Category Archive: Adventure

Long walks in Hyde Park

Posted by Ankit On October 6th, 2014

Of all the things that I miss about my time in SD perhaps the one that is dearest to me is the memory of the long walks I used to take from my house to the Hillcrest medical center bus stop. Every morning at around 8:30 I used to pick up my weathered Jansport bag, which has stood me in good stead for 9 years now, and head West on Quince avenue towards the white wooden truss bridge across the mini canyon teeming with bird songs, bamboo trees, and all sorts of desert flora. I remember the SD weather often being crisp and the Sun often shining beautifully through the foliage on the side of the canyon where it percolated down on its green floor in puddles of gold. It was often very quiet with hardly any traffic on the roads and nary a soul to be seen around. I remember clearly the creak of the bridge as I walked across, the rough touch of its wood as I passed my hands over it, the houses which lay sleepily on the sides of the canyon, shades drawn and the low Sun reflecting off of their windows. I remember the little quiet bridge suspended over a world which was beginning to wake up but had not quite as yet. I would walk across it and up to first avenue where I'd turn right to head North. Along the route are beautiful houses with white picket fences, flowering trees with their branches drooping on to the sidewalk, a weird house with its grounds adorned with large metallic animals, a meditation center, and, of course, the royal mart cafe where I'd stop for a coffee over whichever book I might have be reading then. The whole walk from my house to the bus stop, including the coffee stop, used to take me a little more than an hour and I'd look forward to walking back for another hour in the evening. My house was close to the fashionable neighborhood of Hillcrest which I very much looked forward to moving to in 2011 (from La Jolla). However, I came to the slow realization over the course of the next year that I merely tolerated all the bustle and activity of the place. What I really liked about my neighborhood was the part which was not very Hillcrest: long solitary walks along uncrowded back streets. It has taken me many years to become comfortable with the fact that I dislike the bar culture, the constant din and activity, and the excessive socializing which others seem to crave. I'd rather have my little corner of the world, peaceful and simple.

Not knowing Chicago when I was moving from SD, I ended up renting a place in an area (east Lakeview) which is like Hillcrest but on steroids. It's a very beautiful,  well manicured, slick neighborhood with tons of restaurants, coffee shops, gyms, and bars. It is a place which many people would immediately fall in love with. However, I mostly have memories of wondering how to escape what appeared to me to be pretty much a personal nightmare. I'd walk around and look into the wood paneled bars and become overwhelmed by their shiny fakeness. I'd wonder, where are the real people of this world and how come I am surrounded by these automatons who have been mercilessly cast en-masse from the same unsympathetic industrial mold? I have recently moved to the distinctly unfashionable neighborhood of Hyde park and have been loving it. On a long walk this weekend under the pretty Fall foliage of bright orange, red, and yellow leaves, I got reminded of the pleasure I used to have on those walks in SD. Hyde park is the neighborhood surrounding the University of Chicago which has a distinctly beautiful campus. Imposing Gothic architecture which looks older than it actually is due to the elaborate arabesque of ivy which adorns its walls. Edison bulbs dimly illuminating long dark, hallowed as it turns out, portals of this illustrious institution. Old style, ornate brick houses with lush gardens. The place has a distinctly sleepy feel to it and is more or less devoid, as of now at least, of the laughable, if they were not so annoying, preoccupations of the yuppies. Yes the neighborhood appears boring by modern urban measures but I'd not have it any other way.

ISRO to Mars

Posted by Ankit On September 24th, 2014

India's Mars mission, Mangalyaan, now in Mars orbit! How amazing! I remember the days not too long ago when I'd wait patiently for the results of the PSLV and GSLV launches and having my share of disappointments. Thanks and congrats to the scientists at the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and related agencies for pulling this off.

