Is it possible to have one foot in surface science as an experimental physicist and the other playing bass in a heavy-metal band? Welcome to the life of Alessandro Sala! 

When he is not setting the stage on fire, Sala is “investigating the properties of nanostructured surfaces, 2D materials and organometallic molecules with a scanning tunnelling microscope.”

When he is not exploring the intricacies of surfaces, he plays bass for Rhapsody Of Fire, a heavy-metal band “that has sold more than one million records throughout its 25-year history and regularly tours the world.”

So, what’s the big deal in playing some music after work? His musical role “requires month-long absences from the lab, early-morning flights and dark leather clothes.” (Wonder if the molecules would act differently if the scientist observing them wore dark leather clothes and carried a bass guitar!)

Science and music

Writing in Nature, Sala says, “Good time management is key to having the best of both worlds.” If that sounds like a cliché, it is an art he has scientifically perfected over the years.

His strategy is to find separate spaces for music and science. “I accept master’s candidates and temporary lecturing positions only if no big tour is scheduled in the following semester. I train my postgraduate students to be completely independent, so they can keep working when I travel.” And he attends conferences only in May, June, September and October; the band tends to tour in the other months.

He arranges his parts in new songs mentally over a couple of months and condenses all recording sessions into a couple of weekends. He shares his musical commitments with his co-workers and carefully plans lab activities so that work and music are always in tune. Yes, Sala does attend lab meetings remotely so that he is always updated. No rehearsals while doing lab work, except that “while I’m immersed in an experiment; I do listen to good music, though.”
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Delightful duet

​Has one profession had an influence on the other?

His colleagues are happy to use his scanning tunnelling microscope during his scheduled absence. Also, “in the lab, everybody is capable of using every instrument, and often we help each other on our scientific projects.”

In the music industry, all events from composing new music to live tours are routinely planned around two years ahead. “I treat research branches like albums: every couple of years I revise them critically, and I am not frightened to start a new one, if needed.”

“When I come back to my lab after a month of sleeping on a tour bus, my mind is ready for new scientific ideas, and I feel free to dedicate myself to a scientific task within a well-defined time frame.”

How does one describe Sala’s life—a symbiotic symphony or a delightful duet?

There is the real game of life for most people, and there is the virtual life of massively multiplayer online gaming that is the only real thing for many. A recent report suggests that gaming will soon be the real thing in life, and everyone would be a gamer. Brent Baldwin, once a gamer himself, fervently hopes this future will not come to pass.

In Baldwin's story, “a collection of so many things from my own life”, the gamers in the future are a lost generation, educated but unemployed, living “in a world too expensive and too hot for in-person gatherings.”

Yarro, the central character, lives in a bare minimum pod with no kitchen. For Yarro, “the lack of a kitchen meant more room for a fully immersive gaming rig, which was the height of human existence.”

He hates to go the place where his dad lives (“Miss you, son”) because he does not want to “endure the sun and the heat outside his pod”. Also, because Yarro doesn’t want to run into anyone “who would pester him about ‘not calling’ or ‘how have you been’ or ‘I’m so sorry about your mom’.”

Yet he ends up going there because Sisho, a member of his “posse” had uncharacteristically not logged in for two days. Imagine! A gamer not online! He got to know from a fellow gamer that Sisho was in a hospital near his father’s place.

Sisho had almost died from “nutritive failure.” In non-gaming, real-life words, Sisho was so engrossed in the game that he did not pause to eat and had almost starved to death.

After leaving the hospital, Yarro goes on to visit his father.

Standing in his childhood home, Yarro remembers his parents’ laughter. “How it used to seem so fake, until it was absent. For most of his life, all Yarro had really wanted was to get into a gaming rig and explore other worlds, but for a moment he imagined himself as his Dad, alone day after day. Sisho had the posse waiting for him. With Mom gone, Dad had no one.”

​Do read Yarro's story and ponder about the future that awaits all of us.

A few minutes ago, I came across a scientist’s prediction that technology will make humans immortal by 2030. By 2045, “we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion-fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.”
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Can we harness some of that artificial intelligence to undo the damage we continue to wreak on the outside? And to restore the fragile love and fraying care within us?

