grassy haven

Millions of years ago, the land of Upanishads and Vedas had already established its preference for vegetarian food.

Grass-Eating Dinosaurs

Think of dinosaurs' diets, and red meat comes to mind. Or, for herbivores, ferns and palms.

But scientists in India have found the first clear evidence that some dinosaurs also ate grass. Fossilized dung of what are believed to be titanosaurs - those big-bodied, tiny-headed creatures - contains rigid structures called phytoliths, which were identified as coming from many different types of grasses. The finding is reported in Science.

The fossils date from the late Cretaceous, near the end of the dinosaurs' reign 65 million years ago. That makes this one of the earliest findings of grasses in the fossil record, and shows that grasses had already diversified by then.

cheers...

Abandoned

It's 2:45pm already. All the passengers have boarded while Dave and I are still left tapping our feet near the podium where the deligent Southwest Airline hostess is frantically sorting through myriad iteneraries. I'll have time to be sympathetic towards her later, I told myself. Now is the time to ensure that we are visible, that we get on that plane.

She looks up. Another soul will get benediction, I tell myself. No smile, just an attempt to pronounce yet another polysyllibic name...Yaas..E..sas. "Shroff!", I loudly exclaim. "Yes. Is that you?" "YES!", I'm unable to hide my excitement. We're in! No time to rejoice yet as we scramble to make our way to the gate situated far away for our comfort. It would have been silly to forget both my bags now. The one strapped to my shoulder assures me that this is all I have and the pair of us within seconds are comfortably placed in the metal tube and on our way back home.

Many calls to baggage claim, podium, lost and found have been placed. The aggreived luggage is stubbonly refusing to be found, wanting to teach her owner a lesson in temperament.

Choice

Relevant to a previous post. Choice is an interesting term - as a friend recently pointed out to me, we don't really have a choice, just a perception of it. The life, the path, the destination, are already determined for us. I am not so certain. If nothing else, it surely takes away the perception of control we have over our lives. If we are not in control of our path and eventually our destination, what cause does any divinity have to reprimand us for the wrong 'choices' we make?

Electronika

The talks, the posters, the side conversations...It is an annual symposium and I'm absorbing it all, just like a fresh graduate. Correction. I want to absorb it all but increasingly frequently, the mind wanders about, trying to ensure that this is just where I want to be - here and now. For how long will this charade last, if this is not what i am meant to do? Is the journey itself meaningful or is it the destination that only matters? Take a scientific analogy to this - to present at one of these gatherings, a fruitful understanding of a phenomenon needs to occur. You could incessently go about discussing your approach - the many failed experimental setups, the minor successes - down to the very atomic thinking of your mind. But that's not why everyone is here - they want to know about your key findings, and your thinking matters only if it is insightful. So it seems, the journey of life is seldom important, it is the choice of destination that is.

The journey is there by default, the end is a choice.

I continue to ask myself, am I headed towards the right destination? Increasingly frequently, the answer is 'probably not'.