SD reredux

Posted by Ankit On August 3rd, 2014

My second trip to SD after moving to Chicago completed recently. And while the last one resonated with long walks alone on lovingly remembered streets, this one ended up being about the amazing people I know there. It has been several years since I graduated from UCSD and SD is not the place which most people think of as their career base. Yet, and yet, I found myself entirely short of time when it came to spending it with those whom I'd have liked to. I had the feeling, however, that this was the last time when the tremendous variety that moves me was to be found preserved there. People have plans and many will disperse before I have the chance of going back again. Which is perfectly fine in the cold and reserved sort of way that life works. However, in the emotional and nostalgic light through which I gaze that Sun drenched city, the place would lose a certain magnetism and the people, perhaps, would too. We are primarily contextual, our essences tied faithfully to the settings of certain memories. We are not remembered so much as being endowed with this or that quality but as being lively contributors to some strong remembrances which were made memorable through equal contributions from others and from the settings in which their memories are placed. Once removed to alien surroundings we run the risk of becoming pale shadows of our past. It is, therefore, always with a deep sense of trepidation that I meet someone whom I have very fond memories of in surroundings which have nothing to do with those in which those memories were formed. In those moments, since what I am really trying to do is to figure out how much of the old person still remains, I feel deeply conflicted between the desire to find permanence and the rational thought process of allowing and accepting its absence. Perhaps this hankering of mine for reexperiencing some memory of the past is the reason why I have found myself being utterly disappointed by the medium of photography as well. While what I have in my mind is live and mutating and full of beautiful visions, what a photograph provides is merely a pathetic approximation to these feelings. I find its dead, soulless, sledgehammer approach to memory insulting to what is otherwise intriguing, nuanced, and multicolored. As an extension, I find those who are obsessed with capturing life within the borders of a 4 by 6 or, even less romantically, in the cemetery of a zillion electrons, amusing at best. While they are utterly absorbed with their ridiculous cameras and ridiculous lcd screens, the feathered seraph that is life unfurls its beautiful wings and soars against the patterned clouds.

I have very few photos of SD but it is alive in my mind in a way that a place can never come to life in a photo. There are absolute characters of life I know there but their brilliance owes something to my own imagination as well. In my mind, in the heady drifts of my mnemosyne, I have filled in empty spaces with psychedelic colors and silences with strange reverberations. I have bent the elastic essence of reality, slightly here and a little there; in my mind SD lives on in vivid colors.

SD redux

Posted by Ankit On November 20th, 2013

While on the flight from Chicago to San Diego I was thinking what a rush it would be when the plane landed at the Lindberg field airport. Having spent more than 7 years in SD, the city has sort of become a home, complete with the little bits of nostalgia which one associates with home in general. It seemed to me that I have left parts of myself in various corners of the city and these bits of memory must be waiting around quietly, only to spring up and take me by surprise by their poignancy. However I found myself being disappointed when such a rush did not happen as the plane landed. It didn't materialize while I was driving from the airport to UCSD and there was little to speak of when I met my old coworkers there. It seemed to me as if almost no time had elapsed between now and when I used to lumber along in the office at 10. Everything seemed as if in a smooth continuation from when I left. The broken touch of the chipped  left hand of my old chair seemed all too familiar to evoke any feeling of loss. UCSD, on the whole, seemed to have been frozen in a reality that I had left it in and the series of experiences which are the mile posts of intervening time appeared to me to have been wholly ineffectual in distancing it in my present consciousness.

It wasn't until I was sitting alone drinking coffee at my old favorite coffee haunt at UCSD, the art of espresso, that the whole structure of nostalgia began to take shape. Its a feeling whose substance is a general sense of loss of something dear and whose physical manifestation is a slowing down of reactions. It derives its strength from the vague associations which render a place real in our minds. The smells which characterize a certain place, its overall visual signature, the sounds which one hears while there, all of it serves to endear the place in our hearts in a more permanent way than is possible with its association with concrete memorable instances. This is perhaps why the most nostalgic moments of this visit for me were while walking through the neighborhoods which I used to walk alone. It was in those instances, undisturbed by conversations, I feel, that the essence of the place became inextricably intertwined with me because it served as a canvas upon which something permanent was drawn: the undulating topology of my own thoughts, the lazy stream of my own consciousness. In that barely remembered structure of my recollections, the buildings, the bridges, the restaurants, the drooping trees, the embers of fire, and the chipped paints of whitewashed fences served as the bones of the skeleton upon which rests the sum total of my understanding. While walking they appeared and disappeared and took me around the labyrinthine corridors of my thoughts, revealing snippets which were long forgotten, giving birth to new explanations and new ways of looking at things, but most importantly, often renewing a link to the past, to a time which I spent not talking and and not in anyone's company but strikingly alone.

