Before the Arrival

This is going to be a hurried post. The entire campus is going wild. There is excitement everywhere with the ever dozing administration turning into perfectionists overnight. There is just one topic of discussion everywhere: “Rahul Gandhi is coming to the School.” From state party leaders to a mess worker, it is the same utterance everywhere.

Here’s what different sections of the society had to say before His (‘the almighty?’) arrival.

· S State party G.Sec.: “Mr. Gandhi thinks that by coming over here and probably sleeping in some tribal homes and eating there bread, he can fix their problems.” (The state needs Godfathers like us!)

· I Institute’s Administration in a meeting with the students: “How can you even think of calling a politician to a technical institution? No wonder why we are always reluctant to support you.” (We are reluctant to construct a hostel in a year and now we have to construct a helipad overnight!)

· T Teachers to students: “Oh! Mr. Gandhi is coming. Will he talk to you? Please convince him to change the name of this institute.” (Yeah! A light in the darkness for you.)

· S Students to administration: “Postpone the examination scheduled on that day and leave the rest to us. We will find a way to get things done through him.” (The true master minds.)

· C Canteen worker: “Rahul Gandhi to congress ke liye aa rahe hain. Wo is hostel canteen ka kya, main canteen hi halat nahi sudhaar sakte.” (True words of wisdom.)

· M Mess Worker: ”Aamra o oke shunte jaabo. O kon bhaasha e kotha bolbe? Hindi na Bangla na Ingriji? (We too want to listen to him. What language will he speak in? Hindi or Bangla or English?) (The one truly interested!)

Feel free to add your reaction as comments.

Alternatives galore

I observed him carefully again. Here was a boy sitting on the opposite birth to me. My age. Hair reaching up to the shoulder, shirt unbuttoned to the waist and jeans folded up to the knees. I assumed he too was going to Delhi like me albeit with a very different purpose. I was on a mission. I was the elite. I guessed, he must be returning to his college. I didn’t venture to bother him and continued day dreaming about what lay ahead of me. A while later, my eyes fell on him again. This time he was reading from his diary. I observed that it was some handwritten notes in Hindi. Examination then; last minute preparations. I couldn’t help smiling. Poor dude is suffering from nerves. However, the fact that the notes were in Hindi aroused my curiosity. “Where do you study?” I asked after some hesitation. He told me. I looked at him with utter disbelief and amazement. I was curious and asked him to tell me more.

He told me that he was one of the twenty successful candidates to be selected from a hundred thousand applicants. He told me that his institution was one of its kinds in the country. He told me that his institute’s alumni included great names like Nasseruddin Shah and Anupam Kher. He told me that he was a student of the National School of Drama.

He too had a viva-voce during his entrance test but he was asked ‘what lights would best suit the stage while staging a murder scene.’ He too has internships to worry about but those include ‘training schoolchildren to stage famous plays.’ Finally, he too is tensed about his placements but that depended upon choosing between the theatre and the screen.

I flipped through the pages of his diary. It countained notes on the types of the modern stage, stage lights, latest costume styles, a list of all oscar winning movies and dramatis personae of plays he had directed in the past.

I asked him: “How? How could you build up the courage to choose such a different track?” His reply was: “I knew I was born for the theatre. I have been acting since I was eleven and staging plays in the town since I was fifteen. I knew I had to do this or else I do not know what I could have done.” Such was his confidence, his zeal to do things differently.

I wondered how many of us had unique talents that suffered in the hands of compulsion and stereotyped professions. I have known great actors and lyricists masked as engineers, authors and painters left craving as unwilling technocrats. Will we ever realise that we do not know what we want to actually do in our life. Quoting the play ‘Love in December’: “Most people do not know that they do not know what they want to do in their lives.” How true. I still believe that there is still time to seek what our heart seeks. I still believe that we ought to keep looking. The alternatives galore.

The Rename Game

I desperately wish to write something. Blogging is a great way to relieve tension and bring up the calm. As usual, I have nothing to write but the motivation is high and the night has just begun. So here I am; hunting for a topic to pen down my thoughts. My last presentation of one aspect of college life seems to have gone well with my scanty bunch of faithful readers. Therefore this time I try to explore another fun aspect of college life: the renaming. It can be easily said that you enter college with your pleasant and sweet name and you go out re-christened with a cryptic acronym drafted out of your name. I and my friends have been victims of this weird tradition and I am sure my dear reader, if you be from some other college, you have been too. That’s how, Siddhant becomes Sid, Nilesh becomes Nilu, Gyanendra becomes Gyani and Vijit becomes Biju (this one in paricular reflects the creativity of a professor.) As far as I am concerned, I have been DD since time immemorial. I think it must have been sometimes after my birth that much to my annoyance, I have been stamped by this acronym which has now become my identity and has replaced my name which could have reflected my parents’ creativity.

