to be able to remove it successfully from my mind but I have learnt a lot of things about fighting it. What I am writing here will probably be most helpful for people who are alone or loners like me. First, and probably the most important thing one should know is that forcing yourself to have positive thoughts does not work. After your surge of positive thoughts is over you feel even more miserable than you were before. What works is being around happy people, or talking with others especially friends so that some topic that triggers happy memories or usual friend jokes leading into laughter. What needed is trigger for some happy thoughts and laughter and not forceful positive thoughts. However if you are depressed or sucked into negativity/pessimism there is high chance that either you are alone or people around you themselves are complaining types or somehow you can't connect with them (you hardly know them or very different nature, whatever may be the reason). In short you are in situation like I am from most of the last two years, it is very difficult to find such triggers. In such cases you might to use some techniques which can't cure you but can relax you for some time. Taking number of deep breaths, listening to your favorite music, Reading your favorite books; such things do work. I am not sure about the movies, there are hardly any movies which doesn't have violence or some sad or stupid annoying thing in that. For me what works best is taking deep breath and walking alone. Walking has always been a great relaxer for me. Sometimes, I can't even enjoy music, or read books but walking always works. If you are frustrated then another very effective way to relax is to write. yes, just write whatever you are thinking, whatever negative thoughts you have and you will be surprise how relaxed you feel and suddenly there is no rush of those stupid negative thoughts but you are manging to be calm. The last but not the least thing is eat good healthy food. This is very very essential. If you are alone in some foreign city, it might not be so easy for you to do this, but try as much as you can.
Although I am still struggling with my won negative thoughts and can't get out of them, if I haven't had done all the things above I probably would have gone insane.

Paper writing

With my awesome power of writing disability which is quite evident in this blog, I had been trying to write three technical papers from last three weeks. Now, you say writing technical papers is whole different ball game. Well, yes, but for me there lies the problem, as one of my former bosses said (I had too many, ok 5 in 4 years is not so bad) I write papers like I talk. So, yes writing technical papers is different, it is written in English but its not English. Something stupid like that. You have all kinds of crazy rules for how the language of paper writing should be. The language is definitely not human. I suspect some alien wrote the first scientific paper and laid the rules for writing papers thereafter.
As if the language itself is not big enough problem, there is another problem with research papers, that is of new ideas. According to editors of most journal and conference proceeding and rules for papers, the ideas of papers have to be new but they should be based on some previous writing. Now, that's quite decipherable for my small brain, it should be new but it should be referring to numerous old things, more the better. Hmm... Also talking at abstract level is cardinal sin on paper writing. Only some 50-60 year olds who can not think of anything new can write and speak such things. Youngsters like me are strictly disallowed from braking the mold or thinking at different levels. God save the scientific world.
chalo, have to get back to paper writing, have to go through loads of papers so that I can give reference to some maniac professor's casual statements in his paper. After all, I have to prove that my new ideas refer to lots of old ideas :(