Kaleidoscope

The world's most beautiful sea-beach

2011-06-18T00:07:00.011+05:30

This last weekend I took a break from my Hensel's lemma and statistical physics of molecular dissociation and cobordism of framed manifolds to travel to some of the far flung places of West Bengal. Places which can be as distant from my familiar world as anything can be. For one thing these are places in unthinkable poverty. One is going to be horrified looking at the life-styles of the localities there. Its way deep into the perforated lower edge of Bengal. The travel to these places is pretty primitive in its ways - travel in a local train, then a boat, then a motorized "bullock" cart and then luckily a car. None of the steps are as comfortable as one would want it to be. While at that place I tried traveling to another nearby island but the plan had to be canceled since the Bay of Bengal turned out to be a bit too rough for the small boat that I had hired. There was always this constant fear of the boat capsizing. I guess one wouldn't be so scared if drowning was a painless death.

Do we fear the fact that we will die or the possibility of the pain during the process of death?

But the first destination where I landed held such a mesmerizing spectacle before me that, I almost instantaneously forgot the agony of the journey till there. It is the world's most beautiful sea-beach. I have been to some of India's major beaches and I know what a mess they are and have seen photographs of many more beaches on the internet. I can't see how any beach in this world can be better than this one. Its just empty! I was the only one on the beach when I reached there. As far as I could see, I could spot neither any other human being or any other human creation. It was nature left alone on its own. It was just beautiful.

Being alone on a vast sea-beach with sand plains all around as far as one could see, one is tempted to feel like Robinson Crusoe :D

Nature looks most beautiful when left alone with me :)

Far away one could see the edge of the mangrove forest and the erosion edges of it. At that end at various spots one could see the dying pneumatophores sticking out through the sand as if gasping for the last breath. Inspite of a lot of locals warning me against it, I did travel to these edges. Here one is mostly scared of various wild animals. Though the only thing I had the fortune of seeing were footprints of possibly some wild boars.

The water was clean as one can imagine it to be. And it brought along to the beach various curious organisms which one gets to read of only in the books. I did see a few starfishes, sea-pens and sea-anemones. It was just bizarrely wonderful to be gazing at this apparently infinite sea in front with vast sand plains behind and no other trace of human civilization anywhere else!

A queer sense of excitement to imagine how the world might have been when humans hadn't yet arrived to destroy it.

I walked and walked along the sea as far as I could go. It was like almost trying to gulp down this immense beauty. Nature when on its own without being bifurcated by human's "narrow domestic walls", feels just a bit too large to take in at once. I sat down to gaze at the serene barrenness. I screamed with joy and shed all inhibitions knowing that no other human is ever going to hear this sound.

But this is in sharp contrast to the horrifying images of human poverty that one has to pass by while in the train. Even the train that one needs to use to reach this place can be nightmarish to someone not used to traveling in such muck and filth almost like cattle packed for slaughter. Its a 3 hour long train journey and what one gets for this long is barely a 1 feet wide edge of a wooden bench to sit on. And not alone! While sitting in this precariously uncomfortable situation, one would be gasping for breath as one gets crushed in by the hordes of people pressing into the train from all sides. To add to the troubles there is the regular flow of the vendors carrying huge baskets of enormous amount of cheap stuff or unhygienic food or even pirated foods. "Pirated" in the sense that one would be selling locally made drinks in re-sealed bottles of the standard soft drinks and even standard biscuits at dirt cheap prices. On asking, these vendors would invariably remain mum about how they managed to do this. Looking at the packets one realizes that they do have manufacturing and expiry dates and batch numbers printed on them. Nothing to rule out that most of these are just stolen stuff. But the exceptionally poor customers who travel on these trains in the dark corners of India have little time for legality and will be content buying just about anything that lets them survive this horrific train journey. (..even among the uptown urban Indians or its best of research institutes, legality is anyway not a familiar concept!..) Given my sophisticated urbanized instincts, I was at my wits end at such nightmarish traveling conditions. I can only wonder how they do it those who do this regularly. At some point of her life, my mother, a doctor, used to do similar travels regularly, albeit a little shorter. There more than the need to hold on to her job to raise her children, I guess she was more motivated by the fact that the village where she was posted was so far away from the mainstream that her one day's absence might mean death for someone.

But at the end of this terrifying train journey, lay the most beautiful sea-beach in the world. A seemingly endless and totally empty and completely clean sea-beach. Conflict couldn't have been stronger!

One couldn't be sitting blind to the images that pass by as the train passes through the outskirts of these abjectly poor regions of Bengal. What unfolds outside the window is a chilling story of systematic government failure and of people leaving in subhuman conditions. The houses one passes by are pretty typical. Its basically a cubicle of dimensions 4ft x 6ft x 6ft and this too will have two floors and will be accommodating anywhere between 5 to 10 people. These cubicles are made mostly of bamboo pasted together with mud and the roof is basically a thatched roof overlaid with a sheet of plastic on which is put up a matrix of old rubber tyres. The living conditions inside these houses is abysmal. The stench is unbearable. No lights. Nothing is clean. There is so little space to breathe that there is surely no space to think. The only question for its inmates is that of survival and the only slogan is to be able to do just about anything to make both ends meet. They are barely protected from any of the slightest of natural disturbances. It won't take much of a strong wind or a drizzle to bring everything tumbling down. The state of the people living in the 2nd floors of these cubicles gets only worse. They could only be lying on some old tattered horribly unclean mattresses on broken beds and rain and wind would be blowing in water and dust into the completely unprotected rooms. They can hardly do anything to protect themselves from anyone. But the bizarre miracle of this conniving world is that when it couldn't provide them with even a sense of respectable life, this mockery of a civilization does bring to these tattered homes cell-phones and televisions. It would be a common meal time scene to see all the inmates sit semi-circularly around a single plate of food and facing the television. The food would hardly be anything more than may be a mound of rice and salt and lemon and chillies and may be a cup of dal (lintels) for everyone.

Looking at these lives, one is soon left searching for even life.

The absolute wonder of seeing the mangrove forests at the edges of Bengal did help forget the pathos that had inevitably shrouded the mind. One is only strongly inclined to put into action in one's daily life the philosophy of the terrific book, "The Life you Can Change" by Peter Singer. At the mangrove forests, nature is playing its own beautiful games of survival albeit with a touch of beauty and comforting grandeur which hasn't ever been the forte of the humankind. One would be fascinated to see stretches of mangroves lean deep into the water and the roots to be rising upwards out of the water. At about the age of 14, I had first read about these pneumatophores and it took so many years to be actually seeing this fascinating natural phenomenon. They are a cradle for a very unique mixture of creatures ranging from cranes to deers to wild cats ("Baghrolls") and various forms of wild boars and other animals. I was still only at the fringes near the sea-beach and the deep interiors which I could see far away are known to be the home to some of the largest tigers.

Since I was putting up in house near to the beach/mangrove itself, nights were no less exciting with all kinds of odd sounds. Sleep would be hard to find with the naive mind's untrained imagination adding connotations to the unfamiliar sounds of the forest!

At a certain erosion edge of the mangrove forest, I did spot the natural phenomenon of a lagoon formation. It was hard to spot from anywhere nearby given how beautifully it had curved inside remaining hidden from the forest cover but I could see it from the top of a tower. These eroding edges are vivid signals of approaching natural disasters. Its clearly because of the rising sea-levels in south eastern Asia which is disturbing the critical salinity levels of the water. One is surely going to feel a chill run down the spine as one gazes at these fields of dying mangroves whose only remnant are the breathing roots sticking out of the mud at various places in clumps of various sizes.

Around these one could keep spotting other small water body formations and if like me one can go down inside the mud in hope of spotting something interesting then one would surely not be disappointed. Initially my efforts were paid back with just a sight of a few snails lazying around in the shallow muddy waters but soon I could spot, a "Mud Skipper". Its a very unique animal whose lungs are disproportionately large compared to its lizard like size and structure. And not just big, the lungs are pretty transparent and they bulge out clearly evertime it breathes outside water. It can also live under water. Mud Skipper's are evolutionarily very important since they are the "missing link" between the life that evolved first in water and when it started to come on land.

These still couldn't take away the show from that of a sunrise on this vast, empty, open and sparkling clean beach. It was a sight to see. Just at dawn the sea-anemones would be curled up and as the sun rose they too seemed to pull up their tentacles. I didn't care whether it is harmful but I did touch the slimy sticky tentacles. Just for the experience! One couldn't but help feel connected to a pantheistic emotion as the sun shimmered across the white and golden sand smeared flat and seemingly endlessly around. I walked towards where the red crabs lived and most ran inside their holes as soon as they heard human footsteps albeit from very far away. But still I did manage to get some photographs of their crowd and some of them individually. When they are collectively out, they would make stretches of the sand looks red from away! And pretty much ubiquitously one could see the much smaller and colorless hermit crabs scurry between the legs. Here there would also be dogs who seemed to manage to sniff from outside whether a certain hole in the sand had a crab and could dig it out and maim it. But it didn't seem to have any intentions of eating them. As the sun kept rolling higher up behind me, I crossed these regions to walk to the eroding edges of the mangrove which I described earlier. Here the land would get tricky and marshy and it turned out to be beneficial to pull down some of the long branches of these trees and use that to test the land stability before setting foot any further.

It was too hard to leave this most miraculous sea-beach and return to the shackles of this unfair world of the only war-mongering form of life.

Is evolution necessarily eventually suicidal?

My Buzzes on Indian team's winning the Cricket World Cup 2011

2011-04-20T01:19:00.001+05:30

As and when my project with calculating some queer notion of "cohomology" in some funny superconformal theories gets stuck, I get back to Buzzing about various stuff. Lets me take my mind off. And surely I was documenting the run up to the cricket world cup win by the Indian cricket team.

For me the important thing was not just that the Indian team won but that the final was almost single handedly won by Gambhir and Dhoni. I was especially delighted by the title clinching contribution of Gambhir. What a game to watch and it asserted so many confidences I have had about these two people inspite of the criticism launched at these two people by the crowds in general.

So here are my Buzzes on this historic event listed in reverse chronological order,

* Documentary on Dhoni

* About Gambhir

* Bharat Ratna for Sachin

* Nehera on this last over against South Africa

* The last moments of the world cup final

* Amitabh breaking his superstition with the world cup final

* About Gambhir and Dhoni

* My mother's quip about Dhoni

* About Dhoni and Kirsten

* Why cricket connects so well with Indians

* Reactions of player's families

* The day the Indian cricket team won the world cup

* As the Indian openers collapsed during the final

* Before the India vs Sri Lanka final began

* Someone cycled 1500km to watch the final

* India defeating Pakistan in the semifinals

* Shahid Afridi

* Before the India vs Pakistan semifinal

* Frenzy about the India vs Pakistan match

* India defeating Australia

Buzz on Rabindrasangeet

2011-03-07T21:44:00.002+05:30

Almost as a matter of principle I don't write blog articles of small lengths. (anyway I hardly write anything that most people will call short! Most of my regular emails to my regular contacts are at least 1 page long and not so rarely much more longer :D) I try to ensure that all my blog articles are some accumulated thoughts (hopefully coherent!) about some topic over a long period of time. But in the process of writing blogs over these years I found that apart from these accumulated thoughts there is a continuous stream of thoughts of short lengths which get lost without appearing in public. I believe that every thought which is not expressed at least in private to someone is basically wasted and its best if every thought is made public. GMail Buzz provides a good recording spot for all these and its been an year since I have been Buzz(ing).

Hence if someone of you wants to be tuned into these they can read my Buzz as well. So let me link you to that using as a cue a recent Buzz I wrote about Rabindrasangeet.

As you can see by following up on that link that the Buzzes after that have been on various other topics. Some have been with the intention of highlighting some news article or to advertize for someone's paintings or blogs or on supersymmetric Chern-Simons theory (something I am pursuing these days) and the latest one is about Zorn's Lemma.

Happy Birthday To You

2011-02-21T00:14:00.000+05:30

The first time I ever cried when I missed someone, it was for you. The first time I learnt to shed my egos, it was for you. It was the first time I learnt to stop starting my sentences with an "I". The first time it was so easy to say "sorry", it was to you. Thanks for standing up for me in public. (Once I saw it and others told me about the later incidents.) You probably didn't know that it was me who while returning on the last vehicle trip at night found your misplaced bunch of keys, iPoD, gradesheets and other documents and arranged it with the security guard to get them back to you.

Though how much I may want it to be otherwise, emotions are tied to opinions. But opinions always run the risk of facing the ignominious fate of being perceived as personal bias (and hence taken with a pinch of salt). So let me keep to synergistic facts which give a firmer foundation. The years have rolled by and today I can justifiably choose to write only about the positives. There is so much of it that hardly anything else can remain!

Thank you for all that you added to my life. Let me here talk of only the simplest of things. (It will take a lifetime for either of us to unravel all the deeper aspects)

It started with you teaching me why a vector space is canonically isomorphic to its double dual. I can hardly forget how painstakingly you taught me how to classify groups of order 4. (I didn't use to understand even such stuff!) Thanks for those night long discussions on capture cross-sections of planets and dynamical equations of a crank-shaft. (some innocent competitors in the contest suffered because us brainstorming on that!) Thanks for teaching me the use of filters in making the proof of Tychonoff's theorem more slick. (Lack of use and I have lost touch with this too!) Thank you for the discussion on topologizing the Etale space. Thanks for the extensive discussions on equivalence between the Heisenberg and Schrodinger's formulation of quantum theory. I wonder whether you were convinced that somehow the time-evolution operator is special. How can I forget that hour long phone call where you didn't lose patience even when I confused so many times between the concept of basis of a topological space and topologizing a set from a given basis. (Thanks for the explanation!) And among the many other tid-bit things, I recall your teaching me the use of dictionary data type in Python. (not counting your correcting my convoluted code where I had messed up with the type-casting ever so often!) Thanks for listening to my childish blabber when I was excitedly trying to tell you why the theory of principle G-bundles that we learnt the other day is actually used to model Yang-Mill's field theory. An entire bus journey at sunset I went on and on trying to convey to you the excitement of seeing the correspondence between H-connection and gauge fields and Riemann-Christoffel connection and gravity.

And there is so much associated with that late night discussion on de Rham derivative that I can hardly even begin to speak about that. Of course "sheafs" and "presheafs" will always mean something more to me. They smile!

I wonder how you look back at these modest struggles and excitements of mine now that you are so far up on the curve. (I am still as insanely curious about the universe!) May my humble but true wishes for you find a place in our lives.

Its years since all this, but it will always seem like yesterday.
There lies dormant such an enormous potential in this way ahead that its only logical that you must let it be walked.

Quite humorously I remember those weird discussions about why its not worth listening to a lecture on Perelman's proof and why one should take being called "sexy" as a compliment though should never compliment anyone as such! I told you not to treat me to you expensive date juice. I wonder how you managed to come down with a glass of glucose when once late into the night I fell down unconscious.

Thanks for that homely dinner you hosted after listening to a recording of a concert by Yanni. {I hope to gift you a collection of your favourite Evanescence.} (And you keeping my request of playing a badminton match late in the night after a full dinner!) Thanks for accompanying me through a pitch dark forested patch on a chilly winter night in Bangalore. And there are so many things that you told me never to tell anyone. And there are just so many other things that I still don't have the courage to tell anyone about. I am sure that time too will come. May be you will talk about them the next time!

There were just so many human bonds that I was alien to and you could almost unknowingly substitute for almost all of them. I could live through you so many human emotions that I had never known but is familiar to every other person. Thank you for becoming an embodiment of life itself. With all my deepest and truest respect, admiration, humility and love wishing you everything on your 22nd birthday on 21st February 2011. A very Happy Birthday to you!

Festival of geometry

2010-08-21T00:22:00.005+05:30

These are those rare occasions in life when it becomes possible to concentrate on things completely surreal without getting too much affected by the mortal issues. In general I do find it difficult to concentrate on doing my science after I have a had a walk along say the streets of Mumbai and seeing people living on them in abject poverty. And I have no reason to feel optimistic that any science I ever do will help them. This depresses me at some sub-conscious level. But then probably my love for ethereal surpasses my mortal pains. This ICM Satellite meet at IISc on "Geometric Topology and Riemannian Geometry" that I happened to be selected to attend was not free of such aspects. The key facet was the intensity of the mathematics and the opportunity to meet people with similar interests. (as I have never done! It is quite a rejuvenating experience to spend hours at a stretch talking to people who are all interested and intrigued by the same questions and issues.) The palpable thrill of being able to discuss geometry with professional geometers did help me take my mind off such nagging issues like the food which was unhealthy enough to make me and some others sick (looking at the correlation of events the suspect is the restaurant called Nesara inside IISc), that the bathrooms very often had no soap and that for some queer reason students from Princeton in similar stage of their PhD as me were put up in hotels. (whereas I got a student hostel to live in which was at least way better than the terrible accommodation that I had gotten when I last visited IISc as a KVPY fellow some 7 years ago) I have no clue why this discrimination was done but when I pointed out this seemingly racist arrangement to one of the organizers I got back some gibberish like "you are not equal to them" and "foreigners are not allowed to live inside the campus" etc. I was almost being tried to be given the impression that my fellow Princeton student was paying for his hotel (clearly this is false as I found by cross checking with them) whereas I on the other hand was being given some 800Rs as DA. (with no harm to me I could have easily returned back the 3500Rs odd of TA/DA but given the scenario such an act of mine might have been considered indecent!) As far as I can infer from experiences (may be I am wrong) even TIFR probably as some policy like this whereby every random grad student from outside India when lands up here will get a guest house room in the campus which is almost always out of bounds for similar standing Indian student visitors. Anyway when I first visited TIFR as a summer student I was given an accommodation so far away from the campus that I found it more beneficial for academics to spend my nights sleeping on the sofas and taking bath in the night-guard's bathroom.

The conference did start with some very dubious facets like an Internet arrangement that was yet to be set-up when I arrived. (apparently I was "very early" by arriving one day before the start). The travel instructions somehow seemed to say that there will be someone waiting to receive the visitor at the airport if one arrived by plane. Of course people like me who can't afford to travel by planes had to struggle around to get to the conference location. (Interestingly 7-years ago KVPY organizers had arranged for a pickup when I arrived on plane for the summer camp} {some fancy for the "sky-people"? (Avatar!)} Even when the Internet facility was set-up it was under lock and key! So there was no way I could have accessed the Internet without first wasting quite a bit of time running around to figure out which volunteer had the key. Clearly at night it was impossible to do this. By the time the lectures ended and I got some breathing space to check my emails the mathematics office considered it to be the end of working hours and hence locked the computer room meant for the visitors! Thankfully some of the volunteers after a day or two realized that I am the only one around who is using the Internet facility and they let me keep the key. (Most others had laptops who connected using the wifi in the conference hall)

Some students in IISc apparently mistook me for a prof! (happy to know that somehow my face didn't look like some teenager's to them like many strangers think!) and some people observed to me,

"Why are you so happy the whole day? Why do you always have a smile?"

Never heard that from anyone! Anyway coming from a formal background in Physics it was an interesting experience to attend a mathematics conference for the first time. It was fun being the only Physics student in the midst.
It was quite an experience to attend a Hindustani Classical music (on Clarinets) concert by Narsimhalu Vadavati with a bunch of some of the best mathematicians. (weirdly enough the Japanese people seem to have been visibly enjoying what looked quite cacophonous to me!) The very low quality of the music left me depressed. Definitely India has far far better music to showcase to the world. Add to that the fact that the acoustics of the hall at National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) were pretty bad with the ear splitting at the higher pitches. And then the power fails for a few minutes during the concert drowning us all in total darkness. Though not the first time. It happened the same way when Hutchings (from U.C.Berkeley) was explaining to a full packed hall the mysteries of the geometries of soap bubbles. (Interesting that we still don't have even a conjecture about what the shape should be for more than 4 bubbles together!) Such organizational fiascoes from the Indian side leaves me pretty much embarrassed while sitting in the crowd amidst an international crowd.

Hutchings amazed me by his conspicuous silence throughout the conference whether during lectures or during tea-breaks. It is hard to find someone who so rarely ever talks! He never asked a single question nor did I ever see him interacting with many others. But it was endearing to see his childish enthusiasm and smile when on stage explaining even utterly complicated stuff like his recent discoveries of new obstructions to symplectic embeddings in 4-dimensions.

I had a quite interesting conversations with Fernando, a Riemannian Geometry prof from Brazil. (After all one of the standard texts in the subject was written by doCarmo, a Brazilian). Fernando's talk was very neatly organized which made it very appealing to beginners like me.

I had some very fruitful conversations with this guy Aron Naber . He did his bachelors in aeronautical engineering from Penn State and then did a PhD in Riemannian Geometry at Princeton under Gang Tian! During his PhD he completely classified all Ricci Solitons on 4-manifolds. He is just 1 year into his post-doc and he has been invited to speak at ICM satellite meet!

Interestingly he wanted me to explain to him what are sigma models! That is a very exotic QFT thing. Wonder why is he interested in it. He tells me that people are smelling that the good old idea of sigma models in QFT have some deep Riemannian Geometry hidden in them! I explained to him whatever I knew about sigma models.
Aaron's knowledge of geometry is awesome and I gained a lot from him.

He shared with me his various insights about Ricci flows and solitons.
I got pretty much charged up to follow up further on this topics.

Interestingly Shiraz (with whom I have very regular interactions in theoretical physics) had some insights about what are called rotationally invariant gradient solitons years back in this paper of his. It seems that there quite a non-trivial interest in being able to see if there is a cause-effect relationship between existence of a Kahler-Ricci soliton on a manifold and flat (in any sense) metrics on the cone over it. There are some technical conditions on this base manifold like it has to becompact complex manifolds whose first Chern number is positive (Fano Manifolds)(examples being the projective space probably) Apparently if the manifold is Einstein then the cone is probably Calabi-Yau and that is apparently of interest in physics.

Some other examples of interesting open questions which excited me were,

{not that I understand the exact issues but something tells me that these are interesting}

* If you start with a negative sectional curvature metric then is/when the constant scalar curvature metric in its conformal class also of negative sectional curvature? The problem seems to be that being of negative sectional curvature is an open condition and hence it is not clear as to whether it is preserved under Ricci Flow.

* Are there hyperbolic 3-manifolds with a foliation whose leaves are minimal surfaces?

* Seems to me that there is quite a serious problem in finding an analogue of Heegard-Floer homology for 4-manifolds. (The motivation being that Seiberg-Witten invariant for 4-manifolds is analogous to the Alexander polynomial on 3-manifolds)

* People seem to want to know whether a hyperbolic 3-manifold is always finitely covered by a fibered 3-manifold.

* It seems that there are some topological restriction to putting hyperbolic metrics on spaces and it is not known whether one can put an hyperbolic metric on surface bundles over surfaces.

I hope that at some point in future I will get time and opportunity to spend time thinking about these.

Here I mention some basic issues that I discussed with Aaron and gained clarity about,

* Transitive action of the isometry group on the tangent spaces does not guarantee that it will take an orthonormal basis to another. In some vague sense the number of orthonormal basis in a vector space grows exponentially with the dimension and just transitivity can't match up. Being "maximally isotropic" or "maximally symmetric" (both meaning that they have n(n+1)/2 Killing fields or that is the dimension of the Isometry group) is necessary to make the isometry action be transitive on the set of all orthonormal basis of a tangent space (and make sectional curvature constant). Thats what happens for the euclidean planes, spheres and the hyperbolic planes and also for the FRW metric in usual cosmology.

Basically the idea is that homogeneity and isotropy is not enough to get constant sectional curvature. Homogeneity alone gets only scalar curvature constant and isotropy at a point gets only Ricci curvature constant. (it basically maps every 1-dim subspace isometrically to another and Ricci basically depends only on a basis)

Homogeneity and Isotropy together hence give only a constant Ricci curvature manifold.

* If you can act on a constant curvature (probably in any sense) by a discrete subgroup of the isometry group then you end up as a quotient another constant curvature Riemannian manifold whose fundamental group is isomorphic to the discrete subgroup you started with. But whether or not the quotient is compact and whether what its genus will be (if definable) are much harder questions.

I had come across this concept while I was trying to understand some paper of Witten's where he seemed to be creating solutions of Einstein's equations by acting on the hyperbolic plane by discrete subgroup of isometries of that.

One more interesting piece of insight from Fernando's talk that I ruminated over during these is that from the Gauss-Bonnet it is not so hard to see that on a torus if the sectional curvature is always non-negative then it is surely 0.

Now it seems that this kind of "rigidity" theorems also hold in higher dimensions but they get enormously harder and only work case by case.

The statement for n-dimensional torus was due to none other than Gromov and Lawson.

A particularly interesting generalization of this is by Schoen and Tau who showed that "mass" as defined in General Relativity always has to be positive. (intuitively this should always be true but this was far from obvious from just the Einstein's equations). Apparently there is a more sophisticated proof of it by Witten using Penrose's twistors. (I guess this is the same Schoen who proved the famous Yamabe conjecture that on compact manifolds every conformal class of metrics has a constant scalar curvature metric)

A general idea behind these rigidity theorems is that given a manifold with a metric a compactly supported metric deformation cannot change the scalar curvature. This is something that I would like to understand further.

I also met this very eloquent PhD student at Princeton called Nick who is looking into Conformal Geometry (under Wang). I got along very well with him. He happens to be a batchmate of Arul (he was one year senior to be at CMI). Among the many interesting quips he made about Maths and doing a PhD, one was, "If you really like someone then you should get married otherwise one marries either before or after a PhD". {Of course getting a PhD is simpler than that!} This came up in the context of Aron having already married while only 1 year out of his PhD. (of course there were rumours about who will get the Fields but now talking about them is pointless, but definitely it is completely exciting that half the Fields medals have been given for proving conjectures in condensed matter physics and one can read a short very insightful review of them here by none other than Terence Tao, another Fields medalist himself) Though Michael Usher said, "Fields medal? Who cares?" (Usher gave a very nice talk with lots of motivations!)

Interestingly Nick tells me that given the hugely depleting number of geometry students in his place he is very lonely in his working. (On my side geometry definitely looks almost extinct!). And he tells me that many students in Princeton work for long hours alone and rarely ever talk to others. (interestingly he says he is one of them though I found him quite loquacious!)

Good to know that I am not the only lonely one around. (as one often feels in TIFR where the rest are always huddled into groups doing some calculation which I don't find interesting)

Nick and I chatted about everything under the sun from windmills to conformal metrics and a lot about student-advisor relationships and the hiccups about beginning research. We talked quite a bit about the issue of building pre-requisites for research. (so many things in Riemannian geometry end up being questions in Cartan's classification of semi-simple Lie Groups. How many geometry PhD students know the proof of Cartan's classification? Nick tells me none!) It was nice to find someone to talk to about some of these issues which have been also puzzling me off-late.

Nick did his undergrad from Washington-Seattle.

Nick tells me that at Princeton many people work completely alone and since people don't have to attend classes together there is very little bonding between the people. He says that people at U.Chicago form a very well-knit group since they go together to classes. We talked about which is better, to have regular classes and courses or to be left alone to read as in Princeton.

Aaron's wife works as a counselor in some "Residential Home" for "crazy teenage girls". They are basically taking care of lunatics and helping them rehabilitate them. Aaron says that such social work is simply horrible life since there is lot of work and she gets paid zilch for it. He tells me that he would for nothing on earth take up social work as a career. Apparently it has been listed at the top of some recently brought out "never take up" jobs list. Apparently Mathematics is at the top of best jobs in the US! He didn't lose chance poke at me by pointing out that Physics features somewhere in the 6th or 7th position.

I met my CMI prof KV at the joint dinner between the geometry and the representation theory conference. He asked about my whereabouts and seemed pretty friendly to me. He has also been following on the Vinay Deolalikar stuff and he says that people are apparently convinced that the proof doesn't work but something interesting might be going on.

I also got saw the legendary Kashiwara around. Though I didn't talk to him.

On the mathematical front I was quite enthralled by the talks given by Ron Stern and Ron Fintushel. Awesome people. It was quite exciting to talk to them too. Stern tells me, "One learns Seiberg-Witten Theory if one really wants to learn it". And anyway one upshot of many of the talks was that I should get excited everytime I hear of a lagrangian submanifold of a symplectic manifold. Apart from just a rewriting of good old classical mechanics I had not taken symplectic forms that seriously. Seems I should. And also I had never taken a keen interest in spaces where the dimension is not constant even on connected components. These are of course not manifolds. But then they are very exciting in Riemannian Geometry. For one thing these don't have a well-defined notion of "tangent spaces" but have "tangent cones". And more curiously these might not even be unique. From whatever Aaron says it seems to me that these are known in Physics as "orbifolds". I wonder if they are the same things. Aaron has proved some rate of growth theorems about the dimensions of these stuff for lower bounded Ricci curvature spaces and the formulas looks like Holder Inequalities. (strange!) Andras Stipsicz made this very thought provoking statement while analyzing the path-breaking work of Sucharit,

{Sucharit and 3-manifolds have become almost synonymous now!}

"3-manifold are like prime numbers"
Sucharit's talk was one blitzkrieg of intelligence overflow.

He made his intentions very clear by his opening lines,

"All this is very interesting to me but will be either known to some of you or will be simply too overcomplicated. Hence I will go fast anyway"

He set up an algorithm by which any link could be written as a grid diagram (like Tic-Tac-Toe) and a set of moves on it which basically mimicked the Reidmaster moves and showed that all his moves give cobordant links. Then he constructed a hugely complicated derivative operator which sums over some very queerly chosen blocks inside that grid and miraculously its composition with itself is 0! And hence you have invented a homology theory.

Now the biggest miracle is that this is precisely the Heegard-Floer homology.

Sucharit says,

"The definition is too complicated but it comes out naturally"

Except probably Andras and Siddharth nobody asked a question and the entire talk ended with the same eerie silence as it went with.

Anyway on a larger scale it does seems to be quite a big thing to do to be able to see in absolutely unexpected places interesting dimension lowering maps whose self-composition is 0. Thats the name of the game. You have discovered a homology theory! Things are miraculous if that gives a finite process of counting in the space of maps in some other well known homology theory.

Pursuit of geometry does bring one to very endearing events in life.This guy Nick from Princeton was very nice to me.

He said to me "I think you should definitely meet Gabai" and he introduced me to David Gabai! It was quite an opportunity to get to talk to this legend.

I have been startled by the exuberance and energy of Gabai. I don't know of of many students in their 20s who are so excited about mathematics as this some 60 year old guy! He always had a sparkling smile on his face and was always scribbling on with something or the other in mathematics. I was just stunned by this guy's never ending energy to talk about mathematics and always so with a huge smile on his face!

I also saw "Mahan Maharaj" around apparently one of the very famous "swamis" at Ramkrishna Mission/Ramkrishna Mission Vivekananda university. He allegedly secured a very high rank in the IIT entrance exam in 1987, the same year Rajesh Gopakumar topped it. Rajesh did his PhD from Princeton and Mahan did his from Berkeley. As far as I hear after some more years around as post-doc he gave up normal life and took "diksha" and became a "swami" living that stern life.

Mahan is pretty famous for his work on hyperbolic manifolds and what are called "ending lamination spaces". I have heard a lot about him from 2 of my acquaintances who have studied under him during their undergrad. He has apparently been working very hard with the organization at his place to make subjects are differential geometry compulsory for Physics undergrads and subjects like Conformal Field Theory and Classical Mechanics compulsory for maths undergrads. He has had partial success.

Finally I saw him around here. David Gabai seemed to be very fond of him. Mahan has an awesome physical built!

He gave his seminar wearing that typical saffron coloured kurta and beneath a saffron coloured wrap around dhoti. His talk was about some partial solution of the Hilbert-Smith conjecture. His was clearly the best Indian talk. (compared to unspeakably bad talk by Ramesh Sharma and add to that his distractingly irrelevant mention of some calculation tricks in "ancient Indian mathematics" at the beginning of the talk) Mahan had an awesome level of confidence and a charismatic speaker. His intelligence was almost palpable. Fintushel one day came up with a question as to whether every involution on the product of two Riemann surfaces of different genus splits as a product of involution on each. The very next day Mahan went up on the board and gave a proof for it. In fact he proved a stronger statement that it splits for any discrete group action. (or something like that). Interestingly it was Fintushel's birthday on which Gabai said ,"This is Mahan's birthday gift for him" Gabai said that "I won't reveal Fintushel's age but he now qualifies for medical aid"

Gabai led the congregation to sing a "Happy Birthday to You" song for Fintushel to which he replied, "I thank you all from the bottom of my heart" The camaraderie between these stalwarts in geometry was very inspiring.

I am not just irreligious but anti-religious but it doesn't stop me from appreciating Mahan. This guy can go around as a brilliant mathematician and except for his dress there will be no reason to see or know of his such queer affiliations. Thankfully he doesn't wear his religion on his sleeve.

I planned out a dinner with Nick and I was wondering if he would make it to the appointed spot treading through this so complicated campus with innumerable lanes and forests. And I was overwhelmed when around the meeting time I saw Nick standing by the side of the nearby jungle poring over a map of the campus!

I went up to him and saved him further trouble to what already he had taken up to find his way through this labyrinth to come and meet me.
I was simply overwhelmed by this gesture. I don't remember the last time I was at the receiving end of such efforts!

