Vacation time in If you are wondering what made the Prince Siddhartha say that, and if you have 50 min of free time, you can this documentary made by BBC. As we are all preparing ourselves to welcome this new year..here are my wishes for the new year.
I received this bunch of beautiful tulips, its one of my favorite flower, since I read the novel “Black Tulip” in my school days. In the last few days, when I was feeling very lazy to come to work, these flowers inspired me to come to my lab...Belive me Tulips, I just came to the lab to see you…
Played “Make the silver spoon stand on the nose” game with my friends both winners and the losers got chocolate cake. Well that was an international game, with 11 nation’s participation, I just realized not only my lab, but also my friends from outside my work are very international, well the gold was taken by
Finally….its time to accept the reality and speak the truth… I am completing my 30 years today. I will be stepping into 31 tomorrow. I was planning to take off from my lab on my birthday, have a day for myself and spend the evening with my friends. So, my lab guys arranged for a surprise party and dinner today itself, well!! It was a real surprise….got lots of tulips and gifts. The most sentimental part was this card…wishes and signature in 11 different languages. When I turn back and have a look at my 30th year….it was very very rewarding, its in this year I fulfilled my long term desire to travel…yes...in this one year, I have travelled in 6 different countries… and I feel its just a beginning ...I remember one of the fortune teller once predicted that “my” life will start only after 30+..Yeah..I really feel like 13 at my heart!
I was surprised to see such a ‘wild’ nature, just in the heart of the city.
I told you…People were surfing in the heart of the city…
The Christmas market, with lots of hot wine, cookies and christmast stuff..and lots of people!
Beautiful skyline of 
More home made Christmas cookies, by Jenny...
More of Munich
With bit of turbulence in a baby Lufthansa flight, we arrived in Munich yesterday, Jenny (Micha´s sister) and Jo (her boy friend) drove us trough the city and took us to their huge house, .was very happy to see every thing so spacious and big in contrast to Paris, I was able to take a deep breath and recover from the claustrophobic feeling of Paris. Today the weather was not so great, very cold with bit of rain mixed with snow, but had a nice warm host... Jo took us around the city, we did some shopping and went around the old city center. We had some hot wine , which is a speciality of Germany during winter and Christmas called Glühwein . Had lunch in a very cute Bavarian restro. Not many pic today...thats Micha and Jo enjoying hot Glühwein, in cold snowy rain.I guess the weather is better tomorrow for exploring more of Munich.
One thing I miss a lot, living in a city like 
Andy, (you guys might have already read about him in my earlier blog) a very intelligent post-doc in my lab, and I was lucky enough to work with him for almost 2 years. He got a position in a very prestigious genome Institute (Tigr) in 
I guess my Christmas started already; today I got a very cute gift from my lab friend Nazanine. She bought me this book called “Uma, la petite déesse” meaning “Uma, the little Goddess” . It’s a French book on Hindu mythology , Goddess Uma. My friends are trying all the possible tricks to make me learn French. French men and French movies didn’t inspire me to pick up French, let’s see if this book inspires me. Touch wood! where ever I go, I am blessed with wonderful ,Caring and Warm Friends! Thanks Nazanine! 
Today, I officially step into second year of my Phd. We had our annual meeting in my university, Université Paris-Sud 11, which is in orsay, a beautiful suburb of 
Something I learnt about myself from my recent travels.. I don’t like to spent time before my computer during my trip…even if the hotel room have wifi, Also I take some time to come back to my laptop after my trip….yeah, I was just feeling lazy and spent time in writing reports about my conference. I wanted to update my blog with small exciting things happened during the conference, the most exciting part of the conference was that I showed my work poster to Peer Bork, a bioinformatics big-shot from EMBL and to Ginger Armbrust, a oceanographer (diatom) big shot and got constructive criticism. Also my talk in small satellite meetings, Algal and Toxic Algal meeting was very rewarding, got a chance to explore the Algal world. Now where did this great conference held?
