Thursday, February 24, 2005

This was an email story i started a while ago, but haven't completed it yet (7 Nov' 04)-

few people bothered to ask why i got to UTA. sure being in the herp world, UTA is important on the herp map. but they have no collections from India or the surrounding regions. So Y.

well when i decided I to go to a grad program the reason was simple. i had quit the croc bank as they wanted me to do the same old job. i wanted to start up my own project. they knew i was serious when i threw in the towel. well given that there was no job available besides eating moms food and spending dads money, I decided to spend dads money on something remotely useful - the GRE.

Had been in touch with a few professors regarding my interests and there was one who wanted to get me soon, and the other cared nothing. the latter two were neutral in their interest, waiting for me to exhibit genius. genius they say is usually 99% perspiration. and in Chennai I'm perspiring all the time. but with lack of inspiration, nothing was working.

then the croc bank called one day saying 'we got money for you and a ticket on the next ship... go do what u proposed'. great!! but with the gre a month away i had to buy time. got done with the gre.

now it was the crappy TSE - ie the test of spoken english. it seems those testers understood what i was saying inspite of my terribly cocktailed accent and my inability to pronounce my own name.

now i was ready to leave for the islands but driving one day to the croc bank i almost got into an accident while driving at reasonably fast speed. i started shivering and losing control of the car. I knew it - Malaria had hit me again. and there was nothing to do but wait for help. after managing to pull over and with some difficulty of pressing the right buttons on my phone. I called a friend and gave and SOS. soon i was in a hospital getting jabbed by this pretty mallu nurse (malayali - the kind u hear in that recoring i sent earlier) on my butt. shiver stopped and reached home.

a month later I was sailing. and a week later with permits in hand i was sailing to the island of trinkat. this was my first stop as winds were just right. the local tribes were making excurions to a remote island futher out in the andaman sea. now my schedule of work was 6 months minimum, and this was already march 2002.

its a few months since i began writing this story. let me find the thread where I let off and continue with my narration.

a very crucial bit i lef out in the last paragraph - I missed my ship because I was on tie for its departure. so that was when I climbed the side of the ship and loaded some of my luggage and heard a splash. fearing it was one of my two trunks (metal boxes) that had shared between them all of my money for the next six months, I had a sining feeling. Diving behind the box would be of no avail as the box was heavy by itself and under water would be equally so if not worse. besides I had no confirmation that it was my splash. Running around the ship a while I got enough witness accounts that it was a passenger's packet of bananas that made the splash. Relieved as I was I still had no money for the next months.

"Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science."

[life of pi (Yann Martel - 2001)]

" live

never to be

ashamed if anything you do

or say is published

around the world -

even if

what is published

is not true "

[Illusions - The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (Richard Bach - 1998)]