Over dinner we managed to talk about a myriad of topics. Nick asked me about my family and he wondered "So does your entire family do mathematics?" !
Then he asked me whether I have brothers or sisters and whether they too do mathematics. He told me that he has a brother who is also a maths undergrad at Washington university. His father is a chemist who "works with fishes for the government" and his mother apparently used to check car license certificates but gave up the job after he was born. And his mother was 42 when he was born and he also a brother! (My mother is currently 42!) He gave me a long lecture on what he sees computers to be able to do by 2050. In this context he explained to me how using ZFC one can code every mathematics proof as a sequence of symbols drawn from a finite set and how using some simple rules a computer can be made to check in finite time whether this proof is correct and how this implies that in principle a computer can also come up with a proof given a statement. And how this entire thing relies on Godel's incompleteness and how this is impractical because of time-complexity issues. Apparently Russel was the first person who showed that this can be done and using this coding technique he took 77 pages to prove that 1+1=2! (But this is important since that is apparently the only way known by which a computer can be made to understand the proof of 1+1=2. It is also apparently the first example of a computer comprehensible mathematical proof and very few such examples are known) Then he went on to explain to me how using the axiom of choice coupled to this technique one can make the computer understand statements like "take any 2 points in the topological space". And how this connects to "Model Theory"

Interestingly he has picked up all this while he did philosophy courses as a maths undergrad. This is very interesting that philosophy courses end up teaching so much of deep mathematics. (Philosophy courses as I have seen some Indian students do in Indian colleges is just pathetic nonsense)

He imagines that the time-complexity issues of coding proofs will be the next big thing computer technology is going to achieve. All this while he was so excitedly and animatedly explaining it all this, he seemed to clearly forget that there are other people around in the restaurant! We went on to talk about Avatar, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Celine Dione and Crisswell and Golem! (comparing the similarity of the technology between how Golem and Avatars were created) Then the discussion shifted to cooking and had a laugh comparing each other's astounding cooking skills. (He has gotten addicted to Chicken-Tandoori and Garlic-Naan and thats what we ordered. I introduced him to Lassi which he found awesome) He seemed to have had a very interesting undergrad where he took 5 years to get an MSc from Washington-Seattle. In those 5 years he did some 10 undergrad courses and some 20 graduate courses. And he had the opportunity to replace the undergrad algebra courses where Artin is covered by 3 quarters of Algebra courses where Dummite and Foote is covered. And he took one full graduate course on curves and surfaces! (Its a terrible state in India that people can get BSc. in Maths never having done any theory of curves and surfaces like the ones in the book by Pressley or Singer and Thorpe). While in Washington he did 3 courses in differential geometry where basically the 2 books by Lee were done. (I have read most of Lee's second book and it is beautiful) His complex analysis course looks very inspiring to me where they took 2 quarters to do Ahlfors' book thoroughly! They spent about a month learning how to do real integrals using contour integration and doing those curious summations using complex analysis. I was mentally comparing to that the terribly unspeakable Complex Analysis course which I did in CMI where that horrible compressed book by Remmert was declared to be over in 4 months and never ever was using contour integration to do real integrals discussed and that was called a misuse of complex analysis course! Thankfully I have picked up a lot of that given the efforts of Amol to make us go through that in details, Probably the most (of the rare few) important things I learnt in any TIFR classes. It was simply impossible for me to understand from Cauchy-Riemann Equations to Casoratti-Weirstarss theorem in 4 months. (as was attempted in one of those rare bad maths courses in CMI) A first course can at most go up to Riemann Mapping Theorem or at best Picard Theorem but even that was not done (judiciously so) in this Nick's college even in 6 months.

Nick told me of his experience of meeting Terence Tao when he visited UCLA before applying there. He was completely awed by that guy (and why shouldn't one be!). Apparently Terence took him out to the botanical garden and showed him around all the curious plants they have. Expectedly Nick says that Terence was probably one of the most friendly and kind people he has ever met. They did discuss some mathematics about what Terence was doing then. Never did it become an issue that he was talking to probably one of the greatest thinkers ever.

I had decided to pay for the bill but Nick put up an enormous protest and he wanted to pay. He was under the impression that I was an undergrad and when I told him that I get a stipend he agreed to reduce his stake to 70% of the bill. He said that he will pay the full bill if I ever come around to his place.

Post dinner we had a walk where he came up to my accommodation to see where I live.

Probably one of the best of the rare few dinner outings I have ever had.

I ended this trip by meeting an acquaintance of mine in Bangalore whom I technically know for the last 22 years but haven't met for many years in between. Interestingly while out with him I witnessed the upcoming Bangla band "Backbenchers" perform life at PlanetM. It was quite impressive.

A life through links

2010-06-12T00:32:00.035+05:30

In this ever resource constrained world thanks to the struggle for whatever little there is up for grabs, it is getting easier and easier to label people. It is getting harder to control the addictive simplicity of boxing people into narrow containers of what the classifier wants to see. It has become so hard to refuse the convenience of seeing people as taking sides if one argues for a cause. It is so easy to hold the resources hostage to bargain social compliance.

Like in the wake of incidents like Dantewada, one dare not rise up for the people in the Gadchiroli village, you might run the risk of being called a Maoist (which has become synonymous with being a terrorist probably not without good reason). One dare not say the prof is teaching completely wrong stuff lest one faces social backlash. One better be careful to decontextualize every academic discussion so as to not hurt the egos of someone powerful but has no clue of the academic content of the discussion. (We have now new names like "diplomatic skills" or "soft skills" as euphemism for bad words like "playing politics") One dare not speak against nuclear energy if one is taking salary from the Government of India, or worse from the Department of Atomic Energy. One dare not show contempt for pro-women political smooth-talking lest be threatened to lose potential life-partners.

In this world of threats and arm-twist bargains that I live, it is only getting harder to say the truth, blog, have a chat, publicly discuss, argue, Buzz. I was so naive when I thought that science is all about rational thinking. I was so stupid when I believed that precision and correctness though not the forte of politicians does find appreciation in science.

Growing up is all about disillusionment.

I thought trying out here another form of political smooth talking that I have unfortunately learnt being in academics, avoid the risk of having to show courage of saying something on one's own by filling up writings with web-links.

So here I list some of the web-sites which I have been following for the past few months,

* You-tube like non-English websites this and this one.

* Homes pages of some students in Berkeley whose academic interests largely overlap with mine Kevin Lin, Schoemmer Pries, and Theo

* Witten's QFT lecture notes, fall and spring.

* Some papers on the importance and validity of intelligence and its measurement like, this one , this Gladwell's article, on the importance of g, this blog on intelligence measurement, this article in NYMagazine, (though I have strong objection to this practice in New York schools as explained in this article), and this one about there being so few girls in mathematics.

Inspite of all the research one is still left waiting for the Indian education system (especially the Physics ones that I am more familiar with) to recognize the importance of intelligence and more importantly to recognize that "specific skills" are not to be confused with "general intelligence", the former have a lower cognitive floor and is trainable. We can't skew the system in such a way that "skills" become more important than "intelligence". Just because one can repair broken cars one is not a mechanical engineer. Just because one can do large integrations fast or use Mathematica or can write C++ programs one is not a physicist!

* An interesting CFT paper

* Discussion on the Feynman Path-Integral at MathOverflow, one, two, three and four and the references within.

* A writing on renormalization group

* Once in a blue moon there happens good/interesting courses in TIFR like this, one by Sunil Mukhi and the other by Shiraz and this one by Amol.

* A beautiful article on the problems with economic reforms in India by Swaminathan Aiyar. This is website provides a good open-source collection of articles on socio-economic issues. Unfortunately not everything is open-source here.

* Home-page of Avi Loeb and CFA
Avi Loeb's papers are a joy to read. I recently had some interaction with him while I was preparing for this talk I gave recently. This also brought me to interact with Jonathan Pritchard.

* I was skimming through these papers from the Poverty Action Lab ,one, two, three and four.

* An interesting blog by a taxi driver in Singapore.

* Steve had something to say about Noam Chomsky here.

* A beautiful song by Greenday and this addictive one by Shakira.

* A organization called BloodConnect for organizing blood supply during emergencies. An acquaintance of mine was one of the founders of this.

* Stories by Anderson

* An article in this new e-magazine devoted to reporting on the Middle East.

* MIT OCW's Algebraic Topology, basic, advanced, more advanced.

* An article on evolutionary reasons behind psychological differences between men and women.

* Trying to understand complications of immigration from this article from here. This is another amazing open-source collection of articles on economics.

* MIT World

* Berkeley Lectures

* An organization called "Boond" which looks promising.

* A beautiful photoblog.

* Etingof's course on the interface of geometry and QFT

* A book on QFT which I can freely access because TIFR has subscribed to it.

* Two amazing lectures at TED on regenerative medicine and artificial limbs.

* An article on possibility of space-travel

* Have been looking through these articles by Tim Gowers and Ben Green.

* Dror Natan

* Have been reading through QFT and CFT notes by David Tong

* 3 books on Riemannian Geometry that I realized I can freely access because TIFR has subscribed to it. One be Jost, by Besse and one on Twistors. I have read mostly from the book by Jost and I like it whereas I haven't explored much of the other two. Associated to this is this recent discussion I had on MathOverflow.

* Some good articles by M.V.Ramana explaining a super-obvious idea as to why pursuit of nuclear energy should be stopped and especially India should not invest in any nuclear power and how terribly flawed is the current state of operations and possibly coming up laws on nuclear reactors in India. Its high time we come back to common sense and stop going gaga about people who were instrumental in bringing nuclear energy to India and those who have been hard-selling this self-defeating nuclear dream.

This is another beautiful article by M.V.Ramana along with my friend Suvrat explaining the problems with the cap on nuclear liability.This one is by Suvrat alone.

A malfunctioning at a nuclear power station can within seconds put these numbers of 19000 dead of Bhopal look like a small mishap, something these days Indian media is suddenly excited about. The verdict was yet another example of the barbie-doll status of the Indian judiciary and the administration and more importantly it proves that every Indian is valued between $500 and $2000 by the Indian Government.

For Sashi Tharoor

2010-04-19T23:51:00.002+05:30

I rarely take serious note of any political event in India. Definitely not seriously enough to write a blog about. And never have I blogged about any one single person centric event. But this time with this forced resignation of Sashi Tharoor, I am seriously perturbed.

First of all I know Sashi Tharoor only as much any lay man knows from his websites and public statements. But I have known about him since a long time from he used to be the under-secretary general to UN and later executive assistant to Kofi Annan. More because as far as I remember he happened to have studied at the St.Xavier's Collegiate School Kolkata where I studied from Class 7 to 12. If my memory is not failing me badly I remember my english teacher there Mrs.Ranjana Bhattacharya telling me that Sashi Tharoor was in her class. I also happend to be in Ranjana's class quite a few times. A very charistmatic english teacher who started off by giving me the near failing marks in the beginning and scaring me to death with her principles but ending with giving me the highest scores in my final english exams. Getting almost full marks in her english correction scheme is not a cake walk.

The basic point that is far from clear is, what is the crime? In no allegation that I hear people putting up against him is there a crime! I see no victim! He apparently "influenced" Sunanda Pushkar's getting a stake in the IPL Kochi team. So what? What prevents me from helping a friend of mine get something as long as I am not breaking the law or infringing into the rights of some more able candidate?

There is no clear allegation of crime against him as far as the news reports go. I suppose he probably being unfamiliar to Indian politics became just an easy target.

I believe our home minister Chidambaram is a very knowledgeable and respectable man and he has also stated that Sashi Tharoor didn't benefit from the IPL bid. This statement obviously has no legal value but is definitely important.

It seems more to me that it is hurting the deprived sensibilities of some people to see an "elite" in a high post. If this results in me being labeled an "elitist', so be it.

There is little doubt that very few people in the Indian parliament have the level of know-how of international politics as Sashi Tharoor. Goes back to his extensive involvement in the past notably with the peace processes in Geneva and Yugoslavia. It is hard to imagine a person with such extensive international experiences in the Indian government.

Now isn't the cost that India incurred in losing his know-how quite substantial?

More importantly, why are the people who have something against Sashi Tharoor not filing some police case against him and take to proper legal route if he is suspected for some crime? Why just create a ruckus in the parliament and cause personal embarrassment?

Deplorably it isn't unusual in India for a technical problem to be turned into a personal mud slinging.
Even in research institutes during scientific discussions!
Unfortunately Sashi Tharoor hasn't been spared either.

And this isn't the first time. His tweeting has wrongfully been repeatedly pulled up against him many times. We as a nation don't seem to really believe in freedom of expression and all this hue and cry about maintaining secrecy about government policies is just arcane psychology to say the least. Wonder when people will realize that paranoid secrecy in the functioning of an administration is the perfect womb for corruption.

In India one is free to have an opinion as long as it agrees with the person higher up.

His comment about not enjoying a holiday on Gandhi Jayanti was definitely a good point and didn't obviously go down with the section of people who mysteriously feel that holidaying is a great way to show respect to a person. I think if not anything Gandhi was at least quite a hard working guy. We even give holidays for voting!

Here we see not just causing personal embarrassment to a person but a signal to the intellectual class of the population. "Stay Away". The entire Sashi Tharoor episode casts a deep shadow on the sensibilities of the Indian parliament and its sensitivities about the upper educational echelons of India.

There seems to be a systematic (deliberate?) disconnect between every Indian administration body and the intelligent educated Indians.

It in someway comes as a very little surprise since quality education never really was in the priority list of the Government of India. It has always been focussed on opening "more" institutes than to build even a single best-in-the-world institute. It continues to live under the self-defeating delusion that quantity can substitute for quality.

We as a nation are still far away from realizing that education is NOT about being able to turn knobs of some machines or read and write or even being able to compute some Feynman diagrams! Education has to beget ability to have researched opinions. Now you cannot expect people to get more educated and yet have no opinions in the public. Civilization is essentially characterized by the extension of the means by which every opinion can get heard in the world and resulting in more and more sophisticated public discussions. Democracy by discussions is an idea championed fiercely by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen. We have moved from speeches to posters to books to web-pages to blogs to Orkut to Twitter. The Indian administration has to realize that they cannot live under the delusion of wanting hordes of educated people without opinions!

Then let the government invest more money into making A.I and robots and not on schools, colleges and universities. They might just then have the country they dream of, lots of intelligent machines working day and night and producing results but will have no opinion whatsoever. Robots will not blog or tweet.

This episode further deepens the fatal chasm that exists in India between the intelligent educated people and the administration systems. We are just making it threateningly impossible or people in the former class to step into the second. May be its the way it is designed to be.

A biology lab travelling on the oceans.

2010-03-26T22:13:00.005+05:30

This is a photograph of the boat Tara Oceans on which I happened to land today by an absolute stroke of luck.

I generally don't blog about some particular incident but almost always about an assimilation of ideas from a string of events in life. But this time I am going to change this pattern for this unique case.

It was my first experience of meeting and interacting with an international scientific expedition group. This is very different from the life of a regular scientist. Of course I also heard accounts from these scientists of meeting with pirates near Somalia and how the French Army escorted them when while they were passing the gulfs near Arabia.

Basically this is a small sail boat on which a bunch of French and German biologists (mainly from University of Heidelberg and EMBL)are traveling around the world looking at the distribution of organisms (especially photo-plankton) around the oceans of the world. This will be a path breaking experiment which will do a comprehensive study of the effect of the human civilization on marine life. Remember that half of the oxygen that we breathe comes from the planktons in the ocean. We wouldn't be there without the oceans.

Ofcourse these sientists pointed out that world population crossed the maximal sustainable limit of nature around the 1980s! So the planet having to support a population so much in excess of its upper limit is straining the ecosystem of the oceans to dangerous limits. And this is much more fragile than the one on the lithosphere.

It is a 3-year program during which these people will travel around the globe's coasts sampling the data. Anybody familiar with biology would know that doing on-line analysis of organisms in a solution is near impossible. But precisely thats what these scientists are doing on board continuously using their very sophisticated instruments. To get a feel of the technology remember that to do microscopy one almost always needs a completely disturbance free region. Ocean waves 100 meters away from a microscope on land can be fatal to the experiement. Now comare that these people are able to do amazing levels of microscopy while traveling on the oceans!

This team arrived in Mumbai today and their next stop will be Malaya and then to the Antarctica. The lead scientists landed up in TIFR to give a talk about it and I happened to be in that talk. I was supposed to go to my class on cosmology after that talk but then the cosmology prof (Alak Ray) came and told me with a cheeky smile that he is cancelling the class since he is goin aboard Tara Oceans. It took some minutes for this information to sink in. And then I realized that the biology department has organized a trip for lottery selected 40 students from their department to this amazing floating travelling laboratory. First thing I was told was that I am not allowed to tag along. My cosmology prof was somehow the only non-biology person to be specially invited to the trip.

And the TIFR bus left at 5:30Pm with those few lucky biology students in it.

But then its me the desperado and I wasn't the one to sit around taking that. I came to know that at 6Pm the speed boat would leave from the Gateway of India heading towards this ship. And it was already 5:40Pm. On the spur of the moment I just packed in my camera and left with a friend of mine from the neutrino physics department. I asked the taxi to drive to the Gateway as fast as he could. But even on reaching there we couldn't figure out from where the boat was leaving. And almost when we were planning to come back,I spoted the TIFR biology crowd in an obscure corner. And I also spotted the biologist with whom I had recently done a biology project.

And I hung around as the Tara Oceans sent in speed boats to take the bio people to the ship. After sunset when the last boat arrived, I jumped in. And I didn't regret it.

Since I was in the last batch to arrive on the boat we got a longer time to move around and see this floating laboratory. And the German scientists were more than happy to show us around and explain stuff.

I am pasting below photo of this awesome sailing on the oceans molecular biology laboratory that I saw.

One of the scientists (most probably German) explaining this crucial machine that goes down into the waters to collect samples. It can typically go inside for about 120m though they can in principle send it down for 2000m

This is where they purify the ocean water to extract out the organisms from it which is the ultimate objective of study.

This is the entrance to the kitchen and the bedroom and the living-room and the microscopy room of this floating molecular biology laboratory.

The kitchen. These French and German scientists have learnt to cook Biriyani.

A closer look at the capsule that goes underwater

The living room and library of scientists floating around the oceans. It is in the lower deck.

The store-room for the scientific apparatus and food supplies.

The other end of the kitchen with the fruit supplies hanging from the top in the net.

The scientists in front of the control room on the uppermost deck

Unfortunately blogger doesn't give me a method of uploading the videos I shot of the descriptive talks that the leader of Tara Oceans gave to us on board.

A Right Answer

2010-03-19T23:40:00.008+05:30

A student's life in India is a progress in skills of getting the right answer but probably never being taught how to ask the right question or ever been inculcated the skill to distinguish between what is an important question and what is not. Nobody ever gave any credit for asking a good question but the social hype has overvalued to the extreme the debatable worth of a right answer. I remember as a child vividly watching on television a guy in Kolkata being taken around in almost a chariot with garlands round his neck for scoring the highest marks in the Class 10 board exams of West Bengal board. His only claim to fame seemed to be that he could get the right answers to some questions in some exam on some day. The image disgusted me so much. But paradoxically I see the same psyche prevalent in bigger and bigger proportions in the other institutions too where I happened to land up in the following years like the CMI Physics department and TIFR physics department.

As I made my way across the rest of the school life and the BSc. and half of my MSc. the biggest thing I realized is that every thing I studied at a point turned out to be a special or approximate case of something larger that I studied later. And almost always in subjects especially like Physics, every answer has limits of validity and in more and more complicated areas of Physics there are more and more subtle assumptions behind every answer. Hence the notion of a "right answer" to make any tangible sense has to be continuously be confined to narrower and narrower regimes to remain "right".

Somehow I was born so foolish that every time I am told a statement in maths or physics, I go around looking for the assumptions made in getting to that and then I try to figure out what would happen if I tweaked those assumptions. And very often this has resulted in me asking a question about it in class and now I have learnt that it is the biggest sin to commit as a Physics student in India.

One of my recent attempts at pursuing such assumption tweaking can be seen in this article of mine on the Hall-Effect. Probably not terribly exciting but gives me a personal sense of satisfaction to have brought an idea to a reasonable conclusion.

Possibly the biggest thing to realize about science is the simple fact that the most important questions have no answers! And a point so amply emphasized and aptly illustrated by say the mesmerizing lectures by Prof.Alak Ray at TIFR. Or as Prof.Kailash Rustagi (from IITB who taught me a course in TIFR) said to me once that "If you ask a question for which the instructor has no answer then it is surely a good question....a student is remembered for the questions asked in class"

Such sentiments are only too rare.

Such simple things were never in the priority list of any education system in India that I have seen. It is always busy trying to figure out the "top" based on ability to produce right answers in some examination. Wonder how come India is not the must sought after research destination even though since childhood every other person I knew was so busy trying to "top"! Probably the reasons are also not so hard to seek.

A few more Pink Floyds might sing a few more "Another brick in the wall" but we shall dedicatedly keep building the walls and we shall continue to be fossilized in the walls. The Great wall of China between countries. The Berlin Wall within a country! Walls between houses. Walls between persons. Walls between Physics and Maths. (the word "maths" has been reduced to almost a slang in the physics departments) Walls inside the brain. Walls inside the heart. Rabindranath only wasted his energy writing, "Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls"

Rabindranath was too foolish a person to understand the worth of being able to generate the "right answer" and probably out of his innate stupidity arose those immortal words.

Thankfully Led Zeppelin inspired me to buy a "Stairway to heaven" so that I could climb over those walls.

I remember when the day before my electrodynamics exam in TIFR, I was struggling with a particular assignment problem and then I realized from a batch-mate that expectedly this was solved in the back of some obscure book. And the solution involved some complicated identity about fourier transforms which I had never seen before and I asked this noble person to explain to me where this queer formula comes from. With extreme disgust written on his face and with a heavy accent this guy replied to me "Pehle copy kar dete hain taki kal marks mil jaye. Kahan se aya kyun aya yeh baad me socha jayega." (a rough English translation would be "let me just copy it for now so that I get the marks tomorrow. Where it comes from and how it comes from is something we can think later")

I am very puzzled as to what research is supposed to be about if I am to accept "facts" unquestionably. Probably for such students "research" means what it states literally "to re-search" i.e somebody had written it in some website and now you conquer the world by being able Google it out! I somehow fail to understand how come some of the brilliant profs of TIFR whom I find admirable fail to inspire most of the students into adopting certain basic minimum sense of ethics. But then probably most of them might have not done research had somebody assured them 3 delicious meals a day for free. A conjecture.

Even if the above conjecture might look like a poetic hyperbole, at least I had the shocking experience where I as the organizer of the student-talks was once forced to delay the seminar because all of a sudden just before the talk most of the potential audience and the speaker wanted to spend time eating bowls of dried puffed rice mixed with some raw vegetable slices and mustard oil etc. It is a very characteristic food of rural Bengal. It is a preparation that is usually distributed in the refugee camps established for the homeless in the aftermath of calamities like say a flood or earthquake.

(Not a dish that appeared ever anywhere in my list of preferred food items but that is an orthogonal point.)

In this same fateful electrodynamics course the instructor has surgically removed any detailed discussion of the foundations of special relativity since he didn't perceive them to be "useful" though I am going to stick my neck out to say that probably very little else in theoretical physics is so very important as them. At any rate we could have spent at least 1 class discussing the subtle issues about its axiomatization. But then going by the generic pattern of the courses it is not very surprising since almost systematically all subtle aspects of every subject gets omitted where there is no clear notion of a "right answer".

{It is a different fact that in that relativistic electrodynamics course nothing of any substance or authentic value was ever discussed! }

This over-importance to the "right answer" has very often been extended to a point where people sadly fail to distinguish between what is conceptually important and what is practically useful. And subtle concepts have been dangerously compromised on the shameful pretext of not being "physically relevant". Very often raising my suspicion that it is just an excuse to cloak lack of understanding of the finer notes. Again a conjecture. But then again probably these are not crimes committed consciously but it is part of the general psyche of a society which has gotten into what I would call the "third-world mentality" where you continuously compromise on quality for the sake of quantity.

Scientific research is probably the most vulnerable place to try out this mode of thinking where the cost can be astronomical of only focusing on a perception of usefulness (usually contorted!) neglecting conceptual importance.

I am not so worried about being useful than I am keen to be correct.

Knowing better I never went back to ask him whether he ever figured out where that equation comes from. I lost the marks in the exam. And this statement from the TIFR student reminds me of similar statements from college-mates reported by Tejaswi in IITK (he is also a student of Physics) in this blog article in his quote of "arre yaar. ye sab hamaare liye nahi hain. bas formula bataado, aur ham lagaadenge".(translated in english inside his blog) (Had it not been for the objectionable language in the blog used I might have greatly applauded the insight of this article of Tejaswi) I think Tejaswi hugely overestimates the reach of this attitude when he says that with this we might have remained in the stone-age.

{Aside: Incidentally I had a brief interaction with Tejaswi some 6 years ago in our KVPY camp in Class 11. Then it was a completely different me though. Coincidentally the 3 photographs on the top of that page are from our camp! I can recognize Radhika Marathe in the second photo and Shatajit Mazumdar and Nerella Tejaswi Venumadhav in the 3rd photo.}

No wonder I rarely ever risk discussing publicly anything in science that seriously interests me.

Who knows when I will run into the risk of facing this self-defeating attitude so carefully nurtured by the course work where all one needs is to get the "right answer". Now you go and beg borrow or steal for it. As long as you can get it, you are the greatest genius ever born. You might be taken out in chariots with garlands round your neck for having located that amazing obscure website which happened to have complete worked out solutions for the assignment.

I love discussing science and thats why I seek scientific discussions. Most often I don't seek scientific discussions because I want to learn something since I am sure I can learn on my own almost anything that I want to learn and almost always better than what most people can teach me. It is always exponentially more efficient for me to learn something on my own than to learn it from someone and most often given certain amount of time I seem capable of knowing any particular topic of my interest far better than most people with whom I might have otherwise discussed it. Especially in Physics. And increasingly so in mathematics.

If I am really interested in learning something from someone then those of my serious and hard academic discussions happen behind closed doors with some specific inspirational profs of TIFR or over hundreds of emails with some specific people in my peer group in other institutes around the world or at MathOverflow. It is just too risky to try to have discussions in public or in most of the courses where the society seems to be predominantly interested in being given someway or the other a right answer as shortly and as soon as possible instead of trying to explore all the possibilities of the subject.

I wonder if this feeling of urgency to agree upon a right answer very soon and proceed anyway irrespective of how flimsy the conclusion might be, is somehow related to the post-colonial mentality. I feel that under such a spell one always lives under a self-defeating "race" against time as if trying to compensate for the all the time lost under some oppression.

Of course I give student-talks to share some excitement Anyway most people who see me everyday get to know at most only 10% of all the academic activities I do in a day.

But then again let us be wary of trying to measure work in terms of hours put in. That sounds only applicable if I am ploughing in the farms, which I am not. The reason why I find it hard to rationalize when the administrators try to measure a course in terms of "contact hours". As if I am going to be ever grateful for all the hundreds of hours spent sitting through those dozens of courses in TIFR most which while I sat in, I kept wishing I was never born!

This has many curious manifestations in the administrative techniques in regions where the illusion of a "right answer" gets harder and harder to erect like in experimental physics projects or advanced reading courses. There we have come up with contorted bureaucratic methods to bring in the all-so-familiar sense of accountability which seem to be more counter productive than anything else and driven by a misplaced sense of paranoia.

Like the bizarre question that I was asked at the beginning of my experimental physics project interview "How many hours and weekends did you spend in the lab?"! Me being me clearly refused to answer such insulting questions and had requested the administration to stop asking such questions which so directly seem to send out a signal to the student that he/she is being suspected to be a cheat with no prior evidence. Especially I found this offensive when my project guide (Prof.Roop Mallik) was pretty happy with my efforts.

Or in advanced reading courses where the proxy for the right answer somehow seems to be spending "25 contact hours" with the guide and ratification of the plan by higher authorities! A technique which seems to start off with the assumption that students are in general going to be dishonest.

Thankfully I am in the Department of Theoretically Physics of TIFR where at least reading courses have not been banned like I hear has happened in some other departments. I get to hear so from students in those departments. I personally think that reading courses are extremely important things.

We seem to be so haplessly searching for a bureaucratic peg to hang on to when the illusion of "right answer" seems so difficult to erect and delude oneself into believing in it.

A different situation is seen if I say ask a question like "What is AdS?". This is a question which has a pretty precise notion of a right answer. But I find it quite puzzling that almost all students who I know to be working on what is called the AdS/CFT conjecture by Maldacena find it impossibly hard to give me an answer anywhere near being what might be called respectable.

Do people start research also like that? I don't understand how generations habituated to passing courses by looking up answers in websites and solution manuals is expected to do research. I somehow see a contradiction or may be a miracle!

I see a lost opportunity of benefiting the society if such levels of check had been put in the right place for assignment evaluation and course examinations where every possible means of corruption gets adopted freely across all intellectual stratas. And it is so much more easy even for a person with average IQ to see that by being dishonest in a reading course the only person losing is he/she him/herself.

Probably the daunting task of confronting situations where "right answers" are not defined also explains the dangerous absence of arts departments from the research institutes I am familiar with. An education system which completely cuts out studies along sociology,music,economics,movies etc has little hope to mould complete people. I definitely find the priority lists very hard to justify where electronics courses are compulsory for Physics students but nobody is encouraged to study about the theories about the socio-economic roots of international terrorism. I am not very sure I can think of any argument which will make the later less important than the former.

Obviously understanding terrorism is an example of an extremely important question where a "right answer" is extremely hard to agree on. No wonder many of the greatest thinkers of out times have spent so much effort on this one single issue.

Sometimes I feel that the overarching importance given to right answers as compared to exploration of the boundaries has basically been reversing the civilization as we know it. At one point humankind was frightened to death seeing the storms and the lightning and they conjured up gods to erect a "right answer".

In the academic circuits that I am familiar with, I continuously see this attitude to create demi-Gods to give the "right answers". The importance of being able to get the right answer is so huge that from where it comes and how it comes has become immaterial. So now if there comes by a person who can give the "right answer" for free we have a solution to all our problems! No need to think. No need to read. No need to explore. No need to struggle. Just ask this new found God! And the best of all there is now no need to debate. Debate is probably the thing that most science students I know of are scared about. That is extremely risky business since that runs into the danger of having to question everything that one believes to be true. And it is obviously so easy and safe to believe than to think! Especially if one can find a "God of right answers" to believe in.

The question of belief is so very complicated a theme that I dare not enter here lest this blog article becomes tremendously complicated and long. Just would like to mention that I am yet to rationalize the existence of "pujas" like "saraswati puja" etc in research institutes!

Now once the society has erected this demi-God who seems to have the right answer to every question which most people seem to face on a day to day scale, we start hero-worshiping. Thats the beginning of starting to slip down a slope from where return is hard to fathom. Now science and logic and rationale and thinking are all at stake and bartered for in exchange of a idol to hang on to. How simple it is to try to hang on to an unanimously created illusions of God than to independently try to think through everything. No wonder we have such charismatic politicians when even research societies seem so amply capable of creating super-powers within their nanoscopic world.

And now corruption begins. The system has got the seeker of the answer into a time and resource crunched situation where the seeker badly needs nothing but the right answer for survival and here comes the demi-God who can provide for it. What a perfect case for monopoly! The giver can so well give utter crap wrapped as the right answer and seeker will not even question or try to test or reason what is being given since the system simply doesn't give him/her the chance to do so. The giver soon realizes the immense power that has gotten vested in it and how much it can be used to propagate one's own dogmas in the garb of right answer. Now the giver can extend its sphere of influence irrationally beyond where expertise could even faintly be justified!

Since all you asked for is just the right answer and not the justification.

The giver slowly accretes a gang of cronies around and an system of patronization of mediocrity begins where the ratification by this created super-power is the last word. Scientific rationality and logic got sacrificed long ago at the altar of search for easy answers.

Now even if the giver's worth is provable within the narrow domains of may be Quantum Field Theory, the giver's opinion can go down as a law about much complicated questions like the caste system or the Telengana issue! Since seekers have all found an illusion of magical power to hang their sagging thinking on they are ever so ready to accept the most flimsy arguments in support of say something in Indian politics because the giver of the "right answers" was correct with curvature of space-time!

It is so easy to accept an answer and believe it because of precedence in orthogonal arenas than to think and verify afresh in each realm of activity.

I prefer the later any day.

It is sad that the world I know sinks so deeply into this logical paradox from where recovery will require nothing less than a miracle. I don't know what or how much of argument or proof is necessary to convince a society of the irreversible dangers of hastily looking for the right answers.

When the situation is looking so very gloomy and it is suffocatingly dark all around, sometimes I do see a flicker of light or hope when say Prof.Rajesh Gopakumar in his speech says "..in this age of continuous updates in the iPhone let us not forget the slower processes of building edifices of knowledge.."

I was fortunate to have been interacting with him over two weeks recently when I was learning from him the techniques that he has recently established for exactly computing heat kernels on homogeneous spaces like S^3.

Letters from Germany

2010-02-19T00:04:00.004+05:30

I recently observed that neither on my home-page nor on my blog I had ever written about my adventures in Germany 2 years ago when I went there as a part of the Indian delegation to the Lindau Nobel Laureates-Students interaction program. I was selected to that meeting towards the end of my 3yr BSc.(Hons.) degree in CMI. It is a joint program between DFG and DST and in 2008 many Nobel Laureates in Physics came to meet selected students across the world at this annual event.

The connecting portal for Indian aspirants for this year is this.

Today trying to recollect and write out everything that fascinated me during that entire trip would be a very hard job and hence I decided to compile together here excerpts from various emails that I wrote to my mother and sister, during this journey through Germany.

