Wake me up when September ends!



I am awake. September has ended. Jim Morrison has already screamed
"Wake up!
Shake dreams from your hair
My pretty child, my young one.."
(although I am pretty sure the last line was not for me!)

It has been an eventful month, this last one. First, I was down in the dumps of what they call graduate pit holes. Managed to drag meself out and managed to get myself to Cambridge. It was a pretty place. And it was a useful time there academically too.
But the days passed in a blur, as they often do. Cambridge, influential classes, inspirational research topics, good coffee, bad food, strolls in the history-laden streets, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend from the long gone college days, with and without my camera, High Wycombe, London, unending undergrounds, then again back to classes... conference ended soon. and I got myself to Oxford to a friend's place for a day and a half. The half was nice,- but the day was totally ruined by wonderful English weather.
Soon i was on my flight back. the first flight got delayed, and i had to run for the connecting one. From cold, cold England to warm Turkey, back to hot India. Then from Delhi, back to dear old godforsaken Allahabad.

I hear Pink Floyd playing somewhere... only its to my modified lyrics:
"the month is gone, the blog is over... thought i'd something more to say."

Goodbye and thanks for all the ......... fish?

Last night in Cambridge. Will leave tomorrow for Oxford to drop by at a friend's place and see the place.. you don't need the details, but you have them already!

In case you have not been to UK, and in case you have not heard of the wonderful English weather, (first is likely, second is, to put it mildly, unheard of) it is a disaster that happens practically everyday. And on the days the sun actually comes out, so do the people. The clothes stay mostly indoors though! I am what a physicist or a mathematician would say analytically continuing to times when its warm. Coming back to more practical terms, it is bloody cold for September here! I can hear the wind roar outside my window. The bed seems a rather inviting option right now. The day has been wet and windy and there have been brief patches of sunshine. I even saw a rainbow!

b.t.w. have i told you that the English are horrid cooks? guess if you happen not to be a stranger, you have borne the brunt of my complaining self!! I shed tears for chicken curry, cried buckets for mutton curry... i choked..yes literally choked, on a beef steak. And with it, my wonderful relation with all cows in the world hit an all-time low. The Hindu somewhere deep down in me revolted and presented me a moment, albeit brief, of being pious and thinking of cows differently. That leaves ham and fish.. so, one can give it to Douglas Adams, as I have done above....

Its cloudy! And i want the sun... But it is England. I am stuck in my room... Metallica blasts into the ears. Thoughts are disoriented, quite like the picture and this post. A bit by the music, a bit by the weather, a bit by about seventeen thoughts which decide to hit my head all of a sudden all at once.
"Nothing else matters" ! Why the else? What does?
I am sitting and waiting for a knock on my door.. hate doing this. Waiting..
Am too bloody impatient. Next time you see me, tell me that. I need to know. Say I wrote that in my own blog and it is for my own good. I probably won't even hear you, but you remain clear in your own conscience... you warned me.
What makes this particular waiting worse is the fact that anyone going out of the door beside my room seems to be knocking the door. So i need to pause James Hetfield midway and listen.
"No there's no sun shining true!.... Are you unforgiven, too?"
How bloody appropriate!
The song ends.. and so does this post.

As time goes by...




I am lying on my bed, a pretty white thing, with a laptop in front, typing into it and all this in Cambridge! How times have changed again :)
I have written a lot on my blog lately. If you are wondering why you don't see any new posts, it is just because I have been writing it for the blog, but doing so on paper... strange times, these.. I warned you. You could find me next on the moon, blogging on a supercomputer, for all you know. I have a fascinating room here.. it is long, it has a wonderful window which overlooks a green field and, to top it all, it has a wash-basin which looks so much like a cupboard, that it took me a day to figure that out. You must be thinking I am a moron... well can't blame you for that. It's the English weather you see. And all that walking on the roads of Cambridge. It's got to my head. After a couple of joyous days of being a free man in an exciting foreign land, I am back to being bound by strings. I would need to deliver a talk with a wine glass in hand for five minutes on the work i have been doing for more than five months.. you would think that is cakewalk. But actually, when the audience includes huge shots and a Nobel Laureate the cake can get a bit messy. But that should be interesting..
You might see a lot of posts here in a few days time,- then again you may see none atall.. :)

The reasons for blogging... and a metaphor

The last time I blogged, the act had been inspired by an acquaintance who had put up her blogger name as her status message on Gtalk. How times have changed.. how the mighty have fallen! This time it is a rather subdued and desolate graduate student on the keyboard. Gone is the usual guy,- I am looking for him around. Seems to have given me the slip! For those starry-eyed people who think research is a bed of roses, this is a reminder.. research, like most of life, screws you bad a good deal of the time,- and royally a few times. I have a voice singing somewhere in my head:
"I beg your pardon
I never promised you a rose garden
Along with the sunshine
There's gonna be a little rain sometime."
This is supposed to be a love song. And appropriate it is too... for my relation with research is and has been a sort of passionate love affair which inevitably has moments of bloodshed. And as I bleed here today, I look around for that little band aid which would start the process of healing. What could it be? Where could it be? May be right here!

Now you are looking for the metaphor.. well.. you don't get one!! :D
Well begun is half done, they say.. so forgive the ending and the missing metaphor! :D

Goodbye to Garcia


Decided to do a little editing to the name of my blog.. guess my frequent visitors have noticed. In case you fall under the un(?)fortunate class of people who do not read my blog regularly,- you have not missed the missing "foretold". Yeah, I have come down from that high Marquezical platform and realized that I am starving now.. it is a hard reality,- this. The last month the food in the mess (that's where i eat) was a proverbial mess. Something to write home about every day. There was arhar dal, and arhar dal and arhar dal. And for variations, you had arhar dal,- with tomatoes... now you can't beat that can you?

