Yours inspirationally...

What inspires? A speech? A story? A quote? A movie? A person?

Sunsets, war movies (old style, with the horses and swords!) always inspire me! Braveheart, The last samurai, Lord of the rings, and even troy imparted that feeling...! Some nut eh? ;-) I remember being inspired by the story of 'the race for dna'. Being a biotechie, i found the story of a how an aspiring ornithologist,James Watson and a physicist (measuring viscosity of liquids!), Francis Crick came together to crack the structure of the secret of life, dna, that too after years of competition with a pioneer in the field of protein structure computation, Linus Pauling. Other stories, other quotes or single lines, even songs... they just make you stop for a while and think, and marvel, and wonder...they make you want to do something significant! I still dont know why inspiration is such a short-lived feeling. When it is present, it is overwhelming with its presence, but when it leaves, it leaves you devoid of a feeling of worthiness!

Long hours of travel to our destination, the heat and the distance should have put off anyone among our group who was attending the workshop on toxicology at kancheepuram. But at the end of the 2 day affair, we stood there applauding, wanting more. It is my strong belief that i wouldn't remember more than half of that workshop had it not been for this 20 minute speech by a prof. It was a mix of biology and philosophy, the best vote of thanks i have ever heard. It is very rare that a live speech makes you cry because of the sheer beauty of its contents...this one moved most of us to tears, and was talked about for hours in the bus. It inspired me to the extent of picking up the mic and thanking him for the speech - something i've never done before, and never ever dreamed of doing. So i'd like to say, to Dr.Venkatadri, the look in your eyes when you talked about the sunset and the rhapsody, the fools and the world, plato and biology...that look, was inspiration. And like one of my friends put it, Philosophy was never so beautiful till we met you!

There's this movie i watched today which in its own way was a little inspiring. A movie from which emanated so much postive-ness that even the most determined pessimist would remain optimistic for atleast sometime after watching it. Mozhi. We don't see too many tamil movies like this one these days. Light and floaty, but very beautiful, and very thought provoking, not easily forgotten, good music, excellent perfomances and characterisation. Its like a new genre of movies has evolved with the 'prakashraj production' tag. And every movie is getting better...while you can expect a good story and good perfomances from a mani rathnam movie, good entertainment and commercial cinema from a shankar film, prakashraj gives us the hope that his movies will be classic feel-good, with an under-current of very good humour. I reccomend this movie, highly.

And then there's this story of someone's life. Someone i respected for her experience in the field of cancer research, and her dedication towards the subject till i heard other things... After hearing her story, there's so much more respect and so much to learn from. Though the story of how she waited 2 years, and worked so hard just to get into the lab of her dreams, to satisfy her passion for cancer research is awe evoking, and very inspiring, the other side of her story makes one realise how much the choices we make in life matter, and how important it is to make the right decisions. It seems impossible that a person who has made so many sacrifices can exist...but there she stands, teaches, sits among us like she were one of us, jokes around about students, not ever allowing us to acknowldge the fact that we're blessed to have ever met her, and sit with her and hold subject talk and small talk. One wonders why her story had to be so complicated, why she had to undergo so many trials, why she had to deal with more than she could ever handle... but again, some things, some stories are just not meant to be understood...and we may spend a lifetime trying to understand them. Like a friend once wrote

"kuch kahaniyan, kuch daastayein, jo kabhi kisi ko samjane ke liye na banayi gayi ho, jise samajhne main kabhi shayad puri zindagi lag jaye"

Yours inspirationally
Signing off....