Of all that happened and I saw during this journey the most lasting impressions on me was my experience of giving a talk on behalf of the Indian delegation at Bonn in the DFG headquarters, a visit to the Nazi Holocaust Memorial at Berlin,a walk through Berlin on a chilly rainy evening to visit the old churches in the city, the chocolate brown roses in the Island of Mainau and the white roses in Bonn and a western classical concert in the Island of Lindau.

The date of when the original email was written is mentioned on the top before the start of the excerpt.

The writings on 6th and 8th July 2008 are most reflective to me.

Never mind the many "..." in the mails.
They were written in different states of the mind.

Written on 30th June 2008

Dear all,

Its a grand experience. 550 representatives from 67 countries.

I have heard what 5-star hotels are like but the treatment we are getting here will be underestimated if it is called 7-star. The schedule is very packed and internet access times are weird. So it is very difficult to even write emails.

The boat trip across Lake Constance was an experience beyond words. I have never seen such a romantic and exhilarating atmosphere. Can't think of a better place to go on a honeymoon!

Sunset on Lake Constance in the backdrop of the Alps mountains was breathtaking.
And the music was amazing and the food was awesome.

On the ship I had discussions with Kapil Sibal (the science minister of India)

Deepti, I and Vikrant watched the Germany-Spain Euro Final with a HUGE group of German fans in a huge park in a open air screen. I had heard a lot about the football crazy German people but watching it with a 1000 other Germans is an experience. The atmosphere was crazy and sounds and shouts were defeaning and every German was drunk.

{Here you get 10 beer cans for 1.5 euros and hence people drink alcohol more than water. Almost every food here has some alcohol in it. Here in almost every meal we are offered alcohol {the costliest quality of white wine, red wine and beer and beer shots (40% vodka!)}. Some of the people in the group are drinking like anything. (notable the guy from Jadavpur University is probably drinking a few liters of wine everyday!).

Of course I have not had any alcohol. I am having pork in breakfast and turkey meat in lunch. Turkey is amazing to taste.

We had interactions with the teams from Canada,Germany,Bangladesh,Pakistan and attended 3 of the Nobel Laureates lectures. On the ship we had personal discussions with Prof.Grunberg who won the Physics Nobel in 2007. Nobel Laureates are amazing people. You can talk and laugh with them like anything.

Nandini , I and Shreayas are walking all around Lindau and during such a walk we had interactions with the Chinese team. They are very nice. We had ice-creams here as our first expenditure.

Will write later,

Bye,

Anirbit

Written on 1st July 2008

Dear All,

Yesterday I missed the guided tour of Lindau because I was writing the email. Later we who had missed just walked out and joined the group at a later spot. Given that this is a 3km x 11km island one can find out something pretty easily. Today I am missing lunch to write this email. The timing of the internet access is such that one has to miss something to write a mail.

There is a tremendous lack of communication within the group and I think even today some of us have missed the lunch with the US team. Everybody seems to have left and some of us here have no information as to where they are.

It seems that yesterday was the formal welcome ceremony in the presence of the countess and the ball-dance. So we all wore our sherwanis and sarees. Expectedly the Indian contingent turned out to be the most colourfully dressed ones.

The Chinese press took some photographs and videos of me wearing the Sherwani! And some newspaper from Poland also took photographs of me and Shreyas in Sherwanis with Nandini in her green sari. { Many German guests here came out to compliment Nandini saying that "You look beautiful"..she got the heads turning here!}

Today at breakfast table a Chinese lady joined me and she said that she had noticed me dancing in the ball-room and thats how she recognized me. She said that she had spotted me because of the conspicuous sherwani.

When the ball dance started the only ones to go out were Swastibrata, Krishanu and Ankit. We all just kept standing watching. Ankit balled with the wife of the president of the US Department of Energy. She said that she has 3 daughters and she wants to marry them to Indians! Krishanu got royally dumped after sometime by the lady because he couldn't dance. And the German man who took Swastibrata was so huge that she shied out after sometime.

The lady in the Pakistani team refused to dance because she is already engaged!

It was looking pretty unsocial with us not participating in the dance when all the other countries were on the floor. So finally some of the Indians started dancing together and that attracted a lot of attention.

Anita (the Punjabi lady in our team) invited me to dance with her. That was the ice-breaker for me. First time ever on the dance floor! We tried to do a waltz but couldn't get it very right. She taught me how to do it and we tried doing the ball dance for about 20 minutes. It was a very new kind of an experience.

I think Deepti took photos of me doing the waltz with Anita. Some say it looked pretty nice!

21 years of socially ingrained inhibitions are not that easy to shed!

Ultimately the entire team joined in and we all set up huge circles in the center of the room and Anita led us. We tried typical Bollywood group dances and the rest of the countries got excited about it and joined in. Some of the German ladies did the Bhangra pretty well and one of the German guys danced with Shreyas with great vigour.

Then we tried Bavarina dances with the other Europeans and that worked out well.

Nandini tried to do a ball dance with me but that didn't work out very well since I couldn't match her energy. After 1 hour of shying away she turned out to be a very enthusiastic dancer!

Nandini, Krishanu, Shreyas, Bhargav, Ramesh and Akhilesh danced very enthusiastically and led the whole crowd. After sometime I,Shiva and Prathiba took to the sombre role of photography being unable to match their energy.

Then we played punjabi rocks etc in the hall and all the countries joined together to dance with them. It was a celebration of India ultimately. Members from all the countries joined together to form concentric circles and danced to the music of punjabi Bhangra.

But of course some of the Germans danced the waltz amazingly. I have taken many photos and videos of that. I found a couple here who did that in an awesomely elegant way. I videotaped them.

Of course one should mention that the German lady who was doing that was too beautiful to be believed to be real.

Prathiba and Deepti planned to return home at 11:30Pm. Prathiba asked me to escort her to the hotel since she is "scared" of the drunk Germans on the street! {What a protection to look for....me!!} Thats when I returned back (with her). Others came back at about 1Am and I heard that the dancing got more energetic and fast as the night went on. I heard that the Indian team was given special applause by the other countries for having completely changed the atmosphere.

Anyway lot of other things to tell....but I am missing a lot now...wonder where the USteam-Indian team lunch is happening!!

Bye,

Anirbit

Written on 2nd July 2008

"
* I attended lectures in Condensed Matter Physics by Nobel Laureates like Prof.Hansch, Prof.Grunberg, Prof.Giaver, Prof.Von Klitzing, Prof.William Phillip and Prof.John Hall.

* I attended a special discussion session with Prof.William Phillip and also had a 3 hour long dinner table discussion session with him. We discussed a myriad of academic and non-academic things.

* I attended lectures in structural biology by Nobel Laureates Prof.Deisenhofer, Prof.Huber and Prof.Michel.
I attended a special discussion session with Prof.Huber on the topic of determination of protein structure.

* I attended lectures of Prof.Veltman and Prof.David Gross.
Prof.Gross was thoroughly excited about LHC and its prospects of discovering Supersymmetry.

The Condensed Matter Physics Nobel Laureates whose lectures I attended all seem very excited about the idea of using BEC trapped in optical lattices to produce Quantum Computers. Prof.William Phillip almost took a detailed class on the idea of trapping BEC in optical lattices. There is a lot of discussion abong the Nobel Laureates about the idea of nano motors and how some of these have been partially achieved using laser cooled atoms. Everybody is talking about the experiment where a set of Bucky Balls with Rubidium ion trapped in it was rolled through a carbon nano-tube. They even showed videos of this. They have designed atomic conveyor belts using these trapped BEC.

There is also a lot of discussion about the idea of using trapped BEC in optical lattices as a simulator for the Bose-Hubbard model and then to use it to study the "2D Superfluid-Mott transition". They are referring to this web-site : www.coldquanta.com

Prof.William Phillip is thoroughly excited about this and we has long discussions about these. He explained the idea of splitting a BEC into many lumps and then transporting them through optical lattices. He also referred to the rotating bucket of Superfluid experiment by Prof.Leggett.

Written on 3rd July 2008

Dear All,

Few short comments:

* People in Germany are pretty clumsy. In every eating place we have been (the restaurants or the Lindau dining hall) the waiters would collide against each other and crash the glass plates and glasses. Even in flight the German waiter crashed all the dishes he was carrying. Today at lunch the waiter at the lindau meeting crashed a pile of dishes while washing them!

* There is no dress code in the meeting except for the special receptions. People are wearing anything and everything. Only a small minority are in formals. Some of the ladies in the meeting are wearing a little more than a lingerie. {Anyway Germany seems very open about dressing sense}. The president of the Lindau council today was wearing a blue shirt with a red pant. {You people prevent me from wearing such things!}. Germany is very free about public display of affection. We saw a couple stand and kiss on the top of the Lindau tower gate which is about 70-80ft above the sea and looks down on 3 countries. Such a romantic idea!

   Nobel Laureate Josephson has come wearing a completely crushed laboratory apron!

* Today another Nobel Laureate was talking about the "3Am effect"! That all good ideas come around that time.

Yesterday I was mailing a few profs and I sent a detailed mail to Prof.Baskaran about some of the interesting Condensed Matter Physics ideas being discussed here. Prof.David Gross was explaining how various connections have been found between String Theory and Condensed Matter Physics and how methods of one are getting used in either. Polchinsky and Subir Sachdeva (from Harvard) are holding a workshop on this next year at UCSB. I am planning how to apply for that!

I attended Nobel Laureate David Gross's lecture and discussion session. It was exciting. So many people came to attend it that initially the hall that was booked for it proved to be too small. So Gross and everyone walked into the dining hall and we had the session at dining hall. Gross sat on the dinner table and talked. It was a session on understanding the current situation with String Theory. He is very optimistic and said "Now nobody can kill String Theory"   but said that we must be prepared to change a few ideas in the wake of the LHC {the largest and costliest experiment in Physics in history that will be done starting next month}.

During the walk Prof.Gross and I had a conversation. He was asking where I am joining and under whom I plan to work etc. He obviously knows Shiraz and was referring to him. He asked whether I am from IIT. As usual IIT happens to be the only institute in India that they know of.

Yesterday afternoon Shiv Teja (the guy from IIT who is joining UIUC) and I took a bus from Lindau and went on a trip to Germany. We took a 1 hour bus ride through various towns and villages of Germany. There is a small bridge across the Lake that has to be crossed to get into Germany . On the bus ride we met the Austrian team. They are very nice. They took photographs with us.

Prathiba and Deepti didn't join us since they said that the idea is absurd and we won't be able to make it back for lunch and the concert. But we did!

Yesterday Prathiba, I, Deepti and Vikrant went out and had ice-cream at 11:30Pm and we spent the evening on the Lion tower gate of Lindau. It is an amazing view from there. Then we 4 roamed around a lot. Here sun sets at about 9:30Pm and by the time our official obligations are over all the shops close down. So we are being able to buy nothing except ice-creams whose shops remain open till late at night.

Prathiba and I went on a photographic spree all around the coast which is the common meeting point of Austria, Switzerland and Germany. We were almost competing on our 2 cameras as to who can take better photographs. Today Prathiba and I plan to go shopping in the evening. If we can.

Many people in the group are getting very physically weak. Hemwati Nandan fell down unconscious while asking a question to Nobel Laureate Prof.Smoot. He had to be hospitalized and German hospitals did all checks on him from CT Scan to ECG! Prathiba is also periodically getting weak. She needed extra glucose to get to work yesterday. She was suffering a fall of blood pressure and is going dizzy. So she gulped down spoons of Lemon Rasna that I am carrying with me.

Yesterday I came to know that Prathiba is 2 times Gold Medalist in Physics (BSc and MSc) from Madras University. Now she is in the second year of PhD at IITM.

Anyway I ate beef today. Nothing great to taste.
Pretty much like mutton which I don't like.

Yesterday we attended the western classical music program to which we were invited. It was an amazing experience to listen to a live performance of Beethoven. It was a transcendental experience. The concert group playing it consisted of 7 people from 6 different countries!

Day before yesterday we had a special dinner with the Chinese and Nigerian teams. They were also very nice people. It so happened that some Nobel Laureates decided to come to that meeting. It was going to be completely arbitrary as to who gets to sit with whom and the number of Nobel Laureates was much more than the number of tables. At the last moment there was an arbitrary change in the seating arrangement and it so happened that I got to sit with Nobel Laureate Prof.William Phillip (about whose non-academic lecture I had told you earlier)!

So I had a 3 hour long in-depth dinner table discussion with Prof.William Phillip. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for discovery of Laser Cooling. For million reasons academic and non-academic he completely mesmerized me. Firstly he is a hard core experimental Physicists with pretty strong theoretical base and who doesn't rule out the possibility that String Theory might be right.

Through discussions with I discussed with Phillip the following questions in details:

        1. The issue of dissemination of scientific information among researchers across the globe.
        2. The issue of fund allocation among various branches of science say String Theory or Atomic Phyiscs or Algebraic Geometry. Who decides and how to decide.
        3. Is it a good idea to let scientists take over this decision making process from the politicians?
        4. Is it a possibility that scientific research becomes financially self-supporting and disjoint from the corporate world?

Bye,

Anirbit

Written on 6th July 2008

Dear All,

Life is getting very complicated and very hectic. One thing is very clear..the next time I leave India it is going to be with some very high quality laptop. It is impossible to connect back home without it. There are only 2 laptops here and knowledge of how to connect it to the wifi is very limited. So it is getting very bothersome as to how to get hold of a laptop and how to connect it to the net. I am finally doing it from the professor's laptop who is accompanying us and with his help.

There is no guarantee when and from where I can contact next. Yesterday night Prathiba and me went around the entire Lindau searching for a cyber cafe but could not find a single open one.

I am going almost without sleep for the past few days. Today we arrived at Munich from Lindau on bus. Tomorrow early morning we will leave for Berlin. It is a 8hr bus journey from Munich to Berlin. Even today it seems that I will not be able to sleep.

Today as soon as we landed in Munich we were taken on a guided tour of Munich. We had to walk miles. Then Shiva, I and Jyoti took an adventurous trip all across the city to Munich to see the Olympic stadium and climb the Olympic tower of Munich. Thanks to Shiva's road sense we managed it. It was a breathtaking view of all of Munich from the highest point in Munich..the tip of the Olympic Tower at an height of 204m.

We had earlier arranged for food. We got back in broad daylight at 9Pm. Prathiba had arranged for the plates and the food. We bought in Indian food and she distributed it. Shiva, I , Prathiba, Sampoorna and Jyoti had it together. Prathiba is the first non-vegetarian Tamil I am seeing!

Earlier today we went to the German Technical Museum. It was beyond imagination. It had a complete mine and dissected aeroplanes in it!

We have walked miles after miles over the last few days and now the calf muscles and the foot sole is paining like hell.

On the last day of the Lindau meeting we went to Austria on bus and foot. Austria is just too beautiful..it is green green and green all around...all you see is lakes and green fields.

The last function of the Lindau meeting was on the Island of Mainau and it needed us to take a ship trip across lake Constance. It was beautiful beyond description. We went by the side of Switzerland and the scenic beauty was breathtaking. The ship trip was just like a dream sequence. I can't imagine a more beautiful place. It was just like an oil painting straight out of the medieval times. Almost like Lindau, Island of Mainau can also be aptly be called "The land of roses". Roses of all colours grow there all across the island. They grow just like bushes.

In the island of Mainau, I was so absorbed in photographing that I got lost twice! First time I happened to run into the Pakistani team. The Pakistani prof was very nice. We chatted for a long time and he brought me back to the known places. The next time I got lost I ran into Deepti who also got lost in the Island. Then Deepti and I trekked across the Island to find our way back. The only problem was that she was in her trekking shoes and I was in my kolhapuri with my flat blue punjabi. It was painful walking across the island in kolhapuri.

After returning from Mainau island (where Gross gave the closing speech) the following people immediately left for a quick trip to Austria: Prathiba, Shiva, Jyoti, Deepti, Vikrant, Anita , Anupam and me.

I am taking photos at the rate of about 200 a day. My batteries are failing me. I am transferring my photos into my pen-drive and Shiva's laptop.

A lot more to write......

Bye,

Anirbit

Written on 8th July 2008

Dear All,

This is going to be a completely disorganized writing...it is night 2 Am now (a soft German opera is playing in the background in this hotel lounge) and I have to wake up tomorrow at 6Am to catch the bus...tomorrow we travel from Berlin to some university and then to Hamburg...so there is no guarantee that I will be able to contact again...

Today it rained in Berlin (it was very romantic) and there is a certain amount of chill...the temperature dropped fast and all I had in the street was that red sweater...some of the Germans took out jackets!...I caught cold!...but Shiva is in his half shirts!

Anyway the hotel I am currently in is probably one of the most aristocratic hotels here...the cost is 200Euros a night...everything you touch here is carpeted and soft...my bathroom is in itself a beauty to see with glass partitions inside it...in my room i have a mini bar attached with all types of costliest wine, beer and cognac filled in the fridge....Shiva and I are living together.

Abhishek Bhattacharya (the great mathematician "Bhotcharge" of South Point and now in Jadavpur University) found me out at the canteen of Technical University of Berlin and pounced on me from behind while I was paying the bill and we met after 3 years. Its ironic that it took us both to come to Berlin to meet! He is doing his internship in the telecommunications lab at TUB. We had lunch together and he is completely unchanged. We talked and laughed for more than an hour. He was at Lindau a few days ago and I missed him by a whisker there.

We both realized that we are completely unchanged when he gave his trademark shout in the canteen "Kire Onirbit"....to the utter surprise the other german students there.

He has visited one of the Hitlers concentration camps and he was telling me what a frightful experience that was..Bhotcharge is planning to take me and Shiva on a trip to the gas chambers at Auschwitz....Bhotcharge has gone to East Berlin too and he was telling me that he has seen active Nazi groups there.

Anyway yesterday given the tremendous interests of me and Prathiba, as soon as we landed in Munich we visited the "Holocaust Memorial" (the amazing achitecture built in Berlin in memory of the Jews killed by the Nazis) and the amazing glass tomb of the German Parliament......When I was in class 9 I had read about this exciting glass structure in readers digest as one of the best architectural specimens of the 20th century...yesterday I visited it....it was breathtaking.

We also saw a piece of the Berlin wall. Every corner of Berlin bears testimony to the Nazi movement and the destruction of the WW2...the city can send shivers down the weak spines.

Again at the insistence of Prathiba we found out an Indian restaurant and had lunch there....a punjabi dhaba where I and Prathiba shared a 7Euro plate of Chicken Curry and others had vegetarian food....The shop is called "Bolliwood-Berlin"....In Munich we had lunch at an Indian restaurant called "Indian Mango"....these places give unlimited rice to Indian customers....but tonight Shiva and I went on a walking trip of a few kilometers to one of the oldest churches of Berlin...and hence no dinner...he had 2 cup-noodles and thats what we had...he took some chocos and complan..but I didn't.

Shiva did his 6th semester of IIT at NU Singapore and his last summer internship at US and hence he is more experienced about living outside India.

Within the group now there are a lot of sub-groups...each goes out in its own plan...In mine and Shiva's group..the ladies in power happen to be Prathiba and Deepti...they have taken posts of finance ministers and hence it is impossible to buy anything while going to the shop with them...Prathiba and Deepti have measured out how much money to be spent where and hence they have prevented us from buying anything interesting since whatever I find interesting they call it too expensive.

The men are finding it impossible to ignore the precautionary force of the ladies Prathiba and Deepti. Prathiba is also the disciplinarian in this sub-group who is also controlling our voice levels...but giving us scary looks every time the men speak at decibel levels higher than what she has set as the maximum decent level...she says "You are spoiling the Indian reputation!"

Other officials are asking us as to how come we are so silent than the other Indian groups in the past.
The "Prathiba effect"!

No cuckoo-clocks....the cheapest ones are 50euros and they look bad...the good ones are 150 euros each!

I visited the Technical University of Berlin. As usual the only university that they associate to India is the IIT. Seems that the IITs and TUB are setting up joint collaborations. Except for their nano technology and telecommunication labs I found TUB pretty much non-impressive.

I had done a training program in the best LASER lab in India at Indore.
Compared to that the laser lab of TUB is just childish and crude.

They have spent 5.5 million Euros in setting up the nanotech lab there! No wonder in India experimental Physics is suffering like this. They have expansion plans of TUB nanotech to 35million Euros in the next 4 years! I was amazed by their water and air purification system in the nano tech labs. They purify water to 18megaohms of electrical resistance and air to 10 ppm! (compare to the fact that normal european air has 1billion ppm)

In TUB the telecommunication lab is run by T-mobile and it costs 135million Euros!

The amount of funding available in this world in certain areas of research is just unthinkable and then it seems to need justification that String Theory is suffering from such an intense fund crunch.

It was a theme emphasized over and over again by the Nobel laureates that without extremely sophisticated laboratories further progress in experimental Physics is just impossible since the effects we are looking for today are so subtle.

But my experience with the German research tells me that the difference is simply in money and attitude. Indian science is still not so bold to try any new idea. But probably such huge financial support brings in this courage. Indian scientists need to get far more aggressive than they are and need to build in some more amount of killer instinct to be always the first one to achieve the breakthrough.

Indian science is still far away from developing that uncompromisingly ruthless attitude that nothing but the best shall be pursued and everything even slightly mediocre shall be trashed.

But the only way to break this cycle seems to me be to pump in a few milllion euros into Indian science. The rate at which technology seems to be evolving in Germany it seems to be well beyond the reach of Indian science in any near decade unless something is changed drastically.

Today Prathiba, Shiva, Jyoti and I saw a rally in Berlin protesting the US led attacks in Iraq. We took the leaflets...the statistics was scary...Prathiba is completely anti-US..Shiva is the diplomat.

Today we were given a special reception by the Indian Embassy at Berlin at the "Tagore Hall"...we had idlis!
{Prathiba and I felt connected to home-town Chennai!}

Now it is 3Am..and I am hungry!

The soft German opera in the lounge sounds ever more romantic in this chilly and silent night that has befallen on Berlin.

Bye,

Anirbit

Written on 13th July 2008

"Yesterday I came back from the 58th Nobel Laureates-Students meeting (18th in Physics) at Lindau, Germany. {I am currently in Delhi finishing off the final formalities}

It was an experience of a life time over and above the amazing feeling of representing one's motherland in an international conference. During this I met and talked and had dinners with various Physics Nobel Laureates. It was a great time interacting with them. Apart from the technical exchanges it was a powerful experience to feel the courageous creative spirit of the Nobel Laureates and the attitude of challenging every supposedly known idea to break presumed barriers.

After the meeting we went to a trip across some of the best universities of Germany at Berlin, Bonn, Hamburg and Munich. During these we were hosted some exotic dinner trips on cruise liners across Lake Constance and the River Rhine. During one of these trips I had a meeting with Mr.Kapil Sibal (Minister for Science and Oceanography for India). He was telling me about the formalities been completed for establishing 2 Max-Plank institutes in India.

On the end of the journey a joint meeting was held at the headquarters of DFG (German Research Foundation) at Bonn along with the delegates from China. At that meeting at the conference hall in Bonn, I gave a speech as the spokesperson for the Indian delegation.

DFG is launching a special program for collaborations with India through its new upcoming huge program called "New Passage to India". Many of the big institutes in Germany are part of this program.

It would be a great impetus to CMI if CMI Physics can become a part of this endeavor.

I am trying to understand from them how CMI can specifically gain from these collaborations that are going to burst onto the Indian academic scenario within the next few years. Unprecedented amount of collaborations are going to come and CMI Physics I feel can grab these to build an international image and get out of its current state of complete anonymity.
"

The great Indian red-tape

2010-01-22T23:09:00.000+05:30

There is just too much happening in India to feel sad about.

To start off it was Indian government's insult of the sport Hockey by offering them peanuts. I am not saying that hockey and cricket should be paid equally a priori but from the government side they can't have double standards with regards to facilities,funds and time slots on DD. Its a different matter if one of them can attract greater revenue than the other from commercial sources like sale of tickets, advertisements etc. And then came along the protests from Abhinav Bindra and I empathize with him a lot given that I too feel like quitting research every morning I wake up, just that my love for science overruns all institutional factors. But I am not sure if things continue the way they are then how long I will be able to sustain my life purely driven by personal love for doing science. And then there was this unimaginable intelligent move by the Rajasthan Government to register child marriages as a way of preventing them! {Thinking of telling them that a course on "Logic' is being offered in the Computer Science department of TIFR.}

To top it all has been my exciting experience with the online passport application where the form seems to reflect very well the computer programming knowledge of the Govt of India. If I type the access code then the email id gets deleted and if I edit my height then my address gets deleted and finally when I click "save" the form simply disappears! And our technologically evolved govt. rules tell me that I can't go in with my paper application unless I have filled my online form. Accompanying it was my extremely fruitful visit to the passport collection center in Colaba, Mumbai where after keeping me waiting in that filthy place till 2Pm on the pretext of lunch-time, they told me that such queries like mine about renewal of expired passport, are answered only before 1Pm and rudely shut the doors on me. I was felt so full of gratitude at this extremely timely piece of advice.

And to add to the on going scenario, NDTV decided to censor my comments on their web-page when I commented about the Hockey issue an Bindra issue. Wonder what NDTV found objectionable about my comments! And I wrote to Sashi Tharoor and his office about the fiasco I am facing with my passport and there has been no reply from his office. I also wrote to NIC and the passport office about their extremely well-designed online passport form and I am also waiting to heard from them for many weeks now.

In the light of this miraculous India that I live in talking about CMI sometimes looks like talking of of an institute in a far away land far from the madding crowds.

Think big to do big

2010-01-22T20:16:00.003+05:30

Given that it is the start of yet another Gregorian year, I plan to talk of some positive things. The Gregorian year is just an excuse anyway to decide on "a" day to do this. So I decided to talk about some of the positively memorable aspects about Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI), my undergraduate alma mater.

There are definitely somethings about CMI that I miss badly in TIFR. The most important thing is attitude. Not everyone in CMI was say as hard working as some exceptional people in CMI were but large fraction would appreciate a progressive idea. At least many would value an idea even if not all of them would contribute to it. While in CMI I used to feel sad that many who value an idea or benefit from it but would not contribute to the idea. Like there were students who would consistently come to many of the student-seminars without ever giving any student-talks. At that time I used to feel sad that these people are not getting involved actively enough.

But now after an year and a half in TIFR I feel that even those students of CMI were doing something pretty important. The situation can get sharply worse if one lacks even non-contributing appreciators.

In TIFR I find it exceedingly hard even to find people who will at least encourage an effort by just their mere presence. Haven't yet given up all hope since I see some faint glimmers here and there but then its isn't trivial to keep hopes high.

Reminds me of a comment by Narayanmurthy (of INFOSYS fame) which he made in a different context in an interview to BBC . "in India it is easy to lose hope and to set ambitions low"

There was something intrinsically "international" about the attitude of many CMI students with whom I had important interactions. The way they thought was very often not tied to any locality or a nation. There was a general appreciation of something "good" irrespective of the regional identity of that good thing. It manifested in simple basic things like together watching a beautiful French film like "Amelie" and also manifested in more deeper ways when people engaged in complicated debates after having jointly watched a 'TED' talk. I remember the complicated debate on existentialism that ensued as the aftermath of Arul motivating some of us to watch a TED talk by Richard Dawkins. Not that these debates always had a profound depth but just that people found it worth their time to even spend 5 minutes thinking about such a topic raises the general atmosphere quite a few notches above TIFR. {Anyway Richard Dawkins came back to CMI minds many many times like later through Nivedita's support for the theory of "selfish gene"}

I do strongly miss this "global' outlook in TIFR where very often discussions can get highly local in nature and concerns being discussed would be very hard to appreciate for say a visitor from Nigeria to the institute. Its a different fact that even I find it hard to appreciate the worth of many of the coffee-table-dinner-table discussions in TIFR. Very often the discussion might involve precise details of the geography of Kolkata or the bars in Mumbai which somehow never featured in my priority list in life.

I somehow do value quite a lot a principle that those efforts aren't very important whose root cause can't be explained to a stranger to the discussion. Like if we are discussing theory of spin precession in quantum theory, a physics acquainted student from say Norway can equally participate in it as a physics acquainted student from Kolkata. (A history student might find it harder but not impossible and anyway requirement of subject affiliation doesn't seem narrow to me like requirement of geographic affiliation since subject knowledge is much easily acquirable. Its more to do with the objectivity of the requirement.) Unlike say a discussion about Uttam Kumar (some actor in Bengali films) which will make no sense to a visitor from Japan and even he is forced to see a movie of his with Japanese subtitles might still find it hard to appreciate it!

"being appreciable to a geographically disconnected audience" is in my opinion a good guiding principle while judging whether the current direction of effort is meaningful. I do have a strong feeling that very often sustainability and reach of an endeavour is governed by whether its worth can be felt by someone culturally and geographically disconnected from the people putting in the effort. Like you don't have to be acquainted with Japanese culture to appreciate a movie by Kurosawa. It cuts across boundaries in a self-contained way. And I have heard similar comments by many foreign appreciators of Satyajit Ray's movies that they appeal to people who have never ever even heard of Bengal.

The situation is much more obvious for scientific pursuits. I don't need to know the country Germany very well to appreciate Quantum Theory though most of its creators were German.

This issue of non-locality of pursuits is seriously tied to the issue of progress of knowledge. I somehow value highly the fact as to whether I have learnt substantially new things by the end of a day or have I just say sharpened my high-school skills which would be the case if I say spent the whole day doing numerical simulations on Mathematica.

Like in TIFR when I proposed to a table of mathematics students, "Hey, You know what these Reshetkhin-Turaev invariants in topology are? Lots of people seem excited about it and they say that it is connected to quantum field theory. How about some of us trying to learn this stuff?" The response was a sarcastic laughter probably because I did not use enough epsilons and deltas in my statement to make it sound worthy enough of a TIFR maths student.

When I proposed to a bunch of TIFR physics students, "Hey let us try to learn some of this work that Schoemmer Pries and Theo Feyd and Reshethkhin are doing on Topological Field Theory. Seems it is interesting." Again people laughed at me probably because I didn't use enough order of magnitude estimates or Mathematica in my statement to make my statement look worthy enough.

When I proposed that we should have courses on 'How to write better scientific documents?" or that we should start efforts on LaTeXing courses by scribing and hence adding to free knowledge on the web again people laughed at me.

When I proposed to have a regular web-page to update the sports activities of TIFR (like regular inter departmental cricket and badminton or these days many people are practicing for marathon these days) again people laughed at me.

When I proposed to donate money to the Wikipedia which is extensively used in TIFR for assignments again people laughed at me.
(I convinced my mother about the virtues of free knowledge movement enough that she donated 100$ to WikiMedia)

When I proposed that we should have courses on "How to teach well? or How to grade well?" (like the one's in Harvard where they try to train people about grading well) again some of the so-called best physics students of TIFR laughed at me.

When I proposed to some maths students of TIFR to start actively joining the discussions of MathOverflow (from which I have been benefiting a lot) again they laughed at me.

Probably I haven't been saying things which add numerically to the CV or the mark sheet or worse I probably don't propose things which will enhance getting big pot-doc positions.

Wonder why I don't feel like tuning my activities to generate either marks or to enhance my post-doc chances or enhance my salary. Wonder why I day by day see an essential conflict within the Indian set up between trying to learn and trying to create credentials.

At the end of the day what happens because of the narrowness and locality of efforts is that these efforts are largely disparate and don't add up. More seriously this "local" attitude to life severely affects one's approach to science in general. One might just end up having solved a few "locally" interesting problems without having evolved a "program" or a larger picture. (the word "program" very often is an euphemism to the "Langland's Program"!)

This reminds sharply about what Gelfand had to say about the 4-colour problem that it was a very hard problem to solve but then even if it is solved he doesn't see it to have led to any non-trivial effect on mathematics. He thinks that it was just another hard problem but having no deeper implications.

Gelfand saying this makes things more palatable and on a personal scale too I would be wary of working on a 'problem" just because it looks hard. There are many hard problems. But is the world dying to know their solutions? Will the world change from the way it is just because some scientists cracked some arcane problem which they can only appreciate?

Coming back to my dear old CMI. The fact which made CMI stand out of the crowd was this essential sense of importance. Among many of us in CMI we had a priority list which was very different from students in ANY college of India. At least what was considered important by quite a number of us. It was very important to understand that there are functions which can be infinitely differentiable at a point and yet have no Taylor expansion. It was important to understand why a group is what it is. It was important to understand why a Dirac monopole is a Hopf Fibration. It was important to understand the equivalence between claiming a complex valued function to have a complex linear derivative and it satisfying the Cauchy-Riemann equations. It was important that a wave-function in quantum theory could be undefined on a set of measure 0 and yet be a perfectly good wave-equation. It was important to ask when is an automorphism of a group inner. It was important to understand the difference between defining a basis on a set to generate a topology and to define a basis for a topological space. It was exciting to understand how filters can be used to simplify the proof of the Tychonoff's theorem. It was very exciting to debate whether social work is devalued if the workers are paid. It was a matter of great concern if the little children in the neighbouring construction site at TCS did not have enough pencils and paper to write. Many of us would take notice if a public email used too many "!" or "...". Some of us would spend the whole bus journey from Siruseri to T.Nagar debating whether an acclaimed scientist can be respected if he is say convicted in a rape case. And we spent months debating over dinner tables whether all forms of academic help should be charged and how to decide which service deserves how much money. More often than not we debated n the reach of quantification of human values and services. "To what all can one attach a dollar value?" was a pertinent theme of many CMI discussions I have been in. And not to mention the innumerable debates on free knowledge and on open source. Its pros and cons were debated to death and probably it was one thing about which there was a working consensus that open source is the way to go. The good and bad of Wikipedia was a recurrent theme. Quite distinct from this CMI attitude is the atmosphere in many colleges of India where Windows defines the horizon of softwares and pirated software is unquestioned. And many of these debates were generated in the innumerable public mailings through our internal emailing system. And Alan Turing like Richard Dawkins was another pretty frequent element of discussions. And some of us would have discussions far after the sunset during those extensive regular bus journeys trying to understand whether "love" is necessarily sexual and trying to understand whether to "date" someone comes necessarily with sexual undertones. And we would also debate whether "free will" could be suspended for the sake of the discussion and whether democracy is somehow orthogonal to the whole idea of having the freedom of "choice". And some us sent 100 SMSes to each other in 1 day to resolve such debates.

