Fear

Once again a random blog....probably thats what blogging is for!

Fears..a million fears chasing me day in day out and I psychologically keep succumbing to it and the dimensions of my life get continuously clipped to 1.

I feel tired of running..have been feeling so for the last 2 years...I seemed to have burnt out totally running this rat race of academics for survival.

It probably is just not my cup of tea.

These days the race has just gotten a lot more tougher...to ensure my existence in DTP (Department of Theoretical Physics) in TIFR. I am finding it getting exponentially tougher for me to survive here. The courses are so very boring and so uninteresting and the teaching standards are so very bad that my enthusiasm and the energy to work for the courses has crashed to almost nothingness.

I wonder how many more days I shall be able to keep dragging myself through this and keep getting hit at my weaknesses...somehow the entire situation feels like continuously hitting my head against a rock wall trying to break it. The courses keep trying me and testing me at things which either I can't do or in things that I feel least interested.

I wonder if I could get away from all this and be able to pursue science the way I want to. wonder how..and i keep wondering.

Things are just so messed up and depressing and frustrating. And I feel myself decaying into oblivion.

Probably these are my last few days in DTP and probably the end of the road is very near.

A tale to tell

A few months back I had written a series of articles on similar topics starting with True Love.

As a response to this writing my email-friend Apoorva mailed me a story to read on May 22, 2008 (Thursday) at 2:13 PM. I think it was pretty much relevant to the things I was analyzing in those writings and worth a read.

Hence in this article I decided to share that story. Here it goes.

Appointment With Love

Six minutes to six, said the clock over the information booth in New York's Grand Central Station. The tall young Army officer lifted his sunburned face and narrowed his eyes to note the exact time. His heart was pounding with a beat that choked him. In six minutes he would see the woman who had filled such a special place in his life for the past 18 months,the woman he had never seen yet whose words had sustained him unfailingly.


Lt. Blandford remembered one day in particular, the worst of the fighting, when his plane had been caught in the midst of a pack of enemy planes. In one of those letters, he had confessed to her that often he felt fear, and only a few days before this battle, he had received her answer: "Of course you fear...all brave men do." Next time you doubt yourself, I want you to hear my voice reciting to you: 'Yeah, though I walk through the valley of Death, I shall fear no evil, for thou art with me.'.... He had remembered that and it renewed his strength.


He was going to hear her voice now. Four minutes to six. A girl passed closer to him, and Lt.Blandford started. She was wearing a flower, but it wasnot the little red rose they had agreed upon. Besides, this girl was only about 18, and Hollis Maynel had told him she was 30. "What of it?" he had answered, "I'm 32." He was 29. His mind went back to that book he had read in the training camp. "Of Human Bondage" it was and throughout the book were notes in a woman's handwriting. He had never believed that a woman could see into a man's heart so tenderly, so understandingly. Her name was on the bookplate: Hollis Maynell. He got a hold of a New York City telephone book and found her address. He had written , she had answered. Next day he had been shipped out, but they had gone on writing.


For thirteen months she had faithfully replied. When his letters did not arrive, she wrote anyway, and now he believed he loved her, and she loved him. But she had refused all his pleas to send him her photograph. She had explained: "If your feeling for me had no reality, what I look like won't matter. Suppose I am beautiful. I'd always be haunted that you had been taking a chance on just that, and that kind of love would disgust me. Suppose that I'm plain, (and you must admit that this is more likely), then I'd always fear that you were only going on writing because you were lonely and had no one else. No, don't ask for my picture. When you come to New York, you shall see me and then you shall make your own decision."


One minute to six... He flipped the pages of the book he held. Then Lt. Blandford's heart lept. A young woman was coming toward him. Her figure was long and slim; her blond hair lay back in curls from delicate ears. Her eyes were blue as flowers, her lips and chin had a gentle firmness. In her pale-green suit, she was like springtime come alive. He started toward her, forgetting to notice that she was wearing no rose, and as he moved, a small, provacative smile curved her lips. "Going my way, soldier?" she murmured.


He made one step closer to her. Then he saw Hollis Maynell. She was standing almost directly behind the girl, a woman well past 40, her graying hair tucked under a worn hat. She was more than plump. Her thick-ankled feet were thrust into low-heeled shoes. But she wore a red rose on her crumpled coat. The girl in the green suit was walking quickly away. Blandford felt as though he were being split in two, so keen was his desire to follow the girl, yet so deep was his longing for the woman whose spirit had truly companioned and upheld his own, and there she stood.