Almost all of the places which I associate with these times belong to the last 2-3 years that I spent in SD. It includes a couple of coffee shops which survive within me through the immediacy and intensity of certain sensations, the grain and feel of their wooden chairs and tables, the diffused lights with which they were drenched, the music which played in the background, the flowers which bloomed and withered in the indoor pots, the arrangements and angles of their furniture, the special geometry and touch of their coffee cups, how they appeared when certain regions were taken up by patrons, in effect, by the observations which are easy to miss in good company. Then comes certain streets which I must have spent considerable amount of time exploring. While walking on those again I was exhilarated by how familiar their topology felt, how they rose and fell at places and how the branches of the trees from the adjoining houses leaned over them, how the cracks on the pavement were organized in a pattern that I had intimately known, and how these streets offered well remembered views of the shops, the businesses, and the canyons. I felt a muted sense of happiness when the SD sky appeared framed within its buildings in a familiar way, or when the Sun percolated through the trees like I remembered it did.

In those moments of walking around aimlessly I became aware of a sensation whose flight is often curtailed by ambient distractions, of the permanence of memorized sights and lifeless objects such as a certain color of the sky or a remembered formation of birds silhouetted by a patchwork of clouds or the play of light and shade on the sidewalk. These useless sights, it seemed to me, are not so useless after all but are brimming with incredible potential for genesis and genesis of a kind more permanent and perhaps more important than that achieved through society. They mold and accentuate and sharpen and terminate the various offshoots of our thoughts which are furiously working away trying to make something out of the raw material that is the social part of our lives. They are the tools of creation of hopefully something new and interesting and different and not... well, hopelessly mundane.

I met old friends there who have always been absolutely fabulous. I stand eternally amazed by the variety of their personalities and wish I could spend more time in the company of such awesome people as I know in SD.

Ukulele

Posted by Ankit On October 7th, 2013

An amazing gift from Sonya. All my memories, all remembrances from the last 7-8 years, distilled on to the beautiful wooden surface of a ukulele.

Picture2

 

Thanks!

First lecture

Posted by Ankit On August 21st, 2013

I taught my first proper class this Tuesday. It's an undergraduate course called Introduction to Mechanics and as I was standing there in front of the students my mind could not help but reflect upon, in brief flashes of half-remembered memories, the days when I myself was a student in IIT (!) Guwahati. Those early mornings when the classes would start around 8 still linger in my memory as particularly harsh. And they only got harsher as the day progressed with classes and labs lined up one after another all the way up to 5 in the evening. I have still not been able to figure out what I learned from those classes since I barely remember anything taught in them. The problem, as I see now, was a combination of professors who were not very good at teaching and content which was not very interesting to me. The point of those courses, those semesters, and those years then was just to get the grades which were good enough to land something decent after graduation. And even this highly practical end goal of the studies which should instead have meant something deeper is a realization which I hardly ever made while I was an undergraduate. Perhaps there were others who saw further into the future but I don't remember having that kind of a foresight. I merely have memories of being adrift, almost a little incredulous of the situation that I found myself in, and slow to react in the larger scheme of things. I could not put it in words while my studies unfolded around me but hindsight has cleaned the dusty impression of intuition and crystallized the realization that I did not care too much about most of what was being taught. I went to the classes and gave the exams, even liked some things here and there, but it was only much later that I really came to appreciate the pleasure inherent in learning. And that kind of learning happened with no real goals in mind. It wasn't to get a great job, or to appear well read and educated, or to gain vaguely coherent sets of alphabets signifying murky accomplishments allowing one add a multitude of prefixes and suffixes to one's name. It was just because certain things were fun and interesting. Its pleasure was immediate, complete, and without any strings. It was a bit like taking the bike to North Torrey Pines beach which I used to do almost every evening for a couple of years. I never got bored of doing it even though everything remained exactly the same every day. Its pleasure was absolute to me and did not require any other reference frame for the justification of its magnitude. Its story was one which need not have been told ever again, one which was completely self content in its own silence and aloofness.

Bend in the river

Posted by Ankit On July 31st, 2013

I have finally made the move to my first proper job in what they say is the real world, joining the Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering department at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago as an Assistant Professor. The better part of last year was interesting, with a lot of words being entered in word documents and a lot of pdfs being created, with a lot of flying to places I had never been and meeting a lot of people whom I would perhaps not have met had it not being for the fact that they liked those pdfs which I had spent all that time creating. And upshot of it all, of all the flying and of all the meetings and of all the talks and seminars, of all those times which I spent in transit cities wondering if the inclement American winter weather would give me a break long enough for me to make my next flight, is that I have finally ended up in the quintessential American city of Chicago. It's only been a few days here but we all know how important first impressions area and mine have been really nice. But we have also been told not to judge a book by its covers so I will not. I will judge only when I have read her first few pages at least.

