Random things yet again

If by reading this article you feel that I am some damn stupid guy with very low abilities and intelligence then there is a high chance that in near future you shall be correct and if you want to test your hypothesis on my past then you can email me and I will give you email address of people who know of my past academic life in much detail.

I decided to take a 2 day break from academics since I felt that I was cracking up and hence this blog.

My apologies if the coherence of this writing and its organization seems to be left in the hands of entropy.

It is getting difficult to find time to write anything these days given how TIFR is making a minced meat of me piling me up with huge amounts of assignments and robbing me of a regular 5-6 hours sleep. I simply wonder how other people in the batch are doing these assignments so efficiently when I am struggling to just keep my head above water.

My performance levels seem to be drastically falling and my ability to cope with pressure is also falling pretty fast. I seem to be too slow in doing most of the kinds of things that TIFR is asking me to do and hence I am lagging behind class and just mot matching up to the rest of the class.

By the time I manage to read the theory from the books and understand what is being done, others in the class have completed the assignment.

I wonder what is happenning to me...

I wonder whether my thinking abilities are falling exponentially...or am I simply pushing myself into things which are orthogonal to my interests? I seem to be not getting answers to most questions that I ask these days...

But the differential geometry class of Prof.M.S.Raghunathan is very interesting and I am enjoying that.

Anyway just thought of jotting down a few more random stuff:

1. My friend Pratish's blog is becoming increasingly more and more powerful in its content and I would recommend people to read his writings.

2. There is this new blogizen in this blogosphere by the name of Ranjani from my alma mater CMI. Her writings too seem to be a great read and might leave you with a sense of introspection. Again I recommend people to read it. Just the melancholic title of the blog was attraction enough for me to start reading it.

I have quite a bit of hopes that these 2 above mentioned blogs would keep churning out great articles.

Anyway I should refer here to a few other blogs which I think are great and would recommend highly:

1. Shreevatsa
2. Rajesh
3. Vipul
4. Another one by Vipul


3. After a lot of swaying around I decided to buy an iPod, a 120GB classic black. It was my long dream to own one and it gives a sense of joy to be able to buy this from my own money. It is an amazing tecnology and I am enjoying it thoroughly (much more than my Quantum Theory classes!). I am looking forward to the experience of watching a movie on it..music videos look great anyway.

Times when I feel that my senior Vipul was very correct when he used to debate with me the necessity to be financially healthy. Initially I thought it uncanny for a mathematician to think thus but now I feel that more one is into abstract studies one needs more sophisticated technology to keep one connected to the real world at times and keep the human being inside alive. And in many ways today I more and more feel the need to pump in a lot of money into academics and money to be available in both forms as money in the banks of the people in science and money in funds of the institute. But oviously the later is much more necessary and imortant.

4. TIFR organises something called an "open house" every year where lost of students and teachers and parents across the schools are brought here and introduced to this research world..encouraged to take up science....TIFR asks for volunteers to show the people around..i have volunteered..was thinking of what to tell the school people...

My perception of what doing science is and being in the scientific world means has changed exponentially over the last 5-6 years....and the frequency of my thoughts as to whether or not I took the right decision by taking up Physics has also been on the rise.

Given the kind Physics world that I have faced and see of what it takes to succeed in it (atleast as far as I have seen of it in India) I plan to give these school sudents a test on that day:

I will give them two non-trivial 7 digit numbers and ask them to multiply in 2 minutes. If you can do it then you are elligible to do physics othewise don't even think of doing Physics.

A very common thing...

Probably one of the commonest things that happen in this world is that a guy happens to see a girl and is floored by her. Obviously almost always it is a mere attraction induced by beauty, elegance or sexual appeal etc. Rarely ever the people are able to immediately distinguish between such a "crush" and true love. Probably it is the nature of life that this inability is intrinsic. Obviously most of these crushes soon beget an immense hope and an acute longing for the other person and soon follows dreams of a long stable relationship based on a crush! Almost always all this dream bubble bursts in no time and the persons are left with a feeling of huge vacuum of defeat and hopelessness. It s obviously not a loss in the true sense of the term but just a waking up to reality from a dream.

