A biology lab travelling on the oceans.

 

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

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

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

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

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.

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!