How insane some questions may sound but it is important that we debated what millions across India would take for granted. It was this sheer spirit to question what could be taken for granted that marked for me the libertarian spirit intrinsic to CMI and intrinsic to the sharp progress in thinking that much of the participants in those discussions showed and they continue to affect the world wherever they are.

Is this fraction of people still there in CMI?
A fraction of people who would spend time to "think big" rising above local needs and preferences and personal histories and experiences?

I somehow feel that it is extremely crucial that the education system inculcates the idea to question everything around and to rise above local issues of salary and food and bus fares and photocopying of class notes and crushes on some one and thoughts of a happy married life. The education system need to train to think of the same questions on a more general framework of economics, educational administration and free knowledge movement and relationship dynamics and theories of marriage stability. Progress of a society is crucially hinged on having the ability to think in the large and to think in ways not attached to geographic,linguistic and cultural features but in terms of intrinsic dynamics of being human.

When we in CMI started the social organization of "Spark" for teaching the kids of the construction workers in the neighbouring TCS campus none of us had either the experience or the know-how to go about it. But then the crucial thing about the effort which I would like to emphasize inspite of the short-lived nature of the effort is the fact that our plannings were not constrained by our abilities of resources. We did "think big" at every stage.

An effort has little chance of success if the goals and plans are made within the limitations of resources and abilities one fathoms to have. It is important to first plan towards a desired target (hopefully big) and the try to build up resources and abilities to fulfill them.

My maternal grandfather used to say this very often "You aren't going to achieve anything if you start with a mediocre aim" He always warned of the recursive disaster of thinking small since in that case not only is your aim small but even your efforts are limited by not just your abilities but also by your perception of what your abilities are!

I somehow strongly feel that what was crucial to the meteoric rise of CMI on the academic scene of India was this "international" attitude among may students coupled to efforts not limited by perception of abilities. So what if I have to call a few floors in a building in the market in T.Nagar my college and have to live in dilapidated hostels, I still can think better than the best anywhere in the world. It was very easy to try for simpler things and mediocre things being in a shabby setting but some of the CMI students I know did not let their efforts and thoughts be limited by the mediocrity of the set-up around.

On small scale this affected the choice of books we read in CMI for our courses. Many of us read the best graduate texts in the world to keep ourselves at the cutting edge although Internet was the only window we had to glimpse at the frontiers. One can write an entire article on how the 24 hours broadband internet connection of CMI coupled to a computer-per-student ratio positively affected all its activities. This also couples to the active blogging from CMI. Even those who did not blog would actively read the blogosphere. Blog was quite a part of CMI.

This is a very important feature of thought that identified CMI at one point and it is crucial that this is spirit is maintained at any cost whatsoever. Efforts need to be taken to ensure that CMI always has this crucial fraction of high-calibre people who will use the extreme freedom of the institute to put in efforts to think and work along such "global" questions rising above local issues and limitations and always lift the atmosphere away from sinking into questions like "when will the semester end and when will i eat home cooked food again?" Some people whose thoughts are not hindered by their personal background and experience but is fuelled by a greater view of what is fruitful at large.

Although I can't ignore the reality that for some getting grades in the exams was too important to look at any of the above questions and they never featured in any of these discussions. Respecting their choice to do so, I hereby completely ignore the world which they inhabited inside CMI completely orthogonal to the CMI in which I lived.

Inspite of all the ethical vacuum and the almost-non-existence that I felt with the Physics education of CMI, on mathematical and social fronts I gained from it far more than I could have gained from any other college in India that I have heard of.

Are we sure that enough is being done to maintain an atmosphere where students can ask questions and discuss issues deeper than what I described above in the CMI I saw?

Homi Bhabha Centenary Symposium, Examination systematics and Ramakrishna Mission.

2009-12-08T13:38:00.003+05:30

Let me just jot down a few things that have been intriguing me off-late from my latest trajectories of life.

The topics covered are in this sequence.

1. Homi Bhabha Centenary Symposium
2. Examination systematics (inspired from the state in TIFR)
3. Ramakrishna Mission

On the first count I will explain 9 observations during the function including description of brief meeting with Prof.Rajaram {for the n^th time!} and meeting Prof.Govind Swaroop and Nobel Laureate C.N.Yang. On the second count I plan to make 5 suggestions on how to improve its credibility as I am seeing from the dismal state of affairs of this particular system in TIFR. And on the last count I will narrate some disappointing aspects I observed about Ramkrishna Mission on my latest visit to their branch in Bandra in Mumbai.

The central connecting idea (as is with most of my writings) among these pot pourrie of thoughts is mostly summarized by a poignant statement by Pip in Charles Dickens's legendary novel "The Great Expectations" brought again to my memory by the writings of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen,

" In the little world in which children have their existence there is, nothing so finely perceived and finely felt as injustice"

* First 9 reflections about the Homi Bhaba Symposium lectures that are going on in TIR to mark his birth centenary.

1. Seems it has become fashionable among the foreign speakers to do some amount of pandering to India even though it was obvious that their attempt to connect their talks to India or Homi Bhabha was looking deliberate and contorted.

Why not just give a straight and professional scientific talk?

{Like what Shiraz did! He never ever mentioned Homi Bhbha in his talk and straightaway got to the busieness of explaining the current state of the search for Quantum Gravity. And as usual he gave a pretty much of an audience-capturing talk though nothing he said looked new to me because I have heard these stories from him and others many times earlier. But I am sure it was exciting to whoever heard them for the first time. Shiraz's talk is always also an exciting performance to watch!}

2. The orchestra by Zane Dalal from the School of Performing Arts and the dance presentation by the troupe of Dr.Mallika Sarabhai would win hands down in terms of quality with respect to almost all the other technical seminars. It is not clear to me why the government should give more funds to fundamental research rather than to development of artistic schools! I wonder whether apart from Nobel Laureate C.N.Yang's lecture any other lecture would be comparable to the above artistic performances interms of effect of capturing the audience's imagination.

I think the Indian scientists need to realize that when they are on the stage giving a seminar they also have a certain responsibility to catch the audience's attention since for many many topics in science the society doesn't seem to have any ovious reason to feel obliged to listen to what they have to say (like for most of mathematics and topics like particle physics and String Theory!)

Like the artists who perform, scientists too need to ensure that their performance is attractive to the people. Though never compromising on quality like the stunning lectures of Prof.Manjul Bhargav who sets an example of how to get the balance right. And one can't forget the legendary Feynman in this count!

3. I find it completely incomprehensible why all the Indian speakers and many of the Indian scientists attending the talk have to come dressed in some suit with a tie! Does India lack so much creativity in fashion that there is no other dress that people can find except that archaic British dress!? First of all it is so monotonous to see a number of black suits going around and further it seems so much weird to see so many Indians tip-toeing a particluar old-fashioned dressing style. As mostly over the last 3 years I am wearing some hand-embroidered khadi kurtas bought from the Gandhi Ashram in Sevagram. I just love the comfort these clothes have compared to anything else I have ever worn!

4. When will the Indian scientists (especially the mathematicians) stop talking of what science happened before 1965?

(thats so demoralizing to the students and so much repelling to prospective students to think of joining a place where people talk of what happenned before 1965 in a forum whose catchline contained the word "frontiers"!)

Has nothing interesting been done in TIFR in mathematics in the last 34 years that we still have to talk of what Seshadri, Ramanan and Narsimhan and Raghunathan did? Where are the young people? (Wasn't the catchline of the function "Science and Technology at the frontiers"!?) Isn't the audience already sick of listening to the same old things? (not taking away anything from these stalwarts and especially my great teacher Ramanan but still one can't ignore that the mathematics scenario today has moved universes away from the shadows of Bourbaki and Seminaire Cartan!) Why not have talks focussed on say the kind of mathematics that gets discussed in the blogs like Secret Blogging Seminar?

On the contrary to the above general depressing scenario with most Maths and Physics talks I was very impressed that the biology talks (the stunning seminar by Prof.Vidita Vaidya of TIFR on how emotional shocks and psychological stress during certain specific periods in childhood have detectable imprints at the molecular level of neurophysiology of the animal) and the chemistry talks and the climate change talks (the awesome talk by Swaminathan warning against blind use of genetic engineering but instead coupling organic farming to newer technologies) and the enriching talks on imaging by Knut Urban or Sunil Sinha focussed on what exciting things have happenned in the last 4-5 years and the string theory talk by Shiraz also went only as much back as 1997.

Can't we have it as a rule that the speaker cannot spend more than 10% of their allotted time on things done before 20 years from the date of the talk (or may be their microphones will get automatically switched off!) ?

5. I simply could not understand why so many of the top-notch officials in the DAE and BARC and TIFR paid homage to Prof.C.N.R.Rao. Even in Prof.C.N.R Rao's speech I simply could not find what was exciting about whatever he was talking of. Some new inorganic analogue (BCN) of Graphene has been found and some new properties of Graphene have been found. So? Whats the big point being made? I couldn't see the talk going towards some central principle or some bigger perspective and I somehow could not notice any error bars on any of the graphs he showed. I am not sure whether an experimental data has any value without the error bars or is this understanding of mine applicable only in Physics and not to Chemistry? I have earlier interacted with some Graphene specialists in my life (like Prof.Krishnendu Sengupta and Prof.Mandar Deshmukh) and heard their talks too.

{I first learnt perturbation theory in Quantum Theory from Prof.Krishnendu. His teaching was penetratingly insightful.}

6. As I briefly mentioned a little ago I was feeling pretty frustrated to see the average crowd age to be close to 50 probably! Where are the young people?

Where are the scientists in the age group of 25-35?

Why aren't they on the stage talking of what they are doing?

I understand as part of the celebrations a Young Scientists colloquium was held but even then the mathematics speakers were of the age around 50 and they never seemed to talk of the kind of things that I see getting discussed in the recent geometry seminars around the US. Something looks a bit disturbing. At that colloquium again the other subjects did seem to have put up a better show than mathematics in terms of how recent the topics were and definitely in terms of age of the speakers!

7. I met Prof.Rajaram Nityananda yet again (I had done a course on GR with him during my undergrad at CMI and he is the Director or NCRA and I have had many many exciting interactions with him over the last 4 years initially over emails to learn relativity! ). We yet again debated on whether it is very special that laboratory results match only when the Riemann-Christoffel connection is chosen and not any other of the infinite possible connections and about my point that Einstein's equations doesn't seem to use all the geometric information that is available from the connection on the space-time manifold. It is a coarse grained theory in some sense. But it seems it will take me much further studies and further research to convince Prof.Rajaram of my point which he currently dispproves of.

I wonder if there is a reformulation of Einstein's Theory purely in terms of the connection on the tangent bundle of the space-time manifold with no reference to the metric. Why is that not possible if gravity is to affect only the curvature of space-time which in general is completey determined by the connection with no referece to the metric? May be a wild imagination of mine but if realized that should convincingly prove Prof.Rajaram wrong.

Or what is more likely is that Prof.Rajaram is actually correct but his motivation based on mere experimental evidence is not convincing enough. Isn't it simply possible that there are einstein-like theories of gravity which use some other connection rather than the Riemann-Christofel one but just that experimental precision is not good enough to distinguish? Or may be Riemann-Christoffel connection is the only one that works but just that there is some deeper theoretical reasoning that rules out all the other infinite possibilities rather than just Prof.Rajaram's hand waving.

Will take me a lot of hard-work to decide whether my aesthetic motivation is realizable or is Prof.Rajaram's conviction of its impossibility.

8. I met Prof.Govind Swaroop. I wanted to meet the designer of the breath-stopping GMRT which I visited a month ago. This unparalled huge machine was built completely indigenously headed by this man. (he says that he designed that as an aftermath of a new-year drinking bout on 1st January 1982!) Even today there is no match for that telescope anywhere in the world. Unless Australia comes up with SKA, GMRT will have its monopoly for may be another 5-10 years. Over manythings Prof.Govind was grieving about the state of teaching in India and that Government is mindlessly opening up new institutes when there is a complete deficiency of competent teachers and on the other hand 5000Crores of instruments is lying unused in the Indian laboratories with nobody to use them. And Prof.Govind Swaroop on knowing that I am an ex-student of CMI got very excited and said that I am one of the lucky few to be from one of those very few state-of-the-art undergraduate institutes of India, 'the Seshadri's place". {I am now sure he has no clue of the state of the Physics departmnet of CMI!}

He told me that he has written an open-letter to the Prime Minister recently which will get printed soon in Current Sceince.

9. I attended a discussion session with Nobel Laureate C.N.Yang where I came to know from him of his extreme frustrations and failures in his life during his college life and as a graduate student. I was quite surprised to hear this legendary scientist talk about his struggles and failures in his life till much later in his career when he did his major works which left an indelible mark on history of science. How he got thrown out of the laboratories for his clumsiness and got a joke about him "Where there is a bang there is Yang" and hence his hopes of becoming an experimental physicist crashed and he didn't like any of the theoretical physicists in UChicago. Hence for quite sometime he felt his career was going no where and he usd to write letter of disappointment and frustration to his friend in China about how he is feeling less and less convinced that Physics is his right career! Good to know the ordinary human stories behind the magic realism that science history books will paint.

Incidentally the lecture of C.N.Yang about motivating the connection on bundles approach to gauge theory from vector potentials and Aharonov-Bohm effect was almost exactly similar to a student-seminar I had given during the second year of my undergrad.

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* Recently a lot of my energy has gotten drained and have been feeling tired as a result of struggling for hours explaining to my electrodynamics instructor in TIFR as to why I deserve more marks in the exam than what he has given me. And these cause immense disturbances to the mind and hence I went to the Ramakrishna Mission in Bandra to spend some time there. I will tell you about some reflections I made there at the end of this writing.

Somehow all this seems a bit embarrassing to be fighting for a few marks in an examination though I understand deep down that my life will not be judged by my marks in some course. The serious judge can find many many more credible parameters to measure me! But I feel thse struggles are necessary as small steps to bring in the much needed clarity and transparency in the grading policies as I have seen in both CMI and TIFR. It is a fight for justice in the long run. It is my struggle to get myself heard with the administration that the students have a right to free and fair judgement and explanation if they are made to sit in exams and that such things can't be left hanging at the mercy of the vagaries of the instructors.

I analyze 5 aspects of marking schemes in exams that needs to be rectified to make it more credible are:

These are drawn specifically from my harrowing experiences with the highly debatable marking schemes in examinations in TIFR and to some extent also in CMI. Today I am student at the receivng end of such situations. Tomorrow I will be an instructor and will be answerable for the justness of the schemes I devise. Hence these questions of justice in examination are of utmost importance that one needs to answer just as Pip mentioned earlier had felt.

1. The sub-division of marks among the questions should be announced publcily in the exam paper and not decided dynamically as a function of class performance and whose answer script it is. I have often been in situations where a difficult question I could do was deleted from the evaluation because most of the class couldn't do it and the instructor needed to save a situation of the class average dropping weirdly low!

2. The marking schemes should be uniform for everone and not dependent on whose answer script it is. I have often been a victim of marking schemes where somehow the instructor perceived me to be a "strong" student and hence decided to correct my answer scripts with greater stirctness and gave me less marks for the same answer for which a "weak" student would get more marks. Differential marking schemes look not only unfair but also wrongly change the student-teacher relation from being partners in learning to that of being contestants against each other!

And very often the instructors have made such schemes public with a dubious explanation that it is unfair to have uniform marking schemes when the students are from diverse backgrounds and departments. What a counter progressive idea orthogonal to free market society!

In some sense differential marking schemes also removes the anyway very little incentive that exists for working hard for a course!

Such practices seem to be deliberate efforts to make appear on paper as if the education system is working very efficiently by artificially cutting out the competitive aspect through unevening of the playing ground.

3. If one is going to have open-book exams then one should be framing questions very clearly stating what all can be directly used from the book and what not. It gets very troublesome for the student if he/she is expected to anticipate what knowledge he/she can borrow from the book. And in general very rarely have I seen Physics question papers which are set with a level of precision which can leave no room for ambiguity. Fortunately probably because of the nature of the subject, my experience with mathematics question papers have been considerably better.

4. The notion of accountability seems to be a bit skewed between teachers and students. After the exam when the instructor says that "As I have said in the class that..." , I have no way to prove that the instructor never ever said such a thing in the class! There is simply no record of anything that the instructor ever said and hence as a student I find it impossible to put up a strong case when I feel that what the instructor said in the class was incorrect. The students simply have no evidence to prove their point whereas as a student my assignment and exam answer sheets are written and hence there is always evidence for whatever I said. And students can get penalized for writing wrong things in the exam but nothing seems to work the otherway!

I think it should become mandatory that after every class the instructor should make available on the web-page a scanned copy of his lecture notes. That will add a lot of accountability to the entire system and if the instructor's teaching is very good then the students will actually benifit from reading the notes. It might also act as an incentive to the lecturers to teach better.

This is regularly practised by Prof.Sunil Mukhi and Prof.Shiraz at TIFR who either get their lectures video taped or put up the lecture notes. Students benifit a lot from this and I think such inspiring practice should become mandatory.

5. Given the current state of corruption in the examination system it will do good if the instructors and the graders interview the students based on what they have written in the answer scripts to check whether the answers are copied or self one. This may look too much of a policing or too much of work for the administration but the time has come for the administration to do a serious crackdown on the matter of corruption in examinations and assignments. May be we can have system of doing these interviews on randomly selected students on random questions in the exam to reduce the burden but woould send-out the efective message. Given the apalling level of corrption in exams and assignments that I see in the courses in TIFR I think such steps are necessary to stop the ongoing collapse. In the TIFR course exams that I have sat through I see students adopting every possible unfair means in the examinations ranging from simple copying to full fledged round-table discussions to excange of answer scripts to even going up to a fellow batchmate to have a chat about some question! The levels of corruption in the examinations and courses is very very demoralizing to us minority few who are working fairly.

While TIFR is busy lavishly celebrating the 100th birth anniversary of Homi Bhabha I think it is worth reflecting whether Bhabha would have been happy seeing such a situation in his institute where people can getaway adopting every possible unfair means in the examinations and assignments! And most dangerously this socially ingrained corruption and a vacuous sense of crime and guilt permeates across all intellecual stratas of the students from the "weak" to the "strong"!

In dark times as now I think I have made a contrinution to Indian science simply by never ever adopting any unfair means in any examination right since I was in nursery to graduate school. I have a squeaky clean reputation in this respect and I think it is all because of my mother who inculcated this basic sense of fair play in me right since I went to nursery. And I never doubted the worthiness of fair play inspite of innumerable apparent counter-evidences. Though it should be a trivial thing to do but in such times as these it seems to me to be a big achievement!

As I grew up I naturally extended this policy of complete transparent fair play to matters of money and human relationships. In a relationship with me there is onething the otherside is guaranteed of and that is complete truthfulness from me. {Though as Morpheus said "I promised you the truth but never said that it is going to be easy". Now choose. Red pill or the blue pill? :P }

My mother would not be so saddened to see me lose if I played fair and put in my best for the goal. Right since childhood she also inculcated in me this basic principle of never setting my ambitions low and then to put in everything in capacity to attain it. And even if I fail she would tell me not to compromise on the ambition. This idea also goes back to my mother's father too with whom I had intensive interactions while he was alive who followed this principle of never lowering the ambitions inspite of every hurdle on the way. (His case is a slightly more poignant one since he could keep such ideas inspite of being one of those millions whose property got burnt in Bangladesh by the rioters during the partition of 1947 and he came into India as a refugee.) Anyway my mother is the greatest person I have ever met in my life and there is definitely far much more to write about her than the format of a blog can sustain. Probably someday I will write a book about this woman whom I know so well and in whom I see an embodiment of the essential human spirit of never letting any limitation curb efforts to excel. The babies in the paediatric wards of the horpitals will unfortunately not remember the perfectionist doctor who looked after them just after birth and who was more stressed by their illness than their mothers. My mother definitely develops some magcal bonding with any baby instantaneously. Her eye of detail and struggle for absolute perfectionsism in every aspect of life has strongly gone down with me. (Though my mother is never satisfied with my efforts for detail no matter how much I put effort into it! Oneday after I had given a talk on Klein-Gordon Field theory to Prof.Shiraz and failed to answer some of his penetrating questions he had told me "Learning should be 100% and not stop at 95%". My mother promptly agreed with Shiraz's philosophy when I told her of how Shiraz grilled me in QFT. I have learnt a lot more from Shiraz's questioning sessions than by reading books on the same topic.)

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Now let me come back to my recent adventure with Ramakrishna Mission. It is not the first time I have been to any of their branches. Almost periodically I seem to get to know people closely who are someway or the other associated to them. And all of them have badly failed to motivate me to join them or belive in many of their principles. I have strong objections to the entire idea of religion or any method which uses "faith" as a substitute for logic. I am strongly in support of the path of reason, reasearch and deductive logic and proof systems. Somewhere down there is a small hope in me that oneday all understanding shall be reduced to axiomatization (though for this statement people like Biologists mights call me naive and artists might call me philistine)

The only 2 things I seem to appreciate about Ramakrishna Mission are:

1. The beautiful quality of the music their produce. I have bought about 3 CDS from them and earlier too I had a collection. The music is distinctive of them and has an amazing soothing effect.

2. Most of their institutions maintain large halls and open spaces where anyone can walk in and sit. This is wonderful given that even research institutes like TIFR hardly provide any large silent space anywhere in the campus to sit and think. The somewhat of a library reading room of TIFR is cramped and more than that the air condition is freezingly distractive. And more over such large open places should be maintained since they can be used as shelters in times of calamities.

But what I found very weird was the ritual of praying and doing a "pooja" of Ramakrishna's marble statue like one sees of every other God's sculpture in most Hindu temples. Why have they made that man into a God? He was a social reformer in many ways and lets not convert him into a soource of something that can be used to cut out logic.

Hero worshipping is getting dangerous for India!

{And such increasing hero worhipping attitude among the scientific student community of India also looks very amusing and ominous! Our education system seems to have created a lot of paper tigers in the student community}

It felt very terrible when I saw that Ramakrishna Mission seems to make money by selling goods that are used in pujas like those weird candle stands and corals etc etc. And my shock didn't end their. They seem to print books for children which have tremendous religious under-pinning! I saw them selling colouring books and drawing books for children which are about drawing and colouring picturs of Hindu Gods and Goddesses and elemnts of Hindu puja! And then I had another revelation when I saw in their shops books to teach the english alphabets to children where for each letter the representative character was some God! Like they had S for Saraswati and Z for Zeus! I find it hard to understand how it is very different from a news report I had read at some-poiint that in terrorist training camps the children are taught the alphabets like "G for Grenade"!

I find it hard to swallow such a base system spanning across the world where every action has religious undertones and even education to children! It looks so contrary to the whole idea that education should be teach people to think. Ramakrishna Mission seems to go so contrary to such simpl ideas by enforcing such particular religious biases even when teaching alphabets to children. The stinking undertone of myth is so very contrary to the age of logic and science that one aspires for and identifies with modernism.

I have a doubt that may be I will have similar sights if I visit book shops of other religions too.

Just that the interwining of beautiful music to religion seems to be a deep knot to cut through. Most of the religions have been source of beautiful music like the aratrikams of Ramakrishna Mission or Sufi music from the middle-east.

I wonder whether the human civiliation could have reached such beautiful music without going through the intermediate issue of myth and religion. Or were they just not imaginative enough to seek out alternatives? Thankfuly today modern music seems to have come quite far away from religious content. But it still looks hard to find a way to preserve the beautiful music like that of aratrikams born out of religions without accepting the asociated slag of myth and religion.

May be we can solve this problem if we think a little more harder.

These days I am voracously reading through the book "The idea of justice" by Amartya Sen. The initial part of the book isn't very well -written and gets slightly repititive but its very likley to get insightful as it progresses as I am already feeling. One more step among my many to get a better undersatnding of the notion of justice and the notion of fairness as in distribution of resources and products. The jeopardy of the Indian education system necessiates my journeys along myriad of directions to get a higher, global and deeper perspective!

A piracy free semster of studies in TIFR

2009-12-08T13:01:00.004+05:30

Proud to make this short announcement that I have finally managed to complete a semeter of studies in TIFR without using a single pirated book or watching even a single pirated movie.

This semester I also created this webpage on free knowledge ideas. With the help of other ex-CMI-ites Shreevatsa (currently in Operations Research department of MIT) and Vipul (currently in the Mathematics department of UChicago) I wrote this article on open-access movement.

Obviously the article in a more finished state than the webpage.

Such a piracy free educaion system should have been trivial to achieve in normal circumstances but in India where Physics courses mostly run in absolute hapazard way and where one has to fight corruption on a daily basis the use of pirated and downloaded books from Gigapedia becomes almost inevitable.

I especially had a tough time trying to get through my astrophysics course where most books in the library are lost or stolen or there is only one copy which has been issued out! And astrophysics books are priced astronomically high compared to other subjects and I can't afford to buy them.

So the Astrophysics course was a real challenge in terms of avoiding pirated means when every other person in the class seemed to have downloaded pirated copies of the book by Dina Prialnik. I had to fight out alternative means. Thankfully the prof. was great (Prof.Alak Ray) and he has himself written a few large extensive review papers on the topics he was covering in the class. I substituted the books by his excellent review papers. Towards the end of the course I borrowed some of his personal books from him. He was anyway a great teacher and probably Prof.Alak Ray is one of the microscopic few inspirational Physics techers I have seen in India. (mostly in TIFR!)

Actually many many courses in Physics in TIFR as I see it and in CMI as I had seen it would not even run without pirated books. Its a serious problem that the education system has to compromise so much on the moral front and adopt illegal methods to keep the institutes running. This is a grave problem that the administration is yet to wake up to. As a principle courses should not be organized unless there are enough number of relevant and affordable books for the course available either in the library or in the markets. I am not sure that Physics is so very important to do even at the cost of adopting illegal means.

The problem was also acutely felt in the courses in Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics where too none of the required books were availble either in the library or the market. I was fortunate to know some very helpful seniors who kindly lent me their books and I sailed through smoothly. But for the rest of the batch they were all depending on pirated books. The situation was stinking of corruption, somewhat forced and somewhat out of limited imagination. And to add to the already abysmal state of ethics the instructors decided to freely distribute pirated books! I protested in writing against such malpractices.

I think such courses should not be organized when the basic minimum resources for studying the subject are simply not available. Anyway it remains debatable to me as to whether it is at all important to teach such sophisticatred subjects to any and every person in the street in developing countries. In developing countries like India where 250 million people go hungry I see no reason why teaching obscure things like Particle Physics or Nuclear Physics should be anyone's priority! Probably it is more important to teach people on means of organic farming and how to synergetically couple it to genetic engineering and to teach people economics. Arrangements should be made to the extent of teaching such sophisticated physics only to them who are interested and not made a part of compulsory courses. {It is a separate question that I am interested in learning Particle and Nuclear physics}

In developing countries like India where the reach of education is negligible it is actually of greater importance to enhance Free Knowledge Movement as explained in the article above.

Access to pirated books leads to further cascading problems. Like one can download all sorts of solution books to questions and obscure books of solved problems from which the students can copy the answers to the assignments. Thus adding to one of the many ways in which the whole concept of assignments in TIFR (and also in CMI as I saw it) has been reduced to a complete farce.

Somehow people seem to have limited their imagination about alternative sources of learning and the first reflex seems to be to download the pirated books from the internet and feed the corruption network. For once I wanted to prove that there are alternative ways in life and hope to continue with it.

And more interestingly people seem to use the euphemism of "e-books" for pirated books!
What is intriguing is that even when students are given 15000Rs per year just to buy books people might avoid buying them but would prefer to download from Gigapedia. This situation is again somewhat due to circumstances like procrurement delays and somewhat due to lethargy of thinking out of the box.

I invested about 8000Rs from my scholarship and 2000Rs from my stipend to buy books in the last 6 months. I also spent about 2000Rs on buying movie DVDs to watch since as a part of my movement I have also stopped watching pirated movies.

This adoption of no-piracy rule for books and movies led me explore resources like Google Videos and You Tube for occasional entertainment more than ever and this led me to discover breath-stopping beautiful newer kinds of music than I had ever heard before. These new exciting finds of mine are songs like "Aicha" by Cheb Khaled from Algeria and "Is it true" by Yohana from Iceland and "In love with a fairy tale" by someguy from Norway and many others. Especially I would recommned people to listen to the Eurovision 2009 version of the song by Yohana. She is awesome!

Had I not adopted the no-piracy principle there was little chance I would have come across these beautiful musical creations across the world.

There are many more challenges to be solved in this process,

1. I still have the problem of eliminating pirated music from my life. Wonder how I am going to find my way around it. It doesn't seem prudent to delete all the collection I have though I haven't added to it in the last 6 months.

2. I still have the problem of some very rare and specialized books in Physics and Mathematics whose photocopies I have with me. I think it would be stupid to now burn them. These books are either out of print or are just prohibitingly expensive to buy and all of them even if in print are beyond the reach of the Indian market. Some of these rare books whose photocpoies I have are the book on "Spinors in Space-Time" by Penrose and Rindler and the book on curvature and betti numbers by Borcherds and a book on Yang-Mill equations on Riemann Surfaces by Atiyah and a book on magnetic monopoles by Atiyah and Hitchin. There is little hope that I am ever going to find these books for sale!

Hopefully with gradual progress of the Free Knowledge Movement we shall steadily be able to solve these problems.

Proposal for change of demands rather than stipend hike for TIFR graduate students

2009-11-04T01:07:00.014+05:30

{Blogging seems to reveal a lot about the skewed priorities of the world. When I wrote about some large-scale issues like reactive self-perception theory or use of technology in elections or nuclear disarmament, nobody ever cared to read the blogs. Now when I write about some very narrow local petty issue of salary hike etc lots of people are reading it and commenting about it!

It seems that we prefer to be living in a radiation filled world and get blown up with nuclear weapons as long as we are paid a high salary.}

I would urge the reader to look at the 17th comment on this blog where I have made more efforts to clarify some of the important counter points raised by a batch mate of mine in the 16th comment.

TIFR never leaves me searching for topics to write about. Almost always something debatable is happening here. So here I find myself in the midst of a huge hullabaloo going on about some students asking the authorities for a stipend hike suposedly in accordance with the UGC rules. And off-late many have decided to sit in silent protest infont of the main canteen for 2 hours daily for a week demanding that their requests be met. Apparently they are disappointed that neither the director is meeting them nor is any progress happening with their demands. I have also been receiving many emails from the coordinators asking me to join the General Body Meetings that they organize for this and to join this demonstration.

I have not attended any of the GBMs or the demonstrations. Simply because I am not convinced of the reasonableness of their demands. I am pretty disappointed at the adoption of such cheap means of protest and TIFR students denting the dignity of the instiute and their own image by choosing such coarse techniques such as mass demonstrations even if silent.

Before jumping to calling me an "elitist", let me list 8 objections and weaknesses that I see with this entire scheme of things,

{Or you can jump to the last italicized paragraph where a person I know for quite some time has summarized what all I have to say here}

Basically I think there are much more important, pertinent and useful ways in which government can pump in necessary money into TIFR rather than increase of salaries. There are issues far higher in priority and areas of monetary deficit where government can pump in money rather than salaries. Along this article I shall propose various such alternative ways of sending money into the institute which are likely to have greater positive impact than just a slary hike.

1. I know students in TIFR who have recently bought cycles costing upto 15000Rs and I have myself bought an Apple iPoD of the same cost from my stipend. We students of TIFR seem capable of affording such objects of luxury beyond fulfilling our essential needs of roti-kapda-makan-internet. None of us are dying of poverty.

Hence I 't see a real "need" for a hike in the salary.

2. There are students in TIFR whose families are dependent on their stipends and they have to send a good fraction of their stipend home to sustain their families. This is the segment of the population which really needs a hike.

Why not put in a precise demand for a need-based-scholarship for such students? Why not ask the authorities to set up a committee to accept applications from such needy students and grant specific scholarships to them on a case-by-case basis.

I am disappointed that this specific demand doesn't seem to have been made.

In general a flat hike to everyone seems quite debatable. One can ask for more incentive based hikes like ask for a rewarding system for students which will increase their salaries by a certain fraction everytime they publish a paper or give a seminar in some international conference. (modulo all the debates of how you can compare quality of research papers etc, one person's single paper might be more non-trivial than another person's 5 papers. I think these questions are secondary here and can be tackled later)

Such hike would definitely add more accountability to the money being spent by the government. It would surely make the student feel more cared for as he/she gets rewarded for efforts and the government can also feel the money getting well spent.

Or why not ask for a salary hike with some added quality check like cutting down the TIFR intake by say half and then doubling the salary ?

Otherwise what is the guarantee that a flat hike in the salaries will not merely add to the sales of the local bar 'Gokul" ?

Is there any guarantee that a flat hike in the salary will actually channelize money into useful directions?

Is there any guarantee that increase in salary will actually make the people refrain from such corrupt practices like photocopying books and downloading pirated movies and books from Gigapedia?

Will just a pay hike ensure that the students actually buy more books and buy the movie DVDs that they want to watch instead of using BitTorrent?

