Things to Do

In a few months I will be joining Flipkart as a Software Development Engineer. So there are things I must sort out now. Things I would like to do once I have money in my pockets:

• Volunteer for social services. This is something I have been thinking for many years now. I will see what I can do. Teaching children, helping out the elderly in old-age homes and feed the homeless and the poor. I must do it. Probably on the weekends after finishing week's job(s).
• Backpacking and travel places. Starting with India. I would really like to get a feel about traveling alone(maybe with one or two friends?). Two additional things I would like to do as well. Get a reel camera with photosensitive films. And get a small diary to write about my travels. I think I would ask my father to lend me his camera.
• Read a wide variety of things. There is just so much to read out there. I am really focusing on non-fiction as of now. Revolving around history, physics, medicine and social issues. I still haven't thought of a plan to manage my time here. I will have to be extremely disciplined with myself to do that which brings me to the next point.
• Exercise daily. Running and core-strength training. First one because I want to be a serious runner and begin participitating in marathons from 2016. Second one is to tone my body. Around 4 kilometers of jogging/running, 30 push-ups and pull-ups everyday. That should do it I think.
• As I will be exercising a lot, it makes sense that I consult a dietician/trainer who is going to supervise it. Food intake is going to be very crucial.

Ofcourse, this list is not exhaustive. But I think it is enough to guide me in the coming months. Wish me luck!

Thoughts on the Emperor

This is a review of The Emperor of All Maladies written by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Before I write the review of this book, it would be justified to share the reasons of picking it up in the first place.

It was around 2010-11. The newspaper headlines showed that a non-residential Indian has won the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. The book was on cancer and the author was an oncologist. Impressed by the facts, I took a mental note of reading the book in future. Around four and a half years passes. On October 2015, I get a phone call from my mother. She is worried about her brother. He has been ill for sometime. The scans have showed that his intestines are lined with tumors. He has to undergo a major surgery. Though the diagnosis hasn't come yet, I already knew what was coming. A month later, the biopsy results came in. It is a Stage III colon cancer. The time to read the book has arrived. Cancer is now a personal crusade.

Before I pick up a book written on science, I first go through the qualifications of the author. Though a Pulitzer Prize winner, I still had to check. Siddhartha Mukherjee, in this case, is an assistant professor of Medicine at Columbia University and practices at CU/NYU Presbyterian Hospital(additionally a Rhodes scholar; he has graduated from Stanford University, University of Oxford and Harvard Medical School). All my doubts were put to rest.

The book surely was intense. It starts with the story of one of the author's patients and ends with another. In between, he described the entire history of the disease - from its first mention in ancient manuscripts to Sidney Farber's "Jimmy" campaign to our current understanding of cancer genetics. It was a journey of hope and despair, fighting against a shape-shifting disease of enormous resourcefulness.

This book was strikingly readable and humane. Cancer is a master of destroying human dignity. And so its medicine. Radical surgery, invasive chemotherapy and the haunting feeling of death suck out the life from patients. But it also shows how people don't lose hope even in the toughest of times. For instance, chemotherapy(which is a treatment using cytotoxic chemicals; cytotoxic means "cell-killing") may result in asphyxiation through vomiting apart from hair loss, kidney failure or infertility. People still go through treatments boldly.

Herein lies also the stories of researchers who painstakingly found new ways of controlling the menace. From testing of thousands of toxic drugs to obsessive collection of tumor samples to recruitment of patients for randomized trials; biochemists, radiologists, hematologists, surgeons and medical students helped humanity in the race against itself.

Cancer - fundamentally as a disease of mutations and cellular pathways - is a corrupt version of ourselves. It is a cell which has evolved to get a maddening urge to divide(in a sample present in the author's lab, the leukemia cells still divided furiously; the blood cells belonged to a woman who has been dead for thirty years). All death signals have been switched off - resulting in a scary version of immortality. Cancer cells use tactics which were only used during our birth, when we were developing as foetuses in our mothers' wombs. The tumors also create their own blood vessels for oxygen supply.

Though it may seem daunting, medical researchers are finally getting a comprehensive picture of the disease. Cancer therapy is finally becoming targeted. More and more drugs are being developed which specifically aim only mutant cells. Hope still stands tall.

If you're reading this, then allow me to thank you. I have another thing to ask of you as well. If you aren't, then please start going for medical checkups on a periodic basis. Take your family or close ones too. The best way to defeat this disease is to detect it early.

Revving Up!

It has been really hard to learn astronomy without a teacher or a guide. I have managed to ace through a few introductory astrophysics courses by using whatever little physics I learned at school(luckily my physics doesn't suck as much). But sometimes, my lack of formal training shows bitterly at places.

 

Today, I was solving an exercise involving the radial velocities of stars in a hypothetical galaxy. I managed to solve some of the problems before getting stuck. The problem told me to identify a graph showing correlation between radial velocity and right ascension of the stars. Let’s not go into much details here.

 

Now that italicized term became a horror for me. I tried to learn about it(on my own) near the beginning of senior high school. I didn’t get it then. I couldn’t wrap my head around it today.

 

That's why I have decided to attend an astronomy camp in nearby future. I am looking for a great place with amazing enthusiasts. Do you have a suggestion?

 

Will write about the further developments.