A lunch with Manjul Bhargava

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

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

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.

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.

The paradox of commerce

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

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

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.