That is one animal which does not feature in this documentary. Yet, its call to heed the elephant in the room is not a whisper but a shriek.

Thanks to the push provided by the Oscar-fuelled social media, I finally saw The Elephant Whisperers a couple of weeks ago. Loved it! Made me relive the only time I had the opportunity to give an elephant a bath, in Dubare Elephant Camp, Coorg. I have always been in love with the gentle giants. Oscar or no Oscar, I would definitely watch the documentary again for Raghu and Ammu, and the beautiful visuals.

There are no such beautiful visuals in the documentary I saw a couple of days ago--All That Breathes. No, this is not an attempt to compare the two documentaries. They deal with the same truth we live, but in different ways.

While The Elephant left me feeling good, Breathes left me feeling guilty, uneasy. I don’t think I will ever be able to look a bird in the eye after watching Breathes.

Let me not spoil your experience of watching it and forming your own impressions.

​Just think of all that breathes with us on this planet. And somehow surviving in the filth that has become our ecosystem. We struggle to survive even with fellow members of our species. While we orate, shout, fight and burn, who has the time to worry about birds dropping from the sky?

How can we possibly keep breathing when we consciously and unconsciously create conditions that make it difficult to our fellow residents to live in health and peace? Kites are using cigarette butts as insect repellents in their nests. Should we applaud their ingenuity or be ashamed by our own self-centred callousness?

All That Breathes is set in Ghazipur, where I was some years ago. Then as now, working away in the shadow of the infamous garbage mountain, artisans create pieces of art from waste. Perhaps, there is hope yet?
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Or should we tell that to the birds?

“The earthquake was in Afghanistan,” the old fruit seller said, “but Delhi too was shaken.” He was handing over the second plastic bag my friend had demanded as a backup for the first one bulging with apples and mangoes.

My friend smirked and walked with me to the car.

“What did he mean by that?” I asked.

“Oh, he is nice but a little mad,” my friend replied. “He does not like it when people ask for plastic bags to carry the stuff they buy from him. He used to plead with everyone to get their own cloth bags. He gave up when people stopped buying from him. Crazy guy!”

What does that have got to do with the earthquake?

“He keeps lecturing that we are all one. Earth is gifted to us to by God, it seems. We must all protect it or we will be left with no home. As if, if I stop using a few plastic bags, the planet would be saved. Ha!”

“I doubt if he is even literate,” my friend continued, “but he talks of climate change. Yes, the very words. Climate is changing because God wants to give us a warning, it seems. This earthquake must have been God shaking his fist … ha, ha, ha!”

He was still laughing when I dropped him off before his gate.

I think I will carry a bag or two with me from tomorrow. And I will walk all the way. Why bother with a car when I am supposed to be on my morning walk.

No, I am not thinking of that crazy old man. But why am I thinking of my baby born last month?

You must read if you wish to write. If you are a writer, you must find your reader. You must weigh your words to deliver maximum value. Early lessons.

I started reading early with no ulterior motive. That crept in soon after the professor checked my essay on the college canteen. You are a good writer, she said. Be at it, she advised.

She went to on to make me a part of the editorial team of the junior college magazine. I had arrived, I was sure.

Then I found myself standing at the college gate pleading with all who entered to take a cyclostyled (yes, that used to be a thing) copy of The Junior Rag. The idea is to find your readers, and for that you must go to them, my teacher had said. All I could find was juniors and seniors alike treating the Rag as just that. For the next few days, I stayed clear of the waste bins and random flying bits of paper.

During my year in journalism college, I respectfully approached the instructor. I was carrying a sheaf of painfully typewritten pages. On the pages were words sure to pull readers to the resort I was helping sell. It was my first step into the exotic world of copywriting.

He flipped through the pages as if he were looking at some animation. Then he casually transferred the bunch from one hand to the other as if weighing the pages. “you can expect to get …” he mentioned a price, gave me a patronizing pat, handed the pages back dropping some in the process and moved on.

