With an unwavering faith put in Almighty Allah together we can achieve it!

I asked Almighty Allah for strength that I might achieve. I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey. I asked for health that I might do great things,I was given infirmty that I might do better things. I asked for riches that I might be happy, I was given poverty that I might be wise. I asked for power that I might have the praise of men, I was given weakness that I might feel the need of Almighty Allah. I got nothing that I asked for, but everything I “hoped” for.

Hope being the most optimistic gift endowed upon me by Almighty Allah, I have been yearning for the peace, justice and the long cherished dream of “freedom” for my motherland notwithstanding the recurrence of  oppression, contempt,tyranny, subjugation upon my fellow beings. Hope  dares me to assert it to the tyrant,”Tell me any challenge and Almighty Allah’s hope instilled in my heart can give me more ideas and options for success that you can ever think of on your own.” I  never want to lose a gift like Hope…he will keep my mission all going. Hope is quoted as saying,”Sometimes my encouraging voice sounds like a cheerleader, and as a matter of fact, that’s how  I imagine Almighty Allah – cheering me on as I accomplish all kinds of things I did not know I could do. My dream is that everyone would know this kind of solid support and assurance”.

Next comes “Faith”. Faith put alone in Almighty Allah is a great worker ! If one needs a mountain moved,  faith in Almighty is there in achieving it.Faith’s mission is to encourage others to believe in what they can’t see. He recognizes the reward for heart felt work is to succeed in your beliefs. Faith declares,” My dream is that everyone will know the great and mighty strength that comes from Almighty Allah”.

Recalling Prophet Muhammad’s (God’s peace and blessings on him) Prayer and invocation at the battleground of the great battle of Badr:

As Prophet Muhammad (God’s peace and blessings on him) looked over the Quraish army and compared them with his thin ranks and poor equipment, he felt quite apprehensive. He returned to his booth with Abu Bakr, strongly moved by fear and pity for the career of Islam should the Muslims lose on this day. Turning his face to Makkah and his whole soul to Almighty Allah, he began to pray, calling on Allah to give him victory. He prayed to Allah for a very long while, and was heard repeating the following words: “ O Allah, give us the assistance which You promised. O Allah, if this little army perishes, when will You be worshiped again?” Muhammad prayed with hands raised to heaven. His mantle fell off and Abu bakr had to pick it up and put it back on his shoulders. Abu Bakr said to him,” O Prophet of Allah, enough calling on Allah; he will surely give you what He promised. Muhammad continued to pray, pouring out his whole soul in pious invocation to Allah to help him in this hour of precipitous danger. After near collapse, he came back to himself and told of a vision he saw of Allah’s victory. With radiant face, he went out to meet his men and incited them to put their faith in Allah and enter the battle without fear. He assured them one by one:” By Him who controls Muhammad’s soul, not one of you today fights and falls but Allah will enter him into His paradise.”

Surely it is faith put in Allah alone which makes souls capable of moving mountains, of determining the heavenly bodies, of exerting  power and influence supremely over all men endowed with less faith. Moral power doubles and redoubles material power as established by a total of just three hundred and five muslims on the expedition of  the Great battle of Badr with a true faith in Allah alone.

The absolute need for self discipline and self change:

The common Kashmiri has suffered pitilessly at the hands of tyrant from so many decades. Sacrifices of every nature have taken place to achieve the long pending goal of freedom but still a shortage of something fundamental appears amongst us all.

Our humanity if consists of no more than eating and drinking, growing and struggling for survival, then we are one with the animals. Our spiritual and moral convictions should constitute the moral bond which unites us to our fellow-men, the spiritual link between us and God. The lift of conviction is man’s great distinction from the animal kingdom. By it, he wills for his brother that which he wills for himself. by it he inclines to share his wealth with the poor, the destitute, and the miserable.

We all have got Tawākul (lethargic reliance upon God) in place of the much needed Tawakkul (trust in God).We are corrupted. Our Imān is corrupted. We prefer worldly glory to virtue and use our leadership and knowledge to misguide the community of the people. Had we a genuine imān, our motherland would have had a different destiny. Kashmiri would not have been the subject to the miseries it finds itself under today.

There is absolute need for the self discipline and self change in all of us. Fearing God, we need to be models of pride, dignity, and self respect. We need to be truthful and fulfill a covenant once we enter into it. We need to be patient when tragedy strikes. We need to avoid suspicion, spying and reporting secretly about our fellows. We need to stand beyond jealousy, strategy, deceit, gossip and every kind of misdemeanor. We need to elevate our souls to the level to which  Quran has raised it, and thus emphasize on virtue, mercy, fraternity and love, cooperation and harmony, charity and kindness, loyalty and trustworthiness, sincerity and good intention, the commandment to good and the forbiddance of evil with as much power, persuasion and sublimity as the Quran has done.