T.S. Eliot once wrote...
"There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create"

For the sake of the mess managers, who incidentally happen to be my friends, I hope Eliot is wrong,- about the murder bit at least. Can't hang people for their sense of food, can you? Well I know people have burnt for a lot less.. but i am no Hitler. So my form of expression to oppression is silently removing a word from my Blog name. You could argue that I could be a bit more silent with it. But, hell,- what else is a blog for?

Surviving Summers!!

It has been ages since my last blog. The string theorist was indeed starving! The oppressive heat has brought out the blogger in me again. :)
Shobha De at some point of time wrote a particularly stupid book called "Surviving Men". I am looking to build on that stupidity and write "Surviving Summers". That brings us to what I could write in the book.. and to a Sardar joke. (I hope I am offending no one. I am sure Shobha De would not be reading my blog and Sardars are the most sporting of people.) Once upon a time a Sardar wrote a very big and fat book and took it to a publisher. The publisher was amazed at the volume and asked the Sardar what in the world he had written. Sardar replied, "Aare, there was this handsome prince who wanted to cross a jungle and go to another kingdom. So he jumped up on his lovely horse." The publisher was still all wonder struck,"Then, then...??" Sardar:"Then? Clip-clop clip-clop clip-clop...... " , "Then??", "Clip-clop clip-clop", "Then???" "Clip-clop", "And?", "What else? Then he gets down from the horse after crossing the jungle."

So, let us not digress. "Surviving Summers" would be only about drinking gallons of lassi and nimbu pani and staying inside. Most of my friends know that my relationship with the sun is not great. We are both too bright to share the same sky at the same time. :D So I let him have his share during the day and help out in the nights. These days the relation is getting worse. We hardly get to see each other!! So all of you wait with bated breathe for the book to hit the markets. Make me a bestseller, folks! Then I might not have to starve :P !

world is ..... a football!!

It is almost 12-30am. About half an hour to go to the next World Cup match. However hard you try to get work done in these "in-between" times, it almost never gets done. Having yawned through the opening matches today (astoundingly pathetic games between Spain and the Saudis and Ukraine-Tunisia) the prospect of watching the nonstarting and aged French without Zinidine Zidane, does not look too good. But it is the world cup, and a part of national duty is to ensure that we Indians remain the most passionate non-participating country ever.

A word or two about the pros and cons of watching the world's biggest festival on TV in Allahabad. ESPN which is beaming the matches live hardly seems to be on the priority list of the cable distributors here. "Brajil ka hya babu? E to UP hai!!" We in the institute atleast were getting a stolen espn channel (with pictures good enough to earn you glasses if you didnot have them) for the first few days from the local operator. Then a proper ESPN (along with Star Sports) came along and our joy knew no bounds. But wait! I have not told you about the icing on the cake. These channels come along with their own brand of Hindi commentary which runs together with the English one! It is fantastic... If you happen to pass allahabad, drop into our institute. The commentary is worth the visit!!!

(p.s.- The hin-lish now seems to restricted to Starsports only. Strange!!)

At last I am free. I am off to the mountains and then home, sweet home. No Allahabad, no HRI and hence no blogging for the next few days. 'Ca'nt say I am too unhappy though!! :)

the return of the (shall we say...) king

as i had elaborated on one of my previous posts, phd students go through phases. well i just had a period of constant activity.... whuh!! so the king returns to his kingdom after a long time..
add to that the fact that the bloody LAN connection was down for a week and a half......
it is like finding that the oasis in the middle of the desert is currently out of water!! a chap had to come down from Mumbai to fix the problem!!!!!!!! you can understand the state of things in sad old allahabad...
if only they had build this research institute in some other decent place!!
only solace is the campus and moments like the one on top.

sunset........
I was walking upto the mess for our evening snack when I happened to look up... A quick run back to my room and a couple of minutes later I got these captured on my camera. Got drenched by one of our garden pipes on the way ... Well such is life, you win some and lose some! :)

time...
"ticking away the moments that make up a dull day.. " -Pink Floyd.

We, PhD students, would invariably complain to you about how we are so very short of time.....
Don't believe us! Here I am sitting and writing about it when I could very well be doing what I am supposed to do, what the Government pays me to do.. STUDY!! Instead I wait, I fret about, I write like I am doing now.. It is a relatively free period for us now, a time one should utilize to the fullest.... getting work done. But as they say, when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Shall we rephrase it a bit,- when PhD students get going, you know the going has got TOUGH!! The same work which could have been done slowly and steadily like the age old saying goes, would get done when there is a pole up our backsides, when the deadlines hang above us like the inevitable guillotine. You would (if you are fortunate) see bearded, unclean, harrowed guys (please forgive me if I sound male chauvinistic.. assume something similar for the fairer sex)running about like mad, calculating or mugging like crazy just before the submission of a homework problem sheet or a presentation or say before meeting one's supervisor. We like discretizing our work into packets of extreme intensity followed by bursts of extreme inactivity,- at least I do and there are a good few I know like me too...
For us the hare always wins. It is a long road, folks. One should stop for a snack or two and a couple of naps.....
Three cheers to the fast and unsteady!!!!!!!!

This is the beautiful cage where I have been imprisioned for the last couple of years. To the more fortunate people, who can look and admire from the distance and comment on how green the grass is (which, by the way, is quite literally true) this is Harishchandra Research Institute. The most amazing part of the whole thing is that it is in godforsaken Allahabad. You need to see it to believe it... the difference inside and outside the gates!! 'will illustrate with more pictures as we go along.................