So today we had a lecturer of Indian descent with the to Caucasians probably rather exotic name Velmurugesan Arulampalam. From there it's all downhill, though - what had the potential to be a decent lecture on signal transduction went bad when it turned out the lengthy and advanced PowerPoint presentation previously prepared, had now gone amiss.
What we got instead was plan B in the shape of more less and less more coherent overhead slides, which didn't really do the trick.

Velmurugesan didn't sound Indian either, but rather had the Ye Olde Englishe Accente. A little like V.S. Naipaul, but with less of an upper-class twang.
A Kenyan PhD-student, friend of my brother, once told me that they had a fair deal of Indians in Kenya, but that a surprising amount of them didn't sound too Indian either, nor did students who came back from long stays in India. His theory was that while American or British accents might be cool, an Indian one sure wasn't, and so people did what they could (if they could) to avoid picking it up.
A bit of a shame, I guess. It's not often you get to hear that accent in the "But I always travel first class!"-way of Ben Kingsley (whose birth name was actually Krishna Bhanji - Indian too. As it stands, he's the only ethnically Asian actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor in a lead role, something he - just in case you wanted to know - accomplished in the motion picture from which the earlier quote is taken - Gandhi. It's a really good one, and I recommend you to see it. Actually, the last time I saw it myself, late/early one Friday night/Saturday morning, it gave me an impulse to shave my hair into a mohawk cut.)

Speaking of Indian names by the way, it reminds me of the semi-famous (that is, here in Sweden - in India they put his face on a stamp) Indian Srinivasa Ramanujan. He was a mathematician born in India in the late 19th century, and taken to Cambridge in the early 20th, under arrangements made by the then already famous G.H. Hardy.
I guess Ramanujan might nowadays be somewhat familiar to young non-mathematicians in the Western world since he's mentioned in the movie Good Will Hunting, and the whole thing really does make for a good story:

One of India's greatest mathematical geniuses, Ramanujan recieved his education there up to High School, where he came across a rather old mathematics book (from the 1850s, I might add). With this as a lead of how to formulate simple theorems and proofs, he started his mathematical research, and, with his rather original outlook on the subject, made a series of outstanding breakthroughs with problems that had evaded mathematicians in the West.
Around ten years later, in 1913, he wrote to Hardy in Cambridge (after writing to two other mathematicians, who, it seems, failed to realise the importance of his work), and sent him some of his theorems. Hardy was, as he himself is said to have put it, exceedingly interested. One year later Ramanujan would arrive in England, and together with Hardy, as it said, end up creating some truly remarkable mathematics.

Things like that don't really seem to happen today.

Now it's passed over from Wednesday to Thursday, and I'm starting to get a bit tired. Before writing this I took a shower, with the lights out. But my hair's starting to dry up again, and it's a rather early day tomorrow (but not too early - Velmurugesan is giving a second lecture on signal transduction the first hour and a half. Guess who's not going.), and I think I'd better start aiming for bed.

Goodnight.