Just 30 mins by speed boat or 45 mins in a ferry or 1 hour in a train from
Other lessons I learned: Don’t take a speed boat, when the sea is rough. On my way back to
That’s a picture with Angela, an Italian colleague, during the breakfast, with
Yeah! Today I arrived in 
I disappeared for sometime, I was lost in my preparation for the Marine genomics Conference. .finally.. I am leaving tomorrow to 
Weather is grey for last few days, in fact its favouring me to stick with my computer to finish a tiny project before my conference. thanks to the weather again, I got some time to do a quick and dirty scanning of photos which I took during my summer holidays (Switzerland and Nice) with my SLR.
We all crave for Peace in life and that’s the thing the world needs the most. Many people believe that they are working for world peace, and they make “war to have peace”. Today morning as I was reading the News on the potential Nobel peace prize winner for this year, I was really shocked to see Sri Ravi Shankar’s name. He has a spiritual organization called the Art of Living; I really don’t know how it works, but for its very basic nature that it’s not affordable by an average Indian, makes me have my own doubts, as I grew up seeing lots of money making spiritual organizations of 
Yesterday, I got extremely lucky to see an amazing concert of Shiv Kumar Sharma and Zakir Hussain . You may be wondering that the ticket posted here is not used and it says Samedi (Saturday). You are right, last week I went to buy this ticket and I saw a display board saying Saturday - Complete, I asked for the Sunday ticket, and she gave me a cover, which I didn't open it till yesterday morning. When I opened it on Sunday morning ....I had shock of my life...The ticket was for Saturday. I was almost into tears, anyway I wanted to give a try and thought of explaining the mistake and try to get a replacement or something. But when I went there, I saw "Complete" (House-Full) board. The Theater people just asked me to try my luck in the entrance, if some one wanted to sell their ticket or something like that...It was just 10 minutes for the concert, Poonam,who was suppose to see the concert with me and as I bought both the tickets, she was also in the same mess as me. When I made up my mind to go back home, I heard Poonam wishing some one and heard her saying.."Sir! this is my friend Uma.!" I didn't know who he was, I just said,"Hi ...Sorry! I am in Mess and Put Poonam in the mess too! " , After explaining him the condition, he said he had booked four tickets and can gift us two tickets. Finally this 'ticket mess' promoted us from the last row to the executive class in the 5th Row. and Later I got to know that the Angle who gifted us the ticket was Owner of the Garment factory, where Poonam is working. In all these mess I forgot my camera, even if I had taken it with me, I wont be able to give you guys the feel of the Magical hands of Zakir Hussain and Shiv Kumar Sharma.
Today is Nuit blanche (white Night) in Paris. Every year in October, I guess on full moon night they have this thing called white night, when all the museums are open for free till mid night and many art pieces and installations exhibited in main areas of paris. We went to an Iranian museum, many gold and silver art works remained me of ancient art pieces of India. I felt the same in last week’s Thai expo too. I guess our ancient India had lot of cultural and art exchanges with the neighbors. We just strolled through important monuments...that’s in my favorite square, Place de la concord.. Fountains and statues around the square were lighted blue. People were going crazy in the road,city looked as if the whole Paris was on the street, took a hell lot of time to drive back home, with the drunken teenagers jumping in the streets. 
Just today, I moved into my new office, just across the corridor but nice, big and sunny. It was lot of work, we bought the flooring and fixed it with Marc and made some cleaning and moving my things, with all my plants…Hmmm! Lots of work….but Nice to be on the sunny side, just in time for the winter. Thats my new office..
End of a long, exciting 'Thai' week, Started the week in Thai village, with lot of Thai food, music,arts and dance. In fact Thai cuisine have very less options for vegetarians, but we manged to get some delicious veggie stuffs, it remained me a lot of south Tamil Nadu food, with lot of coconut, banana leaves and spices. I have been to Thai restaurants before, but this experience was very different as it was made by Thai people, who just visited Paris on the cultural exchange Stuff,so it was very authentic. Thai week came to an end with Thai movies. Micha is working as a Junior curator in Center Pompidou, Musée National d'Art Moderne in a crazy colourful modern building in the heart of Paris, as part of his project he arranged for screening of movies by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, a Thai director, who was also present on the occasion, spoke about his experiences in movie making.
