Obsessions

My long obsession with a simple statement -

"The truth is out there"

has led my subconscious to an obsession with the straightforward question -

"Is there anyone out there ?"

Whats Important ?

1. Health
2. Human Contact
3. Fun
4. Constraints

baaki,

ever since I was a little kid, Ive wanted to build a model aircraft (one that actually flies under its own power) and I still do, more than ever.
and not just from a kit....I want to come up with my own designs. how hard can it be :-)

I want to do something really cool with my iTouch and the iPad I know I will one day own. Heck....Id like to control my model plane using my iPad :D

I want to make money by doing something 'useful' in society. Make pans, provide advice(!!), build spaceships, whatever.

Im not sure I want to do a Phd any more....but I need to find a good substitute for a Phd. something I can spend a couple of years doing, thats ridiculous, unlikely, high risk, high return and high impact. before I go home, get married and start trying to not be boring and irrelevant.

Im irrelevant now too of course....but I dont feel it. Im in a place where people are moving, its 'the place to be' in theoretical physics. If a great discovery is made - in any of a staggeringly large number of fields - chances are it'll be by someone associated with PI or someone known to people associated with PI. and then the discoverer will soon be associated with PI :P

Perhaps the reason Im scared of going back home is that I feel I need to be in the 'right place' in order to feel useful and competent. Im scared once I let go of all this, the phd offers, the scholarships and the world in which these things matter, Ill be a nonentity, with no intrinsic value or interest. Maybe I rely too much on where I am in order to feel good about myself.

Maybe this would not be the case if I had some nice round meaty piece of original research in my kitty. Of any sort....something I had built, anything, anything that had come to fruition. other than scholarships I have got based on impressions I have made upon people. I keep telling myself...these are great people (and they are) both as human beings and as scientists, and if they think Im good enough....maybe I am.

Once I go home, whats to certify Im good enough for anything ? Its a family business....I would be much less concerned about taking up a random job. there, the fact that someone was paying me good money would tell me that I was worth something to them.

Nope.....I cant go back unless I resolve this. I need to go home after Ive convinced myself that my worth is something I carry around with me, not something that is bestowed upon me by the institute I am in, or the scholarship I get.
which brings me back to "doing something thats ridiculous, unlikely, high risk, high return and high impact." :D

Apology to Leo Kadanoff

I have been fortunate enough to be taught by one of the great physicists of the last century (the century - I do not need to remind anyone - of Einstein, Schrodinger, Dirac, Feynman and others..) : Prof. Leo Kadanoff. Here is a man who laid the groundwork behind some of the most profound ideas (Renormalization Group) that are a crucial part of the underpinnings of the powerful field theories that are the epitome of human attempts to understand the universe.

He taught me - in fact he is teaching me this very moment - a course on Statistical Mechanics much of which is actually material created in part by him. Many crucial ideas in the field theory course Im doing concurrently originate from him and David Tong from Cambridge who is teaching that excellent course mentioned once how sleepish he felt talking about some of these ideas with Leo Kadanoff sitting at the back of the class listening attentively.

He always comes 40 minutes before his class starts and he likes to listen to whats happening in the field theory course, and he loves to then begin his lecture by giving stat mech analogues of the field theory concepts we had been looking at. He is one of the leading proponents of 'Universality' in physics - the idea that phenomena (like critical phenomena, phase transitions) look identical across branches of physics. He likes to say, and show, how we do the same physics over and over again, the same equations reappear in completely different contexts.

He is perhaps one of the most humble most polite people Ive met. And so it is with deep - almost bitter - regret that I admit that I have not learnt much from him at all. It is my fault entirely, I simply did not make the effort necessary to appreciate and assimilate the deep concepts he was good enough to put forth enthusiastically before us, everyday, even at the age of 82. Between field theory and my indolence and laziness, I just did not do what was needed.

I am ashamed. But - if for no other reason than respect for Prof. Kadanoff - I will study and become good at Statistical Mechanics and understand renormalization before Im done with this business of theoretical physics.

