Sudipta's Life

Positive dis-service: the credit for coining this term (as far as I know) goes to Swapan da from my days at the Ramakrishna Mission. Time and again in my life, while I'm helping others, I have felt that I might actually be doing them harm by making them dependent upon my help or service, rather than equipping them so that they may do it for themselves. I had a friend in school who usually slept through some classes which were deemed boring by public opinion. In the back bench, he would enjoy a peaceful siesta while I took running notes for the history lesson and come back to my hostel to read them or write answers for the homework. Sometime in the middle of the semester, he had come to me once for help and I happened to dig up my class notebook and told him the answer after consulting it. Soon, this became a habit -- he would come to me just a day before the homework was due, and I had to explain to him what was required to answer the questions. He wasn't the best brain in th...

I was just able to finalize the settings of my Bengali blog, called Ek Kothai (এক কথায়). For those unfamiliar with the language, it means, "in short" or "in one word". Please visit or bookmark it -- I wish to make that my own Twitter, to record the snippets from my life. Also, you might need to hit Control-Plus a few times to get it to a readable font size.

About a year and a half back, I participated in a clinical research trial that paid me $350 for taking out my wisdom tooth: which was paining pretty badly at that time. I figured that instead of paying a dentist $200, I'd rather get this done for free and get some money with that as well. They were developing a pain medication and wanted to test the drug on patients. It went fine... I was pretty impressed with the drug since my pain dropped from 8/10 just after the surgery to 2/10 in an hour or two. I forgot all about it until they sent me a letter this Saturday thanking me for participating. The next paragraph in that letter told me that I was given a placebo: no actual painkillers. Meaning, I practically got my wisdom tooth extracted without any anesthetic. You only have to convince me that the job is possible: the rest is always mind over matter. Like I said, the name's Bond. :) P.S. - For those of you who thought the Hum Tum style "Bond, James Bond" way of introd...

It feels so good when people I don't know at all send me messages on Orkut asking why there aren't any new posts on the blog. As always, it makes my day; besides a certain 'hmph' from a certain person. Thank you! :) Then, take a look at this article: Researcher sheds light on increasing 'casual sex' phenomenon . Damn, I say --- where are these mythical girls? How come I never meet any of these? And my apologies for this placefiller of a post --- I promise something really juicy coming up! :D