Whatever failings, whatever mistakes have happened along the way, Almighty Allah has long since forgiven. Let us all have faith and trust on Allah to guide and light our way to success. Let us together take the burdens of slavery and lay them at His feet, while trusting Him completely to meet our need for the freedom of our motherland. His blessings have no ends. Let us all raise and pray to Allah for surely before we even ask Him for something He knows what’s on our mind. Let us make a change in ourselves as Allah says in Quran,”God does not change the conditions of people until that people have changed their conditions by themselves.” (Quran 13:11)

Bioinformatics: a multidisciplinary subject

Bioinformatics or computational biology refers to an emerging, interdisciplinary subject in which computer technology, including software, hardware and algorithms, are applied to solving problems arising in biology. It is the convergence of biology and computer science to store, retrieve and analyze data. However, the field of Bioinformatics encompasses much more than this simple definition. Data, in Bioinformatics, pertains to nucleotide sequences and protein sequences. Bioinformatics does involve biology and computer science, but it also involves mathematics and statistics. Most of the mathematics and statistics are hidden in the computer science aspect of Bioinformatics. The mathematics involved mainly deals with algorithms—a stepwise method for solving a problem. A statistical aspect of Bioinformatics involves the e-value: the expectation value which is “assessment of the statistical significance of the score”. Also, the e-value is a determination of how a match is or how much chance is involved. Therefore, it is better to get a low e-value to have good results. Bioinformatics is a multi-disciplinary subject. Though only about a decade old, it has become very important for the growth of biosciences, biotechnology, and the economic prosperity of nations. Three well-defined divisions of Bioinformatics may be considered: a) Molecular Bioinformatics, b) Cellular and sub cellular Bioinformatics, c) Organismic and community Bioinformatics. Out of these three areas, most Bioinformatics scientists and workers practice molecular Bioinformatics. The other two areas are more recent and are being developed. In the next 5-10 years, cellular and sub cellular Bioinformatics that will include metabolic pathways, epigenetic, and Neuro-Bioinformatics on one hand and Bioinformatics of species diversity, behavior, evolution and the effect of pollutants on higher as well as lower species, on the other will occupy the main stage. The potential of Bioinformatics in the identification of useful genes leading to the development of new gene products, drug discovery and drug development has lead to a paradigm shift in biology and biotechnology-these fields are becoming more and more computationally intensive. The new paradigm, now emerging, is that all genes will be known “in the new sense of being resident in databases available electronically”, and the starting point of biological investigation will be theoretical and a scientist will begin with a theoretical conjecture and only then turning to follow or test the hypothesis. With a much deeper understanding of the biological processes at the molecular level, the Bioinformatics scientists have developed new techniques to analyze genes on an industrial scale resulting in a new area of science known as “genomics”. Many companies were formed during the 1990s to carry out research on genomics and Bioinformatics, such as Gene Logic, Paradigm Genetics Inc., and GeneFormatics. In 1998, two organizations were formed that are important to genomics and Bioinformatics. The first was the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. The second, established by Craig Venter, was Celera. Three major progressions for Bioinformatics occurred in 1988. The most publicized event, which began in 1988, was the Human Genome Initiative, to sequence the human genome. Another advancement that year was the foundation of the National Center of Biotechnology and Information (NCBI) at the National Cancer Institute. A final step in 1988 was the publication of the FASTA algorithm, which is a fast approximation of the Smith-Waterman algorithm. As a result of the Human Genome Project and other initiatives, biomolecular data accumulate at an accelerating rate. For example, the Protein Information Resource (PIR) database, maintained at the National Biomedical Research Foundation of Georgetown University Medical Center and accessible at, now contains sequences. It is therefore essential to have effective tools for processing these data. Data processing in this context includes classifying and aligning sequences; detecting similarities, ding protein-coding regions in DNA sequences, and predicting molecular structure and function. Focus of software engineering in Bioinformatics The focus of software engineering research has been shifted from system oriented tools to user-oriented tools for problem solving. Software tools in Bioinformatics, for example, are targeted towards solving problems arising in biology. Among them, BLAST-Basic Local Alignment Search Tool and FASTA are two most eminent tools, both being freely accessible. Using local alignment algorithms, they try to end the best alignment between a query sequence and every sequence in a database. There are many executions of FASTA located on the World Wide Web. The primary site for FASTA is William Pearson’s Web site at the University of Virginia. Besides the FASTA website at the University of Virginia, other groups have developed their own FASTA interface. The interface at European Bioinformatics Institute’s Web site http://www.ebi.ac.uk/fasta3/ is one such example. Bioinformatics and biotechnology interaction There is difference between bioinformatician and biotechnologist. Bioinformatician actually helps biotechnologist. Say a drug is proposed to be designed. Problem identification of a target protein for curing tuberculosis pathogen: 1) Bioinformatician will test and predict 3-D structure of protein with all possible variations. 2) Predict a drug molecule which will inactivate this and give full structure. Transfer all these data to biotechnologist who will validate the target through biology and chemistry experiments and finally approve the drug. Thus there should be intimate and seamless interaction between software capabilities and biology lab. It has now been universally recognized that Bioinformatics is the key to the new grand data intensive molecular biology that will take us into the 21st century.

