Done For

Yesterday, I took, what I think will be my last graded "final exam" ever. And no, I didn't finish with a bang...it was more like a whimper. The worst exam I ever took. Made me think of all the exams I had done badly starting, from believe it or not, grade 2, right up to last year, and I could find none to match yesterday's disaster.

So much for quantum mechanics. So much for being terrified of it first, that I dropped it last year. So much for reading as much as I could to get over my fear of the subject. So much for my loving it at the beginning of the semester when it answered many questions I always had, and when it helped me as I prepared and read extensively for my qualifying exams. So much for hating it as the semester progressed, because both the teacher and the book somewhat lost track. The prof rushed at Mach 3 speed, and the book became denser than the Dead Sea. And then yesterday happened. When I was not done with classes, but done for.

Arrgh

Studying (band) splits,(energy) gaps, (electrons and) holes, (hydrostatic) stress, (biaxial) strain, (thermally induced) mismatch and tension, repulsion, scattering, bombardment and very short lifetimes.

How can physics not be stressful??!!! :-(

Back from "French Canada"

Back from Montreal, a place surprisingly more French, and more European in general than I had expected. More than once I ran into people I had trouble communicating with. That I was okay with. More than once I ran into snootiness, bothering on rudeness, that i had been warned about. That I was not okay with.

Did I enjoy the sights, the scenes, the scents, the cuisine? Oh yes, I did. From my first introduction to McGill with students in red swimming trunks, and nothing else on (and this is November) to the tropics of the Amazon at the Biodome de Montreal, from a $6 poutine at Patis Patata on Rue St. Laurent to a $28 cheese ravioli (worth every cent) at the Hotel Europea on Rue Montague. From the powder blue gold star spangled ceiling of Basilica de Notre Dame to the crutches and candles at St Joseph Oratorie. From a metro station named Pie-ix, which sounded very suspiciously like a male body part in English to my woefully French-untrained ears, to archaeological digs at Pointe-à-Callière, which is all about the French history of Montreal, not about the natives who were there before them (why do they even mention them, I do not understand).
By the way, the above was accomplished in a day, as I was in Montreal for a conference at the Hilton Bonaventure (huge plastic flower arrangements, no less), but that is another story.

Hmm

Is theatre ,and art in general, necessarily, deliberately, inherently complicated? Or is it that I am a simpleton?
I suspect the latter.
I went for Ratan Thiyam's Nine Hills One Valley yesterday, and was very confused, Not to mention that I do not understand Manipuri. The overhead translations were woefully inadequate, with 5 rapid emotive sounding dialogs being translated into one tame explanatory subtitle.

So, is there hope for the world, or are we doomed even if the wise men of yore give us new directions? Or have we become so helpless that we cannot take responsibility for bettering our own lives? Time is a demon! I do not really agree. I think we demonize Time. It's our fault.

Ok, so I am realy blabbering here. Bottomline being, that the deeper political, sociological philosophies being expressed went over my simple head, so I stuck to enjoying the accompanying music compositions from some exotic Indian instruments, the grace and fluidity of the rich Manipuri dance-form and some of the exotic sword wielding martial-art type sequences.

Time and politics can wait.

"Presenting" my best foot forward

All I have been doing in the past two weeks is reading papers, and more papers, and more papers, and putting together, hold your breath, a 12 minute-12 slide talkfor a conference in Montreal next week. Who knew that it could take so much effort to do that, to have a background, or at least pretend to have background knowledge for every figure, every word, every bullet point.
Last night, I got onto Googletalk for the first time, so that I could communicate real-time with one of the authors for this paper I am presenting.
Getting online, got one of my former colleagues in the company I worked at to ping me. And he was surprised that I was spending so much time on this presentation, knowing that I could whip out reams of such material for training and clients at the drop of a hat.
But this is different. No one has done it before. Here one is not trying to teach or market. One is trying to Prove oneself. It is Personal.

A very next day post! I must really be thinking, introspecting, retrospecting, inspecting...um not the last one, I guess I got carried away with the spect-ulation.

Mean-imp has been nagging today. Mean-imp made me look up rather random things on the internet. Horrible things, unspeakable things....things that whisper of change and challenge. When, when when, like the good old nosy "aunty" in my neighborhood back in my hometown, in her voice filled with pseudo-concern, will I settle down?
A vagabond, a rolling stone, always searching for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I stick to nothing for long and nothing sticks to me for long. Aha, now I know, I am a piece of teflon! Ooops, sorry DuPont, not teflon, I am a piece of polytetrafluoroethylene. Thank you, mean-imp, for summing up my life. I sure feel useful. Hmmmphhh.

Random thoughts and statements

1. The JIT (look at previous post about Just in Time) conference paper did get through. An acceptance email directed to a Dr. ____ (yours truly) was sent to me a couple of days ago. Now begins the struggle with understanding what was written in the paper to talk sensibly about it. Heh heh.