I don't see any such guarantee of good effects of just a flat salary hike.

3. One can surely say that a hike in the salary of graduate students will have little effect in drawing the top-notch students of colleges like CMI, ISI, and IIT to join TIFR for graduate studies. (I have interacted most with students from these 3 instututes) Even if the salary be made 50000Rs per month the top people of these collegs are unlikely to consider TIFR over a place in Princeton or Harvard or a job in an MNC. 50000Rs will be peanuts to the best students of these places since they are looking for and are getting much more deeper returns from their studies than just a big salary.

With even a tripling of the salary TIFR is likely to still lose out on almost all of the of the best people from CMI, ISI and IIT who don't seem to see the incentives here that they see in the options elsewhere. With reasonable confidence I can say that the incentive is not a big salary.

4. None of the mails that I have been sent give me a primary reference proof of the claimed fact that the government has indeed made a rule about stipend hike. The only document I ever received was a clipping from a newspaper (Page 9 of August 18, 2009 Hindustan Times epaper). Now a newspaper report is a secondary reference and definitely not an official document. Who is to say that the article was not just the reporter's day dream?

Apparently they claim to have primary reference but for reasons unknown to me they cannot be shared with us.

5. None of the emails to me state precisely what are the demands they are making and why? Any arbit person on the street can come and shout at the governmnet that "I want more money". So? Should the governmnet pay more money to whoever comes screaming at it? The organizers don't seem to state any clear reasons in any email as to why the hike is being asked for.

6. Apart from the general lack of precision and thinking in the emails that I receive in this regard one is also repelled by the general sense of hype and senstionalism around about it. Many people campaiging for the hike don't seem to have done enough studies about the rule and laws and pros and cons of it. Much isbeing driven by local limited imagination. Most people seem to have conjured up their own personal reasons for why they want a hike and there doesn't seem to be a common consensus. For example some of reasons that I heard from the students are like,

a) I should be paid enough salary so that I can marry and have a family. I am of marriable age and the government should provide me enough money to fulfill this dream.

{One is free to dream whatever one wants. Why should the government go about fulfilling every dream of every person?}

b) I support the hike since the price of food in the canteen has risen by 20% and hence government should compensate for that.

{Seems this person is confused between the idea of a D.A and a salary. And moreover the prices of objects are fluctuations in local economics and government can't implement rules based on such flimsy statistics. One can argue that in the converse scenario the government is likely to reduce the salary once the prices come down. Will that be acceptable?}

c) I want more salary because I think the 12000Rs that I get is too low compared to my peer group who work in IT jobs.

{Then why didn't you join it? I am sure you saw some benifits in joining a research career than an IT job when you made the decision. Has that reason suddenly disapeared?}

d) It is a fight for legal justice since government normally follows the principle that people with equal qualification should be paid equally and the scientific officers of TIFR who have equal or less qualification than the graduate students are paid about triple the graduate students.

{Why should qualification be a criteria for the amount of salary given by the government? I am not sure. I would find it more reasonable if the salary is a function of the impact factor of the job or the importance of it measured in some scale that the government chooses. One can have 3 Nobel Prizes hung up in one's living room and then be a complete drunkard all the day. Hence contributing nothing to anyone. Now should the government pay this person more than others based on his/her past deeds knowing that the money now goes to the wine shop?}

7. Moreover this counting of the salary as 12000Rs is just simply misleading. One should add to it the fact that the TIFR student gets free lodging in Colaba in Mumbai near the sea-shore! Colaba in Mumbai is definitely one of the costliest places to live in India and that too near the sea-shore a plot of land will be worth its weight in gold. Further as a student in TIFR one gets extremely subsidized food and free broadband connection. In this region of the world food and broadband are both costly and here in TIFR one gets one at very low prices and the other for free. So one is being extremely narrow in one's vision by doing such a reductionaist count of the salary.

One notes that the grad students in the US pay for their housing from their own stipend. And house rents near universities like Cornell can be as high as 600$ a month. All this is completely factored out as a student in TIFR. And the pristine location near the sea makes the housing option here far more attractive and costlier. All this one gets for free in TIFR. And the first year students are kept in far more luxurious apartment alsbeit very very far from the instutute and probably the travelling pain nullifies the apartment grandeur.

I would have found it more reasonable if I saw the first year students on a protest demanding housing near TIFR than how painfully far they have to live. Such a protest makes more sense.

Like a another student in TIFR said that he would want to see the kids in the campus protesting against why there is only one badminston court.

I can think of many more reasons for putting up demonstrations and protests in TIFR like,

a) Demand for better classes and lectures.
b) Demand for a complete overhaul of the library (it has currently practically gone defunct! Over the last few months most astrophysics books I have gone looking for have either been lost or stolen or there is only 1 copy issued by someone else. Almost never do I find any book in the library for any of my courses.)
c) Demand for repair of the seeping doors and roofs of Theoretical Physics students room.
d) Demand for fair and transparent grading systems.
e) Demand for upgrade of some of the labs.
f) Demand for better sanitation systems in some of the hostels.
g) Demand for a proper cricket and a football ground.
h) Demand for more shelves to keep books and cubicles.

I would have happily gone and stood for demonstrations demanding any of these things.

But never do I find people so keen on putting up demonstrations and protests demanding these things which seem to me to be of far greater importance than just putting money in the pockets of students. I wonder how many people will be ready to stand for demonstartions for a week for any of these demands.

If one is looking for money from the governmnet then why not ask it in the form of specific upgrades and new facilities? Almost always there is more to be gained by getting money used in building resources of common benifit rather than putting it in the pockets of individuals.

8. One has very little justification being here in TIFR and to ask for stipends comparable to US grad school since a major component of their stipend is a kind of payment they get for TA and RA duties. Unfortunately this idea hasn't come to TIFR in any major way beyond the idea of a "grader" which is just correction of assignments. One should probably make teaching tutorial courses compulsory for the TIFR students to ensure that the next generation of teachers are not of the same inspirng quality that we have to put up with! I can very well say that almost all the TIFR students I know are completely incapable of teaching and that explains the quality of teaching in general in India. One needs to take the job of teaching far more seriously and like Harvard we should probably have courses for students and graders on how to teach and awards for good teaching.

Unfortunate scenario is that some of the "top" students of TIFR would be reluctant to attend classes on how to teach or be willing to take up duties of regular tutorial teaching. It is an interesting paradox that many people who complain of terrible teaching in the classes are themselves reluctant to take up teaching duties. Such hipocrisy lies at the heart of the jeopardized Indian academic scenario.

A stipend hike would make a lot more sense if the students are ready to take up regular RA and TA jobs and demand the hike as a payment for it.

Conclusively I see little reasons why the administration should concede to the demands of the students as they stand now. There is definitely a need for greater money and resources to be pumped into TIFR but a salary hike is definitely not the way to get that in!

Finally let me quote here what Vipul had to say about the entire issue.
He has nicely crystalized many of my amorphous feelings,

``I don't think there is any problem with higher pay per se, but
increasing pay without increasing accountability or answerability
usually has no effect. It might have the effect of attracting somewhat
more talented people into TIFR over the longer term, because
competition for the higher pay will prompt people to try harder for
it.

However, I think the stipend at TIFR is pretty reasonable considering
that most of you don't have any responsibilities other than research
(once you pass your courses). May be it needs to be increased by about
25-30%, but doubling or tripling it seems out of order, particularly
when you also consider that hostel fees are heavily subsidized in TIFR
as well. Most universities in the United States that offer higher
stipends (after controlling for the cost of living, the lack of
subsidy for living costs, etc.) also have students teach or grade plenty of
undergraduate homework -- for instance, last year I was TA for the
undergraduate algebra sequence, and this year I am teaching calculus
to first-years. Besides, at least part of the money for higher pay
comes from the tuition that undergraduates are charged. TIFR doesn't
even have undergraduate education, so almost all the higher pay will
come at taxpayer expense with little in return for the
taxpayer. Perhaps students at TIFR who seek more money should try to
get TIFR to tie in with local undergraduate colleges to offer their
services and help with teaching and grading undergraduate courses."

PS: Experience has made me aware of the many block-headed questions that one gets asked when one is trying to move out of the common road being walked by others. Here one such head-strong question that I guess many will be asking me is "If the demands are met and the salary hike does happen, will you return the extra money since you claim not to need it?"

Ans: I would not. (At this the the person asking me the question might feel a great sense of having drawn first blood and I can hear his/her jeering laughter arising from his/her illusory sense of victory) Firstly I know from previous experiences that returning money to the government can be a very troublesome process and I would like to save that trouble. Secondly in my second point I have said all the possible good effects that a raise in salary can have but is not all assured. At least I can try in my personal case to ensure that the good effects do happen. May be I can then buy some more of the costly books that I am refraining from buying now and mitigate to some extent the corruption caused by many others who photocopy books.

An article that TIFR student magazine "Imagine" did not publish

2009-10-30T00:42:00.011+05:30

I am shocked.
I am saddened.
I am disillusioned.

{Mistakenly some readers of this blog thought that I am perturbed about my article not being accepted to the magazine. I was definitely surprised and saddened at that but that is a much minor reason compared to my central point of protest being that the editors did not inform me of the rejection. I came to know of their decision only when I saw the finished product when all the while over about 2 months I was under the reverse impression! Among many other expected abilities missing from the editors they definitely seemed to lack an understanding of the sensitivities of authors.}

These are those times when I really feel the importance of open-access movement and the great need for blogs in this society when I am faced with the extreme ghetoism that the entire idea of trying to get something published might entail. Like the turmoil and heart-burn I faced during this recent attempt on my part to get an article on open-access published in the magazine called "Imagine" that some noble TIFR students decided to come out with as a part of Homi Bhaba's birth centenary celebrations.

I was naive enough to have put my faith in the professionalism of the editorial team of that magazine. Probably I should have backed out on the entire idea when very early on I received a load of statements from the people higher up when I questioned them on the copyright issues of the magazine. People didn't seem to be thinking enough. The magazine is supposed to come out today and even yesterday when I met some of the members of the editorial board they did not seem to have the basic minimum sense of decency to inform me that my article has been rejected.

And as Mark Antony said on the death of Julius Caesar 'But they are honourable men"

I definitely acknowledge that no matter how stupid their reasons for rejections might be, the editorial team does have the right to reject articles they get. I definitely acknowledge this right they have. What hurt me deeply was the fact that I got to know of the rejection only when I looked at the contents page of the finished magazine which landed on my hands on the day of publication.

The article was not just my own work but it involved extensive painstaking editorial efforts over days by two other people namely Vipul from the Mathematics Department of UChicago and Shreevatsa from the Operations Research Department of MIT. I deeply acknowledge the help and research support that I got from them during the writing of the article.

I definitely have an awkward scenario to face with them as I tell them that the article in which they also put in quite a lot of effort has been dropped by the "Imagine"'s editorial board of TIFR students without any notice.

Hence I make public the article that the esteemed editorial board of "Imagine" neither perceived worthy of publishing not considered worth their stature to inform of rejection:

The article

I feel very sure that Homi Bhaba would have found great satisfaction to see such editorial etiquette being followed by students of his institute.

Or probably there are deeper issues involved here with the publishing of the magazine which I seem to be ignorant of. One of the many pertinent questions that one can raise here is about the ability of the editorial team to read and comprehend articles of size more than 1.5 pages (written in double spacing?) I do realize that not all people have the concentration to read something long especially if it has references and research backing.

I would not want to delineate the issue here but would definitely like to mention here some more associated pertinent questions here regarding the seeming narcissism on the part of the editorial team when they decided to put up a half-page photograph of themselves in the magazine. (Anyone ever heard of it? I have definitely seen magazines like "Scientific American" or "Resonance" where a stamp-sized photograph of the editor comes out but they also put up same sized photographs of every author of the articles which "Imagine" didn't bother to do). One can obviously go on here questioning various other things about the magazine like the pedestrian sense of aesthetics as apparent from the out of context cover page photographs and other such associated cheap publicity techniques. Also one can question the process of selection that the articles written by the editors themselves were subjected to? Or were they given a wild-card entry?

Oh! And before I forget let me thank the noble editors for publishing two of my poems in their magazine. I shall be forever filled with gratitude to the brim of my heart for them doing me this favour.

At least the fact that they did publish two of my poems, lets me claim boldly that this blog post is not just an issue of sour-grapes. Its a question of sustainable transparent policies and honesty.

{Actually this makes me wonder if space was a constraint for the editors then couldn't they have actually asked me to make a choice between publishing those 2 long poems of mine and the article? Somehow characteristically again they seemed to have chosen to play God here and not bothered to give me that option. Given this option I would have any day forsaken my poems and would have opted for this article which took much greater effort for me to write.}

Wishing for a freer world tomorrow.

Wishing in the eternal words of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore,

``Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit.."

PS: To keep the slate clean I should also formally apologize for screaming at one of the editors when I realized this unfortunate state of affairs on the eve of the function. But definitely this apology doesn't mean that I concede even an inch of ground to them.

A brief critique of the movie "War and Peace" by Anand Patwardhan

2009-10-12T14:22:00.003+05:30

Film Director Anand Patwardhan came to TIFR to screen his film ``War and Peace" I watched the film and the panel discussions before and after it and also watched the tape of the discussion on a Pakistani channel about the film with the director and some guests.

Sometimes it becomes necessary to prevent naivety from leading the pursuit of otherwise correct paths and this movie provoked me to reflect on that.

Firstly let me make a basic thing clear that I am strongly against all uses of nuclear energy. I oppose making of nuclear reactors even if it is for "peaceful" uses like generation of electricity or for nuclear weapons. Elementary undergraduate physics education and passing level knowledge of school history books would be sufficient to convince people of why nuclear energy is one of the greatest mistakes of mankind. Let there be no doubt that there is nothing called "peaceful" use of nuclear energy. The entire process of generation of nuclear power whether in controlled or in an uncontrolled way, in many steps causes some harm to the humankind. It is sad that in Nuclear Physics courses this most important thing is not taught!

But then I suppose whatever I said till now was obvious and it will take truthful professional scientists in that field to explain the nitty-gritties of the issue and to be able to frame a convincing document which can stop all pursuits of nuclear energy. And I am not knowledgeable enough to do that.

But this writing is not about nuclear energy but about the interesting movie "War and Peace" by Anand Patwardhan and how he missed the point.

The "discussion" post the movie was equally forgettable for Anand's ability of sarcasm that came to the forefront. I would refrain from debating with people who would quickly resort to such "Smart Alex" kind of attitude that Anand was prompt to adopt whenever questions got tricky. (experience with public debating has taught me to judge a forum for its ability to sustain debates and then deciding whether to join!) His answers to most questions were more of street-smart thinking coupled with a sharp tongue than answer full of insightful thinking or research. After a first few questions it was probably clear that this discussion is going nowhere and asking questions can only lead to that person getting laughed at by Anand.

Not a great way to lead such a complicated movement like nuclear disarmament!

Hence I decided to keep shut during the entire show.
And I also know my inability to engage well in verbal debates but I am more comfortable through the writing.

The essential difficulty with all nuclear debates is the lack of knowledgeable and intelligent debaters on either side of the line. It doesn't take much intelligence to fence-sit in most of such discussions and have fun poking both the sides. The people who really understand what is going on have either bequeathed their freedom of expression to some regulatory body or have taken a laid back style of life. Hence the debate left to the limited imagination of the common man can only at most hope to produce movies like "War and Peace" by Anand.

On the other end of the scale I would like to refer the reader to the article on nuclear disarmament by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in his book "The Argumentative Indian". He definitely gives a better example of leading such discussions. Not that Amartya Sen's approach is fool-proof either.

The 6 basic pit-falls of this attempt of Anand are the following,

1. Completely de-focused.

Had there not been that tiny little almost apologetic mention of the Bofors scandal at the end of the movie, I was beginning to believe that this movie has nothing to do with nuclear power but is an anti-BJP propaganda. Atleast the director was capable of main ting a semblance of political neutrality by his trump card of Bofors Scandal at the end. Although I am not affiliated to any party and have little sense of belongingness to any party, but I have strong objections to movies going around in the public which talk of every other thing in the world except for what they claim to talk about. Like the movie spent so much time on the Tehelka issue that again the audience was dragged into memories of India's sad narrow political imbroglio far away from the bigger issues of possible nuclear annihilation and need for disarmament. But then yes freedom of speech and expression is essential. How else would people get to learn how not to make a movie like "War and Peace" and how else would I get the chance of writing this blog about it! :P

2. The complete lack of research!

I was left hunting after sometime in the movie waiting for it to say at least one new fact about the issue or even at least one interview with a nuclear physicists or an international affairs experts who will explain the details! Not a single one! The movie seemed to too focused on lambasting the politicians and bureaucrats that it completely forgot to give at least a few minutes on the technicalities of nuclear energy and about all the million laws and conferences held around the world to understand the consequences of nuclear power.

The movie seemed to have no place for the many deep thinkers and experts and researchers around the world in the issue of nuclear power. It seemed to have more place for stupid statements by politicians than for research backed analysis of experts.

3. Naive look at deterrence.

The entire complicated issue of nuclear deterrence was thoroughly mishandled by the movie. The movie or the director's explanations after the movie completely failed to move even an inch beyond the common-sense understanding of nuclear deterrence that every lay man on the street seems to have. Nuclear deterrence is much more than just the idea of each country having nuclear stock-piles with a "no first strike" policy or M.A.D (Mutually Assured Destruction). Understanding of nuclear deterrence and whether or not it works requires quite a deep understanding of game theory which is a very sophisticated branch of mathematics.

The movie or the director seemed to have no clue about all the heaps of research available on understanding of nuclear deterrence and the subtle mathematics behind it. Like the documentary could have say interviewed experts in this field for analysis like Robin Powell of Harvard University or Martin Shubik at Yale University.

The movie briefly went to the US but again got lost filming the mass rather than getting hold of experts to add insight to the film.

4. Tremendous focus on mass hysteria.

The movie seemed to spend frames after frames on displaying all sorts of hype that gets pursued by the people about nuclear energy and its consequences. It spent inordinate amount of time filming the multitude of stupid comments by people in both India and Pakistan about how they feel they have become the "superpower" after their country testing an atom bomb. I was left pulling my hair as to when is Anand going to show some non-trivial stuff focusing away from the uninformed comments by lay men on the street each more hilarious than the other. If good movies have a sense of purpose about leading the society in a better direction then why spend so much time showing all the useless things that we anyway know the religious nuts on either side of the border have to say?

Much of the movie looked like a comedy show when they filmed people in Pakistan showing maps of the world where each country is coloured in green demarcating complete conversion to Islam under the title of "United States of Islam" (or something like that) or in India VHP selling maps of the world where each country is coloured orange and a VHP flag posted on each of them.

Such unintended humour content of movie completely distracted from the core debate about pros and cons of nuclear power.

5. Emotional arguments!

This is one of the biggest problems I see with many of the attempts that try to address such deep social issues. Very soon after some shabby attempt at scientific thought the movie moved fast into showing pictures of devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nightmarish footage of heavily injured people of Hiroshima getting treated at the make-shift hospitals post the atomic bomb-blast. No doubt such footage is painful to watch the first time and can give night mares for days afterwards. But then why show them when they actually serve no purpose to any side of the debate!

Showing a horrifying picture is not a substitute for a reasoned argument.

Time and again the director seemed to have lost his train of logical thoughts and seemed to use such emotional crutches of horrifying pictures to move the audience. The same happened when he showed pictures of brutally handicapped children being born to families of mine workers in Jaduguda near the uranium refineries of the Uranium Corporation of India Limited. I agree it is a horrifying story and one of the many reasons why I don't sanction even use of nuclear energy for power generation.

But then again showing these pictures is not an argument for the cause but only makes the director look logically weak who is trying to use such crutches to further his cause as if he has run out of points. The pictures would me meaningful if they were backed by research on their background correlation.

I would very much like to see a movie which promotes nuclear disarmament though research and various other means and doesn't step into the conventional trap of showing gruesome footage of Hiroshima victims.

The use of such cheap methods of furthering a cause send out wrong signals about the director as if he is trying to cut-short reasoned debates by using painful photographs as a short-cut to impose his view on the audience. There is very little room for thinking with the audience once it is so emotionally overwhelmed by horrifyingly painful pictures.

Emotions are not the way to argue a point and can only lead to further quagmires.

Let me illustrate my point by playing the devil's advocate here.

Especially with the Jaduguda photographs one could have easily picked holes saying that he never shows an evidence that the children being born handicapped are due to the radiation damage from the UCIL plant. (except of him showing the Geiger counter readings in the houses and roads but that is far from enough) That children are being born handicapped is a fact and that the UCIL plant is nearby is another fact and just from the statement of the two facts one CANNOT conclude that one is the reason for the other. How do you know that this very child born elsewhere to the same parents wouldn't have contracted the same disease? This cause-effect relationship has to be established through research to be convincing. (keeping up with his tradition at various other fronts in the movie Anand here too missed the necessary element of research!) And only such kinds of arguments can be used to present a case with the authorities when asking for closure of nuclear power plants.

6. Knee-jerk anti-Americanism

This was one more disturbing feature of the movie which blatantly failed to understand the natural diversion that can happen between the opinions of a government and the feelings of the people. It would be a great injustice to the large plethora of people who inhabit USA if they are collectively blamed for war-mongering and weapon-selling that American government is very often perceived to be doing. It is just so wrong! We have so many times heard of mass protests in the US itself against the government's foreign military policies. Now it is just so stupid on the part of the film to keep portraying USA as the devilish nuclear threat on the world as if there is some essentially unifying theme that binds and identifies each and every American!

We all know of the one million stupid things that the US government has been doing over the past decade but to think of them as the identity of the US would be a narrowly reductionist view of US (or for that matter of any country). As a science student I benefit so much from the scientific literature and products produced in the US universities and these are the first things that come to my mind when I think of the US. And I am sure many people have interactions with many other facets of US and it is an injustice to all of them if US is portrayed only as source of nuclear threat.

There are so many different some deeply fruitful ways of Indo-American interaction (like the recent example of Prof.Venkatraman getting Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research done in the US where he went after completing his undergraduate education in India) but the movie bent upon driving its own dogmas set out to video tape some stupid party by some stupid Indo-American ``Club" in Delhi which seemed to understand the only version of Indo-American interaction to be some Indian people doing stupid dances on the stage. I have definitely seen much more elegant and beautiful dance shows from both the Indians and the Americans!

Such reductionist view of any country is dangerous to the world. Like many times I have seen in European literature India being always associated to issues of poverty and malnutrition. That is again another example of narrow perception of a country.

With such non-intelligently made films the cause of nuclear disarmament seems only further weakened. When one has such a daunting task ahead of getting nuclear weapons and establishments removed from all countries one cannot risk even a single weak step or an attempt in which even school children can pick holes.

Nuclear disarmament is the need of the hour and it needs far more intelligent and thoughtful attempts than what one finds in "War and Peace" by Anand Patwardhan. We need more thoughtful people to lead this march who come backed up with more critical research. Thankfully probably not many a looking up to "War and Peace" for leadership!

A discussion with Vipul on education systems

2009-08-24T00:48:00.004+05:30

After we watched the video of the discussion on education between Hillary Clinton and Aamir Khan on education, Vipul and I had this email discussion. As usual to most of our discussions (most of which are technical discussions in mathematics and some are of this kind) between us over the past 4 years of knowing each other it was highly multi-layered and non-linear, convoluted, cross-referenced and self-referenced and hence this is merely an attempt in releasing to the world an approximately linearized version of that discussion,

To get the obvious legal questions out of the way, when I put up the proposal of making these discussions public Vipul said

"You can feel free to put up the content in this email and previous emails online"

Vipul:
Hillary Clinton shows that she's good at acting. Aamir Khan comes out as a reasonably good politician, but he could do with some improvement. It's interesting to note how Bollywood actors are getting so Anglified in their accent. c'mon, the average issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is more substantive.

Me:
Aamir Khan very importantly mentions the importance of cooperative learning versus competitive learning.

Vipul:
This cliche about the importance of cooperative learning versus
competitive learning is like a hundred years old.

When the skill differential between educated and uneducated people
translates to a higher earnings differential, and seats in educational
institutions that train for those "high-skilled jobs" are limited,
competitive learning is a natural outcome. When there is a large
number of job opportunities that depend on education of different
sorts, this "competitive" aspect will reduce.

Me:
I agree that given the current scenario competitive learning is the natural outcome.
But I can't agree that competitive learning is the optimal situation.

It is of utmost importance to create job opportunities which harnesses different capabilities and hence will give an incentive to cooperative learning. But to start off the schools can encourage cooperative learing in hope for a better world.

Today the schools since kindergarten tell you day in and out only 1 thing "prepare for the rat race","compete". This destructive education is probably doing more damage to India than Mayawati's building statues or Lalu's scams.

(Especially in Kolkata and why I am apprehensive of getting my sister back to Kolkata's schools whereas the schools in Wardha encourage a more liberal attitude letting the students hone their personal skills)

Competitive learning is definitely is channelizing useful energies into useless activities.

{Like the average amount of time wasted per day in just travelling to the coaching institutes in the life of a normal high school student. I am sure, I could have spent my energies better in high school if I had better opportunities and more information regarding the opportunities and a more sensitive society around me. I used to be too fatigued to do any useful work, by the time I came back home at 8:30Pm having gone out of home at 9AM. 1 month after all my stupid entrance exams were over, I took to a self-training in mathematics for the ISI exam and that time I think I was most productive working on my own at home and not travelling anywhere. For one thing I was enjoying the process of solving challenging mathematical problems and learning advanced mathematics on my own and more importantly I was more focussed because I was doing only 1 subject mathematics day in and out. I learnt and did more useful science in that time than during all my 2 years before that travelling regularly across the ganga to go to those stupid coaching centers. {And I think it is completely because of mental comfort with the format of the exam and the comfortable self-training that I had done that helped me smoothly sail through the ISI exam and interview.}

Me:
Aamir also emphasizes on the importance of making teaching a lucrative profession and a socially enviable job and the most respected job. To create an environment where the best of minds want to become teachers. He clearly mentions the reverse scenario happenning in India where people uninterested in teaching but land up in this job because of failure in their wanted job.

Vipul:
Yeah, right. Why should the best of minds want to become teachers? Obviously teachers help society, but so do doctors, engineers, and even particle physicists. It isn't clear that the net benefit that a person generates for society through teaching is greater than through choosing one of the other professions. AK offers no comparison of the
benefits to society between teaching and any other profession.

Second, if learning is so valuable for children, schools should have no problems charging children much higher rates and paying their teachers enough for teaching to be as lucrative a profession as medicine or engineering. In fact, governments have maintained control over both the fees charged by institutions and salaries that teachers can draw, even at such "premier" institutes like the IITs.

Me:
I agree with the point that teacher's salaries across India is very low and it needs to be increased. The teaching salaries aren't competitive enough.

It is not just about salary. In India there is absolutely no incentive to learn or share knowledge, sadly even so in the research institutes. The society has to learn to value knowledge and its dispensers. A nation en route development has to first become a strong "knowledge society".

Increasing salaries may be one of the million steps required to achive the above social change.

But I can't agree that the fees across the colleges need to be increased.

Anyway, IITs charge their students quite a high fee which many students coming from various socio-economic backgrounds find hard to pay. And in myriad of colleges that I know there is so much of black-money around that it is apalling! The "cost" of seats in MD courses in some Indian medical colleges in the lucrative subjects like physiotherapy etc is near 20-30 crores! People pay the colleges in 10's of crores to secure a seat for their ward in these departments whereas the students in the merit list don't get the seats.

With so much of disproportionate amount of money floating around in the education system, I can't see a logic to support a further hike in the student fees.

On intuitive grounds I would agree that paying the employed people handsomely might lower the corruption but is there a study which shows that raising the student's fees will have any effect on the black-money floating in the education system?

On more basic grounds we should agree that many students in the IITs find already find it very difficult to pay the fees. I wonder whether this encourages people to go in for MBA after an IIT degree, so that they can "recover" the huge money spent in the entrance process and durng study at IIT!

Atleast I am aware of such thinking in the medical circuit. People who way 20crores for the seat in the medical college. invariably open up posh nursing homes in the big cities targetted at the elite and charge exorbitant rates completely inaccessible to even the upper middle class. These "doctors" are basically trying to recover the money spent in getting the medical degree.

Now the other doctors also want to "compete" with them and start moving into the bigger hospitals which pay more.

At the end of the day there are no doctors who cater to the lower sections of the socity.

Obviously the problem starts at the deeper level that the government is too busy helping AIIMS but hasn't made efforts to open equivalents of AIIMS in the remore corners of India.

Vipul:
One could make a more complicated argument involving social benefits not directly captured by the student ("positive externalities to society") but there isn't anything that special about teaching that generates such positive externalities. Everything does.

Me:
It would be foolish to expect that the "positive externalities to society" out of cultivation and sharing of knowledge will be obvious. Had it been so easy to see then 2 Indians 60 years after independence would not have to write these emails to each other!

I can conjecture that a huge positive externality exists but it definitely needs to be rigorously established to be convincing to the larger population.

And please don't say that the doctors and engineers and the MBA's and the IT sector people and the financial sector people are anyway contributing towards the aim of a knowledge society! They are not! Many of them ideally could have but are not. Most of them haven't probably learnt or created a single new concept in their field after their college and what they did in their college is also highly dubious given that we know/hear of the lackadaisical and the corrupt attitude taken even in the best institutes towards education.

Its actually sad that most potential contributors to knowledge and its sharing are NOT in the teaching profession but are in the above fields.

I am not saying that we can dispense with doctors and engineers and the MBA's and the IT sector people and the financial sector people, but we can probably do with a lesser number of them whereas we need to hugely multiply the reach and quality of education in India.

Me:
Hillary's mention of the famous research by Howard Gardner of Harvard University on the theory of multiple intelligences and modes of reception. Why the conventional education system is biased towards only 1 form of communication, an approach proven to be hugely ineffective by Howard's research.

Howard's research was pivotal in illuminating the importance of what in psychology is called "kinesthetic teaching"

You can read about it here: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences#encyclopedia

Vipul:
The theory of multiple intelligences is _not_ a widely accepted
theory. For instance:

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i39/39ferguson.htm

Smooth-talkers in politics have exploited this theory to somehow argue that different people are "differently abled" (rather than "less abled") and so people who "aren't good at academics" may be "good at
other activities". But the evidence for a number of totally _uncorrelated_ intelligences is non-existent.

Me:
It is very difficult to judge whether a person is really incapable in a given particular field or is this person actually grossly less abled in all fields.

This raises the controversial issue as to why should the government spend resources on mentally challenged people. What is the incentive? I had raised this topic once in my blog and I had gotten harsh responses privately and publcily. Ravitej had screamed at me for proposing such a thing!

I am aware of these criticisms. Especially of the lack of data regarding uncorreralated intelligence.

Analysis of standardized tests like GRE,SAT etc have repeatedly shown high degree of correlation (generally >0.6) across the various areas of testing.

Even in my personal experiences I have many times seen that the best students in school in the language subjects is also the same student who does best in mathematics. But not so probably with the sports and performing arts. There is lot of room for debate.

But definitely it is plausible that Ronaldinho is as intelligent with the football as Andrew Wiles is with number theory.

Variation in the manifestation of abilities is definitely completely ignored by the schooling system which is perpetually harping on a unidimensioanl set of skills but again that may be the result of a social pressure to produce employable people where opportunities are less.

Me:
She crucially mentioned the importance of bilingual teaching given the multi-ethnic reality of our modern world.
{For a reverse scenario, I am completely incapable of communicating anything non-trivial in my mother tongue . Though I have taken efforts to learn enough of my mother togue to read the best literary works in that language but to explain it to someone, I will have to shift to english. Even when I am teaching my sister, I very soon shift to english as a mode of communication!}

Vipul:
Bilingual has many pluses (and some minuses).

All this pandering to India ("best education in the world") with a straight face just highlights her political skills.

And all this talk about disparity and inequality! For God's sake! Carping about inequality makes it sounds like the better schools and the worse schools are to blame equally for the disparity.

Me:
I agree. Thats why I said "looking beyond the media glitz" :)

Vipul:
I don't agree with many of the statements you've made, but I don't have the time right now to air my views. Perhaps I will do so at a later stage. Let me just talk about one point.

You say that fees at the IITs are extraordinarily high and many people find it difficult to pay these fees. This is not true. The annual fees at IITs, if my estimates are correct, are less than what a typical IIT graduate can earn in one month (and what almost all IIT graduates can earn in two months) after graduation, even with a job in India.

Most people from upper middle-class backgrounds can pay these fees easily. But your concern about people from lower middle-class backgrounds and poorer backgrounds is valid. Which is why I suggest that people from lower middle class backgrounds, as well as historically disadvantaged/discriminated against groups be given a combination of tuition discounts and loans, while poor people and those from severely disadvantaged groups be given a tuition waiver. In fact, loan availability should not be a problem for people getting admission in the IITs because the IITs open up so many future educational opportunities.

It is ridiculous that the government subsidizes an IIT education to the tune of more than 60% for people coming from rich backgrounds.

Most private nonprofit institutions in the US, suhc as the University of Chicago, charge tuition rates that are 30-40 times those at the IITs (and 10 times those at the IITs even after adjusting for purchasing power parity). The U of C's annual tuition+compulsory fees come to around $42K. However, they offer complete tuition waivers to people whose parents earn less than $60K and substantial discounts to people earning between $60 K and $100 K. In addition, there are merit-based discounts. In addition, there is ready availability of loans. Despite what you might hear about the "burden of college debt"
in the media in the US, most people pay off their college deby comfortably over the next few years. This includes people who take up relatively low-paying jobs such as teaching and working for NGOs.

