A request to the blog readers...

Hi guys

This post has nothing do with food, so if you are here to get a dose of food fix- sorry not today. I am writing today to raise awareness and potentially some money for the organization I volunteer with "Stop Child Trafficking Now" and an issue that is close to my heart.

My teenage years in India involved feeling helpless and angry at households that employed children as domestic help. Many such scenes have left a deep impression on me early on in my life (they still do) and I remember making my mom promise me that she would never ever hire a child (thankfully my mom never did hire help for a long time). I could not bear the thought of someone my age doing all the household chores while I bask in their labor and get all the education I need to move me forward in life. Only a handful of us think twice before we hire children to perform duties that we are fully capable of handling.

I must clarify here that even though I talk of child domestic labor, in many countries a lot of these children working far from home are easy prey for the sellers, and therefore sooner or later some of them will be trafficked and sold! A majority of trafficked domestic workers are girls, this is especially true in Africa (source: UNICEF). Children are trafficked for sex and slavery.


I do my part in small ways by refusing to buy anything that I know was the product of child slavery. Anyway my anger issues aside- now I have actually started involving my time and effort in learning about various forms of human slavery and more recently volunteering with SCTnow. SCTnow provides me with a perfect platform to help stop any and every child from being trafficked for sex or as slaves.

 I am writing to encourage you to take a look at their website- register for the walk, volunteer with the organization, donate any amount of money to support the cause (remember human trafficking is the SECOND LARGEST criminal enterprise after the selling of drugs and weapons). Together lets put an end to the misery of millions of children- it is our duty to protect them.

If you are interested in walking or volunteering, check here. The walk is taking place in over 50 cities worldwide, so be sure to check the list and register for the walk.

You can donate here by clicking "support me" on MY donor page.  Remember the walk is happening on Oct 2nd and Oct 3rd in many cities.

You are not alone...

I find this amusing and annoying at the same time, I understand when you work you want to left alone but science is all about mingling- sharing ideas, sharing crazy hypotheses, sharing work space and more. I think science would have remained rudimentary if the iPOD was discovered 200 years ago. I am not sure I can embrace the idea of come to the lab, turn your iPOD on and do whatever it is that you might be doing- surfing the net, working on an experiment or reading papers. My old lab was different that way and I liked it- we did not flaunt the "oh-look-wires-coming-out-of-me and so glued to my ears I cannot take it off" thingies. We talked incessantly, our thoughts constantly collided with one another giving rise to better experiments, we would badger the newbies in the lab calling it the "we would love to get to know you" phase.
This iPOD fetish might have something to do with being in a big lab, your bench spaces themselves are so far apart that there is very limited extent of interaction.
Anyway, I think as scientists we should limit the use of such devices- use it albiet sparingly, at least when at work. I am just a fly on the wall but I hope I am making sense here. I think this is not just true about science, you walk on the road all you can see are people either talking to themselves (back in the old days we used to think such people had the crazies!), or talking to a cell phone or concentrating on the music that is playing right into their heads.
So long people...man is a social being afterall, is he not?