2. The clean room has been re-christened as the mean room. It has not cooperated with me in the last two months. I hear its HF-drunk (HF stands for Hydrofluoric Acid, you moron, not High Frequency or Hands Free or what have you) voice taunting and mocking me every time I walk in. Everytime I look into a microscope, a banshee-like wail (or is it a witch's cackle?) penetrates the soporific drone of the equipment.

3. The mean-room is also called so, because it causes me to ponder on the Mean-ing of my life. While I wait for things to bake, boil, spin, pump up and pump down, this little imp or angel (I haven't figured out which) inside me, Mean-imp-fully (so I guess I decided it is an imp) keeps tapping me to draw my attention, and then keeps saying "What are you doing? WHAT are you doing? What ARE you doing? What are YOU doing? What are you DOING? You Fool!"

Poetic Inspiration

There was a period, between December 2001 and April 2003 that I was on a creative high, spouting poems at the drop of a hat. The creative stream ran to a trickle, and finally stopped with one last loud sigh in December 2003 when I wrote a long, funny poem about my workplace and company, which Was funny because at least 20 of my colleagues laughed when I read it out, and it did not sound like they were laughing out of politeness.

Now, more than 2 and a half years later, the best that I was able to come up with while sniffing and rubbing my nose with the back of my hand this morning before leaving for school, is this two liner:

A cold, and lack of paper tissue,
Definitely creates a nasal issue.

Oh well.

Potato Farmer

That is one of my new epithets.

When Piyali came in Feb, she saw that some of the potatoes in the kitchen had sprouted rather vociferously. Not wanting to get rid of them, she put them in a small
styrofoam box with water. The plants were growing, but the potatoes were rotting and creating a stink. A month ago, we removed the water, cut off the rotten parts and put in soil (still in these small styrofoam boxes). Ever since the plants have been looking sorrier and sorrier till they totally dried up. 2 weeks ago I decided to get rid of the plants all together and use the soil elsewhere, and digging in, I found baby potatoes! Some are an inch across, and many are a little more than a centimeter.

Yesterday, I "harvested" four tiny potatoes from my 1 square-foot field. Today, I am going to eat food that I grew myself! If not PhD, then PF. Not much of a variation from earlier undergrad years during exam time: if not an engineer, then a vada pav (potato-fritters and buns, a Very popular fast food)cart owner.

Just In Time

Two days ago, I redefined the concept of Just in Time. We submitted a prospective paper online about a minute before the deadline. Do not ask me how it came about to be so. It was about the baby I did not know much about (but my colleagues at the other university did). This race to the finish was a result of an overlooked mailing, an unreceived email, different time zones, miscommunication, very tight schedules, politics, strategy and a lot of, and I mean a lot of last-minute head-scratching. My pulse rate was double even 15 minutes after I finished the submission.

Unfortunately, the very fact that we got it submitted does not mean that I am happy and everything is hunky-dory. As always, anything last minute means that there is compromise on quality. And since I was the last person in the chain before the paper got in, the buck stops with me. Oh well, if the paper gets accepted then all is fine, if not, then I really hope I do not make the big mistake, of being reactive, of getting defensive and passingon the blame. On the other hand, maybe even before we get a decision, I could just go ahead and pre-empt the situation by giving all the reasons why it may not go through. Something to think about, eh?

Cleaning up

This past semester, my desk looked like, pardon the cliche, it had been hit by a hurricane. I am not saying that it is the worst that a work desk could get. Presuming that a tsunami is worse than a hurricane, the neighbouring office has a desk that looked like it had not very successfully weathered the former.

I cleaned up today. Summer cleaning, if you will. I now have my papers in their respective file folders, color coded and all. I have only my latest research work sitting in a neat pile at one end. And even neater, not to mention higher pile of scratch paper at the other end. I actually have place for keeping three laptops if need be, instead of only a half. My stack of study books that were tottering alarmingly at the edge of the desk (a complex phenomenon worthy of a PhD topic in gravity and mechanics, and what have you) have now been safely anchored (on three sides!) to the shelf.

A clean slate, a new leaf, a blank piece of snow white paper. A green grassy plain where you can see into the oh- so- distant horizon. That is what my desk, my daily "karmabhoomi" (place where one fulfills one's duty) looks like. No desk can look more uninspiring than mine does at this moment. The Rosetta stone would not have shaken the world of egyptology if it were a clean slate. Ramanujan's notebook pages wouldn't have packed the same punch if they were neatly type written, double spaced, instead of being handwritten blue over red (or red over blue....I forget which). And the allure of the Great Plains can be but compared only poorly to the dark mysteries of the Amazon.

In the interest of the creative faculty, and an inquring mind, I hope that the sterile environment of my desk does not last more than a week. Read about Feynman and the cyclotron in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! . I rest my case.

Moonrise moonrise

This past weekend, after a really tiring move from one apartment to another, Phaedrus, Piyali and I drove down to Wilmington, a beach town in North Carolina.

