The holy city of Mecca

There is a Pakistani girl, who is doing "Basic Pathophysiology" course with me . Her name is Nimra. I, the curious one, waned to know the meaning of her name and sarted googling for it. The search, as usual carried me away to read the Wikipedia articles. I had always been interested in the Islam religion and it's history. I spent an entire day reading about Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him), the mecca, the Kaaba, the medina, Hijra, Haj, the first caliphs, the shia beliefs etc.

According to the Islam, "Allah is the only God" and "Muhammad is the last prophet". The Quran says that a muslim should pray by facing the "Kaaba" which was supposed to have been built by Abraham and his son. The Kaaba is in the Holy mosque in mecca. Mecca and Medina are forbidden for non-muslims. Hence, I wanted to see the site using google maps. I got some good pictures of Mecca and Kaaba and would like to share it in this blog.

You can see the white marble floors of the holy mosque in mecca.

There is a lot of settlement to the left of this mosque, but there is no settlement to the right. This is because the right side has hills.





The Holy mosque.
The central cube structure is the "kaaba". The edges of "Kaaba" roughly face the 4 directions.
The semi circular walls just next to "Kaaba" are not clearly seen. Between these walls and the "Kaaba" lies the remains of Abraham's son and Abraham's second wife.



Wikipedia Kaaba link

PS:
1) There is a lot of argument about the direction of "kaaba" from the places that are on the other side of the earth. Look at Quibla for more details

2) "The Gypsy, the Jew and El Islam (1898)" By Sir Richard Burton is an account of his travel to Mecca disguised as Arab. Should get hold of this book someday.

3) Did you know? In 1979, there was a terrorist attack on "The Holy mosque". Read more..

PPS: Well! By the end of the day, I got back to my original mission, to find out what Nimra means. Nimra means "Tigress" in Arabic.

Typhoid - an infectious disease

Two days ago, I had to submit a case study on bioengineering in infectious diseases, as a part of the course on "Basic Pathophysiology". The moment I heard about the theme of this case study, I made up my mind to base this report on Typhoid. "Why so?", you may ask. Well, It is a long story.

On Jan 2003, the Dinghy-Dinghies (the wing fraternity) started our internship at different companies in bangalore. We were are flocked in "Vemee Sadana", Ulsoor, Bangalore. The six months of internship was fun there. Myself, CB and Sundi were put up in the same room. It was world cup time and CB had brought a small TV to watch it. The entire gang used to hang out in our room and watch the games, day and night. Sundi had his slow Pentium computer in our room. Well! all the individuals(especially Y-Axis) made full use of this slow PC... you know what I mean :).

Those were great times. Got the first taste of the Pizza hut then...MG road was very close. we used to catch up with a movie, used to eat the "POOR-MAN'S HOT CHOCOLATE FUDGE" near the rex theatre... ogle the beautiful Bangalore girls...

All fun was over by the end of May. The gang was splitting..Veva was moving to US for higher studies..CB to Hyderabad...Sundi was planning to move with his parents...RL was looking for better job-offers...Y-axis was still growing (Today, he has completed his MBA and is working at ICICI bank)...Mumu was planning to stay with his Mama.. Myself and PAM were left behind in Bangalore.

To make things worse for me, I got infected by some high fever, in May. Initially, the doctors to whom I initially went to, thought that it some viral fever and gave some usual pink tablets. Every evening the fever got worse. I used to take the medicines and the next morning, I wake up healthy... but as the day progresses the fever slowly increases. By the time I get back to "Vemee's" I used to be dead-beat. To add to this misery, I had'nt got any job offer from National Instruments (the company where I was doing internship) and didn't get the offer letter or joining date from infosys (my job from campus interviews). And My parents and brother were away on a month long trip to North India and I didn't want to tell about this to them and ruin their trip. My sister was in a hostel doing her engineering. Didn't want to bother her too.

It was a teribble time with very high physical, emotional and mental stress. If it was not for the Dinghies and Aruna-Aunty family (she ran a mess near vemee's), I wouldn't have coped up with the situation. It had been some 15 days of high fever and nothing was curing. It was then, the Uncle from the mess took me to a doctor friend of his. The doctor immediately diagnosed that it could be Typhoid and the blood results proved it. Three weeks earlier, I had made a trip to Tuticorin. I had to eat in road side hotels. Looks like I got infected then. I had to take antibiotics for 3 days and that's it. Things started improving. I was fit and healthy once again. Few days later, I got a job offer from National Instruments. When my Parents got home from their trip, they found the infosys offer letter waiting for me at my home in Tuticorin. I decided to take up the NI offer. Myself and PAM decided to be roommates. By mid June, 2003, the internship for the entire gang ended successfuly.


TYPHOID:
When I knew that I had typhoid, I used to search the internet to know about the symptoms and my survival chances. But I never got to know about the biology behind it. The case study gave me an excellent oppurtunity to know more about this diesease. Let me try to present my case study it in a way that makes more sense to every one.

Causing Bacteria: Salmonella Typhi
Bacteria characteristics: Has a toxin within its cell wall. When this bacteria is affected by human immune system, the toxin is out and causes more virulance. It also had a protein called Invasin which helps it to survive against the human immune system.
Pathophysiology: Affects the intestine and the parts of digestive system
Symptoms: High fever, Pain, skin rashes, large liver, diarrhea, may lead to death, if untreated.
Medicines: Antibiotics like ampicillin, chloramphenicol, streptomycin, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and ciprofloxacin etc. These drugs affect the baterial cell wall or its protein sysnthesis or its DNA replication and results in the death of the bacteria.
Current challenges: The Bacteria has mutated and is resistant to the commonly used drugs. My case study focused on the study of the mutations and the bioengineering methods used for the new drug development.