The movie water was released in Paris couple of weeks back, last week me and Micha got a chance to see it, with student offer, buy one student ticket and get the second student ticket was for 1 Euro. I am always hesitant to spend money on movies, but I felt really bad to just spend one Euro for this movie. Its the best movie of Deepa Mehta, unfortunately she faced lots of troubles while shooting the movie and now its banned in India. Seeing the status of women in Indian society, just half a century ago, makes me feel so blessed. The highlight of the movie is little Sarala acting as seven year old widow and the final Gandhi's punch dialogue "I used to think that God is truth, but now I know that the truth is God". This movie is nominated for Oscar from Canada, We Indians should really feel ashamed of our self for always showing the blind eye towards the bitter reality of our country. The best way to show our love to our mother country is not by idolizing her, but to see the reality and listen to her pains and work hard to fix it, thats what all the great leaders of past did to bring up our country to this admirable condition. We just like to talk and feel proud about Gandhi but fail to walk on his path. I wish this movie wins the Oscar.
Yeah..We went for mushroom hunting this weekend too, this time to a very beautiful suburb in north-west of Paris called Saint Germain en laye. Its a very cute little town, with a Chateau and a huge garden merging into the forest. The highlight of this place is kilometer long terrace of the Chateau, which have a beautiful view of the both industrial and classical center of Paris, the weather was bit gloomy, but I guess it will more beautiful on a clear sunny day, like to go back there with my bike to discover more.... Thats Ale and Nazanine having a view of Paris from the looong terrace..
Today Microsoft lunched a new search engine to compete with Google, which is very obvious from their web interface. What about the performance? Google is doing very well; even it got a ‘verb’ status and started appearing in dictionary. Now me as a big fan of Google, you may think that my comparison of live.com vs. google.com will be biased. But as soon as live.com went live, I did a small and stupid test to know how strongly my name is linked with my thesis subject “Diatom”, well Google says there is almost 120 hits for this combination, and guess how much did live.com hit?? Just 15... !!!Unbelievable!!! But still we can appreciate Microsoft’s new venture, as it can be a small challenge for the monopoly of Google over www searching. Also need to appreciate Google for making Microsoft launch something for ‘free’.
This weekend I went for mushroom picking with Iva and Nazanine to a forest in Meudon a sub-urban region of Paris. . Since its was the hunting season in France, we were advised to dress in bright colors to go into the forest, every year there are some incidents of people being killed by hunters in French forests it seems. The forest was nice and cool, with lots of mushrooms; we had a small book, something like dummy’s guide for mushroom picking. We were able to identify the poisonous or the non-edible ones. Finally we got back home only three different types of mushroom, we just wanted to cross check in the internet before cooking and ended up throwing away all the mushrooms and dialed a mushroom pizza for our dinner, any way there are more forests and more weekends and more mushrooms... Some people in India still consider mushroom as a non-vegetarian food. As a biologist I can say that mushrooms are 100% vegetarian and as a vegetarian we need to more mushrooms, than the non-vegetarians. More over they are sooooo delicious!! Dil Mange More..!!! 
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. -Picasso
Priya needs no introduction, she was in As soon as reached
On my way back to 
I went to Mont-Soleil again, this time to be a volunteer in the meditation center, this vipassana meditation center, all around the world is run by old meditation students. People who are benefited by this meditation can go the center and work for the new meditators, starting from the management committee, managers and the Assistant teachers and the kitchen staff are all the old meditation students working there as volunteers. Depending on how much time you commit to the center, you can take a long term or a short term position, since I was there only for 10days and also because of my love for cooking, I worked as a cook. It was so amazing to cook for 50 people, that too strictly sticking to the time table that too over a top of a mountain where you get farm fresh vegetables and milk, I use to go the farm to get milk, sometimes as I walk through the beautiful landscapes in a silent evening, made me feel that I am walking inside a beautiful painting, the beauty of Switzerland seems to be far away from reality. I was there few days before the course and was lucky to get a free pass for a big and a very expensive open air music festival and for the first time I got a chance to listen to Mozart’s last composition, Requiem, It was amazing to see people frozen in rain, listing to this piece of music. More pictures of the beautiful Mont-Soleil. 