Me:
You talked of scholarships for the needy in IITs and accessibility of educational loans. I think it is a very subtle point and some of the realities of its implementation needs to be taken into account like

a) I have no objections to scholarships for the needy and its a great idea in parallel to what you said happens in UChicago but then what really happens in the IITs (as I hear from many of my acquaintances there) is that most of the scholarships in the IITs are merit based and hence most of the good students in the batch get them who are rarely ever the needy ones!

It will be politically incorrect to say so but I will stick my neck out so say this that most often the really economically needy ones are not the top performers in the class. It necessarily does not reflect a lack of ability but a lack of exposure and resourcefullness.

We have to ensure that the scholarships retain their meaning by being given to them who are in need of it.

If I take a hard look at it, then I think I was never in really need of the KVPY scholarship. In some sense the govt. wasted its money by giving it to me and that 2.5lakhs could have been better used by giving to one of those many children who can't go to school because of lack of money. At some level I feel guilty.

The part of KVPY that I really needed was that it gave me a ticket into India's best LASER labs and the summer program with Shiraz and the bangalore camp where I met you! The money part of it could have been better used instead of wasting on me.

I think the entire concept of meit based scholarship is non-sense. They will always be gotten by the top students of the big schools in the big cities who anyway don't need it.

Vipul:
Your arguments against black money in colleges confuses the issue of an increase in fees with black money. It is only natural that colleges that keep fees low for most people charge exorbitant fees from people with less merit and more willingness to pay. This is called "price discrimination" and it is often the most efficient way for colleges to make the most money that in turn allows them to provide substantially subsidized service to people with greater merit/need. Priec discrimination is common in the US in many private nonprofit institutions.

I have no opinion per se on the increase in fees in private for-profit colleges. They are only responding to a heavy increase in demand. The solution to the problem is to open new private institutions that compete with them. However, I do strongly feel that the government should allow the IITs to set higher tuition rates, provided that adequate provisions are made for low-income and discriminated-against sections.

Also, your belief that high college tuition forces people into taking jobs that are lucrative to the detriment of the national welfare gets the issue backward. Ricardo, a nineteenth century economist, said, "It is not that the price of corn is high because the rent is high; rather, the rent is high because the price of corn is high." It is not that engineers demand higher salaries because they paid more to get through engineering colleges; rather, it is that parents and students are willing to pay more to get through engineering colleges because of the prospect of higher salaries.

My opinion is that heavy government regulation of teaching institutions has been a major factor in limiting growth in the
education sector. Recently I read a fascinating book by James Tooley, a British person who came to study schooling in Hyderabad, describing the growth of private schools for the poor. Despite running completely as private for-profit schools, lacking any government subsidies, and having to deal with painful regulators, these private schools offered
a consistently superior education to poor children. You can read more of the research in the book "The Beautiful Tree" which is available from The Cato Store as a PDF (http://www.catostore.org). Interestingly, these schools for the poor
_still_ manage to provide scholarships to the poorest of the poor, so the richer poor end up subsidizing the poorer poor. If private schools on top of a shop can do that, surely the IITs can do it too.

Your detestation of the value provided by doctors and engineers speaks of your affiliation with academia. Doctors provide valuable services to patients and get paid accordingly. Coaching institutes often do a better job at teaching stuff than schools. Engineers do a lot of valuable stuff too. It is not at all obvious whether India "needs" more or less of these people. I am rather amused that, sitting in TIFR, you are able to make these pronouncements.

Me:
About your opinion regarding the value added to the society by the doctors and engineers etc, I have one thing to say. Yours seems to be a text-book opinion written about an idealist society.

How many medical or engineering innovations have happened in India?
Why are all the equipments in the hospitals and most physics labs in India imported?
Why can't India make a single microchip?
Why can't India make a tera-hertz CRO which would revolutionize experimental physics research in India? (and thanks to US sanctions India can't buy it even)
Why can't India make indigenous equivalents of Intel Pentium processors?
(again US sanctions prohibit India from using them in its satellites which hugely hampers the efficiency of the Indian space missions)
Why can't India make a single cell-phone?
Why can't India even not make a single wireless data tranfer system?
(what is used in India in the cell-phones is far inferior in quality than what is used in Europe. Again due to US sanctions)
Why can't India make a single tera-hertz laser or a spin polarized STM which would revolutionize condensed matter research in India?
Why can't India get its sole synchrotron source at Indore working even after all these years? (India has to pay heavily to european labs to buy "time slots" in their machines)

I hold thousands of the engineers and doctors produced in India responsible for this situation. They have surely made good of themselves but with no foresight about the future of Indian science!

After all this I can't buy your argument that the engineers and doctors are adding a great value to the society! Many of them are working for MNC's with very little thought about how India's dependence on imported technology and crippling sanctions is harming work here.

Definitely some people of these professions are adding to the society but then again they are affecting locally without making any big difference to the national scenario!

Vipul:
It is interesting to note that you lambast the "competitive spirit". But at the same time you detest it when your batchmates "cooperate" to solve homework problems.

Me:
I knew you would retalliate about the competitive spirit thing regarding my objection to collaboration in the homeworks. This is again a 2 step reasoning which you missed.

I appreciate collaborative work but my objection was that the evaluation system works independently of the reality that there is collaboration!

You can't have the cake and eat it too!

If at the end of the day there is going to be a numerical evaluation then I am going to stick my neck out to say that I deserve 5 times more marks than them who also did the assignment with 5 people collaborating and I did it alone.

If the system really wants to encourage collaborative work then why not show the guts to get into a system of evaluation which Prof.Sanjeev Arora at Princeton University uses? I really appreciate his stand point about collaboration in homeworks and assignments in his couses

The problems lies somewhere else:

Very often when such problems arise, the prof is incapable of setting classy assignments where they can have the confidence of publicly encouraging collaboration like Prof.Sanjeev Arora does. The profs most often know that a collaborative work will locate the internet resources from where the solutions can be downloaded. As we are all aware in Indian colleges what happens in the garb of collaboration is not cooperative learning but mass copying and internet source locating.

As an instructor of the course, first you need to have a strong knowledge of the subject yourself to allow the merits of collaboration to bloom among your course students without the slip-side of it taking over.

When I become a prof, I plan to adopt Prof.Sanjeev Arora's model.

A lunch with Manjul Bhargava

2009-07-04T02:43:00.004+05:30

Dear Reader. If you always thought that my writings are childish then probably this writing won't come as a surprise. If you didn't have any such opinions then let me warn you of a pretty childish writing.

Imagine you were a young teenage tennis player practicing in the court and one fine day Federer walks into the court sees you playing and says that you play really well. What would you do?

I blog!
And childishly so after being given a compliment from a legend!

So Manjul Bhargava ultimately turned up today in TIFR after Arul waitng for him for the last 1 week. Manjul was sick in Jaipur. Arul was a student in the Mathematics department of my alma mater CMI (Chennai Mathematical Institute). He is currently a graduate student in Mathematics at Princeton University under Prof.Manjul Bhargav.

To understand why I am writing this blog you should know something about Manjul Bhargava. In case you have never heard of him then I suggest you do some Google search about him before you read the following.

Because of Arul's waiting here for the last 1 week we spent quite some time regularly discussing Representation Theory of Lie Groups which I have been pursuing off late and in which Arul has gained a lot of computational expertise lately. Given that it is Arul and me we had quite a few heated arguments over dinner about social issues starting from ethics in medical research and Hinduism and Caste-System and obviously Nazism! (details of such controversial discussions shall be known only to select people :P) Inspite of my repeated insistence to the converse Arul paid for both our lunches and dinners while at TIFR.

Arul asked Manjul if he could ask me to join them in lunch and Manjul agreed. Hence I had this interesting lunch with Arul and Manjul Bhargava and Manjul's mother!
What a company to be with!

Manjul while introducing me to his mother pointed at Arul and me and said ``2 CMI-ites from 2 different departments". Manjul's mother also seemed to have a pretty high opinion about CMI and hence by benefit of doubt probably I was also momentarily considered as a brilliant student!

Manjul had met me earlier last year and I had given him my article on torsion free connections on Riemannian Manifolds as way of introduction. {You can see the article here } But this interaction with Manjul Bhargava was an year ago.

Today during lunch Manjul suddenly remembered of that article of an year ago when he saw me at lunch! He said that he liked it!

I never believed that Manjul Bhargav has even read what I wrote!

I was stunned for a few seconds when of all people on earth Manjul Bhargava said that he thinks the article has a very new flavour of writing about geometry. and that I had written it very differently from how it is generally thought of.

I was flattened by the time Manjul said that he thinks I should try to get it published. He said that my students will definitely gain a lot if I teach from these ways of thinking.

I just kept gazing at Manjul with probably a stupid smile as he said all this.
I couldn't believe my ears!

Then Manjul asked me about with whom I am working with and I told him that I am trying to learn QFT with Shiraz and Representation Theory from Dipendra Prasad. Manjul asked me if I had talked with Atish and I said no.

{Prof.Atish Dhabolkar is a prof. at DTP,TIFR and was formerly a grad student at Princeton}

Manjul and Atish seem to have been great friends since their Princeton days and his mother also added "Atish is just brilliant"

I informed them that Atish has taken up a post with University at Paris, Orsay and hence he comes to DTP only rarely.

Then Manjul made an intriguing comment that he wonders I will find people here in TIFR who will share my interests. He said that he isn't aware of anyone here who thinks along these lines.

Then Manjul was telling how Atish has recently shown some number theory results in something called "Mock Modular Forms" to be useful in string theory. Manjul made the comment that almost anything that was ever interesting in Mathematics finds a way into String Theory and also the reverse is hapenning.

Eventually the discussion spanned a million things starting from the highway that Manjul has been on which connects Mumbai to Pune and how Swine Flu is overhyped in the US and Manul's mother thinks the bulk of Indian girls in their 20's are hopeless. How they adjust their cosmetic without washing their hands just after coming out of the toilet. Manjul's mother is a fun lady even at this age!

As a result fo living in the US for so many years her english has become heavily accented but her Hindi is surprisingly good and she talks with her son in very correct Hindi.

She was telling me how she is such a nocturnal character and Manjul also agreed that its great to sleep during the daytime and its best to work at night when there are less distractions and people around. Manjul's mother was telling us how Indians are forgetting to take pride in their own heritage of learning and she wonders why the nation which cradled the best universities in the world Nalanda and Takshashila now can't keep that level. How most Princeton and Harvard students are non-Americans and Manjul said that only recently there is a slightly non-trivial number of Americans in Princeton. And how when he was an undergrad at Harvard all the bright people in his batch were Indian or Chinese or Koreans.

It was a memorable lunch!

Poignant Mumbai

2009-07-04T01:31:00.002+05:30

Its 12:30Am in the night and I am on top of the Malabar hills, completely fatigued with a 6x2 geared cycle in my first three-quarter pants. Probably not the Anirbit that most people know of.

All this is thanks to the spirits of Prof.Pranab Sen of the Theoretical Computer Science department of TIFR. My association with Prof.Pranab Sen started when I heard a coffee table discussion of his about Vitalli Sets and Cantor Sets and later a seminar of his about testing polynomial identities. I was pretty impressed by his fine knowledge of measure theory (something that I am currently trying to learn). Later I found out about his deep contributions to the still open-problem called the "Hidden Subgroup Problem". {Wikipedia article about this mention his contributions}. All in all this lanky bespectacled energetic below-30years absolutely precise thinking professor almost instantaneously gained my respect.

Soon I found out that Pranab Sen was a cycling freak and knows as much about cycles as he knows about Quantum Computing. And I joined him on one of his frequent cycling trips. A decision taken almost at the spur of the moment at 11Pm. I haven't cycled for at least 4 years and suddenly at midnight I decided to embark on this cycling adventure to Malabar Hills from TIFR. As I have always said except non-take-home examinations, I am not afraid of anything in life.

Pranab Sen told me with great enthusiasm that it is going to be a "short" trip of "only" 20 kilometers since I am a first-timer! All my previous cycling experiences have never been more than 30 minutes long at a stretch at moderate speeds through the lanes of congested town of Howrah. For a split-second I had this fear emerging in me as to whether I can take this 20km adventure and in a second I squashed it with my tenacity which can be infinity for many purposes. {People who have had regular academic interactions with me will definitely know of this sole ability of mine, to stick to something to achieve it till the end.}

The cycling process was definitely not easy even with the emptiness of the mid-night roads of Mumbai. Apart from the sheer physical stress (which I haven't subjected my body to in recent times except through sleepless nights!) and dehydration it was the problem of speed that made a lot of difference. My top-speed happened to be may be 1/3rd the speed of Prof.Pranab Sen and since I didn't know the roads, it was quite a worry whenever I lost sight of him, which always very soon. But then Prof.Pnab Sen was very nice. He stopped at all the bifurcations to ensure I took the right turn and he also stopped at various points in Mumbai to explain its historical significance if any.

The first exciting cycling stretch was along the Marine Drive when we were cruising on our cycles along the Arabian Sea with the full "golden necklace" of Mumbai visible in front. There Pranab Sen stopped to explain me some errors in my cycling techniques like I should paddle with the ball of my feet and not through the center. Magically enough this change of position instantaneously vanquished all the pain in the feet! And of course along the Marine Drive in the middle of the night, one can conspicuously observe the love-birds coupling along the beach either on the rocks or along the benches. (Who would ant to miss this romantic setting?) Hand-in-hand couples walking down the beach at midnight probably dreaming of a romantic love life in store definitely makes for a nice back-drop. I looked. I sighed. I cruised along.

The second excitement was cycling up the Malabar Hill. Helpfully enough just at the foot of the uphill road I found Pranab Sen waiting for me and he asked me if I have ever used a geared cycle. I said no. And there on the road he gave me a basic lecture on what are gears and what they do and how to use them efficiently. I was surprised that when I was sweating profusely thanks to the trip till then Pranab Sen had the energy to explain me on the road that the gear number is the ratio of the radii of the front crank to the back crank and how lower gear generates larger torque. And after that my first uphill cycling on a geared cycle was pretty exciting. It was a weird feeling of suspended animation since at the lowest gear up the incline my legs were paddling pretty fast but the cycle was moving slowly. The apparent disjoint feeling between the two motions gave a floating sensation. As if I was floating up the hill but still losing energy.

When we reached the top of the Malabar Hill at 12:30Am, we were near the Hanging Garden and could get a bird's eye view of the Mumbai and Arabian Sea beneath us. Pranab Sen explained that this is the highest point in South Mumbai and thats why here is the water-tank which supplies water to the region.

Then the down-hill ride was awesomely exciting!
First one had to take a hair-pin turn at top-speed to get down.
Then the cycle just shot down like a bullet. All I had to do was to keep the cycle steady as it was shooting down. It was a miraculous sight. On my left the Malabar Hills was shifting up and on my right the Arabian Sea was shifting up with the full arc of Mumbai visible from there. The landscape was enigmatic and the lightening speed of the cycle downhill added to the scene. Gravity rewards with high-adrenaline experiences after the killing uphill ride.

On another day I cycled with the same group from TIFR till the Taj (the hotel where the 26/11 Mumbai attack happened) and India gate and back via the marine drive. It was my first glimpse of the Taj Hotel. The thing that I noticed is that even if I am walking quite a few meters away from it the air there is full of smell of some of the costliest perfumes. The smell has the typical mild intoxicating tinge that one wouldn't find in most perfumes that people use. It is definitely of some much higher cost. A glance at the people around in the neighborhood would tell that it is the hang out of the absolute upper economic class of Mumbai. A good indicator of the economic class of a person is probably the watch that the person is wearing (mine is the simple lookng TITAN Exacta with replaced black bands and my black hands). I could clearly see people there wearing watches that I had seen in one of the poshest showrooms in Bonn,Germany. The crowd there wasn't the crowd that I interact with on a daily basis and not the crowd I even see regularly.

Infact the cycle rides through innards of Mumbai open up a new face of Mumbai that I don't see during my usual wanderings in the theoretical departments of TIFR and worrying whether a given field is causal or the topological space is compact. I see that post-midnight there are regions in Mumbai which become hangouts for the rich kids of Mumbai smoking away hundreds of rupees on an expensive cigar and very near by a half-clad child might be crying unfed.

It was 1Am and along with Prof.Pranab Sen and the other friend of mine I walk into a posh bar called the "Mocha" and for the first time I saw a "Seesha bar" People tell me it is the only one around here. Apparently all others have been banned by the govt. So this is a glass enclosure in which I saw people in the age-group of 20s and 30s lounging along sofas and smoking from long pipes of Hookahs which were bubbling through jars of coloured water. Apparently the colour signifies the flavour of the Hookah as to whether it is apple flavoured or mint flavoured. There were many types and they cost something like Rs.250 per pipe!

The people included were very apparently representative of the same upper economic class of India which thronged the neighborhood of The Taj. The same accented english and the same artificial talks of vacuous topics about which is a better cosmetic. The same antics of conversation and ways of expression of emotions which seem so unfamiliar to me. I have never talked/email interacted with any girl in my life who would fit the kind I could see in the Seesha Bar. I am sure that all of the five or six girls I know or have ever known in my magnificient history of 22 years of existence would give me a straight and sharp "No!" if I ask any of them to come with me to a bar and that too at 1Am at night! (and also probably ensure that it is the last interaction I had :P) I remember how one of the girls I was crazily in love with at one point of time freaked out when I called her up at her home at 2Am. Interesting how the academic world gets you to meet only extremely conservative typically Indian women who would be mentally made of steel and be extremely intelligent and would shoot-off otherwise. Atleast that has been the case till now.

But interestingly I know quite a few guys who would agree to such a proposal notwithstanding that they might have a heart-attack if they hear such a proposal coming from me in the first place. :P

Interestingly I realize how orthogonal are the worlds that I live in and they live in.

The entire glass room was filled with smoke and people were apparently enjoying the smoke. I could smell nothing since I was outside the glass enclosure.

Prof.Pranab Sen ordered some fine quality of beer and I ordered a tall glass of cranberry and lime juice. The cranberry was't even one-hundredth as sour as the plates of raw cranberry paste that I ate in Germany. Here it was highly diluted. The prof tried to motivate me to have beer and explained me the nuances of beer taste and explained me the orgins of the names and tastes. Mocha had a list of "Today's Special" beer on the menu and each was from a different country.

After the drink I came out of the bar and saw the stark other image of Mumbai in front of it. Rows and rows of half-clad and malnutrition affected people sleeping along the footpath that went along the bar.

All of them were clear images telling a story of life lived at the bottom of the economic and social ladder. A life lived in the lands of nothingness.
Nothing to wear. Nothing to eat. Nowhere to stay.

"Slumdog Millionaire" The story begins.

I saw the same picture of Mumbai when I cycled through the backside of the Mumbai dockyards. Rows and rows of people living a life in the islands of nothingness inside the heart of Indian commerce. On the other side of the dockyards lies the glistering ports which probably unloads the costly wines into the Taj Hotel.

Tomorrow the sun will rise and all these people will rise up again for another day of struggle to find food to live. In turn they will keep the rickshaws running and the drains clean for Mumbai to keep ticking. The hidden force behind the metro whose source of force recedes into hiding at nightfall.

And I return mentally and physically fatigued after the 20km cycling. I return to the safe air-conditioned cocoons of academia as the other half has nothing to return to.

I can't sleep. I have questions to answer. Answer to myself.

Is the gap natural to any developing country?

Who is "developing" when we say India is developing. The guys/girls who are smoking pipes for Rs250 each in the Seesha Bar or the half-clad half-fed children infront of the bar or me who bought a 120GBiPod a few months ago whereas 6 years ago it was a big thing when my mother bought me a Phillips walk-man?

Am I guilty?

Reactive Self-Perception

2009-06-06T14:22:00.004+05:30

I sometimes do just love these long train journeys where I get to sit 30hrs in one position and just look around and think. It just lets you introspect. It lets me analyse the world around like never before and observe the ocean humanity flow by as if I am not a part of it. Watch everything from a distance and yet not feel a part of it. Look at the world around as if I am looking from outside but with as much proximity as anybody living in it but letting a larger picture sink in unrestrained by all personal affiliations and identifications.

This state of mind lets in thoughts which I have never thought and lets me think about non-academic things at a greater depth than usual when I don't even remember the very possibility that I can have a non-academic life. Given my recent mental disposition sprouting from some recent emotional and relationship adventures (which generated the last 2 blog posts) every little human interaction was seeming like hitting back at me with greater force than ever before. But I have this ability to detach myself from such issues so that I can quickly get back to logical thinking, my natural state of mind.

And in these times reading or thinking about Economics provides something intellectually challenging to pursue while crammed in half-a-seat in an Indian train. It just looks so relevant.
Hence sharing here the thought and insights developed in those lonely hours.

Hence I started reading about this idea of "Reactive self-perception".

I was reading how some countries in the post-colonial period have failed to take full advantage of the globalization leading to the opening up of markets. It has lead to an unfair distribution of the advantages of globalization and this stems as much from the faults in the implementation of market economy in a globalized manner (like super-powers maintaining an upper-hand in terms of patent rights etc) and also because of these colonized people unable to recover in some sense from the age of empires. The countries which have been severely hit by this are the African ones and India to some extent but India has somehow escaped the terrible situation of Africa thanks to its active intellectual movement and powerful press and media which has championed the Indian identity in a very assertive way. India at least didn't see the severe internal collapse leading to civil strife and famines and blood pools which Africa has seen since the end of the colonial period. Unlike most South-Asian countries they are yet to see the fruits of democracy.
Not that south-asia has been any paragon of democracy but the implementation has definitely been much better than in Africa.

Now the interesting thing is that this has serious roots in the subject of psychology (interesting how psychology helps understand global economics!) in what is called the "reactive self-perception" .

Reactive self-perception is the state of the mind when one decides one's identity NOT as a result of an analysis of one's own self but as a response to what OTHERs think about him/her. If for centuries a set of people are ill-treated and humiliated and told that "you are all idiots" then the first generation takes it as an insult and might revolt but if the revolt is crushed then the next generations believe that their identity is of an underdog. After a century these people start seeing themselves as the "natural" underdogs and suffer from what Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen calls the "illussion of destiny". They start thinking that their natural place is at the receiving end of the world and are not supposed to be the agents of change but can only be the receivers of whatever the powerful gives them.

This reactive identity can lead to mis-utilization and under-utilization of resources and also fatalism. It can lead to a complete failure of all the goods to be achieved out of globalization. There is a market where people are ready to buy and sell but the people with the products aren't there to bargain the prices since they don't realize that they have the power to bargain! The producers coming from underprivileged backgrounds are not even psychologically prepared to challenge the buyer into giving a better price! Again even in an open market economy the advantages of fair dealings is lost because of internal psychological barriers.

I think even in day to day life and in our social life this feature shows up where lots of voices and talents are unheard and unused simply because the voice and talent belongs to someone who has been collectively ostracized by the society and hence has been implicitly led into believing that he/she is incapable or wrong!

Further this kind of Reactive Self-Perception can also become the roots of terrorism where one starts defining one's identity as a reaction to some certain set of ideas. Like even though any well-reasoned person will understand that it is hard to distinguish between what exactly is a "western idea" and what exactly is an "eastern idea" given the amount of mixed global heritage we inherit, unfortunately much of Islamic fundamentalism relies on this "reactive identity" where one starts defining as "Islamic" everything that is in contradiction to whatever is commonly called "western"! This can lead to devastating effects as the world is aware of like the recent declaration of Talibans in the SWAT valley that "democracy is un-Islamic"!

Islamic fundamentalists have unfortunately looked as "Islam" as not a philosophy stemming from certain geographic regions but as a symbol of being "anti-western"! Islam as an answer to everything that the west seems to stand for. Its roots are probably not far to seek when the west at one point did pump this Islamic identity to counter the Russian.

One day this is likely to hit-back the social memory of Africa that when the world was agog with Obama being elected in the USA, millions died in Zimbawe in famines. Its likely that the world will eventually pay for this grave error.

Linking to what was being said earlier, there are reasons to believe that eventually this sense of "reactive identity" coupled with the implementation errors of globalization and open-market economy it will lead the neglected Africans into becoming a base for terrorism in the coming years. Today they are physically weak because of the famines, tomorrow they will be psychologoically suicidal and the mortal pains will become irrelevant. We are very likely to see a rise of another Osama Bin-Laden in Africa in the next half-century mimicking the Islamic terrorism that sprung from the middle east and has wrecked havoc in the last half-century.

African terrorism might be just round the corner.

And the next day after being candid.

2009-05-31T17:03:00.005+05:30

I wake up the next day and I tell to myself

"Its all useless. Chalo forget it. Lots of work left to do"

I thank for the existence of this subject called Maths and Physics which look like infinitely deep holes to me where I have dived in and more I sink into it more seems to exist down there. And thankfully so!

Otherwise what else other than Representation Theory and Quantum Fields could help forget such things?

Another day. Newer things to learn. Newer roads to walk.

But the destinations never change just that I carve out new untrammeled paths in this wilderness.

Candid and with no disclaimers.

2009-05-31T00:11:00.004+05:30

These days are not those days but the murmurs of the truth echo through the times.

She showed me the moon in the Bangalore sky visible through the crack in the roof of the conference dining hall.
All the technical talk around melted away and I thought I was in love. I could have soaked all the pains of my life into her deep dark eyes and held her hand. I could have kissed away my empty mortality into her lips. But I didn't.
I knew she didn't love me.

She could not to be the one for whom I can write this.

20 years of exposure to the vicissitudes of life are enough to alienate people. to kill people and to forget people. But sometimes people comeback again and again as if through an invisible force and no amount of self-denial can obliterate the longing even if on one side.

"Your silence continues"
"Silence broken"

It doesn't need to be love, it doesn't need to be sexual attraction. It is just the invincible force of human connection. It is the longing to be together. It is the need to coexist. It is the way mortals are built to survive this finite eternity.

Every time I walk these streets after some late night dinner at a restaurant I see those couples come out along with me and I say in my mind "It could be us". I have walked into Nalli and wondered which saree I could have picked for you. I go to Barista to enjoy the cold frappe and I wonder why these tables have precisely 2 chairs one each side of it. I go to the cele-jor shops and wonder which cake would best reflect it was this one evening between us. Every time I watch a movie I wonder whether you would have liked it. Every time I go to the seaside to look at the sunset and the sunrise I wonder whether you too are seeing the same colours. Every time I have my dinner I wonder whether you would have liked a little more salt. Every time I have my coffee I wonder whether you would have liked less sugar. Whenever I see that candle stand on my table I wonder whether it was the right kind for a candle light dinner with Bach or Beethoven playing softly in the background. I wish it could be the one night between us and we could have danced a salsa into the wee hours. When the stage would be empty of all the happy hearts we could still be in arms looking for the nest in each other. Or if this were to be the only night we could arrange for a clandestine meet in the dead of the dark in so eerie a place that you could later deny to yourself your coming to meet me.

Every time it rains I thank nature for such a mechanism when I can cry and no one can see my tears.
I thank cooks to have created this drink called lime-soda into which I can drown myself to forget these thoughts.

I return to my room late at night listening to Jagjit Singh on my iPoD and I wonder how the shayar could so well understand my inner-self which the world has never seen. These melancholic tunes in the dead of the night as if floating in from far away hills like quaint tunes telling of the pathos of some soul. I wondered whether the song would make you cry.

I shut off the light and try to get atleast 3 or 4 hours of sleep a day and I wonder whether I am alone in this dark room or is it your subconscious memory that fills my dark. And I wake up suddenly thinking it is already too late into the day and my broken cell-phone confidently tells me it is just 4:30Am. And I wake up every hour of the night feeling that I am wasting time by sleeping when I should have been working. Then I wonder why should I work? Who will gain by my work? Will me knowing the renormalization group theory a little better bridge the gap between us? I thank this world to cocooning me into this harsh world of academics where one has to consistently perform at one's intellectual best to remain among the counted ones. And this race keeps me away from breaking down into tears at your thought, all the difficult theories that I need to understand come rushing in from all sides punishing me for that flippant moment when I missed you. Its 5:30 in the morning and I am back at work.

I have a world to fight.
I have a world to win.
Will I lose you to win this world?
I wish I could see you cry.
My tears have dried up.

This night shall also pass. Like those thousands of lonely nights between us. And this night too shall fade away into another day of us living in separate worlds. If this were the last night between us what would I say to you? "Remember me when the world shall forget"?
"Forget me if the memory pains you"?

Next morning I shall again smile because I can't stop for my tears. I shall again keep my world by typing smileys in my emails and the world shall never know what passed between us. These tears are too precious for their reason to be known. These moments shall ebb away like smoke wafting into the thin air and the world shall never see the fire.

I thank you for teaching me to fight this war alone. I thank you for removing all my fears. I thank you for making me discover the steel cold self of mine whose existence I wasn't aware of. I thank you for teaching me to live alone.

The paradox of commerce

2009-05-04T00:28:00.004+05:30

The other day I was eating in a shop in the Indian Navy campus and I was impressed by the shopkeeper who was selling jalebis and refused money for his jalebis since they had gone cold and were broken. Some people might say that he was not thinking economically but I think he is only being more efficient by ensuring that because of this attitude I will come back to his shop again when he would have hot jalebis which would taste better and he can then have the full right to charge me the cost.

This is probably the biggest effect years of scientific training has on you is its ability to make you capable of going through various situations in life without emotional involvement. Gives you the ability to observe subtle aspects without being touched by them. Can't say much about Physics but mathematics education definitely gives me this powerful ability.

Of course scientific training if gotten into the blood also has interesting social and personal consequences! Most innocuous of them is probably the sensation of solace and deep happiness when I can cocoon into the cubicles of the academic institutions with connectivity to the web far away from the hustle-bustle of million people outside apparently enjoying their lives. Gives me that detached perspective where I feel far away from the party outside and seem to see grander visions of universal features through the regular struggles of other people's lives.

A state of mind when you start thinking like an AI without emotional edges or ripples of human bonding or binding. A state of mind where the amorphous existence of the human race seems to crystallize into bare essentials. A state of liberation from all local identities of caste,state,religion,language,party and elevation into the state of being an observer and a thinker.

And many people see it as my fundamental inability to feel associated to anything, feel a sense of belongingness to any particular sect. And this misunderstanding leads them to think that I am an hypocrite. What they can't see is my feeling of association with the human identity. This is an identity which makes you humble at the thought that apparently we are the only one around who can think deductively. In many cases I am an unapologetic reductionist.

Its a feeling of being a global citizen minus any sense of local identification.

I don't see why people host huge parties etc on their marriages with rituals going on for days! I see the bare essential to be 2 people signing a legal paper that the Indian constitution wants them to. If the 2 people are mutually compatible then anyway they will live happily and if they are not then no amount of grandeur of parties and rituals will keep them together. If I ever ever decide to marry then she and I will one fine morning go to the marriage registration office and sign the papers. Of course we would have lived together for quite some time before doing this.

Why am I suddenly thinking of these things?

It probably stems from a sense of betrayal I felt from my visit to a restaurant in Mumbai called "Calcutta Club" which specializes in Bengal cuisines (West Bengal is a state in the eastern part of India). When in the company of people not from West Bengal I have always defended Bengal whenever people from other states start poking fun at Bengal along the same old stereotyped issues. I generally have an publicly unacknowledged advantage in such discussions since most of these stereotypical features are missing from me and many people before initial introduction thought I was from the southern states of India! But this restaurant, notwithstanding the fact that the food was good seemed to put up a weirdly hypocritical show about being a representative of Bengal in the middle of Mumbai.

This restaurant had put up posters all around of Amartya Sen, Rabindranath, Soumitro Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Mother Teresa and what not. The photographs didn't seem to have any apparent reason for being there except for the fact that all of them had something to do with Bengal. The set of photographs on the wall were completely thoughtless to say the least and seemed to be screaming out with a sense of cheap "selling" Bengal to Mumbai.

I wonder whether Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen would approve of his photograph being hung by the tables of a restaurant!

And more deplorably there were customers in the restaurant who seemed to think that this was a great thing to do since this "Brings a sense of being in Bengal" ! I was struck at the lowly levels of thinking to which people can fall to and at the gullibility of the average customer.

I am sure many customers in that restaurant would happily walk out of the resturant full of photographs of Rabindranath and Satyajit Ray and drink like a hog in some nearby bar and return home drunk in a totterring state. Wonder if that also makes them feel like a Bengali!

While I was wondering about these things people around were busy wondering what a long time it has been since they ate proper Bengali food and debating over apparently irrelevant questions like whether item X should be had before Y or vice-versa. I have eaten a hell lot of different kinds of foods in my life and I have learnt to appreciate culinary skills of the human population without a sense of attachment to any particular type. Again a scope for the cynics to attack me.

This situation reminded me of a dialogue by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie "Cheeni Kum" where he as the chef of an Indian restaurant in London proclaims that

"We are not like other cheat "Indian" restaurants in London which put up posters of elephants and tigers and sell anything in the name of Indian food to ignorant english people"

Unlike Tabu in that movie, I was in the company of people who were highly appreciative of "bengal" atmosphere of the restaurant and hence because of social restrains had to control my bursting rage at the misuse of these great people and walk out of the restaurant immediately.

No wonder I run into so many social conflicts since when other people around were appreciating the food, I was feeling a sense of betrayal. I couldn't get my mind off the fact that this restaurant was downright immoral by misusing the names of these people.

I wonder when or if ever India is going to come out of such cheap business models which try to sell by rousing cheap local sentiments. Why go and blame the politicians for making hollow speeches if we keep patronizing such restaurants which adopt such hypocritical business models?