However, I consider myself luckier as there are worse victims. There are people, who are almost unidentifiable if you call out their true names. I often wonder who the hell Ashish Yadav is for he is Haria/Harry (for his friends decided to rename him to make his name sound like that of a manservant) or who is Satyendra Aggarwal for he is Boss (for his dominating style.) Nor can I decipher the name Shubham Shankadhar for he is better known as Kholu (for he holds the best JEE rank among all the ISMites of my batch.) Then there is the case of Telly who is called so because of his exceptionally poor eyesight. I am sorry but I do not know his real name.

The rename game runs high in college life and most names stay even after leaving the institute. There is hardly anyone left out whose name hasn’t been transformed into something creative. My message to all those who believe in the statement: “What’s in a name?” Well, at college your name may not just identify you. Beware! If you have a bunch of creative friends, it might just reflect your entire personality or even peculiarity.

The Peculiar Relationship

It is once again that time of the year when people with a lucky JEE getaway are lured to spend their next four or five years at our outstanding institute. The reason I call it outstanding is that it stands out from the seemingly endless list of IITs that our patron: the MHRD has so humbly bestowed upon the better minds of the nation. This implies that people need to trouble themselves less about making it into the list of the better minds.

However, before I cease pretending that I care about these younglings who will be soon ushered into our huge family (we have insufficient rooms to keep them), I would like to give them sincere advice about something that is so important to them: relationships. Now, before you classify me among those preachers who are forced to preach something they have as much idea as a laboratory mouse might have about the Helium-Neon Laser, I must clarify that I am talking about the ever important relationship with your roomy.

Believe it or not, a hurried decision to bind yourself to an unfamiliar face at the beginning of the year can create the most hilarious and uncomfortable situations for an entire year. Your roomy may want to sleep early when your nocturnal escapades may involve playing music at the highest pitch. Or maybe your roomy may find clinging to the phone the most interesting part of his/her jeopardized life, thus causing you to delve into the deepest well of frustrations and inferiority complex, provided you are one of the paradoxical creatures who crave for commitment and at the same time happen to be commitment-phobic. Funnily enough, break-ups and divorces can emerge from the tiniest of issues such as locking your roomy outside the room while he/she is at bath. You can’t blame the offender for that. The tragedy of Othello rests merely on a perfumed handkerchief. Alternatively, partners who vouched fidelity in their first year have fallen apart before me and unforeseen divorces are no longer a rare event. You may always expect your roomy to have begun sleeping with the most unlikely character after your return from a nice vacation.

Therefore, it is my sincere advice to my fellow juniors to choose their partners wisely. The relationship with your roomy has greater value than that between you and any of your girl/boyfriends. The greatest of friendships emerge from this peculiar relationship.

The Curves of Time

The good times at IUCAA, Pune will soon be over and I will be back at my old rooms at ISMU. Most people have the opinion that if you stay at a place for too long, you imbibe the general qualities of the place. Having stayed here for six weeks now, I can now invariably argue that they are wrong. Astrophysics flows in every block of concrete that IUCAA is made up of. However, nothing sticks unless you want it to and you take up only the part that you really enjoyed and that becomes a memory. Now I must really thank the reader for having made this far in this article and before you quit, I would like to state that I haven’t forgotten the sole objective of this blog: “to amuse and cheer up the reader.” Having said that, I would like to ask you, did you ever imagine that your entire life can be represented by a single curve in three dimensions? That’s where the concept of World Lines comes into the picture. It is the one topic that I found the most fascinating during my stay at IUCAA.

The following perquisites are necessary to understand the fundamentals of World Lines:

• You need to know the four dimensional coordinate axes in space-time. (Bet, they didn’t teach that to you in geometry!)
• You should be fascinated by curves. Only then you can strongly appreciate the concept.

Having mastered the above, let us move on to what we set out to understand. Imagine a space-time coordinate system which represents the position of the particle in space as well as the instance of time. Thus a curve in this space-time coordinate system will represent the sequence of space-time events corresponding to the history of the object.