He could see her pale face was gentle and sensible; her gray eyes had a warm twinkle. Lt. Blandford did not hesitate. His fingers gripped the worn copy of "Of Human Bondage" which was to identify him to her. This would not be love, but it would be something special, a friendship for which he had been and must be ever grateful... He squared his shoulders, saluted, and held the book out toward the woman, although even while he spoke he felt the bitterness of his disappointment.


"I'm Lt. Blandford, and you're Miss Maynell. I'm so glad you could meet me. "May, may I take you to dinner?" The woman's face broadened in a tolerant smile. "I don't know what this is all about, son," she answered. "That young lady in the greensuit, she begged me to wear this rose on my coat. And she said that if you asked me to go out with you, I should tell you she's waiting for you in that restaurant across the street. She said it was some kind of test."

Random things yet again

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

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

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

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

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

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

I wonder what is happenning to me...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

A very common thing...

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

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

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

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

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

I wonder and I only wonder.

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

Yet another Durga Puja...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Various random points...

There is no denying of this basic fact of my life that there exists many many people who have strong objections to my ways of life and opinions etc. Most of the times it is pretty easy to know who is taking a stand against me but sometimes it is not....these are those times when life hits back with its cold reality.

Its a shock even when a suspicion becomes a confirmed reality. I keep talking to a person on a regular basis and suddenly truth unfolds before me that this person with whom I was smiling a few hours ago has been doing a public campaign against me. Not that it came as a great surprise but still it takes some time to get used to the inkling getting converted into realization.

My batch-mate in CMI, Ravitej has been upto such purposes for quite some time and here are 2 of his writings on the web where he launches an all out attack against me. I am not trying to defend myself but just putting up on my "web-diary" opinions of some other people who have not shown agreement with my ideas in general.....just giving every side of my life a fair chance :

1. http://jetivar2.blogspot.com/2008/02/anirbit-akfu-chat-reply.html

2. http://sepulchralwords.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/reminisciences-comment-about-comments/

Somehow I dont feel much perturbed by such things any-more..gotten life-hardened and pretty much used to everything.


Anyway talking of some more random things:


1. Given that many people anyway feel that I have made no contribution to this world and that I have only probably caused sadness to the lives of many people etc etc etc...I don't let go any chance I get in my life to make a positive contribution to someone's life...if the other side is receptive and i see that i can make a positive change then i put in all possible efforts of mine to help him/her....i just hope that at least one of these people will turn up on my funeral and say at least one good thing about me.

Somehow I have always felt that girls in general take quite a bit of lackadaisical attitude towards life especially towards academics (my apologies if you are a girl reading this page and don't fit this above description)...and interestingly most of these girls also happen to be very talented and intelligent!..i wonder if for girls being talented and being unmotivated are 2 qualities that come together!

Somehow I have had the good fortune in my life to have met and interacted with quite a few girls who are vey intelligent and talented. And for some of them I have tried my best to help them in their lives. But it has always been so difficult to get them to come out of their state of slumber into a state of being pro-active about life. Somehow girls , at least the ones I have met, never seem to be take an active role in their lives but would be happy to let life take its own course.

I somehow deeply feel that the development of anation crucially deopends on the women of the nation taking a pro-active role and changing from being the objective of change to the cause of change. I wonder how India is going to develop if its talented women continue to remain so inactive!

2. I had been feeling pretty troubled with the current accomodation scenario of the TIFR..that our housing is in some other corner of the city and that we have to commute 2 hours each day etc etc..I have been sleeping in the seminar room sofas to avoid commuting and also taking bath in the guard's bathroom etc..

But today I found out that there are students in TIFR who have worse accommodation scenario than us. I was talking to a girl in the biology department and realized that TIFR has admitted student to the biology department in 2 categories i.e just for MSc and some for integrated PhD. It seems that unlike us who have been atleast given some acommodation albeit in some corner of the city, the MSc students of DBS have none! It was supposed to be a part of the admission criteria that if you are ready to stay in Mumbai with your own acommodation arrangement only then join MSc in Biology!

The girl I was talking to is living in a working women's hostel and she said that some people are living with their relatives in Mumbai. It takes her 2 hours of journey to come from her hostel to the insitute! It supposedly took her one month of research around Mumbai and knocking at the doors of 40-50 such hostels to find out a proper place. Thankfully she has relatives in Mumbai to help her with these ordeals but I wonder how a person completely new to Mumbai would have found out such resources!


I India it seems that various other factors far apart from academic competence is becoming influential in deciding whether a student can learn at the good institutes. I was wondering whether a part of the TIFR entrance test is implicitly a proof of courage to put up with pathetic acommodation arrangement.