I have made many similar mistakes....sleeping in PSB sir's class while he poured his heart into imparting knowledge springs immediately to mind, and perhaps I will never understand DSP and Control Systems as well as I should, but this time, I wont let it pass.

Free to Dream

"Be very protective of your enthusiasm. Dont let anything affect that ! If you find yourself getting stressed out, if classes seem too much, take a break. This course is for you to figure out what you want to do with your life....but we have definitely packed it with too much stuff !" (or words to that effect)

- Dr. Neil Turok to the PSI students

There are idealists in the world who create wonderful things, wonderful places, wonderful situations and I am in one of them right now, among amazing people. To bring enthusiastic people together and give them everything they need and give them the freedom to dream, think and create new ideas for mankind....surely we need a lot more such places ! As David Deutsch so eloquently said in this talk, the survival of mankind depends on the ability of our species to create the knowledge that we require to solve the massive (existential) crises that we will face sooner or later.

Im really keen to see if I can actually do what Im supposed to do now that Im here : make a real and significant contribution to my species - Humankind and to my planet - Earth, so that we may hope to live and explore and carry to distant corners of spacetime the memories of Earth. We will certainly be extinct one day, but will we leave behind only a few primitive ruins on one planet of one obscure system ? Proof that we never grew up, that we remained small minded and spiteful and primitive ? Or will a million wrecks on a million distant and inhospitable worlds bear testimony to how far beyond its 'natural' mandate this unworthy chemical scum went, exploring the universe simply because it is there !

In The Songs of Distant Earth Clarke mentions a story of a frozen leopard carcass found near the top of Kilimanjaro. (the story happens to be The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Hemingway and almost certainly true) and wonders what the leopard was doing there....what was it seeking in those bleak icy slopes when the plains below - its natural home - abounded with game ?

The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle...

- Konstantin E. Tsiolkovsky

Image - New Scientist

Perimeter !

Im in Waterloo, ON, Canada now, and classes at the Perimeter Institute start tomorrow :)
All blogs specific to the Perimeter Institute and my activities here will go here. This blog will continue as it is of course....that one will be a little more tech/subject oriented.

Here's a story.

After much huffing and puffing and tension, my exams finally got over on the 28th of Jan 2008. and then, instead of breathing a sigh of relief and enjoying for a few days, I had a take home exam to do to be sumbitted on the 13th of february for a subject we freshers had been advised not to take on account of its advanced nature (and so of course, I went and took it. I insist on finding new instruments for my lazyness to torture me with). I had reconciled myself to my 10 day holiday being washed out in yet another tense period of wasted time and desperate concentrated work coupled with irritated house-hunting (the latter the courtesy of the VUB housing department), but my parents had other ideas. They had decided that I was working too much (hear ! hear !) and needed a vacation. They dint say it, but they clearly thought I was becoming(?) psycho, sitting in my room all day, eating by myself, not meeting people and generally brooding over a cold grey cityscape and inscrutable equations and growing slowly but surely fatter and balder. (all of which happens to be true) So, when my dad visited me on the 29th, he was quite insistent that I finish my paper before friday (thats today) and go meet some friends in Switzerland over the weekend. the more he spoke of it, the more inviting it seemed, and I promised that I'd do something about it. So, after I got back to my room before lunch on the 30th (I was in Brussels with dad) I promptly took my computer over to Aditya's place (apart from being a splendid chap with a large room, his landlord provides free, fast, unlimited download wifi access) and proceeded to watch some 10-15 episodes of the Xfiles well into the night.

I slept feeling quite guilty. So the next day (the 31st, yesterday) I woke up before lunch and found out that the housing problem had been kind of, more or less, solved, but my internet was not working and my phone was lost. Understandably, I thought myself exceptionally vulnerable to attacks by hi-tech psychopaths and alien abductions, so I spent most of the afternoon fixing my internet and finding my phone (which I had forgotten at Aditya's place obviously) and so on. I gave my nonlinear optics a cursory glance and in the night, settled down for another bout of the x files in my room. By the time I slept I had realized that the time had come for desperate measures.