(Author is student M Sc. Bioinformatics at Gangtok University. She can be mailed at gowsiasidiq@rediff.com)

Swallows My Beautifull Guests

Most of us feel blessed to receive and serve guests as it is obligatory upon all religions to honor them. Still then the guests I received this year were unique ones. Not humans but
It was the month of April when a pair of sleek bodied Swallows having long forked tails started frequenting my room. They apparently were inspecting the site for building their nest. I could see the wonderful birds hopping from the hanging glass jars to wind chime to doorbell and then wherever they could find a perch just to hang on, leaving no place unexamined.
Truly said, God helps those who help themselves. After few days of toilsome search and mutual ‘consultation’ the birds chose an unusual place-The doorbell of my residence, for carving out their habitat. And the work started with an onerous task of mud and straw collection out of which the nest was build. I could see their hundreds of to and fro flights. The efforts put in by the pair were purely exemplary for all practical purposes. Finally a marvelous work of masonry blended with art and wit took shape, protruding out, over the doorbell of my room.
Enjoying the delight of their eventful company, I captured some of the timeless frames of my life. Just few days after building of the nest, I found three beautiful eggs laid by the mother Swallow. The moment was celebrated at home. The curiosity pulled everyone at home for at least few glimpses. However, the laying of eggs was followed by incubation that was the job of male swallow with the female playing the role of a sentinel in his absence.
And one fine morning in the month of May, I felt worried to see the broken shells of eggs lying scattered upon the floor. But all my worries transformed into a strange kind of joy as I peeped into the nest and I could just utter a very big Wow!!
I found three tiny, tiny hatchlings bursted out from the shells. “Pee, pee, pee…I could hear the feeble beeps”. The pleasant but featherless hatchlings were too delicate to be touched. Their parents would hop and fly around as if dancing in air to celebrate the arrival of their loved ones. I too shared their joy and felt ecstatic about it for days to come. I would just hum the tune of Mere ghar aayee…….
Afterwards I could see these little birds napping all day in their nest waiting for the feed that would come religiously after intervals. The swallow would feed their nestlings by rolling insects into tiny balls in their beaks and then put the insect-mash into the shaking openings of their offspring. Both parents contributed equally in feeding their nestlings.
It is known that typically a swallow can bring about four hundred daily meals, consisting of about twenty insects per meal, back to its brood. This way I am delighted to assert that swallows have proved beneficial to my residence in controlling the insect population as very often I could see them swoop upon insects. With the passage of weeks, the parent swallows started providing flying instructions to their offspring motivating and urging them to produce unusual twittering and squeaking sounds. Flying was difficult, but they kept on trying.
And one day surprisingly I was amused to see that our baby swallows appearing out of the nest and trying with their short distance flights from their nest to the wind chime that would sing every time these little birds perch upon it.
One day when I tried to capture them with my mobile they were barely at an arms length. They looked straight at me as if posing for a photograph but then burst past and dashed out from the nearby window. Those young swallows often remain out of the sight during daytime as they love to spend most of their time darting swiftly across the sky with their long pointed wings. It is amazing to know from my elders that swallows come back to the same nests year after year. They also say young swallows usually build their nests just a few miles of the nest inhabited by their parents. Swallows repair old or weakened nests which last for many years. Even more delightful is to hear that the swallows stay with the same mate for life. And the bond of love they forge once lasts for ever. Same seems to hold true about the lasting perch they have founded made in my heart.