Someone died today... someone I don't know a great deal... a fellow scientist, a fellow string theorist, a person who was a student of my supervisor... a person who was less than ten years older than me...
the solar eclipse was meant to be doomsday according to some astrologers... the world is safe for most of us... some though are not so lucky.
as an atheist, I do not believe in souls and afterlives.. but if I am wrong, ..... may your soul rest in peace.

All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All you feel.
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All you save.
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy,
Beg, borrow or steal.
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say.
All that you eat
And everyone you meet
All that you slight
And everyone you fight.
All that is now
All that is gone
All thats to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

So, I told you I was near Berlin. I am actually in a place called Golm, near the town Potsdam which is about 40 minutes by train from Berlin. I am at the Albert Einstein Institute which is inside the Max Plank Institute at Golm. Thoroughly confused? So be it!
This place reminds me of HRI. Except for the fact that there is no mess open on weekends and for dinner on weekdays. It sits in the middle of nowhere. Not that Potsdam is as bad as Allahabad. But you get the picture. And as you expect with Germany, it is a pretty fancy place. There are keys which smile and frown, doors which open with buttons, lights which are automatic and all that jazz. I have spend more than a week here. My host has been unbelievably nice.
Just as I write, there is a sudden urge to go out... get to Berlin and see it closely once again... so fare you well.

I am in Berlin. Well, not quite in Berlin, but near Berlin. It has been quite a while away from home. Almost a month now. I have been traveling around Europe and talking about my work. And it is not as wonderful as it sounds. Its like doomsday every time I need to move from one place to another. Catch a bus, go to place X .. from there take a train, go to place Y... if you are lucky, from there take a flight to place Z. Once you are in place Z, the fun starts all over again. Doing all this alone is such a pain. Part of why I am blogging now is to record my feelings and remember how I felt if I get bored of staying at HRI!

Bridge over Troubled Waters

As I am on a writing spree now, the weak-hearted take cover!
It was day before yesterday... (or was it yesterday? Alzheimer's catching up.. help!)
I was in the middle of a game of badminton, when someone called. A friend.. looking for my camera tripod. Well, you would say, pretty ordinary start to this post. But hold your horses.
As it happened, he and another friend of mine were taking a couple of Italian visitors to our Institute (if you don't know about my institute,- go hang yourself while there is still time) to the Magh mela. This religious fiasco, which takes place every damn year, has a pretty torrid relation with the grad students in our institute. For the uninitiated, Magh mela is a religious gathering that takes place every year on the Ganges around this time (yes, on.. the river is as dry as a bone at this time) and every sixth year turns into a monster called the Kumbh Mela (here is a Wiki link!).

Yeah, so I lost it... the thread. But let me rant a bit more about the hate-and-hate relation with the mela. The "religious" people who come down to the mela dont come alone. They bring their microphones along. And they blare them for all they are worth. The icing on the cake is that this starts everyday around 4 a.m. when most of us poor souls are heading bedwards. Just the other day, I was telling someone how the sound levels had gone down this year. As if just to prove that I was the greatest fool that ever walked the earth, the next couple of mornings, the noise was taken to another level.


Okay... now back to what I was planning to narrate. A couple of my friends and a couple of Italian women. On the spur of the moment, I joined them and off we went. The road outside our institute takes you down to the banks of the Ganges. We decided to take that road and then walk on the banks for about 3-4 kms to reach the mela. If you have not been to HRI, you would not know that they burn corpses by the side of the Ganges here. They do. And we chanced upon witnessing the last stages of a burning. Of the two Italian ladies, one was a bit older and a bit more prone to the "omg-this-is-india-i-might-die" syndrome. The walk at night, in the moonlight through the deserted banks of the river amidst the burning corpses, as you can understand, did not do a world of good to her morale.

As luck would have it, after a while, we came to a place where you had to cross a creek. For the mela, people had put sand bags in the water. So one could, in principle, cross. But the sandbags had got a bit submerged. So, when you did cross, you would wet your feet/footwear. This lady, understandably, did not want a holy dip in a dirty creek and we went on the search of a different route. The other option, we discovered, was jumping over a smaller region. We saw a local do that. The poor lady was in no mood for gymnastics and we decided to go back and give the creek another try. I crossed first. Man, it was dirty! And did it smell!! Girish (the initial caller) and I then took turns to guide the two Italians across. The older woman was so convinced that she would drown in that waist deep water that she shook my confidence,- proverbially! She did not fall, however. We got across. All of us. The Italians used up about a couple of packets of tissue-paper trying to cleanse themselves. But I think the deed in itself was very brave. Imagine trying to cross a water-stretch somewhere deep in Africa with local natives with you in the middle of the night. We thought it was something equivalent for them.

We walked a lot more that night. But most of it was uneventfully boring. We got back to HRI. The Italians seem to have survived without getting sick. I think they might still be showering during their leisure time :D. This was an absolute certified Indian experience. Incredible India!!

Happy New Year!

I agree that it is a bit late for season greetings. But since you have no choice, you might as well accept the pleasantries while they last :)
This post is initiated by a song ... here it is


Let us all thank my sister-in-law for this. :)