I woke up today morning and decided that I must go to Switzerland and meet the few friends I had there and take a break (theres irony in there somewhere). I realized (admitted is a better word perhaps) that I'd never get down to work unless I gave myself a fixed inflexible deadline. So the obvious course of action was to book my tickets to switzerland and then make myself finish the needful before then. So I thought to myself - thursday I go to Switzerland, spend friday and saturday there, back on sunday, and next semester starts on monday, so by wednesday, I have to finish my exam, attend a meeting in brussels on monday, wind up my affairs in Gent, arrange for my luggage to be shifted to Brussels in my absence, and make arrangements for Aditya (who is staying in my room for a week because his contract expired in January).

Easy.

So I started looking at the various low cost airlines. I needed to go to Zurich, thats where the chaps are, but Zurich turns out to be an expensive place to fly to. So I was prepared to fly to anywhere in switzerland, and there were 10 open tabs with any number for airports and flights and few were affordable. Finally, I saw a list which read something like

Basel - EUR180
Bern - EUR132
Geneva - EUR156
Zurich - EUR1023
Nice - EUR3

AHA ! I said to myself ! finally ! So I clicked on the last dot, filled in my card details, paid, got my ticket in my mail and as I was about to print it out, I saw something that should have been horribly obvious right at the beginning - Nice is in FRANCE !!!!! its 600km from Zurich ! and the flight is on Tuesday !!

But the deed was done. The gods had spoken. there was no turning back. . . . . since then, I have bought myself a nice medium sized backpack and a good North Face jacket (my first major non food expenses in europe and they wiped out my savings for january) and helped Aditya move to my room and fixed an appointment to wind up my room contract on tuesday afternoon. I leave for Nice on tuesday night, reach there at 10. I'll spend a day or two around Nice I guess and then go to Switzerland either via Grenoble or Milan (I've been to north Italy, so Grenoble seems a more interesting but less convenient option) and my flight back from Geneva reaches Brussels at the exact time that the first class of my next semester is supposed to start. I dont know where I'll stay in Brussels when I get back and what I'll wear to college on the first day, but I dont care.

As usual, I'm in a tight corner, but I can assure you, its a lot better than being rooted in front of a flickering screen in a dark room feeding on cheap vicarious thrills ! I'm looking forward to wide landscapes, the sea, the mountains, the flavours of faraway cities and the winds of foreign lands :-) Should be fun, especially after 4 months of motionlessness :-)

And there is the small matter of doing 2 months worth of work in 2 days, but thats routine. Thats precisely what my Bachelors degree was about :-)

Exams, Cricket etc

I've become very bored and too comfortable in the middle of the exams. I liked my subjects while I was studying them, I was excited, but now that the exams are here they have become a drag. I fail to see how performance in an exam can be a good criterion for judging a masters level student's aptitude for research, and they are certainly a HUGE waste of time for all concerned, so I'm very surprised to find the intense, lengthy exam periods these people in Belgium have. I am keen to get done with them as soon as possible and get on to the next semester of learning. I am quite disappointed to find that "careless mistakes" are still very much a part of me, and my math exam which could so easily have been a triumph has left me feeling quite disappointed and a little bit helpless. To be honest, at least some of the lack of focus that might have resulted in the mistakes I made will have to be attributed to my excessive involvement in the tumultuous exploits of the Indian Cricket Team.

There have been reams and reams written about the Sydney match, and I have soaked it all up. I have read every blog, every article and followed every comment and its aftermath. I have seen all the videos on youtube and I have reached the conclusion that the whole matter is too obvious to comment on, and that I have nothing to add to the huge body of material already published (and indeed, is still being published). But, I do support the Indian team, not just because they are the Indian team and the underdogs but because most of them are gentlemen worth emulating in many respects.

I do wish they'd come up with some steely performances and win though. I miss India !


Update (20-01-2008) - Yesterday, they did exactly that ! A magnificent win at Perth !

