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.