Of course this attitude of trying to "sell" doesn't restrict itself only to restaurants but also penetrate deep into the society and disastrously reflects in the way Indian education is compromised. I am scared of the day when corporate sector shall start determinig syllabuses in colleges so that they can "produce" efficient workers.

I am already seeing such trends in the Physics education scenario.

Growing up is learning the art of silence -Part 1

2009-04-15T15:16:00.006+05:30

3 years ago when I was studying about the Dirac Equation, a few months later a question came to my mind as to how would one go about writing a representation of the Clifford algebra for arbitrary dimensions. I somehow felt very uncomfortable with the idea that Dirac was picking up the 4-dimensional representation and it was sort of a magic that it was giving me the spin 1/2. {Today I hopefully understand more about what is going on here given the studies on spin and representation theory that I have done over these years.}

But then at that time I was a kid compared to my present self. I went to my classmate Swarnabho and asked him to explain this to me since I knew at that time we was studying Representation Theory. What I got from him was a load of sarcasm and lecture regarding why I was dabbling in such "hi-fi" stuff when I didn't know basic group theory etc etc etc. But neither for once did he even give me a reference which I could look up. I felt damn irritated. (This was neither the first nor the last time I got some non-sense reply from him. I definitely respect him for his huge knowledge of mathematics but I am sorry to say that I never got any help from him whenever I asked him. I this respect I got tremendous help from Vipul who is definitely one of the finest brains in among science students that I have ever met. )

What this interaction with Swarnabho resulted in was me running down to the computer room in CMI and write a blog about this "characteristic attitude" of mathematicians. This blog of mine irked a lot of people around and rightly so.

I clearly remember the email reply I got for the blog from Nivedita. She lashed out at me. Again rightly so.

Recently when I met Nivedita a few weeks ago I was wondering at the back of my mind whether she was still talking to the author of that blog or to me. I am optimistic.

Surely I did a stupid thing then by writing that blog.
May be that action of mine was more stupid than Swarnabho's enlightening sarcasm.

People live and learn. I am optimistic that I do that too.
At least I am sure I won't write such a stupid thing today! Today such an experience would probably result in a blog post or probably silence.
{I have just gotten used to so many weird experiences about human relationships!}

Deep down I know I am a completely different man today than the guy who wrote that blog then. But then again as Vipul said to me once

"Even if you change overnight, some people will never change how they perceive you"

:D

Its actually so very difficult in life to communicate what one really wants to say and its so easier to send out a wrong image. At one level I believe its just not worth one's time and energy to ensure that everyperson interpretes things correctly. Its probably again that silence can come to the rescue and let one focus energies on ensuring that a select group of people see the right things.

Silence gives birth to selectivity.

This is probably the essence of growing up. Somewhat CMI life forced me to mature faster as a person than what might have naturally happened. Probably it was the intellectually charged atmosphere of CMI in those days and the completely hay-wire courses where in-class comprehensibility was low and various social factors which forced me to grow faster. Today when I look at people from colleges in various other parts of India I feel this one thing significantly as to what a massive impact the challenging environment of excellence in CMI in those days could have on a receptive mind! It sent my scientific maturity of thinking way ahead. {Though I must say that the terrible Physics curriculum of CMI didn't teach me much when compared to the Physics courses of IITK} I absorbed more essential things like global maturity of thinking from the environment than I did from the classes.

What CMI atmosphere did to me in the first year was to kill all possible narrowness that might have existed in my mind and open up my thinking to make it receptive to radically new ideas which students from other colleges would not be able to appreciate readily. It was becoming natural for me to see by the middle of my second year of BSc. as to why one needs the idea of "parallel transport" on curved spaces to make sense of Newton's laws.

The most essential ingredient of this growing up process is the art of silence.
The most important tool that one develops as one grows is the power of silence.

The importance of the moments when you look inwards and think harder through everything and get clarified about precisely what all things you understand and what all you don't. Its a process which leads good results whether the question is scientific or not.

Its about learning when to be silent. Its probably a big thing that I learnt while at CMI that no conflict is ever resolved by speaking or talking or discussing. Its best resolved by thinking silently and then coherently putting down in words and sharing the writing with relevant people.

The identification of the "relevant" is also a part of the growing up process. That as you grow up you learn to pick out from the surroundings who are the relevant people i.e who are the people who serious enough about the issue that they would like to understand the reason and the resolution of conflict. When I was kid in the first year I was full of optimism about this that everybody is interested in questions and issues I am interested in.

Its a useless waste of energy to try to make lots of people see a subtle point about which you are excited about and hence efforts should be concentrated on the relevant people and not communicated via public mails.

Long long ago in the past I used to have the optimism that I can make many people see why I think something is worth thinking about. That something was at times why spin of a particle should be defined by irreducible representations of SU(2) instead of any other "physical" idea or why smoking/drinking alcohol should be banned inside institute premises.

Silence is the route to resolve the relevant set.

In very simple cases like that of curved space-time I realized as I grew up that not many are interested and in more complicated cases like whether there should be reservations in colleges, even lesser people are interested!

Its a hard fact that the process of growing up teaches you is to recognize that 99.99% of the people around are not interested in things that you might be seriously interested in. And it would be massive foolishness expect any larger fraction of people to be interested! More important the matter is on a larger scale lesser will the people interested in it. But this scenario should not be a deterrent to you pursuing the cause if you are yourself convinced that the cause is important.

This is also again one of the realizations that arise out of silence. The determination to pursue what you think is important regardless of what other people have to say about it. Silence is a tool that helps to not get lost in the crowd.

Silence is a way to take firm decisions.

When I was a "kid" in BSc. if I thought that the teacher in the class was saying nothing sensible the I used to directly say that in the class and object. And hence got into serious trouble. Today I know that this simply doesn't help since me pointing out the trouble doesn't suddenly raise the intelligence or the knowledge level of the teacher (unless of course the teacher is exceptional who appreciates subtle points like say Prof.Amol Dighe in TIFR) and almost always most of the class doesn't see the subtle point. Its a useless waste of energy again.

Today I choose the silent way out of such situations. I simply bunk the class at times or I might send my feedback about the stupid class when I am officially asked for it.

Again silence becomes an artistic tool to fight life.

But then one should be beware of the pit-falls of silence:

1. On should not resort to silence as a mode of communication! Like if I my girlfriend (lets assume one exists and is unique for this discussion!) resorts to silence when relationship is in trouble then the situation only becomes grim. Silence might become the route of further confusion by becoming a gap in the communication. In such situations each side must probably think in silence and write out everything coherently and communicate in writing rather than start shouting at each other.

Thinking and writing frees the mind. (why I blog!) Its an art as to how to use silence.

2. One should not become suddenly silent without trying to sort the trouble! Its as bad a solution as just passing by like a stranger whenever this person with whom you are in trouble with is passing by. Its best to first to be silent and think about everything through and then try to talk with the person and get things sorted and if then things don't work then assume complete silence but by giving a notice to him or her like

"After thinking a lot, I think you are hopeless and brainless and useless talking to. Hence I am becoming silent. Do you have any further clarifications to give before I shut off? "

I have been at both ends of this problem! I would have greatly appreciated if the people who at times assumed silence with me to have given me a notice like the above becoming so! :P

Silence is an important art that one has to acquire while growing up but not at the cost of losing frank honesty.
But then honesty is a very big thing that only nanoscopic number of people can appreciate and hence again through silence one has to resolve this "relevant" set with whom one can be honest without wasting energies.

In a second post I shall dwell on the more complicated issues about silence like should you be silent when you see a crime being committed? Does growing up mean remaining silent to crime just because survival instincts and matured judgement tell you that speaking-up might mean danger to you? Is maturity of judgement only about diplomacy and hence compromise with honesty?

About doing science and research

2009-04-12T14:52:00.002+05:30

When mortally pressed for time one compromises with quoting other people than taking time out to coherently report one's own mind. And hence here I plan to put up links to a some exciting writings about doing science and research about which I could myself go on for pages albeit it comes from only 4 years of experience.

{I shall be biased towards Maths, Physics and Theoretical Computer Science since these are the 3 fields with which I have some acquaintance. Its been a long time I have been committed to Physics and flirting with the other two. Again among the other 2, I have been courting Maths for the longest time and have only been looking at from far away at TCS. Eventually I don't plan to meet the day when I shall need to choose! :P}

Hence the job is best left in the hands of the giants like Dyson, Hamming and Atiyah etc:

1. "Advice to Young Mathematicians" by Atiyah

2. "Heretical thoughts about science and society" by Dyson

3. "Birds and Frogs" by Dyson

4. "You and Your Research" by Richard Hamming

5. "Kill the messenger" by Sunil Mukhi

And yes before I sign off I will tell you to watch the movie "October Sky". It really captures the idea of doing research .

The passionate insanity of doing science and research and that addictive feeling of being involved with an idea forgetting everything else.

Curiosities in Computer Science. Can one go beyond finite and discrete data ?

2009-03-22T04:04:00.005+05:30

My knowledge of Computer Science is near 0.
My knowledge of Mathematics is epsilon.
Officially I am supposed to know some finite amount of Physics.

My only slight non-trivial brush with CS was with the exciting course that I took with Prof.Madhavan Mukund at my Alma-mater Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI). Prof.Madhavan Mukund is definitely one of the best 5 professors I have ever seen in IEMS (Rourkela), St.Xavier's Collegiate School (Kolkata), CMI, IMSc, TIFR and SINP. (4 institutes of India where I have spent non-trivial amounts of time).

{Of course St.Xaviers is a special case in this list from where I can hardly recall a single good science teacher. I definitely got some great English and Hindi teachers. And IEMS (Ispat English Medium School), Rourkela is the school in Orissa in which I studied till class 6. I was in Rourkela for 11 years. IEMS had an intensive mathematics and science environment and that instilled in me a love for these subjects right since my childhood. That school has produced many awesome students and its a pity that today that school is crumbling because of government's apathy towards it and lack of funding. I would urge people to collect together to do something for that school which has given Indian some of the finest students in science in the 1990s and the late 80's.}

Prof. Madhavan's course was awesome to say the least. (those unforgettable days when I used to stay awake for days at a stretch trying to do his innovative assignments...I could atleast get a working code ready for all of the questions, though almost always my algorithm was nowhere close to the slick solutions of some of my awesome batchmates like Hrushikesh, Arnold or Preyas.} For me whose only exposure to programming in school was ISC exam level programming with C++, this was an introduction to the completely new world of CS. I always wished that I could take up more courses in TCS but given my professional commitment to Physics I never could get the time to study TCS more seriously, but I keep hoping that someday I shall study more of it. At least I hope to understand someday Automata and Complexity Theory. Little that I see of it from talking to my various friends who work in these fields, I feel they are exciting things to know.

I later sat through another course of Prof.Madhavan Mukund..just listened to the lectures. But anyway thanks to his lectures in the 2 courses, it sparked in me an interest for CS. It drilled in me a basic fact that CS is NOT programming as is commonly and erroneously conceived.

Anyway here I want to talk of some naive thoughts about mine about CS. These are mostly some questions about CS which I have been curious to understand and know but never got the time to do serious reading about them. I am sure most of what I will be talking here will be naive to professional CS people but then I have been filled with childish curiosity to know about a million things since I was a kid. I have no fears to ask questions no matter how naive they are.

I would be glad if some CS or Maths person reading this blog decided to explain these things to me. I have been thinking of these questions for quite some-time but as usual given my primary commitment to Physics I have never been able to do serious reading along these lines and hence have made no substantial progress. All I have is some questions to ask. Let me at least ask them publicly!

So let me begin.

We know that given a linear map between 2 finite dimensional vector spaces one can represent it by a matrix by a choice of basis in the two spaces. A lot of interesting things begin to happen if the linear transformation is an automorphism and then I have interesting structures to play with like the eigenvalue, eigenvector, trace and determinant etc. Now we know that even if the matrix representation is dependent on the basis one can write the characteristic polynomial of this linear transformation and then the coefficients of this are basis invariants. The coefficient of the highest and the first power are most familiar to us by names of "determinants" and the "trace". And the determinant of of a matrix written without the signum function in its defintion is the well-known "Pfaffian". {There are some very exotic definitions of Pfaffnians through graph theory and through differential geometry but I shall avoid all that stuff here}( I shall avoid getting into the complication of differentiating between the minimal polynomial and the characteristic polynomial and whether the field is algebraically closed or not and what its characteristic is. I shall brazenly sweep these subtleties under the carpet so that I can get my essential questions across to the reader. Reader is requested to assume the best case scenario whenever required :P )

{Most common difficulties will arise when the algebraic dimension and the geometric dimension of an eigen value doesn't match but then if one restricts oneself to algebraically closed fields like the complex plane this problem is gone. So kindly do it if you run into problems :D }

Q1. We needed a choice of basis to define these n-basis-invariants (let the vector space be of dimension "n"). Can we define these basis invariants without a choice of basis?

Q2. So isn't it possible to the give a linear transformation as an "input" to a computer program by giving it these n invariants along with their multiplicities? Can't everything that can be known or said about the linear transformation become deducible to the computer as soon at it knows these n-invariants?

I can see this much that one can solve the characteristic polynomial to uniquely determine the linear transformation (upto permutation of the basis) if there are no degeneracies in the eigen-value.

Q3. The most naive way to specify an automorphism of a finite dimensional vector space to a computer would be to give it a matrix representation of it. But can't there be situations when it is advantageous to the computer to get the linear transformation as a set of its invariants ? {it saves memory for one thing..in the first way it has to store n^2 data and in the next it has to store n data}

On the same strain if I have a finite group then everything about the group is known if I know its group multiplication table.

Q4. Hence isn't it possible to give a finite group as an input to the computer by specifying its multiplication table?

Q5. We know that in some cases the group is generated by a generator set using some relations. In those cases can't memory be saved by giving the computer an group not as a multiplication table but instead as a generating set and the relations?

Q6. Isn't it possible to input to the computer in this way a free abelian group on a set? Or to get very fanciful, is it possible to make the computer understand the "free abelian group" on a set as a solution to an universal mapping problem?

Q7. Conversely given a table which "looks like" a group multiplication table isn't it possible to write a program to take this as an input and test whether this represents a group? This definitely can be checked in a finite number of steps but I suppose one should be able to come up with a slick algorithm which does this checking in less than that.

Q8. If the above can be done then isn't it possible for the computer to check whether two finite groups are isomorphic given their multiplication table? This again seems to be a finite process but can someone give a slick way to do that?

Obviously the non-trivial question is when the cardinality of the 2 groups are equal. Since we know that there can be non-isomorphic groups of the same cardinality.

Q9. Thanks to Lagrange's theorem we know the possible values of the cardinality of the subgroups of a finite group. Hence given the multiplication table we know the subsets of it that we need to search to detect subgroups of a group. Given any subset of the matrix checking whether it forms a subgroup isn't very difficult.

Hence can't one write a computer program which will take the group multiplication table as an input and then generate all possible subgroups of it?

In the all the above cases the saving grace is that there is a sense of finiteness about the data being taken by the computer whether in form of a vector space dimension or cardinality of a group. But this is where I want to let my fantasy take a bit of flight.

Can't we get computers to get to operate with things which are not finite and discrete?

Apparently Topological Spaces seem to be such a non-finite and non-discrete data unless the underlying set is a finite set.

So we can think of the following possibilities:

Q10. If the underlying set is finite then it should be possible to give as input to the computer the set and the open sets and then ask it to find out, say, whether this Topology is Hausdorff. This seems possible since it is more or less a search algorithm.

Q12. Even if the underlying set is not finite, but say the Topological Space is second countable and further the basis is finite. Then can't this be given to the computer as input?

Q13. Similarly other immediate notions of "finiteness" in topology that might be a good area to try computability would be:
a. If every point has a countable basis of neighbourhoods.
b. If the space is compact.
c. If the space is paracompact.

Q14. Further if the space is not only compact but also can be embedded in some euclidean space and can be gotten as the 0-set of some equation. Then too probably one can try a method of doing topology on it with a program

Q15. We see that the essential trouble with programming topologies is that we don't know of any way to make the computer understand logic which involve ideas like:

a. "For any 2 points..."
b. "Given any point one can find...."
c. "Given a curve.."
d. "Given an open set containing.."

It is not clear how a program can be made to understand ideas of "any" when the number of possibilities is uncountably infinite.

I would be delighted if some computer programmer or mathematician reading this blog can think about these questions and try to come up with ways of bypassing these limitations.

Q16. Can one do some kind of lattice approximation to topological space.
Like try to convert topological properties into lattice calculation?

I know it is a very fanciful thinking. But still can you do it?

Q17. On a probably simpler note I think it would be great if people can collaborate to create a database for Homotopy, Homology and Cohomology groups of known spaces and write programs which can take input like "X union Y" ("X x Y" would be trivial ) and compute these groups for these spaces by searching the database for the groups for spaces X and Y.

The issue of computability has always seemed an interesting question to me. Those questions which can be "programmed" always seem to belong to a different kind of understanding than those which can't be programmed.

Like one can write a program which will take a matrix as an input and will decide whether the corresponding linear transformation is invertible and can also decide if not then how large is the null-space.

Q18. But it doesn't seem to be possible to write a program which will take a function as an input and will decide whether it is continuous or differentiable at a point. It isn't clear how to program the idea of "taking the limits".
And as far as my intuition goes I don't think a lattice idea will ever work here since things can go wrong on a measure 0 space which a lattice can never get to.

One can also try making this following idea computable:

Q19. Given a Lie Group find its Lie Algebra.
Even mathematically it is a hard question unless quite a lot is known about the group in terms of its topology or it being understood as a zero-set of some polynomial ring.

Or a more difficult and basic question would be to understand how to give a Lie Group as an "input" to the computer?
The issue here becomes circular since in most cases a natural way to give this data to the computer at least for finite dimensional Lie Groups would be to input a chosen basis in the Lie Algebra as matrices! And that means to solve what I wanted to solve I need to know the solution!

Obviously I am thinking very naively and I would urge CS people to give some serious thought about this question.

And making the above question programmable shall be of great utility to Physics.

Q20. I would encourage computer scientists to look into these questions about general manifolds as well where there is a hint of finiteness to help compute things about apparently continuous and infinite data:

1. Triangulable manifolds (all differential manifolds are triangulable)
2. More hopes lie with manifolds which are homotopic to some polytope.

This was a brief glimpse into my world of scientific imagination about which very few people know.

I hope this glimpse would motivate some Computer Science or Maths person to think along these lines.

PS: I would recommend people to read: http://pauli.uni-muenster.de/~munsteg/arnold.html

PS: If any of you readers have any ideas about how to go about these questions then kindly put the idea in the comment. Let there be an online discussion of the ideas. If something non-trivial can be developed through these blogs!

Some thoughts about elections.

2009-03-16T22:58:00.002+05:30

{ This has also been put up at this blog. }

Recently got my legs pulled and jibed at by a senior of mine, Vipul (from my alma-mater CMI and currently at UChicago doing a PhD in Mathematics,) about the stagnant situation of this blog and whether democracy can really be reformed by people who blog about it only once in 2 months.

{ Actually one can look at in this way: I have not been able to put up updates on this blog since I was too busy with my Physics whose professional requirements have been mounting off-late. Hence I was spending more time with Physics. Now is this a bad logic that I have actually been contributing more to the nation by trying to do my Physics well rather than blogging here? }

Anyway thanks to Vipul's comments and pokes, it accelerated the process of me finally writing down some things which I have been thinking of recently. The election round the corner seems to provocate enough number of dinner and coffee table discussions to keep one's mind thinking and hence thought of sharing some of the thoughts which I discussed during these discussions.

1. One thing has always worried me as to whether election makes any sense in a country where most voters are illiterate and are probably have little or no information about the political scenario and the plans of the parties and the larger questions that the country needs to face. Can't really blame the people because if one has to struggle day in and day out to make one's both ends meet one simply can't afford to keep track of the larger questions! The larger issues are simply a luxury when you are not assured of your next meal.

In this situation what is the difference between large number of uneducated/mis/non informed or non-thinking voters voting and voting by a random number generator?

It seems to me that a random number generator will be better since it will be unbiased and might help a better party win in comparison to a corrupt politician being able to "buy" these non-thinking voters by dubious means.

Here one also sees why issues like "caste" and "religion" and "telengana" issue based voting makes such an impact in India. When the population is so huge with no net coherence of thought then if some local issue can cause a local correlation it has large contribution to the net scenario since the rest of the system is anyway randomized! Thats what politicians use, cause local polarization (especially with a non-thinking mass) based in local issues hoping that there is no large scale coherence.

This actually shows why "blogs" are potentially powerful. They can become centers to cause these correlations among a certain section of the population and that can become non-trivial.

2. The point about becoming an effective voter is whether as a voter I am a "thinker" who takes a well-thought decision or a "believer" who goes by the hype and votes for the party which best hypnotizes me into believing in them.

As Vipul put it in a catchy question to me

"Do you think you are believer or you believe that you are a thinker?"

Let us first realize that the essential reflection of whether one is a thinker or a believer is in the way the person makes "choices". Its the process of decision making that amounts to making a choice is what differentiates between "thinkers" and the rest. It can start from simple things like working on a maths question where at every step one needs to think to decide the optimal next step and also in bigger questions like choosing one's life-partner.

Let me try to list out here as to what all a person needs to be a "thinker" apart from the basic minimum intelligence which unfortunately a person cannot change :

1. Freedom of choice.

Unless one has choices there is no use of the ability to think. If one gets excessively constrained that one's choices then there is nothing that the person can do even if he/she can think. Now choices can get constrained by internal as well as external reasons. Internal as in, I fail to see the choices that exist or may be for external reasons where some external force closes choices for me. like as a dalit landless farmer facing the guns of the rich upper-caste landlords, my choices in life are too constrained.

A large section of the Indian electorate is deprived of this fundamental thing as in freedom to choice.

And pretty paradoxically this section of the people who are artificially deprived of choices are the one's for whom a good government might make the biggest difference. Rich businessmen and people in research are probably more immune to political perturbations.

2. Relevant and correct information.

This is the next step. I have enough intelligence to think and say I have choices but still I need some substance to start thinking on. An Economics Nobel Laureate simply can't think about a question in Quantum Theory unless she/he knows enough Physics. <>

Thats the basic kind of problem a large section of the Indian electorate faces. Many simply can't afford to get time to get themselves informed about the parties and the larger issues since they have their first priority to arrange for food! Who cares about what happens to the nation when I am hungry and have no food to eat? And another considerable section of the population simply doesn't care to find out though they have lots of resources since either they are too busy with their profession or busy hanging out at the malls. Somehow given the kinds of lives we live cocooned inside research institutes worrying day and night about courses, assignments, exams and science, politics and larger questions of India seems pretty distant.

Given that large sections of the population don't cast a well-thought vote..I don't know what sense democracy makes in a country like this.

Now there are 3 sides to see in this:

1. If everybody is busy with his/her life striving for professional excellence isn't that by economic ideas an optimal state for the country? How does it then matter whether each person is thinking about the future of governance and larger national questions since anyway every person is trying for professional excellence?

May be the above idea can be put in analogy with the idea of economics that "we get our bread because the baker wants to make profit". The idea is that such a set of people is creating "positive externalities" for each other and the system is thus progressive and then why would anyone need a government? Somehow isn't it possible for such a system of "self-optimizing systems" to show some kind of spontaneous large scale collaboration like what in statistical physics is called "self-organized criticality"?

The associated idea is that a single man's vote is irrelevant to the election since one vote cannot make difference to the future and the energy and time needed to spend to inform oneself and vote knowledgeably is huge. And at the end of all this research the party for whom this party voted might not win. Hence the "net payoff" in this process tends to 0 and hence this makes no economic sense for a person to drop commitment to one's profession and educate oneself about the larger national issues.

So why should anyone vote?

2. When every person is trying to achieve personal professional excellence then everyone is tending to get into a tunnel vision where one is slowly missing the larger picture and anyway people are only going to create positive externalities only locally and not cause large scale collaborations to happen.

This is where the government chips in with an external view of the larger picture to cause macroscopic reallocation of resources to optimize its utilization by the entire population as opposed to the only local optimization that you and I can cause.

Hence one needs a good government.

3. Education and ability to think brings in with it a sense of individualism and independence of thought. How likely is it that a set of such people will show cohesion and coherent thinking? Why hasn't it happened that all the good students across the various world class institutes in India like CMI, ISI, IIT, TIFR get together to form a party which will surely have an average IQ and education billion times any other existing party?

The question is where does the market equilibrate between these 3 competing factors? Can a government have this global ability to cause large scale optimization by macroscopic rearrangement of resources? Can a government be expected to have enough insight and information to cause this?

If the answers to the above question is "no" and if anyway most voters are "non-thinkers" (and hence 1 thinker's vote counts for nought) and even economically it makes no sense to try to be a "thinker" w.r.t voting, why should I vote or worry about casting a good vote instead of doing Physics and Maths properly?

Holi at TIFR

2009-03-11T14:53:00.005+05:30

Coming from a relatively highly sophisticated and silent and gentleman/womanly atmosphere of my Chennai Mathematical Institute holi at TIFR was a culture shock.

Back in CMI Holi used to be a very formal affair where some of the guys used to dab a pinch of gulal on each other's face. Mostly it was arranged by my batchmate Jigar. Only last year Holi at CMI took a slightly more vibrant tone. But still it was quite an organized thing except for the last minute efforts by my great friend Atul to throw mud on each other and add some new "colours" to the event.

But then last year in CMI, I believe the defining moment was when one of my batchmates went to put colours on another girl in CMI and she sharply replied back "You dare do that and I shall slap you hard". And she went back to her academics shutting off the colorful frenzy outside.

Hence Holi in CMI for the sake of self-respect remained mostly a guy's affair.

Hence I had a completely new kind of Holi here at TIFR. They dug up the ground to create a huge mud pit and then people were thrown into it irrespective of age,sex and position in TIFR. { After CMI I was actually pretty surprised to see such enthusiastic and uinhibited participation of the female sex in the Holi chaos. In TIFR they were quite instrumental in initiating the funny mayhem! }

The students went and caught each of the profs and held them up by feet and hands and threw them into the mud pit. And then everyone kept splashing mud on each other. Some of the profs said "no" and their decision was respected and some who said "I don't want to" got held by legs and hands and dumped into the mud pit. :P

Obviously I too got thrown in and it was quite fun to get drenched in mud by so many people. And the I also joined in the process of throwing mud on others! :)

I have been shedding many inhibitions over the last 2 years and I shed this one today. I am a highly freed person and I don't restrain myself from trying out something unless the action runs the risk of destabilizing my thinking or damaging my health or others. Hence I don't drink alcohol or smoke but have danced at parties and balls.

As soon as the people were coming out of the pit there was a water shower arranged for them to clean up and thats where the consistent pranks started. People were too drenched in mud to see whether the other guy was pouring mud or water. So as soon as someone got out of the shower cleaned he/she was welcomed with a bucket of mud water on him/her.

The argument was simple "You are not allowed to be so clean"

There were a few visiting French scientists in the Physics department and they too got thrown in. One of our physics profs went to them and explained to them:

"You have to do nothing at all. Just go and sit in the pool and close your eyes and ears. The rest will be taken care by us. This is annual ayurvedic treatment festival in India"

They happily enjoyed the "ayurvedic treatment"

One of the profs had boiled a lot of beat-root to create pink colours and that was given to the children in the campus to play with. Nutritious and non-toxic colours for children.

And there were obviously colours but they took an obvious back-seat and there were liters of "Bhang" and sweets for everyone. The girl who was distributing the Bhang found a nice excuse to be not thrown into the mud saying "I am busy" :P

I steered clear from such suspicious liquids. :)

Weird questions? May be not.

2009-02-10T01:48:00.002+05:30

Walk into one of these glassy and glossy malls which throng most of urban India and of the many things the one thing in particular that catches my attention are the abundant number of "couples" that I see moving there. Pairs of guys and girls in the age group of around 17 to 30.

(Disclaimer: I have no experience of having been to any place ever in my life with another girl. I have neither ever been on any date nor have I ever asked any girl out. My maximum experience in these directions is to have danced with some girl at a ball or parties or dandiya. So all that I am writing here stems from what I observe around me.

Further it will be apparent that all my discussions are biased towards the heterosexual relations since I don't have much understanding of the homosexual relations. Of course this bias is not because I am against homosexuality but simply because I have never interacted with any homosexual. Along the similar lines my discussions also completely exclude eunuchs since again I have no interaction with them and hence a lack of understanding of them. Of course homosexuals and eunuchs are very much part of the human society and ideally any human issue should also include them but somehow this wretchedly biased society has so surgically excluded them from the mainstream that so many people live all their life with no understanding of them but only filled with socially grown repulsion for them for no logical reason. )

These couples are seen hanging around in the Barista or the Cafe-Coffee Day or any of these kind of hangouts. Its such an amazing phenomenon that is happening around me that has always baffled me. How come these pairs of guys and girls happen to meet and like each other? How many of these pairs are in love? How many of these pairs are just bonded by sexual attraction for each other? How many of them are just having a casual time out with the other and how many of them will end up living together for a life time? Anyway to begin with it seems that an highly improbable statistics has worked in their favour that they found a person to go out with!

Let us focus on that section of these couples which plan to have children and set up a family in the conventional sense. From what I get to hear and see around me it seems that this section is pretty large. And what I also infer from what I hear from others is that the guys involved in the relationship are pretty keen to have children. (I am not aware as to what is the general feminine standpoint but I have heard some women say that for the stability of a relationship it is important to have children. For some reason beyond my comprehension many guys feel this instinct to have children and have a family. Note: this feeling goes much beyond just sexual drive. I somehow don't seem to comprehend why 2 people in love can't just be happy living together without having children.)

But somehow again by some weird statistics these things fit together and many of these couples marry and also have children and probably their children will also fit into these statistics and they will also feel the need to marry and have children and somehow this cycle keeps going on. And the weird thing is that this instinctive cycle is not just restricted to the section of people I started out with who had out in the malls but cuts right across all social, economic, linguistic or cultural divisions.

A large section of the people right from the people living in deadly poverty in the most terrible slums of India to the richest and the glamorous of the society...this one instinct equalizes them all...the instinct to have children and to set up a family..the instinct to have a next generation with a hope that my son/daughter will have a better life than mine and will live a better life than mine. The guy in the slum dreams that his son will have a good job and will have a house of his own and the guy leading a large business group dreams that his son will take the business to new heights.

{Why isn't it possible to explain to that poor guy living in the slums that if you don't have enough money to support yourself properly then how do you hope to bring up a one more child? I simply don't understand how these simple logic get washed by this weird instinct to pass on the genetic code! This instinct is unexplainable to say the least.}

{ I am deliberately using "son" here since I can't forget the extreme gender inequality that India has where the society is light-years away from looking at men and women on equal footing. Indian society commits a million crimes against women everyday germinating from the thousands of years old gender bias ingrained into it. Unless the women in every home actually start realizing and fighting for their independence and equality in their own family then this male chauvinistic society of India is never going to change and it will keep teaching in the books to children "Mother cooks food for the family". I just hated this statement in the books right since I was in kindergarten. My mother was first my teacher and given that she is a doctor she was also the first medical help. She taught me basic geometry (much before school taught me these things in class 6, my mother taught me to construct the incircle and circumcircle of a triangle when I was pretty young and all mathematics till I could start reading things on my own from class 3 or 4 and of course taught me a lot of biology. In no way can I imagine my mother as the one "who cooks food for the family". And of course she almost saved me from various things that were beyond my control and could have potentially completely jeopardized my life...things that I can't share here. And later in my life it was to my mother that I disclosed and cried when my fist serious love in life crashed...it is just amazing as to how much I could share with my mother that I could go and tell her of one of the biggest disasters in my life when I lost my first serious love.

How many of these girls that I see hanging around in the malls if they become mothers later in their life will be mothers like mine?

And coming back to that cycle that I was talking of. It seems to just go one without any rhyme or reason. And then this society will complaint that the world is getting polluted, that plastic is choking this earth, that there is less space to live etc. etc. Every generation comes in full of this instinct to pass on the genetic code and then what follows is simply a consequence. And definitely human beings haven't been built to adapt to nature but has a weird piece of brain attached on the top of the shoulders which comes up with all possible ways to bend nature to fit its needs and obviously nature back fires. And yet this society keeps producing new human beings who with every passing generation will live in more and more polluted earth and in smaller and smaller boxes that chequer the cities.

And then given this unstoppable cycle of reproduction, the society goes in search of producing more life sources from lesser and lesser raw material and will keep growing more and more sophisticated industries and more and more genetically engineered seeds to grow more crops out of less land. And then this cycle gets to the limit of its recursive stupidity when we keep expanding the cities and keep eating into the the crop lands and convert them into industries and keep complaining that resources are going down.

On one hand we keep reducing the available land to cultivate and on the other hand we come up with weirdly engineered seeds to grow more out of less land. Isn't it obvious that this process of indiscriminate expansion will only backfire.

Every generation will see pairs of couples populating the glossy malls and using up watts of energy to run these huge AC malls and guzzling gallons of coke in plastic bottles without any thought as to what will happen to the plastic. And these couples in the malls give birth to another generation of couples who will again populate the newer and probably bigger malls in the next generation and will drink more gallons of coke and will throw the plastic bottles.

Why are we as a society collectively failing to prevent this stupid recursive cycle of reproducing purely driven by illogical instincts and then producing more plastic waste and reducing crop land and increasing industries and then eating genetically grown food.

Why can't we stop this mindless circle?

Why does falling in love and sexual attraction have to lead to increasing the population?
Why do these fundamental emotions have to lead to self-destruction of the society?

Just an imagination...