On Solitude

I have had unparalleled opportunity to be alone with myself and meditate, both upon my life and upon my subjects, and (I regret to say) after making a very promising start 3 months ago I rather tired of my quiet isolation and yearned for the company of old friends and the comfort of old haunts, the warmth of home and the careless lethargy of an unambitious life. The splendid solitude of the earnest savant that I so relished at the outset of this journey became a burden and slowly I wandered from the path of learning, maintaining enough of a hold to keep track but not enough to delight in it. As I have so many times before, I saw the light and somehow, I forgot. I have been competent all this semester, but there was the opportunity to be exceptional, to be inspired, and I squandered it in my indolence, my mind clouded by false concerns and intellectual diversions just engaging enough to hide the damage being done.

Just this afternoon while I mused upon life, I identified "a willingness to be alone" as the factor that separates the definitively ordinary from the potentially great. I then realized that in this semester, that was exactly where I was found wanting. I could, after a point, no longer sustain the mental focus that forms the basis of productive meditative solitude, and it became all too easy to find ways to be entertained and thus not have to think. Being alone induces a state of honesty and introspection that many people find abhorrent, and I - having conquered the daemons of self deceit - threw away for no reason the purity of mind earned over weeks of silent work and thought. I reached the very edge of genius and turned back, unable to maintain order and peace when they were most important.

Genius is a state of mind, and it is earned through sustained meditative work. If I dont get there in the next year or two, I will never get there. There is a definite window of opportunity, I know the path, I have but to walk it, my mind at peace and my voices silent.

In a beautiful country of chocolates, cobbled streets, waffles, civilized rivers and quaint buildings I sit in a room and feel time flow past me. I loose myself in the current, letting the past wash over me, knowing that its over and done with. I let visions of the future, multitudinous and fantastic stalk me enticingly, knowing full well how short lived, weak and pathetic they are ! The present ? the present is nothing ! it is a point where there is only awareness of its existence. Everything else is in the past or the future - unreal, immaterial, impotent. They are the imaginary winds of our creation, we unfurl imaginary sails and set forth on fantastic journeys, borne hither and thither by gusts from our pasts and our future. Pull the sails down, and not only does the wind disappear but also the sea. All one is left with is consciousness. The present. The one point, the only point at which we know we exist.

Raireshwar, Kenjalgad and a jolly good weekend !

I reached S's mama's house in Poona late on friday night (after hitching a ride with a man who turned out to be a newspaper editor fighting for superstition !) only to find that M and N had not reached yet and that nothing had been decided for the weekend ! After assorted arrivals (everyone seemed to be surprised that nothing had been decided) a plan for the next two days was sketched out (hatched ?) with the help of an excellent book called "The Sayhadri Companion". We (four of us) slept at 1.30 and woke up at 5.30 saturday morning and left immediately for a village called Korle in Poona district in the Bhor region. The plan for the day was this - we climb up from Korle to a place called Raireshwar, traverse the ridge to Kenjalgad, climb to the top of that, climb down to Korle from there via a different route and then drive to Mahabaleshwar for the night.

We parked the car in Korle and after a bit of haggling with a local who was to show us the way, we sent him off and were on our way up at 9.15. The weather was cloudy and pleasant at this time and the path was more of a jeep track, so we were all a bit disappointed, having hoped for something rather more adventurous. We reached the top of the ridge at about 10.30. At this point the path went to the left towards Kenjalgad and one to the right to Raireshwar. By now the wind was quite strong and clouds were billowing all around. We walked along the top of the ridge for some time (and took a few photographs and videos - my last for a long time on this trek) and reached a sudden steep ascent upon which cement stairs had been built. Along the razors edge of the mountain, the wind was quite scary and the steps were a comfort. Soon, the steps gave way to 2 flights of rickety steel steps/ladders in a very steep and exposed rock outcropping. The mist around us was very dense now and we could not see much at all. The last part of the ascent was a steep but well marked rock patch with a thick rope fixed to the side. Once on top, we walked along a misty, windy and rainy plateau ( picture below) for quite some time beside lakes, through paddy fields (rice seems to be the main crop of the entire region) before stumbling upon the village temple of Rireshwar. It was a temple and location with a very unique atmosphere which I would dearly have liked to have captured on film, but the weather was foul and it was all we could do to find some shelter and have something to eat. In fact, there are no pictures in Raireshwar and no pictures till we were almost down from Kenjalgad. The most exciting parts of the trek I was unable to photograph because of the rain, I did not want to risk my camera. The temple, (which was a bit like the temples one sees in the villages of Konkan but made of black stone and looked more rugged and weather beaten and less refined - a frontier temple perhaps) as well as all the buildings around it were open and empty. Rows of houses, another temple of similar size, all seemed abandoned. We shared the shelter of one of these with a few dogs (who N felt very sorry for and she wanted to shower them with food but was prevented from doing so by vehement protests from S and me) and had a bit to eat.