In my one month summer vacation the only known person I interacted and communicated with, was Micha and my family for couple of time over the phone, rest all were new people, travellers and mediators. I met a bunch of wonderful people. It was nice to see people from different places and background and more over amazed by their passion in life. one such person in Tamae, a swiss girl from Geneva. I met her in the meditation center and she invited me to stay with her as I was travelling through Geneva. I stayed at her place for a night and she took me around Geneva the next day. Since she was born and brought up there, she had friends at every corner of the street. She is studying music and lived in India,Calcutta close the slum people, interacting with them through an organisation to teach them dance. She also collects money by arranging small concerts with her boy friend. They play piano and Tabla together in their concerts. We walked around in geneva, the old town was beautiful, In the evening we came to the lake side, where we met some of her friends and had some nice cuban tea.Then it was time for me to leave back to the meditation center. More Geneva pictures... 
From the day I met Micha, I was wondering what makes him so admirable, he is someone who is always adored and surrounded by people....I stopped wondering about it on the day I met his family, Its a sweet mix of French and German Family, with the best of both. The days when we didn't travel, I played with his cute little nephew, Adrian who taught me lot of French words and games and Micha cooked delicious food big family lunch and dinner. one day was this amazing pizza day,the whole family worked together with Micha to finish the toppings, that was my first ever home made pizza just delecious... more photos of Micha's family taken on the Pizza day are as usual in my flickr... One week went off just like that...and then it was the day when I have to take this 40 min flight back to Geneva. And that was the beginning of a episode three of my summer vacation..
Me and Micha made some day trips discovering the beautiful cities and countryside of the french riviera. France is divided into many regions, a small region close to Italy and Monaco is called Côte d'Azur. The biggest city in this region.... I guess is Nice and also has the famous town cannes, where the famous Cannes Film Festival takes place is in this region.We went to Nice, Antibes and some small countryside around Grasse .Antibes is my favourite place. Nice is nice too...but in the Nice beach,as I was standing in the waves, a big wave gave a small bath to my digital camera in my packet. So no digital photos from Nice. Later hair dryer treated my wet camera and cured it. Micha is a walking encyclopedia, never seen a such an unbeatable combination of intelligence,good looks and extremely pleasant and humble person....had lots of fun travelling with him, he was telling me the history and geography of every stone in this region and took me to the best places and introduced to the best food of the region.
Check out more photos of the beautiful Côte d'Azur....
Reached the Geneva airport..the trains in Switzerland are so annoyingly punctual,Its very difficult for Indians to get used to such punctuality, I reached the airport almost one and half hours did some window shopping and got into the flight and just had a small nap and the flight landed in Nice(a city in south of France), it was a shortest flight trip I ever had just 40 min on air.Micha was waiting with his mom to receive me in the airport and another 30 mins drive, I reached a absolutely beautiful house(Micha's Parent's) over a top of small mountain in a town called Grasse, between Nice and Cannes.The house had a beautiful view of three towns,Grasse,Cannes and Antibes between the valley and view of the alps dropping off in the Mediterranean. I stayed there in that beautiful house with very lovely Micha's family having excellent Micha's food and with nice trips and strolls in the small towns and villages in that region. Some more of Micha's home are here....more pictures after I get my film scanned. Thats the view from his room at dusk..
Next day the weather was still nice and sunny, we decided to start driving...Some friends from the hostel, an Australian girl and Canadian boy joined us in the drive, we went through the beautiful small villages, and mountains of the Switzerland to reach Château de Chillon. A castle next the Lake Geneva (Lake Léman)Beautiful castle, very well planned and built on a rock in the lake, most of the balcony open into the lake, amazed to see almost a small kingdom inside, had jails, royal rooms and even a 15th century toilets. we had small picnic next to the lake and then it was time to say bye to Sandra...They started travelling towards Italy and I took a train to Geneva airport to take a flight to France. No..it was not an end of my trip but a beginning of an all new beautiful episode in south of France.