More recently I cleared out a huge stack of yellowing newspapers from the attic. Each carried a story with what was once rarely obtained, my byline. Explosive exposures, tearful tales, faithful facts. All by a writer who had, as my boss once put it, “strayed” into journalism. The scrap dealer dumped all the bundles on a large weighing scale, checked the weight and counted out the compensation. No, I did not linger for another backward glance.
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Today, when yet another potential client asks me to quote my price per word, per page or per hour, I revisit my early lessons. Then I weighed every word because I valued the reader. Now the buyer weighs content that must be optimized to be found. 

Procrastination is how you make the most of your time. While you are at it, do thieve some to enjoy yourself. After all, I have just about 800 left and you too have not much left, given that each of us has 4000 weeks, give or take a few.

That’s Oliver Burkeman’s estimate. Just that number immediately tells us what really matters, what is precious. TIME!

So, you have your ways (prescribed and digital) to tame time, you think? “The more you struggle to control it, to make it conform to your agenda, the further it slips from your control,” says Burkeman in his famous book, Four Thousand Weeks.

The problem, he says, is that time management techniques don’t acknowledge that time is limited. When you try to manage it, you no longer enjoy it.

Time was when we worked by the sun. Rise, shine and set, all with the sun. Then came the industrial revolution that made time another asset to divide and exploit.

Are you among those who pine for a bonus 24 to add to your given 24 in a day? It can be liberating if you accept the limit. “The paradoxical reward for accepting reality’s constraints is that they no longer feel so constraining,” says Burkeman.

What if you had all the time in the world to be at your device or at work? After all, there is so much to get done by EOD.

Once you accept time is finite, how do you make the most of it? Burkeman has a few suggestions. Know what must be done now, procrastinate or even neglect the rest. Limit what you take up and know you must choose and settle for some. Most importantly, enjoy what you use your time to do.

As the author puts it, the only way NOT to waste time is to use some of it "wastefully focused solely on the pleasure of the experience.”

Burkeman prescribes giving up some control over time and sharing it with family and friends. You will gain emotional riches when you prioritize the out-of-range, in-person kind human connections over the online.

Want to know how well you gel with time? Burkeman suggests four questions to ask yourself:

• Do you avoid new activities, fearing the outcome may cause discomfort, uncertainty or disappointment?
• Do you hold yourself to impossibly high standards?
• Do you live today as a journey to the person you feel you ought to be?
• Do you hesitate to pursue an activity in which you don’t feel you have the expertise?
• Would you approach something differently if you didn’t need to see its completion?

Accept the answers and get going. Enjoy it while it ticks. 

Dr Christiaan Barnard, the pioneer in human-to-human transplant, had visited India when I was in high school. Not sure if that was the trigger, but around the same time I developed this great interest in medicine, specifically in cardiac medicine.  

Even browsed through all of Gray’s Anatomy when I was supposed to be reading Economics much to the amusement of an indulgent family doctor. As a bonus, I had this fascination for science fiction. So, save little details like studying medicine and learning surgery, my heart was set, well, on heart.

Thank God, that didn't happen! They say heart surgeons are dying out. I thought only writers were at risk. Looks like technology is set to bypass my dream surgeons, too.

According to The Economist, until “the late 19th century, surgeons were convinced that the organ was so delicate that even touching it would cause death.” When cardiac surgery emerged around the 1950s, “it quickly became one of the most prestigious and well-rewarded branches of medicine, dominated by vaunting men who gloried in their power to save those doomed to die.”
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In 2008-09, heart operations in Britain were at an all-time high of over 41,000 only to fall to 31,000 10 years later. As against this, from 10,000 in 1991, the implantation of stents increased ten times to over 100,000 by 2020. Reportedly, there is ever less work to go around the estimated 250-plus consultant surgeons in Britain, a number that has remained "largely static." 

What is happening? Is a ChatGPT cousin taking over heart surgery? 

When Simon Akam, the writer of the article asked Dr Dincer Aktuerk, a consultant surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s about the future of the profession, the answer was arresting: “I don’t think that the conventional cardiac surgeon, as we know it, will exist in a few years’ time.”