And then begins the sequence of blame game where mostly the guy blames the girl for being insensitive or something like that. Most often the interaction would have been so short and so superficial that neither had understood the other well enough to decide about their mutual compatibility.

Girls probably have a tendency to quickly remove themselves from any thing that seems even slightly off-normal and get back to their usual life and guys in general have a tendency to peg themselves onto whatever soft emotion that they chance upon as if their life depended on it.

But at the end of it what amuses me most is that the guys never get tired of falling for the next nice girl they meet and putting themselves through the same cycle as above. It is absolutely mysterious as to what motivates them through such emotional ordeals over and over again.

Is it a deep urge to fill a vacuum in their lives or acute loneliness that guys deeply feel that only a female can fill? Is this ability to endure this cycle somehow intrinsically a part of the arrangement for existence of the 2 sexes and hereby nature trying to optimize that the most compatible kind of people from opposite sexes build relationships. And this optimization is reached through going through a series of such crushes which act like filters?

I wonder and I only wonder.

Somehow I have always felt so very alien to the idea of builing realtionships and my lack of understanding of such things continues. How these things happen seem to be absolutely mysterious to me.

Yet another Durga Puja...

It is 'Durga Puja" time and I am perfectly aware that a certain cty in India called Kolkata is abuzz with activity liek people and relatives flocking in to their homes for this special time fo the year and friends and relatives going out together Pandal hopping and gorging on the most exquisite cuisines Kolkata has to offer. And all the cosy corners of the dimly lit restaurant will be filled with couples enjoying the exotic romanticism of darkness with the faint sound of the party time outside floating through the windows. Lovers finding their cosy proximity in this crowd of human race as if the rest of the universe didn't exist. The time when love is in the air in that city and people just find this extreme party atmosphere of sound and light the right time to take their beloved for a trip and probably the opportune moment to speak their heart out while the rest of the world is busy with the Puja.

Of course I have no personal experience of whatever I wrote above but is a mix of what I imagine of what beautiful things exist in this world that I haven't seen and what I have heard from other people. I haven't ever enjoyed any Durga Puja in Kolkata in the true sense of the term like going out with friends etc and freaking out. It is supposedly a great experience that my life seems to have denied me and that seems to feature on the top of my to-do list with my lady love (if ever she starts existing in my life)

Last year during the Pujas I was in CMI (Chennai Mathematical Institute) (www.cmi.ac.in) struggling with a myriad of examinations and I wrote this blog:

http://figments-of-the-mind.blogspot.com/2007/10/yet-another-durga-puja.html

An year later I am a student of TIFR and still struggling with a million examinations and subjects that I hate to the bottom of my heart (Electronics!) and trying to ensure my academic existence. Somehow life has been pretty much stagnant and essentially noting has changed.

I still continue to be the slave of the Indian education system which refuses to give me any freedom or facility that I ask for and it seems to continue to strangle me and subjugate me to the state of an invertebrate. Somehow I just still manage to keep myself alive and write few blogs as my probably my only display of life.

As life probably is bursting with colour and sound and light in Kolkata, I take my lonely walks along the TIFR sea-beach in the opalescent evenings gazing at the relentless ocean which never ceases to lash at the shores. I stare blankly at the mysterious play of colours on the sky above the Arabian sea and a single word emanates from somewhere inside me "Why?" .... I don't know what I am asking but it is a question whose answer I seek. So many "Why?"s that seem to flock together and I see the sun set reflecting back to me the same number of questions as I had asked yesterday.

I don't know why I ask "Why?". I don't know why I don't feel a million things that million other people around me respond to. Seems this devilish education system has made a million things irrelevant in my life which others respond to..It has somehow surgically cutout so may possible dimensions of life and reduced me to a state where I lose the freedom to individuality and any attempt at doing so is a crime liable to be severely punished.