The boards written in marathi in the area near the temple (which was dotted with remains of old buildings here and there) informed us that it was at this unlikely but beautiful place in this strange old temple that Shivaji with a few of his companions first declared on 22nd October (I think) 1645 that he would fight for Swaraj. I wondered what the people felt then, what did swaraj mean to them ? Did Shivaji ever return to tell the simple village folk of the swaraj he had fought and earned ? Did he really give more freedom to the common people of the Deccan ? The Cambridge University history of the Marathas rejects the notion of Shivaji as a 'Hindu King' saying that he was a maratha nobleman who did what he had to do to come to power and whose armies were a mixture of religions, locals and pathans and villagers from all over which was common to all powers on the Deccan at the time. The author says that all references to him being a 'hindu king' are later additions by hindu revivalist historians and stories of him being influnced by Ramdas Swami and Dadoji Kondev (who were both brahmins) are later brahminical additions made in order to capitalize on the popularity of Shivaji. Possible and fair enough. But then one begins to wonder if Swaraj could have actually meant anything to the village folk of the Deccan. Shivaji was a fort based king, his armies harried his enemies from high inaccessible forts and he did not have a large standing army which could protect the territorial integrity of his dominions. Invaders would regularly sweep through his lands without being able to take all his forts, and be beaten back after periods of harassment by small skilled troops riding down from his mountain strongholds. So he never really provided the majority of villages on the Deccan - the ones which did not lie in the immediate vicinity of one of his more powerful forts, any degree of security but did levy heavy taxes. So what Swaraj did he provide if not a vague religious one ? The notion that one is oppressed by someone of ones own religion and not another although it made little or no difference on the ground. It is a question that the author of the Cambridge University Press History of the Marathas needs to answer.

There were a couple of other boards, one of which told us that in 1642 a poojari named Shiva Jangam was brought to the village to perform ceremonies at the temple and was present when Shivaji made his declaration and that the family still performs the poojas at the temple, while the other board was a reproduction of an edict by Shivaji for the villagers telling them to use the resources of the forest carefully and never to rape it (literal translation). It was still raining heavily and the fog was thick when we started on our way back. We roamed the plateau of Raireshwar for 40 minutes, dashing hither and thither looking for the path by which we had come, wet, muddy and in good spirits. The photo below is a burnt hut (with the bed and everything still in place) we saw while wandering around on the plateau. After we had finally located the right path we ran into a man tending his buffaloes (with the typical protection of a sack/plactic looking like a pointy hood thrown over his head and back) who asked us if we had had food and if we wanted to stay. He had a large house near the temple apparently (which we did not see) and could accommodate 15-20 people. His name was Shankar Jangam from the family of the temple priests. I began to wonder if - in the three fifty years since Shiva Jangam - the family had only progressed as far as Shankar. Shiv, Shankar, Shivshankar etc etc.