It was happy sunny day! so me and Sandra decided to go up the mountains, we went up a small Green hill called harder kulm, which had a something like a Buddhist temple on the top, and had a a nice view of the town, interlaken as the name suggest its beautifully located between two lake and then it was the time for the summer snow. we had two choices one was to go up Schilthorn peak or to Jungfrau peak, it was very difficult to decide between two, later for financial reasons we ended up in Schilthorn, we hiked a bit and reached the cable car and a very scenic journey to the top of snow covered peak. It was just snow and snow and snow all around with just a small cheesy restaurant, Piz Gloria which revoles 360 degree. It was nice to have a long 3 hours lunch with some American travellers, food, nice chat and a 360 degree view of snow covered peaks...very very cheesy....
We didn’t do much on the first, a messy.. cloudy.. day, just went walking around this small touristy town, which is located between two lakes and beautiful mountains on the other sides, we just had look and feel of the town, I was shocked to see many announcement boards in Hindi, and lot and lot of 
My travel in 
After reaching Mont Soleil, and started meditating, I did not see both Mont and Soleil for at least a week, the mountain(Mont) was hidden by fog and the sun(Soleil) was behind the clouds, but it was so wonderful for meditation, one day early in the morning after meditating from 4:30 to 6:00 , came out of the meditation hall into a big balcony, and saw thick fog surrounding the centre, because of the lightness in mind and body had a feeling of living between clouds. In the breaks, it was so nice to walk in the woods in the wet wild grass. And later during the sunny days we had after noon nap in the grass land surrounded by woods, it was so relaxing for the body and mind. That’s the picture of the meditation centre, taken on the 10th day, when mediators started leaving the centre. I was also ready to leave the centre and explore the beautiful nature of swiss. 
Finally..I got a small break from 
Discussing more about honey...today I had a lunch time discussion with Andy about honey. Me and Andy are so crazy about honey; we have bottles of different types of honey in the lab for tea, yogurt and salads. Discussing about honey, it was so easy for us, the two animation fans to switch the topic over to Pooh, the honey lover. He started discussing about his favorite book Tao of Pooh, he showed me lots of sites and quotes from this book. Some of them touched me very deeply, specially the description of different characters, which can briefly put as in this above image.They just reflect the people we meet in our everyday life. A very good friend of mine, is more like this ‘pontificate owl’,clever but has some unwritten dogmas of life and try to impose it strongly on people around. Then there was a day, when I got bored of discussing over dogmas,the silly 'dos and donts', which sounds absolutely stupid for me. When its so easy to live ‘just like..’ pooh! Why do we complicate our life like this owl and try to control the whole world with the dogmas, created with our little intelligence.We dont need dogmas and long lectures to know the simple way to live, every one is capable of discovering by themselves...otherwise... in terms of Pooh…
To know the Way,
We go the Way;
We do the Way
The way we do
The things we do.
It's all there in front of you,
But if you try too hard to see it,
You'll only become Confused.I am me,
And you are you,
As you can see;
But when you do,
The things you can do,
You will find the Way,
And the Way will follow you.
I am making arrangements and plans for summer trip, one major difference between travelling in India and Europe is the use of maps. In India you have a "Bhaya" (Brother) in every street corner, you can directly walk to them and ask for directions. Unfortunately that's not possible in Europe. so, now a days maps are my bible when I am travelling, even with good road signs and maps I still get lost in Paris, we humans are so dumb, specially more dumb comparing to these cute little Bees! Today, scientists working on bees discussed their work on bees in BBC..they are just amazing, they were able to find their way back home, even if they are left 13kms away from home, no maps ...no road signs..no Bhaya...! Also when they finish nectar in a flower, they leave some sort of chemical signal in the flower ( some thing like a post-it note ;-) to tell other bees that the flower is empty...How amazing they are..We human having sixth sense??? but not worried about losing the sensitivity of other 5 senses. More over they produce this miraculous honey, rich in nutrition but cannot be spoiled by Bactria or fungi..with some sort of natural preservative...! sorry but we have to steal it from my cute little honey! Thats the picture of cute queen bee in a famous french comic on bees called Mireille l'abeille. 
