And, so what's the point?

Keeping the phone down, after a long debate/discussion with Phaedrus on the rapidly changing nature of technology, fashions, tastes, needs and the increased disposability of goods, the gear wheels of my brain and mind still kept whirring, refusing to die down. Much like a ceiling fan running even after being switched off, assisted by some invisible, yet gusty gale.

Quite winded, (no pun intended), my thoughts turned to the fact of Need and Want and Action. Why do we want so much, when do do not really need it? Why do we want to be rich, and famous and beautiful and knowledgeable and well read and learned and well-quoted and published and cited and married and virile and fertile and wise and charitable and philantropic and powerful and amiable and loved and loving?
Eventually we shall die. Then, what's the point?

It's not like we shall be around to see if our great grand kid turns out be an Einstien (and even then, what's the point?), validating our choice of genes, or that that 2 room shed turned into a 5 floor hospital (all those patients eventually die too), thanks to all the funds we raised.

This is not to say that I am turning into some pessimistic deadwood or a selfish prick. I feel attached to my loved ones and charitable to my fellowmen, and I want to listen to music and admire a painting. I feel the Need to Do and Act, and Want to do it. I worry about parents, pets, paise and publications (and that's not an exhaustive list). All a race against very finite time, with a very different finish line, one which does not have "the other side", to look back and exalt. It's amazing, isn't it, that we do what we do so that we can hopefully feel elated for that very short period between having run much of the race and now seeing the finish line? Of course, people might disagree and say, well, the joy and fun is in the running, but its not like you can reflect nostalgically on it once you are done with it, coz heck, you are not around! If finally it is dust to dust, then , again, what's the point?

Very literally, as Tennyson wrote, Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die.

Death is not supposed to be dark and ugly and like a black hole. But it sure seems so.

I promise my next post will be more cheerful!

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.