Seems that there are people in India dedicated enough to science to be able to struggle with all the disadvantages of living in a developing country to pursue science as a career.

A rare positive experience

In this bizarre kind of life that I lead I get excited by any little positive thing that happens in my life..they are just so rare. And hence this article to share a positive thing that fell into my life by a sheer stroke of luck..may be what I will describe is a very commonplace thing in other people's lives but for me it was almost a dream come true given that my life has always been devoid of such things and I have only imagined of such things. {The description of the main incident starts after the first 2 paragraphs}

As I continue to get pulverized by the Indian education system (first in my St.Xavier's Collegiate School and then in Chennai Mathematical Institute and then in Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) which refuses to let me pursue my interest, my senses get numbed and my sensitivities and sensibilities get more and more blunt. I seem to have most senses like that of sorrow,joy,love etc ..nothing seems to touch me much unless in extreme. My emotional thresholds have been considerably pushed up. This system acts like an efficient gas-chamber which tries to smother a person into submission where he/she just follows what is told and is robbed off one's imagination and curiosity. After some time one starts to ask whether whatever seems natural is right...like if the education system is right then I have to conclude that it is a crime to ask for a bare minimum amount of sleep in a day and it is a crime to ask to be left unperturbed so that one can study or follow one's own pursuits. It doesn't seem to be right to ask to be left alone so that one can follow what one is interested in.

These questions seem to have gotten old to me and I have at some level stopped asking them since I don't hope for any real change to happen. But yes in someways TIFR has been a slightly better experience for me since here I have more resources to study what I want to. Obviously the stupid compulsory courses keep strangling my life to a bare existence so that I have no more energies left to do what I want to do. I have to do all sorts of things to be able to steal a few hours out of the system to sit down for an hour or two and study things I like...like these days I am attracted to the book on vector bundles by Milnor. The way the system expects me to study Physics seems so bizarre to me that after sometime I feel repelled from the subject and it takes quite a lot of effort to keep up one's interest in Physics. I keep homing that someday I will do Physics and Mathematics the way I want to and that I will create a system where everyone interested in the subject can pursue it the way he/she wants to.

I strongly believe that the role of a system is to provide advice and resources to help the people pursue their interest and NOT try to mould people into what it thinks is right.

Somehow by a sheer stroke of luck the system happened to do one such good thing to me among the million things it has done to damage me physically and mentally. Of course this flash in the pan doesn't cleanse it of its sins. Somehow this happened through my course in experimental physics course.

In the experimental physics course we were split into groups of 3 randomly and each group is supposed to perform 3 experiments given an approximate time of 4 weeks per experiment. The group allocation and experiment allocation was completely arbitrary. The first 3 amazing things that happened in this doubly random process are:

1. I got a group such that I gel very well with the other 2 people. Firstly it is very rare that I find people with whom I gel well and then to get them in the same group as mine is another bliss. Their names are Sambuddha (BSc from somewhere in West Bengal and then MSc from IITD) and Padmanath (BSc. from somewhere in Kerala and MSc from IITRoorkee). They too like me are in the Department of Theoretical Physics. Somehow we 3 have a lot of resonant frequencies. Something like this happened when the new first years came to CMI in 2007..I seemed to have a lot of resonance states with many of them like Dang,Pratish,Ashwin,Aditya,Hrishikesh,Atul and Rajesh.

2. Somehow the TIFR records mistook me to be a post-MSc student and hence grouped me with 2 other MSc students. I was the only BSc. student to have gotten into a MSc group and hence the nature of experiments that I got were also different and somewhat more to my taste. I just cant stand the idea of having to sit with a machine/apparatus for hours but the experiments we have been allotted were mostly of the kind which involved sophisticated data analysis of some complicated experiment done by other people. Of my 3 experiments, 2 happen to be of such a kind and hence many of the conservatives around are raising eye-brows about it that these are not "experiments" and especially BSc students like me should be exposed to more direct kind of experimental work. But I am thankful to whoever in the office did this error of feeding the data that I am a BSc student.

Somehow this age gap factor doesn't seem to make any difference in the group's interactions.


3. The first "experiment" we have gotten is to analyse bubble chamber tracks gotten from subatomic particles like muons and pions passing through liquid hydrogen. To top the situation the prof. who has been assigned to guide our group is Prof.Amol Dighe! Anyone who knows him knows what a "cool" guy he is. Probably years and years of education and work experience at US (at Chicago University and Berkeley ) has built in him a very dynamic attitude. He has been one of the spear-heads of research in theory of neutrinos in India and has hell lot of an experience behind him about analysing complicated experimental data. He is a core theoretical physics guy and is an extremely amiable person. He is the kind of guy who made it clear on the first day that there is no "right" and "wrong" way in Physics and that we should freely explore methods and techniques and come up with our own to suit the purposes.

