When I decided to become a researcher in the field of biological sciences, research was the one and only thing that excited me. After struggling with research for almost five years it has lost the charm and I’d rather be doing anything but science. I have often thought that we work of money and hope to enjoy it too…but in reality we work for money. And then I come across article like this…

I can’t even imagine how much this guy actually loves his work and how strongly he preaches it too.

The headlines for today: Exxonmobil posts the largest profit in corporate history. According to this report on CNN, this translates into a profit of $1300 per SECOND!! I thought of putting this into a different perspective - how does this per second ‘profit’ compare to the per capita income of India? This world bank statistic puts the real per capita income of India in the year 2006 to be $820. WOW!! It means Exxonmobil makes more profit every second than what an average Indian makes in an entire year!! Also do note that we are talking about the ‘profit’, the comparison will be even more shocking if we take into account the ‘revenue’.

Take this a step further. Convert this profit and per capita income to find out how many people of India can Exxonmobil support if it were to donate its profit away. Do the math and then look at this table that shows the population of the states of India. Imagine this, if Exxonmobil were to donate away its profit, it would be enough to support the population of Gujarat!!

When I hear such stories, I find myself torn between two thoughts - Is this fair or such profits are crossing the threshold towards being called criminal? On the other hand, how wonderful is the business model than can generate such profits? Is this capitalism at its worst or at its best? Intrigued I am :-).

Would your jaw drop in utter amazement when I say that the Google founder Sergey Brin’s wife is busy “bringing personalized medicine to the public” by helping them “read and understand their DNA”?

All this comes at a price, of course (and a rather steep one I might add). A little startup called 23andMe co-founded by Anne Wojciki (wo-JES-ki) unravels the mystery of your ancestry for a cool $999.00 so that you can know all that is to know (and maybe more) about yourself.

Another one of those Web 2.0 marvels!

Remember the days when your mom would be all upset because the maid didn’t show up! Well, my fellow desis those days are over, we have babajob.com for reliable maids, chauffeurs, cooks!

Alright, this is still in the future for anywhere except Bangalore and even Bengaluru (this is the last time I am using this spelling) has limited listings and no referral comments from other users, but its a start!

You may ask, ‘Ramesh, using internet? He can’t even write his own name’. This is where you and me come in; baba’s of the house and yes the baby’s too! We create the profiles for them, and we get Rs. 200 for doing that if they are employed through babajob.com. As if we needed an incentive to help Ramesh or Vinod or Lalji whom we have seen growing up! For posting a job or to get the contact information of the person seeking job you pay Rs. 500, small one time cost if you can find a reliable cook, who speaks the language you do and cooks delicious vegetarian food in desi ghee.

Babajob.com is not only about finding maids, its essentially a job website for anyone who might need help finding a job but has no means or knowledge to be connected to the modern world of internet. What surprises me is it took an American to see the need of such a website. I really hope this startup survives the test of time as we are getting connected more and more!

Podcast of the interview with the co-founder Sean Blagsvedt..

1. Write a book
2. Love him more every day
3. Live in New York City
4. Be debt-free
5. Have an apartment of my own, and not have anything from IKEA in it
6. Lose enough weight to fit into the skirt from 2002
7. Get more than 5 real emails a day
8. Learn to tell when I move from high to drunk
9. Finish reading Satanic Verses
10. Learn Arabic
11. Have flawless skin
12. Travel through Eastern Europe with a backpack and not a suitcase
14. Try food journalism
15. Have some sort of savings plan
16. And have enough money to actually afford anything I want in a store
17. Cook on a daily basis. Master french food
18. Not cut my hair at all
19. Camp out for at least a month
20. Take mom to ladakh
21. Write a screenplay. Or two.
22. At least once, go into a club with a prepared dance routine. Push the people aside on the dance floor, signal to the DJ to play “the song” and proceed. Might need to open a club myself, for that sorta thing.
23. Learn to hate french fries
24. Write a blog entry every day
25. Travel through India as if I’m not a native