2009-01-24T00:57:00.002+05:30

Just a few random thoughts. Apologies for the lack of grammatical correction or organization or attempt at coherence.

Imagine:

a cold day with snow all around and frost on the window panes and the mellow dew sunlight filtering into the room through that..and sleeping on a soft white bed under large white quilts the entire day...and green meadows outside over which a black stallion is riding by.

and far away is faintly visible in the fog a series of blue mountains with moss green vegetation on it..and far away one can see some houses where people are cooking porridge and the smoke is rising through the chimneys into the blue sky shadowed with cotton like clouds...and sleeping in the wooden room while thats what the world outside is.

and the only thing that disturbs this melancholic silence is the quaint tune of the flute of the shepherd who has taken his flock of sheep to graze on the pastures on the hills and somewhere far away there is a water fall...the faint sound of water falling onto the hard rocks and frothing up in its desperation to break the rocks...and you sleeping in the bed happily disturbed by these sounds

something exists because humanity strongly believes that it is true

sheer force of imagination can make abstract things tangible reality.

its just like the concept of God. like love, like the end of the universe .. people just believe in these things strongly without any proof of their existence

and these look real to many people.

Its just like suddenly believing that one particular man can change the world. Just like falling in love hoping this lady will change life.
Its temporary insanity and yet we continue to imagine and err.

Today are we really all Mumbaikers? (Part 3) {Characater of terror and what money can and cannot buy.}

2009-01-06T01:36:00.002+05:30

{This article has also been put up here: Reform Our Democracy blog }

A naive question that sometimes rises in my mind is if let us say India were a nation where everyone is well-fed and every person has a happy life and everyone is well-educated then will India become completely resistant to all sorts of terror activities? Will such an India be a land which doesn't even become the breeding ground for terrorism? If everyone in this world has sufficient resources to survive then will that world be devoid of terrorism?

I deeply feel that the face of terror has changed a lot and the modern form of terrorism CAN NOT be checked by access to good life to everyone. Osama comes from a very rich family and his top men are well-educated professionals who are doctors, engineers etc.

We should realize that terrorists are no Robin Hoods who are fighting to acquire resources for some deprived people. They are basically thinkers who are motivated by some idealism beyond measure and are not coming from any economically deprived background.

Of course one is aware of how many poor families are exploited by these terror groups. They get threatened to pay either a large sum of money to these outfits or send some of their young men in the family to join the group. Obviously the poor people choose the later alternative. The poor section of the people are very vulnerable to exploitation and they eventually act as feeding centers of these groups.

But even then the question rises if there were no such poor people to exploit will terror groups get crippled?

Again I feel that the answer is NO. There are thousands of intellectuals across the world who are brain-running these organizations. They are well educated people with specific ideological motives. They are sharper diplomats than most governments have and are fine thinkers. They have propaganda running all around to motivate the young and educated to join their outfits and become vehicles in their way to attain those political and ideological goals. There is a huge section of these terror groups who are joining these outfits not out of any need or force but by sheer motivation of ideology.

A world where resources are available to everyone is not going to prevent the rise of this educated and motivated section of the terror groups.

One must realize that not every lay man can be converted into a terrorist. It is not easy to motivate a person to go on a kill and have him kill thousands. It takes a lot of awareness and understanding (or probably mis-understanding!) of the history and political complications that exist in this world to feel motivated for a reason and motivated enough to lay down one's life and kill thousands for it. It is a very different level of inspiration than what we can off-hand imagine. Many feel inspired by the words of some great orators like say Vivekananda or by the words of some public figure or politicians but these inspirations are far less than what is required to lay down one's life for it or kill thousands for it.

There is probably no one in India who is motivated by any politician or spiritual leader in India to the extent to which the terrorists are motivated by their intellectual gurus running these organizations from far away.

War against terrorism is not a fight against a few hundred men with sophisticated rifles but a fight against some ideologies which are far more stronger than anything else when it comes to motivate people.

To summarize we should realize the following character of the terrorists:

1. They are NOT a bunch of irrational people creating havoc. They are decisive thinkers with immense education behind them, who have a very specific interpretation of history and politics of this world. They are cool thinkers working with definite purpose and methods. They are people working with definite organization and discipline.

One can put it this way that if someday India concedes Kashmir to Pakistan then Masoor Azad and such men will be hailed as "freedom fighters" by many people and whose lives will be taught in history books in some parts of the world just as we teach about the lives of Bhagat Singh to Indian school children. Reciprocally British considered Bhagat Singh to be a terrorist and life of Bhagat Singh is not taught to British school children.

In our war against terrorism we should keep in mind that against whom we are fighting are glorified as "freedom fighters" among large sections of the people.

2. They are NOT people "without return address" (as US believed them to be some-time ago). They have specific shelters and refuge centers across the world. They have powerful patrons. Whenever they see themselves getting cornered by some government they have specific places to return to and hibernate, regroup and then again attack back when the time is ripe.

3. They are NOT people who are working out of deprivation. They are well-off people fighting for their ideological goals. One cannot hope to bargain with terrorists by offering in exchange money or other resources.

Terrorists have enough of anything that money can buy.

So any plan to counter terrorists have to keep the following in mind:

1. The immediate aim of the war has to be to try to eliminate the intellectual sources of terrorism with as much urgency as governments try to eliminate the financial and other material sources of terrorism.

With the thinkers and philosophers gone what shall be left of the terrorists is just clusters of men trained to shoot. Indian army can take care of them with ease. What the army will not be able to fight with ease are the thousands of strategists and political thinkers across the world who are motivating people across the world to fight for their ideals.

2. Talk to the vulnerable youth before the terrorist propaganda talks to them!
This I think is the most important thing to do now as an extension of the education system of India.

This shall have to be an extensive outreach form of the education system which goes knocking door to door across India and neighbouring countries to teach the youth about the ideas of nationhood and ways to practical realization of it. To teach them use their skills to directly solve the problems that their nation faces and do these BEFORE the sophisticated thinkers behind terror outfits go picking these youngsters and brainwashing them into their ideas of killing.

3. Try to eliminate poverty in specific places where terror groups are active. They are most vulnerable. If poverty elimination looks like a long plan then at least immediately hike up the security of these economically backward regions.

4. Have an extreme level of control of who and what enters through the borders of India. A definitive form of identification of every resident of India, like say a number that shall identify every Indian. And every person in India should be able to prove his identity of being an Indian by that number whenever and wherever demanded of. You might be sitting in the cafe with your girlfriend but if demanded suddenly in the cafe by some passing by army person, you should be able to prove that you are an Indian by that unique number. And if the person fails to do so she/he should be immediately taken into custody.

This may sound harsh but given the situation in India this is time for strict measures.

It shall be a very difficult thing to implement in a country of 1 billion where so many people are homeless and where there are million remote areas where no transport goes. But still I think this is an effort worth trying.\

Apart from the security aspect this numerical identification has the chance of unifying India through a common means rising beyond all other local identities.

We have too large and rough a boundary with Himalayas on one side and ocean on the other. Our borders are too porous and it is too difficult to control what goes on there. But we have to have very strict control of what goes in and goes out of it. Such high security at the borders will mean a sharp decline in the trade that occurs there but I suppose when national security is at stake it is a very small cost to pay.

The above control at the boundary and control over identification will definitely need to be supported by a strong drive across the nation to curb the population growth drastically. Today it is time we look at no child per family rule. 1 child per family also looks to be too costly given the devastatingly large burden of 1 billion.

Today standing in these times let us all Indians exchange all our personal freedoms and choices if the need comes for the sake of national security and to fight terrorism.

It is not the time to be politically correct.
It is not the time to preach ideas of a liberal world and democracy.

Today are we really all Mumbaikers? (Part 2) {Is the "Indian" fighting terrorism?}

2009-01-06T01:32:00.001+05:30

{This article has also been put up here: Reform Our Democracy blog }

It is simple mathematics that the sum of a randomly chosen set of vectors will tend to 0 as we keep increasing the number of vectors. Precisely the situation with India. The huge diversity that exists in India rarely ever seems to work in favour of the nation since this diversity has through out history prevented any coherence between the thoughts of people across India to develop. The random phase differences has always led to destructive interference and whenever our Indian identity is suddenly under attack, like by Kasab and his men, the entire set of 1 billion people are unable to immediately respond with any unanimous voice or action. Aptly reflected in the dilapidated and confused response of the government to the issue.

How many more attacks on this land will it take for this nation to feel united?

India as it stands today is a land where one can get anything from life to love with money or muscle power. It is a nation where everything is a commodity and anything can be sold and acquired by force be it life or sex or body organs or seats in the parliament or seats in the train or marks in the examination. It is a nation where even the best of students in the elite institutes of India can be seen dancing to the tunes of the professors and buttering them to keep them happy so that they can get good grades and good recommendation letters so that they can get a seat in some US university. (Leave alone the fact that many professors are vulnerable to such lowly behaviours!). When I was in school in St.Xavier's Collegiate School, Kolkata, in class 8 I had seen my Hindi teacher "selling" marks in the examination. I didn't feel even slightly disappointed at failing in that exam when after the exam I saw one student go to the teacher after the class and telling him "Sir, Is 100Rs for every mark okay with you?". Over the next few days that teacher got gifts of various kinds. Since today I have no way to prove this incident in court, I can't write here the name of the teacher.

This nation CAN NOT fight terrorism.

We as a nation have been completely unable to build in some basic civic sense and environment consciousness. We have been unable to prevent people from spitting and throwing garbage in the streets and have been unable to ensure that people don't get into the trains without a reservation ticket. Leave alone the fact that most train ticket checkers in India can be bribed to get a place to sit in the train even if it is by the toilet! India as a nation has failed to imbibe within its people the basic ideas of honesty and correctness. It is a nation that lacks sincerity with anything it does and we unashamedly keep taking pride in some great men who have been from India whereas the rest of the country is completely disjoint from these handful of great Indians. It is a nation that has never seen a renaissance or a revolution that affected the common man. The common man has historically been kept away from all sorts of intellectual reforms or political upheavals.

And obviously in this strain one should mention our shameful failure to check the population growth. Its a time-bomb that has blasted and the repercussions continue to thrash us in day to day life. Various reasons rising from mainly vote-bank politics has corrupted the politicians and have prevented them from talking about this issue bravely and facing the population expansion problem. It seems completely ridiculous that this country in 50 years post independence can't control its population!

This failure is a collective failure of the Indian education system resulting from politically driven education system where every thing is done with the aim of ensuring a win in the elections than what is good for the country. We have compromised to the extent of not teaching some basic ideas to the students in fear that this might conflict other social and religious teachings and might result in the mass angered against the government.

This inability of India to follow logic and look beyond social customs and religious teachings has resulted in a jeopardized large population. A large population immediately becomes a breeding ground for hideous activities (could be terrorism ) since it is so easy to hide oneself in this large population.

India faces a complete internal security failure in form of loss of accountability of the people.

This nation CAN NOT fight terrorism.

What India lacks in general today is a sense of honesty at every level apart from the most tangible loss in the form of being prone to bribes and corruptions. Most professors in even the elite institutes of India simply come and go having taught nothing useful in the classes or having made any effort to be correct or having made any efforts to ensure that the student has learnt anything correct. Most of them simply hand-wave arbitrary things knowing that most students fearing back-reaction from the prof. in terms of bad marks and grades will not question. They produce students who have grown up listening to such hollow lectures full of erroneous ideas and they become teachers for the next generation and the cycle continues. There is no feed-back mechanism where things get corrected just as there is no check on a minister for those 5 years he is power. In the end what India is left with is a completely dilapidated education system in which it is solely a good student's credit if she/he has been able to learn something correct. And it is only best that we don't talk of the state of primary education in India...I wonder whether it "educates" anyone.

As a by-product we have a huge section of the youth in the colleges of India given to drugs and alcohol. Millions of potential thinkers and workers for India drowning their talents in narcotics. Unemployment in India is not just a result of growing population of India but is very much growing from the fact that the Indian youth is today devoid of thoughts and creativity but soaked in alcohol.

This nation with a corrupt education system and a lost youth CAN NOT fight terrorism.

We as Indians have weakened ourselves in every way we could have morally, physically and intellectually. We have built a nation where the youth neither thinks nor speaks the truth. We have created a nation where each and every person is in some way or the other afraid of falling out of favour with someone, student from the teacher and teacher from the head of the department or employee from the boss and the companies from the ruling party and the politicians from the part leader and so on the chain continues.

India is a nation built on favouritism going back to the times when the rajas and maharajs gave privileges or the Britishers bribed Nawabs etc with titles of "Rai Bahadur". We as a nation have never thought of attaining anything without favouritism and what hence we have a nation which never speaks the truth but only continues to try to be diplomatically correct so that she/he is socially well-off.

What better state than this could a nation be to be a soft target for the terrorists! With this factious state of affairs we have made ourselves extremely penetrable to all sorts of foreign designs. It is pretty trivial to play one section of the Indian population against another and generate local support. I am pretty sure that without generating local shelters a foreign force can't operate so efficiently. Further it is not just direct support in terms of resources and information but also to some extent there has to be presence of elements who render moral support.

Its only surprising that not all the terrorist groups across the world don't have their head quarters in India!

Today are we really all Mumbaikers? (Part 1) {Is it a nation of 1 billion people called "India" that is fighting terrorism together? }

2009-01-06T01:28:00.001+05:30

{This article has also been put up here: Reform Our Democracy blog }

Recently it was reported that the ninth child, a girl, of a certain poor family in Bihar was sold by their parents to someone in exchange for a few square meals a day. I am sure it is one of the millions of such incidents in India which got reported. Its a country where poor daily wage labourers sell their blood for 500 or 1000Rs per bottle to earn a living and many people sell one of their kidneys for 50,000 to 1lakh rupees to stay alive.

This is my India that hopes to fight cross-border terrorism!

I find it ridiculous to say the least and obviously the only thing that comes from the prime-minister and the defence minister post 26/11 are a few hollow shouts at Pakistan. Isn't there a fat chance that the Indian government acted meekly against Pakistan sponsored terrorism simply to preserve their Muslim vote bank in India?Can't forget that the elections are knocking at their door!

Pakistan almost making a joke of India's calls by showing the world that it is trying to curb state sponsored terrorism by putting a few locks on the offices of some of the terrorists!

India as it stands has a completely hollowed society split under innumerable factions and it is too fragile a society in terms of unanimous thinking and this society CAN NOT fight terrorism. How is Ajmal Kasab and his men different from those doing business in India by selling kidneys, blood and doing pre-birth sex determination to kill the girl child? (whom Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen called the "Missing Women"...I wrote a blog about this some time ago )

An army fights as a group so that its organization is not infiltrated by the enemies. How can that army win a battle when its own organization is itself infiltrated by the enemies or its organization is itself crumbling due to corruption?

Let us not fool ourselves in taking pride in the elusive concept of "United Republic of India" and rusting statements about "Unity in Diversity"! "India" is just a concept that exists in pen and paper and has never existed in reality. People of this "nation" have never really thought in any unanimous way and have never thought of themselves as part of the same nation. The idea of "nationhood" has never been a part of the Indian psyche. A typical person from Kerala or West Bengal is very likely to give his first identity as a Keralite or Bengali rather than as an Indian. State identity is only one of the million possible identities that can get pre-dominance over their national identity. In some social or religious occasion, this Keralite or the Bengali might again get united under their identity of being a "Brahmin"! but even by mistake they might not unite as "Indian".

The nation called "India" is only an abstract idealization of a factious reality and the "Indian" is some fictional character.

We teach the school children very proudly about the "Revolt of 1857" and give them the idea that this supposedly "great Indian uprising" was the first organized revolt India launched against the British. I have found all these sugar-coated statements to be extremely erroneous and anyone who has read history even a little more carefully would have realized how completely disjoint the 1857 revolt was from common Indian. (not to mention the surgical door to door butchering of lakhs of Indians by the British post-revolt of those families who took part in the revolt)

1857 revolt came no where close to the French Revolution where the common man took up arms. 1857 revolt was purely a meek attempt by some local provincial kings to join forces to regain their authority over their lands. It was purely a fight by the local rulers to regain power and no one had any idea of "India" in them and they were not fighting for liberation of India.

The reality as I see today is that we still are split along the same lines as the armies in 1857 were split. Regional division is so deeply ingrained by those 200 dark years of British Rule in India that even today it takes only a little bit of spark to set one region on a blood-hunt of the other...recent example being the attack of the MNS against the candidates from Bihar!

This piece of land called "India" which is so deeply split along all sorts of local identities of caste, region, family (gharana and biradiri!), language etc is extremely vulnerable to the evil designs of any foreign power. It is trivial for foreign powers to take advantage of these local splits to infiltrate the society and create their shelters within India. Wars at the borders of India are pointless when such a split society further made desperate by killing poverty has been hacked into by the terrorists.

No wonder Al-Qaeda's recruitment advertisement tapes were found being circulated in Bihar.

And this issue of one particular identity of a person being hiked up is extremely generic to the way India works. "Those are Muslims. They are foreigners. They are terrorists" can be enough to raise many Hindus to kill Muslims in India irrespective of their profession whether she/he had another identity as a scientist or farmer or a clerk in a bank. Similarly many Christians in Orissa can probably now be made to kill Hindus by properly instigating their religious identity and telling them that "These Hindus have burnt your churches and priests". Indians have become extremely vulnerable to let any one of her/his identities being used as a crank to turn her/him into an instrument of terror.

At the end we have a completely divided India which is one nation only for a show and a cluster of provinces in reality with provincial heads working for personal gains. No wonder we still see politicians going to vote with their manifesto supporting a further split in India, the so called "Telengana"! And these splits have over the years given birth to numerous guerrilla warfare expert POWs (People War Groups), all of them fighting for local interests and indeed some of them have genuine reasons since various remote areas of India have always been forgotten by the government of India.

Imagine the situation if all these POWs could be motivated by the foreign terrorist groups to join them against a common enemy the "government in Delhi". It would be a severe collapse of the already fragile nation.

As soon as Mumbai was attacked I could hear voices around me suddenly preaching 2 ideas:

1. All Muslims be removed from India. It is impossible to live with them. They are anyway culturally so disjoint from us.

{I would rather kill myself than see people like A.P.J Abdul Kalam, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Shah, Gulzar, Amjad Ali and Zakeer Hussain thrown out of India because they are muslims!}

2. Let all Hindus assemble themselves into Hindu terror outfits which shall counter Muslim terrorism. Let the hard liners of Hinduism motivate all Hindus in India to form such military organizations. Even one former MP seemed to preach such similar ideas in an article in the newspaper Indian Express.

{I can't remember hearing more stupid ideas. Seems to me to be the perfect idea for Hindus to create a Frankenstein for themselves. I would like to put this very strongly that Hindu hard lined organization is NOT an answer to Muslim terror groups. It would be suicidal to say the least.}

But obviously one can't deny that most terror outfits in India are Islamic groups and clearly claim religion to be one of their main motivating factors. It is definitely necessary that the India government does a crackdown on all possible places and means through which such Islamic terrorist groups could be operating. Such an operation should definitely include all Mosques and Madrasas which have at various times been used as bases for terror groups. And we every now and then hear that many Madrasas are being used by terror groups as their training centers.

But now this would be extremely stupid if such a combing action gets interpreted by someone as an attack by Indian government against Muslims. One should be ready to look beyond every human emotion for the sake of national security.

But welcome to India! I am sure that many in the government would immediately oppose such a combing action since they would be afraid to lose their Muslim vote bank! This nation built on the lines of cheap politics can never hope to fight terrorism.

And then we hear further weird propaganda being carried on by various Muslim clerics outside India and there have been reports in the news papers that there are secret pamphlets getting circulated in various mosques in the Middle East which seem to say that the even though Muslims ruled India for about 800 years (Mughal Empire) it managed to convert only about 20% of India to Islam. What a shameful situation for Islam! They look at this as a great failure on the part of Islam and this is the time when this historic error needs to be corrected. Hence let us spensor terrorist groups and capture India and convert it to Islam.

Wonderful! If ever one needs an example to skewed ways of thinking then this is it!

And then from some of my friends in South India who are deeply religious about Hinduism I have heard statement like we should not count only the 200 years of British Rule as the only period of Indian history as being enslaved by a foreign power but we should count it has 1000 years including the Mughal period. They were equally foreign powers having enslaved India.

With such philosophies doing rounds in India I find it impossible to think how this nation can ever fight terrorism!

Birth of a Child-II

2008-12-12T18:46:00.002+05:30

Contd..from the last article

As I was stating earlier the time of 36 weeks inside the mother's womb is very crucial. As I experienced recently that even if the baby comes out after 34-35 weeks it is a considerably immature baby! These babies are very likely to have breathing troubles and in the baby that I am observing off-late he had to be put into an incubator in a ICU immediately after birth. Even after 34 to 35 weeks the lungs can be highly immature and unable to supply enough pure blood to the body. The alveoli in the lungs may simply be unable to expand enough and the baby might have to put into artificial breathing machines. Contrary to prevalent ideas and very surprisingly recent research has shown that these artificial breathing machines when used on new-born babies can affect brain development! So the situation is really complicated.

If the lungs seem to be maturing fast and the situation is not very bad then doctors can try to do some chemical treatment where they use chemicals called "surfactants" which little that I understand from the viewpoint of a physics student is that they reduce the surface tension of the alveolar bags and hence help them expand to full capacity.

The point is that birth just 2 weeks earlier than the typical 36 weeks can lead to pretty complicated situations. Over and above these lung problems another very common problem with pre-mature babies is that they may be born with holes in their heart! If the hole is large then chances of survival can be very slim given that already the lungs are under performing. If the hole is small then gradually the correct tissues grow and the holes get filled but if this does not happen then pretty complicated and risky operation might be required.

The baby I am observing now and whose situation has prompted this blog seems to have both the troubles of a under-developed lungs and has 2 holes in the heart!

Further if the premature baby is not of a good mass and is not physically very healthy then he/she might not be in a position to even survive these complicated medical treatments.
If the baby is very pre-mature then even after birth she/he needs to be kept in similar humidity and temperature conditions after birth like she/he was inside the womb. That is maintained these days by artificially creating such conditions inside glass chambers in which the baby is put.

Obviously these processes are very very expensive and not every family will be able to afford these treatments. And in these treatments there is no guarantee of success, further with things like late crying and convulsions the baby is likely to grow up to be a spastic child which no treatment can cure. Then why should the parents keep trying to save their child when it is sure that there is no cure and the fatal damage has been done within the first few minutes of birth!

Isn't it better for them and the world that in such a situation the parents decide to opt for mercy-killing of the baby?
Isn't euthanasia for the new born baby a much better thing in such situations than let her/him grow up to be a mentally handicapped person?
Shouldn't parents in such situations let hard sense of logic dominate human emotional instincts and take the bold step?

On the little brighter side...one of my grandmother's elder brothers was born a very pre-mature baby and in those days about 75 years ago there was no such technology as talked of earlier. He was supposedly kept inside wet-cotton inside a shoe box and the room was covered with wet-clothes which were constantly kept wet! I feel a sense of extreme scientific thrill that they could save the baby in those days! Even one of my childhood friends was also born a very pre-mature baby. She is very much alive today and very much running around with her life.

And to top it all I had read that even Newton was born a pre-mature baby! I feel completely excited at the idea that in the early 17th century, some 300 years ago they could save a pre-mature baby!

In fact various research works have shown that pre-mature babies if are free from any other health complication at birth like lung dis-functioning etc then are likely to grow up to be very intelligent people!

The point of this article was to share from my almost non-technical viewpoint (that of a student of science with formal training in mathematics and physics but nothing formal in biology after class 10) some of the various non-preventable factors at birth that determine the health of the baby and have an irreversible effect on the person.

The point is that all these scary things can happen at birth and the couple has almost no control over it and can do nothing to prevent it. And if they can't go for hard options like euthanasia at birth then they have a very very painful life ahead, further society has collectively a terribly difficult task of bringing up a mentally handicapped child.

This reminds me of a Spartan custom. During the times of the roman empire the Spartans were supposed to be the most skilled warriors and probably the first civilization to have election and a democratic government and they supposedly had greater women-men equality in the society than it exists even today. Already in those days they supposedly had elected women representatives in the parliament! These Spartans had some specification about the minimum health standards of a child at birth and if the baby was below it then it was immediately killed.

What they did definitely does not seem appropriate today since today we need not have an entire society of warriors. I don't see why to do mathematics one needs to have a herculean figure. But the point is that given their needs Spartans did have the courage to overcome normal human instincts and use hard logic.

Given all this huge gamble that exists with the health and intelligence of the child, is this entire adventure of having a child worth it?

Couples unable to conceive naturally take all sorts of expensive and sophisticated help from medical professionals to be able to have a child.

Why?

What justifies all this effort and emotion and expenditure when on the bare minimum one can't ensure that the child will not be mentally handicapped?

(especially in India where the nation is already crippled by this luggage of 6 billion people!)

reminds me of the lines of a famous hindi song:

"...Tujhse naraz nahin zindagi se, Hairan hoon main..."

Birth of a Child-I

2008-12-12T18:37:00.002+05:30

I have been planning to write about the idea of "Single Parent" for a long time but almost every time something or the other happens that distracts me to some other topic. Single parenthood is a concept that has been very close to me ever since I have memories of and I have experience of almost single parenthood from pretty dangerous proximity. Today when I have some sort of a standing in life I have the courage to write about this issue...it took me 21 years to build enough courage to do it. But probably not enough to get into personal details. That might have to wait for more years.

But this time round, again there is some other topic boiling around me that seems to have a greater immediate force on me. The issue is of a newly married couple and them having the idea of having a child.

With due apologies to all the people who think that I am inexperienced, I have a simple question to ask. Why?

Why most newly married couples are so eager to have a child? Given the phenomenal development that has happened in the science of contraceptives and abortion, there is no reason why people can't have a happy sex-life without conceiving.

I am still waiting to hear a convincing argument from anyone as to why they would want to have a child of their own. I have of course heard of a lot of flimsy arguments like the need to have an heir to carry forward the family and things like who will carry on the family business? and then things like it is somehow the necessary completion of a marriage. Some people seem to be more driven by the social stigma that a marriage is successful only when the couple has conceived. Then there are arguments that the child is the essential bonding in the marriage and that without a child the marriage is unstable and is likely break down.

I simply can't buy all these arguments. I am sure that a very compatible pair of people in love with each other can remain happily together whether they have or don't have a child. At some point it seems that the stigma of not having a child is created by the society to back up its reservations about love-marriages. It seems that getting the couple to have a child was a way to seal an arranged marriage forced on the couple.

Why am I suddenly perturbed by this idea? The immediate reason is that I am currently seeing from a very close distance the troubles of child birth. I am seeing on a day to day level how complicated the birth of a child can be and how very subtle factors at birth can determine the health of the child and how easy it is for a potentially healthy baby to suddenly become a spastic and become a burden for his/her family and the society at large. {Of course one can say that a spastic child is million times better than a healthy baby growing up to be a criminal or a terrorist.}

Last few days have been very revealing to me in terms of medical knowledge about the complications of child birth thanks to such a situation having risen around me.
It seems to be so much of a risk to me and so much about the health of the baby is in the hands of probability! The couple has so little or practically no control over it.

Given this huge gamble why would a couple want to have a child when they can't even at least prevent the new born child from being a spastic?

I never studied biology officially after class 10 but given that my mother is a doctor I always keep hearing of the details of the human life processes from the million discussions at home. I suppose I can be excused if I am not technically very correct but let me try to get the basic idea that I can understand as a science student although with no formal training in biology.

Probably because of my lack of formal training I can communicate the essential idea to people who have very little idea of biology. I think these are issues that everybody should appreciate.
Let me talk of some of the subtle risks that are involved. Of course I am not counting the obvious risks that are involved if say the mother is very young or malnourished or suffers some accident during the period of pregnancy or is HIV positive.

Even if the mother is healthy there are these 3 very subtle factors determining the health of the baby:

{There are a million other almost non-controllable factors that can affect crucially but these are the 3 that I am seeing closely during the experience that has inspired this blog post.}

a) The time elapsed between when the baby first cries and when he/she first comes out of the mother's womb.
b) The number of weeks the baby has spent in the mother's womb. The typical time is 36 weeks but I recently came to realize how important that number is. If say the baby comes out after 34 or 35 weeks even then there is considerable risk.
c) A large baby might happen to gulp in some of the amniotic fluid and that can complicate matters a lot.
{something that I am told that I did as a foetus!}

The idea is that the foetus when in the mothers' womb is floating inside a fluid bag. The fluid being called the amniotic fluid. So this baby is not breathing when inside this fluid and his/her lungs are collapsed and non-working. It nourishes itself completely by diffusing in oxygen and nutrients and diffusing out carbon-di-oxide from her/his mother's blood through the vessel, umbilical chord that connects from his/her navel to an organ called placenta on the mother's womb.

Even though it is slightly off-point here, I would like to note that the general practice has been to cut the umbilical chord at birth. One should remember that for other mammals there is no doctor around to cut the umbilical chord and the baby is born with that. It gradually dries up and falls off. So it is not clear why we humans have devised this artificial method of cutting the umbilical chord! In fact some recent research has shown that this process of cutting the chord gives considerable mental shock to the baby at birth and this is completely preventable. More and more doctors are of the opinion that like other mammals human babies should also be let born with the chord and let it naturally fall off.

Further inside the mother's womb the baby is in a fluid environment and when she/he is coming out he/she is having an environment shock from fluid to atmosphere. For quite a few years it has been shown that this environment shock is bad. Hence the concept of "Water Birth" has been going on for quite some time. In this process the mother gives birth to the baby under-water and the child doesn't have this shock. The baby is cleaned inside the water and is then brought out. Statistics has shown that this process is much more pleasant for both the mother and the child. In fact most doctors are of the opinion that water born babies are much more peaceful and intelligent. It is becoming increasingly popular in the west but somehow India doesn't seem to adopt this process. I don't understand the reasons.

{In the same strain one might note that many researches are pointing to the fact that use of diapers (Huggies kind of thing) might be harmful. The idea is that these diapers seem to inhibit urination and hence suppress the micturating center in the brain and the speech center is very close to it. Scientists more and more have the feeling that this harms speech development in the child. This is not very well established conjecture enough of a warning.}

Now when the baby comes out he/she breathes for the first time and air gushes into his/her lungs for the first time. Now the fact that we all have to live with is that the human brain requires the maximum amount of oxygen and it can't tolerate even the least of oxygen deficiency. When inside the womb the baby's brain has no oxygen deficiency but if the baby cries after a long time then the brain remains devoid of oxygen for that time and this can crucially ruin the baby forever.

But how long is a "long-time"? Its just a minute! If the baby cries after 1 minute of coming out then probably already some damage has been done to the baby' brain and if he/she cries after 5 minutes then the damage might be severe and the child is very likely to be highly mentally challenged.

In general it is expected that the baby will cry immediately as he/she comes out.
Now during the operation given that the mother is not very conscious she can't know exactly as to how soon the baby cried and hence this information is solely present with the doctor doing the delivery. It seems that there are corrupt doctors who try to suppress this number if the baby did cry late! But this data becomes a very crucial information in the process of diagnosis if the baby has breathing troubles after birth or shows mental disability as he/she grows up.

{It seems that I cried immediately :) I started speaking very early too. By 1 year I could speak fluently complete sentences and I used to talk a lot and ask a lot of questions. Apparently I asked "Why?" and "How?" for everything that I was told or saw. People tell me that they got tired completely of they had to baby sit me since that effectively involved answering the million questions I would ask}

Now there is this further risk that the baby might be very large in size compared to the mother's womb and if the delivery is getting delayed somehow then the mother's body might find it increasingly difficult to keep with the oxygen demands of the baby and the baby might run into oxygen deficiency. Then this triggers the breathing reflex of the baby even when she/he is floating inside the amniotic fluid. Then it is a very risky situation. The baby might just gulp in some of the fluid and get choked to death or some of the fluid might get trapped in the lungs or somewhere in the trachea. In someway one can say that the baby is getting drowned inside the mother's womb.

Now even if the baby comes out safe and healthy as soon as it starts breathing in the atmosphere this trapped fluid will cause it to choke and again the brain runs into oxygen deficiency. Now very commonly the baby runs into convulsions and if the convulsions happen for a long time it can severely affect the brain.

This precisely what happened to me at birth. I was a pretty large baby at birth. I had those convulsions but somehow due to the prompt action of the nurse it was stopped very soon.

Continued into the next writing.....

Fear

2008-11-10T19:12:00.003+05:30

Once again a random blog....probably thats what blogging is for!

Fears..a million fears chasing me day in day out and I psychologically keep succumbing to it and the dimensions of my life get continuously clipped to 1.

I feel tired of running..have been feeling so for the last 2 years...I seemed to have burnt out totally running this rat race of academics for survival.

It probably is just not my cup of tea.

These days the race has just gotten a lot more tougher...to ensure my existence in DTP (Department of Theoretical Physics) in TIFR. I am finding it getting exponentially tougher for me to survive here. The courses are so very boring and so uninteresting and the teaching standards are so very bad that my enthusiasm and the energy to work for the courses has crashed to almost nothingness.

I wonder how many more days I shall be able to keep dragging myself through this and keep getting hit at my weaknesses...somehow the entire situation feels like continuously hitting my head against a rock wall trying to break it. The courses keep trying me and testing me at things which either I can't do or in things that I feel least interested.

I wonder if I could get away from all this and be able to pursue science the way I want to. wonder how..and i keep wondering.

Things are just so messed up and depressing and frustrating. And I feel myself decaying into oblivion.

Probably these are my last few days in DTP and probably the end of the road is very near.