We got down from Raireshwar fairly rapidly to the spot where the road led towards Kanjalgad. For sometime the road let through dense insect infested jungle but we reached the village through which the path leads up towards the top of the gad. It was immediately obvious that this was going to be a stiff climb. A lady in the village told us that it was a clearly marked path and that we must not leave it and go into the jungle. "Payakhalchi vaat sodu naka" she said. Bur the path bifurcated into equal halves every 10 steps and we were quickly on a very steep, muddy, slippery patch struggling to pull ourselves up, and it was very obvious that we were lost. After some exploring and scrambling around we spotted the right path which led us fairly smoothly to the top of the shoulder of the mountain from where we could see both sides of the 500 foot cliffs that protected the top of the gad. This is a formation very common in this part of the range, a forested hill with a sheer vertical outcropping of rock protecting a large plateau above. There are generally only one or two possible routes to the top and so these are ideal locations for forts. I wonder if these are entirely natural (they seem quite unlikely) but then, for someone to have hewn them out at that hight seems incredible. We went along the path towards the cliffs facing the side we had climbed from and after a small rocky patch the stunning sight of rock steps hewn into the cliffs, 2-3 m broad, and very slippery. All this while the weather had been merciless and we were all tired and hungry. We reached the top along those steps and found some shelter in a old structure whose roof had partially caved in and had the excellent excellent theplas M (who is Gujju/Kutcchi) had so thoughtfully brought. After a moment of panic in the dense impeneterable fog, we found the steps leading down again and were quickly to the village. The path leading back down into the valley was found after much exasperated shouting from a large troupe of ladies and girls who had gathered to watch us leave (I guess we were quite a sight, muddy and shabby with M and N being highly incongruous in the surroundings) and among them was the lady who had told us the path when we set off to the top. "Ranat gele na tumhi. Sangiltla hota na, ti vaat hitun an hitun ashi ashi jaate te !" We said yes, we had made a mistake and thanked her. The photo above is of Kenjalgad taken on the descent, it looked quite imposing. We climbed down to a village called Yeli and then walked across the pretty pretty valley to Korle. S carried N on his back for some time much to M's (and my) surprise. We reached the car and borrowed a news paper to spread on the seats to protect them against us.

A scenic drive to Wai (which has some old and pretty riverside temples) and then to Mahabaleshwar (we gave a couple of garrulous villagers a ride to Bhor too). Some excellent sandwiches and pizza at Mapro and some very average rooms in the MTDC resort. The next day started comparitively late with a brilliant breakfast of Makai patties and frankies at Hirkani dhaba and then a walk to Arthur seat (3 hrs, and for much of the time we were convinced we were lost). It was raining heavily throughout and we waded through calf/ankle deep water at regular intervals. The jungle was dense on all sides and the mist added a lot to the atmosphere. (In the photos where its misty, nothing at all can be seen ! so none of those are put up here) Mahabaleshwar was very misty overall, making driving tricky. After much walking we reached the parking lot for Arthur seat, and found that we had been walking along "The Lady Willingdon Gallop". We started walking down the main road back to where we had parked car and were given a lift by a chap playing Himmesh songs very loud. We reached the car and started back, and had excellent Pithla Bhakri at a place near Poona. Then we dropped the girls to their transport back to Mumbai, while I went to S's mama's house, freshened up and then S and me went out for dinner like old times after which I took the 11.00 Asiad back to Aurangabad and was home at 4.30 today morning.

Ideal weekend.

Contrasts

I could not sleep that night. In that remote, impossibly beautiful place, with my head throbbing painfully every time I moved, cold, uncomfortable and overawed by the sheer scale of everything around me - the mountains, the sky, the silence - I walked slowly around camp, alone, (which is when I took the photo that accompanies this post, the only star in the sky) with my puny headlamp, thinking about a city I have never lived in.

I grew up in a medium sized industrial town in the underdeveloped interiors of the Deccan plateau where the roads are broad, the houses large, things are well spaced out and the people gentle - the very definition of respectable middle class suburbia. But the city I missed that day was not the city I knew so well and liked so much, it was a city I actively detested and avoided, like all those around me. The old town, with its tiny gullies and overcrowded, overflowing garish shops, the open drains, the thick smell of chaat, gutter, cowdung and sweat gathered over years and years, the food, the temples, the burquas and the chatter ! The vibrant, colourful, bustling city full of verve and dash and spirit and devoid of the antiseptic snobbery I have always practiced.