After circling the city in smaller and smaller spirals, we finally reached our hotel at 8.00 pm at night. Too later to do anything or go anywhere, other than a pub, which is no good because, hold your breath, I do not drink, and the smoky interiors really gets to my head and brings out all my violent instincts...not something you want to risk on a vacation intended to be peaceful.

So we chose to drive down to the beach anyway. It is wonderful, this thing called the ocean. Keeps pounding away relentlessly and deafeningly, and miraculously still sounds soothing. It was quite dark by the time we reached. The only light was from the pier next to us. Just enough to light up the waves lapping the shore. But in the distance one could still see the horizon. Two different shades of very inky blue. And while we just kept staring into nothing, we saw an orange blob that looked like a buoy. But it wasn't bouncing up and down, it just kept coming up. It took a while for it to trigger in our heads that it was Mr. Moon putting up a nice show.

I know that the moon looks big when it is close to the horizon, but this was Huge. A mottled bright rust colored moon that seems to be painted. Except that paintings do not move, exude a soft glow, and dance in a shimmery reflection off the surface of a choppy sea. We tried hard to capture it on our digital camera, our rudimentary skills with it not really helping the situation. But we finally gave up on wrestling with technology, sat on the white-gray sand, and enjoyed nature's sound and light show.

We got a baby, but don't know what it is!

So that is what my professor had to say about these supposedly fantastic test results that this other university raved in their email about.They were based on those samples I had been slaving over before the exams began. And well, we only know how to make this thing, because someone else is worrying about the theory.

Our group meeting after those test results were emailed out was the funniest ever.
Big Boss: "What is fantastic about these squiggles in these plotted results?"
Minion: "I don't know. I thought you knew. I only Made the stuff".
BB: Long drawn sigh. Then laughter: "Heck, I thought you read up so you could tell me."
M: "Ummm. Uh. Uh."
BB shakes M's hand and says: "Well, if they think these squiggles are pathbreaking, then why should I doubt it! We got a baby, but don't know what it is!"

Exams over

The perennial Damoceles' sword hanging over the hassled, overworked, under appreciated student has been temporarily removed.
Exams for this semester are over. Whew.
Back to outer space starting next week.

Delegate!!

Today, I am very very angry. Angry at people who do not know how to delegate and manage stuff. Who run about helter skelter trying to do everything, be everywhere. Be the one-man army, the sole standing hero. The supervisor and sweeper and thus... neither. And finally, when the show is over, say, "See! we pulled it off!", and count that as experience. But never learn anything from it. Be too irreplaceable, too inexpendable. Be the three rungs of the ladder instead of the carpenter who fixes it.
"If I could offer you only one tip for (being) the future manager, Delegation would be it". (This line is parodized from "Everybody is free to wear Sunscreen"by Baz Luhrmann. Read the lyrics to this song here).

The potion works!

Heh heh heh !!! :-) I managed to get that magical moment where I could see my newly created device under the microscope. So, the spell is created. Next step is to see if the spell works.

Well, so I shipped this out to the other university, and the proof of the pudding will be in the t(e)sting.

Glad to be back to rainbow hues, and natural sunlight...the regular earth, ....till a few more weeks. The weather is really warm here, and everything looks bright and the trees look so green, and the sky couldn't be bluer. You'd think I was falling in love! And all I did was make this itty-bitty thing that is just about the size of my little finger nail. Phaedrus would wonder, coz I told him I hated this stuff, but see that's what it is.....I like the end not the means ;-)

Alpha to Earth

April 23, 2006. Either it is going to be a go-down-in-my-history date, or just another day. Sitting in the fabrication (clean room) of my university. In a clean room gown, and nitrile gloves (typing with gloves is not much fun, really), face mask, hair cover and goggles. Waiting for the final step of my fabrication process to run, patiently expectanct, or more truthfully Very impatiently awaiting the fruit of my 6 hour labor. Well one, cannot do much about the analogy to chilbirth. When you Make something, it really is your baby , isn't it?!
The sterile environment of the cleanroom occasionally does make you feel like you are out of this world. The light is all yellow, so even glancing out of the double paned window makes you feel you are on Mars, or Jupiter, or wherever the powers-that-be claim life exists. The lone PC with internet connection helps to drive you back to reality. The white clad beings similar to me move about silently, differentiated only by their height and girth and eyes. Focussing hard on the work at hand, almost desiring themselves to see the microscopic features of their work by the naked eyes. Did this really work? Is this really there? All this stuff that I am magically seeing here under the microscope, is that really all there on that tiny chip? One can have done fabrication ad nauseum, but the tightening suspense of seeing a perfectly device under the microscope, as you move from a small magnification to large...couldn't be beaten by the nerve-racking moments of a prime time who-dunnit on the idiot box. Well, let me go check what the status is, the concoction that I am boiling....of frog's blood and newt's eyes, whether it turns my lead to gold.