Thursday, October 30, 2008

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.

2 comments:

Pratish Gandhi said...

Hey, thanks for recommending my blog [:)]..And about the iPod, I guess you should not be loaded with it all the time for it will 'damage' your brain in the literal sense..enjoy!!

DonnieBrasco said...

Tell you what.....That is the condition with all science subjects being taught in India at +2 Level and beyond.....

Interest in a subject is decided by the marks you obtain in it...