Note to recruiters

Note to recruiters: We are quite aware that recruiters, interviewers, VCs and other professionals generally perform a Google Search before they interview someone, take a pitch from someone, et cetera. Please keep in mind that not everything put on the Internet must align directly to one's future career and/or one's future product portfolio. Sometimes, people do put things on the Internet just because. Just because. It may be out of their personal interests, which may have nothing to do with their professional interests. Or it may be for some other reason. Recruiters seem to have this wrong-headed notion that if somebody is not signalling their interests in a certain area online, then that means that they are not interested in that area at all. It is worth pointing out that economics pretty much underlies the areas of marketing, strategy, operations and finance. And this blog is about economics. With metta, let us. by all means, be reflective about this whole business of business. Also, see our post on "The Multi-faceted Identity Problem".

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Ask The Delphic Oracle meets Nobel Laureate Brian Kobilka

A few earlier posts of mine (here, here and here) discuss a new writing system proposal for the Tamil language. In order to bring attention to the issues with the current Tamil writing system and in order to generate some measure of awareness for my Tamil writing system proposal, I sent an email to Prof. Brian Kobilka, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford, to ask if he would be able to meet some time. Prof. Kobilka has directed research resulting in many discoveries of great importance and these have led to many drugs in the field of Medicine. He also happens to have won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry this year.

Before I continue with the rest of this post, I should mention that Prof. Kobilka has requested that this post not be read as an endorsement of my writing proposal for Tamil, and I want to make sure that that disclaimer is there up front. I had come across Prof. Kobilka's work as part of my work for this blog, and his accomplishments are many, but I must say that meeting this man was a humbling experience for me.  In fact, one of the medications that I used to take targets GPCRs, one of the discoveries of Prof. Kobilka's that has resulted in his winning the Nobel Prize his year. And so, I was really quite excited. It was very generous of Prof. Kobilka to give me the opportunity to speak wth him. He struck me as very modest about his accomplishment. I consider myself very fortunate in having the opportunity to meet Prof. Kobilka.

On the day of the meeting, I walked into the building and asked a passing student for directions to his room. She asked me about the room number. I was sure I had it right. I told her the room number again, and she pointed me to Prof. Kobilka's room and stifled a look of surprise. It is quite possible that it was simply my bouquet of flowers that threw her off.  I wanted to give Prof. Kobilka a small token of appreciation for his spending the time on a matter such as this, and so had bought him a bouquet. I am usually on time for all my appointments, and the irony was that I was late for this meeting of all meetings. In fact, I had had to run the last three blocks to reach Prof. Kobilka's office and so was one out-of-breath guy. Before I crossed the street to the department building, I asked somebody for directions. The person told me how to get there and yelled after me - "Somebody is lucky today!" - assuming I was on a date. He probably did not know that it was I who was the lucky guy that day.      

I was shown into Prof. Kobilka's office and the Nobel Laureate was seated at his desk. I briefly explained to him what I had come for. I had already mentioned to him that a script system which offers an unambiguous way of writing words and phrases has many advantages. This includes being able to write out names of drugs  in Tamil unambiguously and this could help people who only know Tamil get the right medicine based on a written prescription. After my brief discussion with him, I asked Prof. Kobilka if he would agree to have a photo taken with me. It sounded like a good way of commemorating the meeting for me. Also, a little bit of marketing never hurt. He agreed and so we took a couple of pictures of me with Prof. Kobilka. I had already decided to leave shortly after having the pictures taken. I really didn't want to take too much of his time. I thanked him for the pictures and walked over to a seating area I knew of nearby. I really had to sit down.

Update: updated the post a bit, moved it forward by a day.