Dr Richard Galloway, a surgical trainee has chosen to focus on orthopaedics. The rationale is more head and less heart. “Everyone’s going to need knee replacements,” Galloway told the writer. “You’re in good business there.”

Back in 1976, while in India, Dr Christiaan Barnard had told a journalist: “You can't be a heart surgeon and be tense.” Tense they are today, going by what Simon Akam has revealed.

I wonder, the next time I meet my writer friends over pints of a morale booster, and we again aver that no technology can ever replace us, will I also run into some cardiac surgeons asserting that no wire can slip through and cut the scalpel out?

Can a disaster that no one wants turn victims into villains?
​An evil scientist has released a dangerous virus inside an aircraft mid-air. All are infected; many die. 
Would you let that aircraft land in your country?
If you are a passenger, would you want to land?
Would you choose to be safe or want to save?
Would you describe those who deployed fighter jets to force the plane out of their country as selfish?
When you force a child to join the section of the aircraft meant for the infected because you have spotted a rash on her hand, whom are you saving?
Why is it that those safe on the ground and those dying in the air have the same question—if the plane lands, can we live?
Can humanity draw hope from the captain’s announcement before he broke all communications?
“All of us aboard this plane have decided not to land. We know what the people on the ground are scared of. We don’t resent them. It’s just that we were caught in a disaster that none of us wanted.
“We are weak and frightened humans. But because we are humans, there are things that only we can do. Now, we intend to make a decision for everyone’s sake. This decision is not to give into this disaster, and to make an honorable choice with our humanity.
“Therefore, we won’t land. For the last time, we send our love to all our families."

These are not meant to be spoilers. These are just some of the questions that came to my mind after watching the Korean movie, Emergency Declaration on Amazon Prime.
I am no expert, but this movie may not be perfect. If you decide to watch it, do not let the telling distract you from the story … and the questions it raises.

The fish swam at ease
Letting the ripples pass
The grass swayed
In pace with the wind
Pebbles and rocks, big and small
Lounged lazily along the shore
The mountains stretched
Unmoving, in green hues
Above all, the clouds
Were pristine white
None knew boundaries
Except man

There is a lizard on the other side of the pale curtain. It seems happy just holding on as the curtain sways.

The old clock ticks on, loud and relentless. The sound fills every gap in the banter and laughter.

He is at the head of the dining table, most convenient to reach on his wheelchair.
“Why don’t you make some tea?” he tells the maid. She is more than a maid. She was the chief help even when his wife was around. She took over as his prime caregiver after the wife’s death and an accident confined him to the wheelchair.

A doctor who has come from a distant city checks him out. He obeys the gentle instructions. Raises his hands. Tentatively at first, grimacing at the pain. As the pain eases, a smile breaks through his white moustache and beard. As the testing and relieving continues, there is unceasing chatter, a lot of good-natured teasing between the patient and the doctor.

The wheelchair handler is called in to understand the doctor’s instructions. Soak his legs in hot water before he goes to bed. As hot as, and as long as he can bear.

As the doctor departs, so does the delivery guy from a grocer, who had been inside, stacking up stuff.

The old man puts down his cup and resumes the story he was telling. Another trip down memory lane. Like the sun filtering through the leaves in a gentle breeze, dates and names are now bright, now in shadow.

The maid signals the guests not to make him talk until he finishes the tea. Else he would again forget to sip. Again, she would have to reheat.

He tells her to shut up and go away. She does just that. Keeping an eye on him but away from his eyes. She takes her time to respond and come to him when he calls her again. There is no malice. He is smiling. So is she, despite the sulk mask.

No one who has interacted with him so far is related to him. Yet everyone around in the community is his family, tightly bound.

By ownership, he ought to be alone in that grand old house. Someone or the other, from near and far, always ensures he is not.

He is wheeled out, shouting out instructions for yet another get-together in the evening. The dogs waiting outside can barely contain their jumps and wags of glee.

The clock ticks on as if urging the lizard to get a move on. It remains where it was.
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Tomorrow, more will come. So will more laughter.