Now let us take this concept one level further by considering humans as points in space-time. In that case, the world line will represent the history of the human being! Thus two world lines will intersect only if space-time coordinates of two people coincide or in other words, they meet at a certain time. Not only this, since a curve can take any particular shape in space-time we can invariably argue that future has infinite possibilities and thus predicting the future or worrying about it is similar to tracing an arbitrary curve’s future path in four dimensions, or in other words: futile. We meet so many people each day and often make the best of friends. It is fantastic to imagine that when and where two unknown people will have their world lines intersected which may result in the development of a beautiful friendship or a relationship.

I found the concept of world-lines fantastic as it provides a way to think about ordinary things differently. Meeting of two people, your future, and your past can all be explained scientifically through world-lines. I hope my meagre knowledge was able to fascinate you with this charming concept. Do read Stephen Hawking’s masterpiece A Brief History of Time to know more about these curves of time.

A lot closer to heaven

A year ago, I had watched Shane Warne and his men: the Rajasthan Royals lift the IPL trophy after having battled their way from the underdog status into stardom. I had cheered and booed along with Vijit, my good old pal and a bunch of unknown mates at the dormitory of our temporary residence at Barrackpore, Kolkata. This time the season 2 of IPL brought new surprises and who would have thought that it would be the Deccan Chargers who would steal the show and likewise, I had never imagined that I would watch it from an AC guest –house room on a personal television at the Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune.

So, it has been a week since I landed here in Pune, this time without a known face by my side and life has been full of surprises, new companions and unforgettable experiences. While, it is always nice to be served food free of cost, I am still getting used to jokes such as: “Oh! Those fireworks must have produced gravitational waves” and “Instead of putting so much money into the IPL, why couldn’t they just make an 8m telescope.” Also, my distinguished guide has been good and supportive by moving to France for the next two weeks, putting me in the care of a bunch of software engineers with the command of ‘putting tight reins around me.’

There is a lot to describe and words are not sufficient to put them forth. For, how am I supposed to describe the feeling when waking up late caused us to miss the official bus trip to the Giant Meterwave Radio Telescope (GMRT) and the IUCAA Girawali Observatory (IGO). Needless to mention that missing the bus wouldn’t have stopped us from going, as we decided to face the twisted 100km route to GMRT. Or, how am supposed to put my mental state into words at a stage when I find myself capable of sitting through a dinner with more than just food on my plate. Thanks to my colleagues, we are also served haughty discussions on turbulence, accretion disks, gravitational lenses and super massive black-holes. Also, I am trying my best to make the environment homely here which means that I am working efficiently to bring the state of my room close to the state of my old room at Sapphire. Did, I mention that I am facing the additional challenge of having my room cleaned every alternative day by the guest house authorities.

All said and done, and with my knowledge of Marathi increasing to a word count of two, I need to watch out before this centre dealing with the study of the heavens enchants me through its eternal charisma.

A bit closer to heaven

I think I have lost all my writing skills or at least the will to write. But the inner war for keeping a dying hobby alive has been won and so, here I am, penning thoughts which I could easily have avoided telling the world. More so, since I am enjoying the blissful comfort of home. How many of you have complained getting bored at home after two days of stay? My dear friends let me tell you that this is the only place where you can savour the delight of accomplishing the goal of absolutely doing nothing and at the same time enjoying heavenly food.

However heaven has its rules and restrictions, which explains the state of my hair. It has been reduced to a bare minimum even though I had taken guard and had already reduced it to half of its actual size. Also, when the prodigal son returns, he is expected to announce his arrival to all the near and dear relatives who had seen him off initially. Relatives too have a strange way of outpouring all their sentiments and piling you up with questions which have one similarity to the questions asked in the examinations: ‘you are clueless about the answer.’ At one of these places, I was sympathetically asked whether I had managed to have a girlfriend. I have now sadly and hopelessly resorted to the answer: ‘yes, many.’ At another place, I was recounted the story of a sixteen year old lad who fled to Agra when he heard that his girlfriend had shifted to some random city.

In the world of people close to my age, it is good to see old friends doing well in their lives. They have risen up and have made and unmade many commitments. I as a well wisher, wish them several more commitments and broken-hearted women. Also friends have pointed out qualities in me that I was unsure of previously and have suggested a few remedies. I list them below:

• I try to chicken out of tight situations and need to have courage for making a commitment
• I should look into the mirror and remind myself: “you just don’t deserve to have a commitment dude.”

Also, some of my friends have decided to setup their own start-ups. I plead to them to be quick in achieving their target so that I can at least start formulating a list of my possible placements.

Among other things, my career in three dimensional modelling has ended even before it started. The disaster took place when rendering a plane surface looked so less interesting than watching King Julien (Madagascar) dance on the big screen.

I will be off to Pune in few days time. See you later folks.