In that moment of cold loneliness I longed for the proximity to other human beings that the old town enforced, the impossibility of ignoring the outside world, it bombards every faculty one has with insults, invitations and paradoxes. From beautiful handiwork to the cheapest chinese goods, from the ultra conservative to the inextricably mixed up, it has everything. Cows and horses in houses smaller than my room off a street narrower than my bed, a colony of temple brahmins under the wall of a white mosque, a girl looking wistfully far away into the distance from a window overlooking 10 feet of road and a thousand people.

Uniformity is the curse of the modern world, the sheer life that one can feel coursing through the tiny unkempt streets of the old quarters of even the smallest towns cannot be matched by the myriads of sleek cars that whizz - in all their air conditioned arrogance - along the eight lane highways we are taught to be proud of.

I'll take some photos and see if I can convey what I mean, if I can capture some of the atmosphere on film. I'll try.

I'm finally home and as a consequence am feeling more peaceful and comfortable than I have in a long, long time. With peace and comfort comes a strangely easy and wonderfully pleasant lucidity. Take away physical discomfort and let a chap feel removed from the turbulence, the trauma and the wild moods and extreme views brought on by the skewed perceptions, lonely unfamiliarity, unnecessary discomfort and exaggerated pressures that seem to go with hostel life and what you are left with is the only healthy kind of philosopher - the kind who finds philosophy stuffy and redundant. Take away the emotional biases and duress - mental as well as physical - that cause opinions to crystallize into sharp weapons causing injury to oneself as well as others, and it becomes remarkably difficult to decide one way or the other about most issues of note. The clarity bestowed by peace makes it possible to perceive just how astoundingly complex and subtle the world is. People turn out to be multi layered and faceted, geographies more intricate and histories more interesting, the past difficult to judge and the future a lot more varied and promising.

Thus, everything having become an object of infinite wonder, it becomes next to impossible to write about anything.

"Servant of God, Well done ........."

Yes, times are bad and I'm in a really really tight spot.

The huge inertia of a dismal position, the months of indolence, the opressive sinking feeling in my stomach and the crushing weight of seemingly inevitable disaster which I feel upon my heart is fast taking me inexorably towards the end I'm so desperate to avert. The tension which makes action impossible, the fear which precludes clear thought and a mind too nervous and twitchy to calm down and concenterate are the three insidous foes I have to overcome if I'm bite the bullet and face this like a man.

I do not aim to undo the damage already done, nor do I wish to perform any heroics. My ambition is remarkably modest for one in my condition. I just want to do the best possible thing in the time remaining. Thats all. There is not much of the game left, but whatever there is, I want to play well.

If I can say to myself, that from this point on, there was nothing more that anyone could have done, I will have put my ghosts to rest. The shadow of doubt that darkens my life will lift a little, and my friends and allies of old - impossible hope, ridiculous optimism and lofty dreams - which presently lie weakened, mute and scared in the deepest caverns of my mind, will once again emerge strong and smiling, once more will they lift my spirit and bring a twinkle to my eye, "Thank you friend" they will say "We are back."

"..........for thou hast fought the better fight."

Diwali.

I'm not even sure what I would like to write about.

I could write about how the festival has been celebrated in my little city, and how things have changed over the years, how the euphoric and blissful diwalis of childhood under the watchful eyes of grandma seamlessly gave way to the daring deeds of boyhood when parents and elders were viewed as needless nuisances to be kept away from the festivities as far as possible and the comfort of grandparents and legions of cousins was ignored and forgotten in the heady daredevilry and the innocent competition that accompanied it and how this strange but happy state of mind quite suddenly turned into the surly disinterestedness of the teenager when the whole thing seemed silly, the rituals a huge pain, the smoke a disgrace, all relatives were bores and everything was pointless and why, after all that, this young man now feels that the diyas were brighter and more colourful, the houses more brilliantly lit by hands more loving, the sounds of crackers exploding were more civilized, the smoke was less pungent, the faces were friendlier, the smiles were wider, eyes sparkled and twinkled like stars, the air was suffused with happiness, minds were more willing to care and the world was a better place . . . . . when he was a child.