Prof.Amol Dighe is sort of acting like the "ideal system" which I explained earlier who is providing us with resources and help and advice when we ask for it and is not making any periodic demands from us like "report at the end of the day what you have done"...he is not forcing any of his notions of right and wrong on us but subtly tells us the alternative ways he thinks and urges us to explore everything to find out what is optimal. Best of all he doesn't expect us to follow his word but to only try out everything and do what we find the most convincing.

Given his huge experience with sub-atomic particles he can tell us one alternative process of analysis for every algorithm we design. Most excitingly every idea that he gives is new to us and vice versa. So every side is interested to try out the other idea and figure out if that shows something new.

So cumulatively we are generating ideas at a very fast rate and if one plan of action doesn't work we almost always have another way ready to try out.


Hence it happens that 3 students from the Department of Theoretical Physics are doing a "theoretical experiment" (or "virtual experiment" as the critics like to call it) in the theory department under a theoretical physics prof. In case you have forgotten it is a part of the experimental physics course!

Coming back to the serious positive aspects of this experience:

More critically the balance of abilities in this group is very satisfying and is probably one of our greatest strengths apart from the fact that all of us seriously consider the ideas of the other. Sambuddha has considerable experience with high-energy physics which is crucial to understand the specific data at hand (he actually has 2 published papers in particle-physics) and Padmanath has experience in numerical computing for Physics and knows programming in Matlab,Mathematica,C++ etc. So Padmanath is the central programmer and he has amazing ability to debug programs and Sambuddha is explaining the physics at every step then I can mathematize the situation and Padmanath can code it.

I am sure I would not be able to write these huge programs that Padmanath writes and then debugs then patiently. No wonder he gives his killing look at me at times when I come up with a new algorithm to do the thing. Already we have tried and thrown about 4-5 methods before settling into the one that seems to keep the errors under control the best. Each algorithm is reached through an intense series of discussions on the black-board generally between me and Padmanth and sometimes Prof.Amol Dighe. After the session the black-board looks like the battle ground of Kalinga after the war and Padmanth knows that now it is his painful time to code all the exotic ideas that I have come up with. It is actually surprising that many of the basic mathematical techniques can get so complicated to program.

Ofcourse everything is being done on the laptop of Sambuddha. One should mention the terrific sense of humour of Sambuddha which keeps nerves under control when after 4 hours of algorithm designing and coding the program outputs sheer junk. He can laugh even when the output is as bizarre as we have got at times like at one point the output was such that the distance covered by the particle was an oscillating function and once it was a complex number!

Thanks to CMI I have considerably higher maturity with mathematics (especially calculus and geometry) than others so at every step of the analysis I am being able to chip in with detailed analysis and derivations and rigorously cross-check whatever others feel intuitively. So every algorithm that is thought of and program that is written at some stage goes through a thorough mathematical scrutiny by me for possible pit-falls and detecting unaccounted for special cases.

Further given my experience with higher dimensional geometry I am being able to take the data analysis to the level of detail where one can use the curvature effects of the chi-square surface and do serious analysis regarding the Fischer information. These are at some level purely concepts of statistics but I can see a clear advantage of being able to "see" them given my experience of having studied some amount of geometry in higher dimensions.

This is the first time that any of us are using our skills for any real situation. Especially this is our first experience of doing serious error analysis of data using Bayesian Statistics. So in effect I am having to learn a certain amount of about Statistics and Information Theory.

The central question we have been trying to figure out is to be able to determine the length of a curve and radius of curvature at various points given coordinates of a discrete set of points on it. The point is to come up with a consistent way of computing the curve length and curvature along with an error bound on it. It may sound simple but I assure you that you shall get unexpected surprises like we got when we did our first tries.

We still have a lot of errors to fix but somehow we seem relaxed about it given that we enjoy so much the process of doing it. This is probably the first time I am being able to work in a group and also enjoy doing it. It is probably sheer luck that got me into this amazing group with an exciting question to solve.

I wait for the sessions with the group very eagerly given that the rest of the courses are simply torturous and kill whatever abilities I have of thinking and imagination. Its the first time I have a little scope to explore my scientific creativity and let my ideas free to find out methods to reach a certain scientific goal. A few hours of blissful independence in an entire week of slavery.