Euripides once said “Money is the wise man’s religion”. And that is probably the driving force for putting in endless hours into our non-motivating, essentially boring and monotonous jobs. What if you did not have to work for money? What if there were sufficient funds so that you did not have to think twice before mindlessly spending it? What would you do then? Believe it or not, it just baffled me to imagine myself in this situation. There are probably a million things I want to do everyday instead of waking up each morning and dragging my sorry ass to work. But I still could not think of what I would do with the hypothetical endless amounts of money.
The more I thought about this situation, the more confused I got…even though the answer is simple- own a beautiful mansion, purchase a (maybe more) sleek and sexy sports car, wine and dine at the finest restaurants, oh…how can I forget all the shopping and above all travel across the globe. Now, in this laundry list of ‘to dos with tones of cash’ the only thing that appeals to me is the sports car and travel. This is bizarre…I somehow lack the art of spending money…even hypothetically!! I probably have to kill some more brain cells to figure this one out.
After carefully considering all the pros and cons…countless days and weeks of sleeping in late, no stressing about work, simple plain boredom of doing nothing, I would like to settle down in a remote, underdeveloped part of the world and set up a small teaching center. Far away from being prim and proper all the time, far away from being politically correct and far away from the ‘getting complicated everyday technology’. One does not really need a whole lot of money to do the philanthropic things. I guess it is psychosomatic; it is the idea of not having to work for something in return that gives the sense of liberation. It just might be true…money can buy everything, even the sense of freedom.

As peaceful as Ithaca is, we don’t even expect someone shouting loudly on the streets. I was walking towards the parking garage with a friend when we heard some noises as if someone was fighting, it was late in the night and the streets were deserted. As we approached the stairs two black girls came running down, to our relief they were kids, just running around, playing. We took the stairs to the second floor, as we walked towards the car we saw a black kid looking inside the car.’yeh car ke paas kya kar raha hai?’ (What is he doing next to the car?) my friend said as she gave me a concerned look. I gave her the same concerned look back ‘pata nahi’ (don’t know). He saw us ‘we were playing hide and seek’ as he ran down to join his friends. Car was alright, he didn’t scratch the paint, neither was he trying to steal anything - he was just playing hide and seek. I felt guilty - guilty of acting a racist, guilty of stereotyping a black kid, he was harmless.

He knew we were worried, we spoke a language that he didn’t understand yet he knew what we were talking, he had faced such questioning eyes before.

Had it been a white kid, would I have the same questioning eyes? Was it wrong of me to think that way? Is my guilt justified?

We emerged onto the cold but crowded street after the New Year eve party “Indian Experience istyle”; everyone either trying to haul a cab or waiting for their ride. While my girlfriends and I were trying to keep away from the nasty wintry winds in the corner of the building, this friend of ours was approached by a Latino guy. This Mr. Mexicano approached Mr. Friend a couple of times and we got a little uncomfortable when Mr. Friend walked with him into a gully. Much to our relief our ride arrived and we heard Mr. Friends saying, “I cannot help you any further…I have to go”.
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Wanted to share a piece of recording that a friend and I quickly collaborated on, a while back in June 2006, without much prior preparation. It was pretty much a 5 min attempt at relaxing ourselves at the end of the day.

Its not the best sound quality and I apologize for that, but its a sample. This one was recorded at 5 pm at the back of one of our office labs in an isolated RF Cage (a shielded chamber broadly meant for radio frequency testing purposes). The only reason behind using that spot was that we thought we could manage to go un-noticed. We got caught-in-the-act by our boss that evening and had to compensate for it, and that’s another story, but it was all in good spirit. Hope you enjoy our attempt.

Dooba Dooba H&A

-Me

Disclaimer - Any obvious vocal artifacts are because of the lossy audio compression algorithm!