But whats the point ?

The warm grey twilight of the Deccan, a sky painted with bold strokes of vibrant purples and reds, the mad games and the glorious mud, the ajjis and ajobas walking with a slow and easy gait, kindly smiles and twinkling eyes all bestowed by long years fruitfully spent, walking and watching us as we played the exuberant and carefree games of our vigorous and happy childhood, watching us but seeing themselves, in a time long gone, in a world no longer theirs, as they played games with names now strange, with companions long forgotten, but seeing the same flushed faces, the same excited voices, I wonder if they did not feel just a bit sorry for man, and us kids, destined to move on and forget, the exausting and cozy evenings of boyhood, the casual familiarity and implicit trust of treading on land well known, the food we knew awaited us when we went home and washed off ourselves the day's grime, the delight of fathers returning, the comfort of mothers scolding, of siblings fighting.

What life, what man be so forsaken that there are none who are awaited, none who have the time to scold, none who will dispute and argue secure in the knowledge that destinies so intertwined cannot be burst asunder by trifles !

Blood is thicker than water they say and the love of the land more dear than money. I will miss them ! The roads I have always detested,the neighbours whose existence I rarely had the energy to acknowledge, friends whose names I no longer recall, the strange, rich, multi textured smell that suddenly springs out of books long unopened awakening memories long buried, they wave me onward on my journey, they let me go secure in the knowledge that they shall never be lost to me, that I should continue working the spectacularly beautiful, impossibly intricate, consummately eternal tapestry of which my life is a small part. It is hoped that my little contribution shall be of good workmanship, that it should - at the least - be suitably profound and appropriately bright.

I shall do my best then, but from time to time I'll miss them all, and one day, if only to be able to see what I have really done, I will come back.

About itself.

Its quite sad really, and makes me feel not a little guilty, that I dumped into this post and subsequently deleted, two random thoughts that occurred to me before I started blogging. The purpose of my blog you see, is to write. My purpose in writing is not to blog. Its strange that the deepest guilt and hurt are felt when we defeat our own purposes. If our purposes are defeated by circumstances, then we are sad, but sadness is a burden man has been given the ability to carry, for it has been, is, and will ever be, his companion - sometimes forgotten, but always there. Guilt, however, is a load that quickly becomes unbearable, and results in men either cracking or trying desperately to undo their mistake. A very nice example of the latter, is this little paragraph of mine.

I could have written a lot. I could have shared the thick, fragrant, soothing taste of a divine scoop of sitaphal icecream, the quiet but disconcerting hum of a cold computer lab in the wee hours of the morn, the cool silence projected by the silvery glitter of a grassy maidan on a moonlit night as seen through clumps of dark swaying trees or the loose relaxation and quiet satisfaction brought on by a good head massage. But I did not, because unlike feelings of anger, bitterness, frustration and their kin, feelings of gentle peace, detached loneliness (mostly), enthusiastic interest and likeable pressure are easier to experience than to write about.

sad day.

Just a bad day.

One of those when just as you think you're getting somewhere, walking past the shadow, the past comes up, grabs you by the throat, and shows you your place.

One of those days.

well well well.....

Its almost dinner time, and I ought to have figured out the hspice netlist for the scba by now, but I've been playing around for the last couple of hours, reeling under the shock of an unexpected capacitance value. It turned out to be a typing error ( that was about 45 minutes or so ago ) and so I ought to have got on with the calculations, and finished my work well in time, done some extra, impressed my prof, extracted a good recco, gone to a good university............but now I'll prolly go and have a spot of dinner and a walk, then I have the whole night ahead of me in which (I hope) I will finish my work, do some extra, impress my prof, extract a good recco, go to a good university.......................

and so....

So I did finish (more or less) what I ought to have finished. Would have been nice if I'd run the simulation and seen what the graphs looked like, (they're expected to look really really bad...I dont expect anything to work) but the've some server maintainence to do, so thats that for the night.

Well....

as ol' Scarlett so famously said, "Tomorrow is a new day...."