However, San Diego is a book which I have read from end to end, several times. I have spent the last eight years poring over its many ink blots and many purple passages. I have come to recognize the musty smell of its dusty Western hardbound and  its pages have turned dogeared between my fingers. I am intimately charmed by its yellowness and I remember its content from its page numbers. San Diego is a book that I can judge, perhaps not to the extent that some people can but more than a lot because of the time that I spent and the people that I came to know there. San Diego is a curious city. I honestly believe that if you live there, there can pretty much be no justification for being unhappy. It exists peacefully in that goldilocks zone of warm contentment which can provide you with surprisingly more than you expect from a city like it. Of course there are always bright young things who are mesmerized by the shiny facade of other places but I have come to take their hopes of happiness with a pinch of salt and a passing chuckle.  San Diego effortlessly provides diversity in demographics, eclecticism in arts, a vibrant outdoor culture, near-perfect weather, and the opportunity to lounge about on the beaches of the mighty Pacific every day. There are great things that one can do in places like New York or Chicago or San Francisco or Los Angeles, feeding off of the energy and creativity of the teeming milieu. One so inclined can probably write great novels and create great music at these places, inspired by their sharp edges. However, it probably is much easier to be happy in San Diego and that really is the argument to end all arguments.

In addition to landing in the perfect city for PhD I also had the great fortune of knowing some truly interesting and intelligent people there who have wittingly or unwittingly molded the rough draft of the personality that I began with in the US. Through my experience of knowing them I have come to appreciate a certain kind of person, one whose particulars cannot be stated but whose essence can be. They have substance to share and possess a certain depth of thought and view. They are about more than the next hot hangout or the next great financial investment. I have enjoyed the company of such people in San Diego and learned from them. So much so that I have no doubt that the years that I spent in San Diego have been the best years of my life, and the most formative ones. I look back at the company of those people with a genuine sense of gratitude, for having contributed to the exciting exchange which shapes personalities, to the invisible and complex hands of human interaction.

Flamenco Fiesta

Posted by Ankit On September 3rd, 2012

My good friend Natasha invited me to a Flamenco festival over the weekend. The venue was a sprawling property built over a canyon tucked away in the midst of the bustle of the SDSU campus. I could never have imagined that such a place existed in the heart of San Diego. Deeply wooded mini-trails laden with the smell of fallen leaves, illuminated in patches by the puddles of sunlight which had managed to filter through the thick foliage. I walked down one of these trails to reach a clearing upon which was set a singularly bohemian scene. Musicians huddled together practicing and learning from the flamenco masters who were invited to perform. Periodic taps of their feet and their eyes rapt in attention at the fluid strumming of those guitars. And music, in gushes of good natured melody. Women getting up and tapping to the flamenco beats as I sat in a shaded corner over a pleasant cold rock and soaked in the very unusual sensation of letting go. Like those sunny winter mornings in Lucknow when I would be laying outside on the lawn with a thin white sheet on my face. The chirping of the birds and the reassuring distant sounds of the daily household chores and I would lift the sheet up a little and look at the garden with lazy eyes - butterflies on the flowers, a squirrel running up the tree and a general sensation of warm cozy lethargy. A deep breath, letting go of the sheet, and with it, just letting go. There was Spanish food being made and drinks being served, a massage center, and classes on flamenco dance and yoga. People who had arrived from different parts of the world speaking different languages and dressed informally in beautiful colorful clothes, women with red flowers in their hair and flowing patterned skirts playing music, dancing, singing, men lounging about with their guitars and drums and glasses of sangria.

And what conversations! Do you have an interesting story to tell beyond your office and your gym and your beaten to death observations? Do you still remember what it was like to be passionate? I sat mesmerized listening to the stories of the people that I met. I had rose tinted glasses and even though I realized that their lives must also have their moments of mundane concerns, the fact that they could be so passionate about something was immensely refreshing. It's a bit like listening to Feynman even though the talents cannot be compared, but still, in that moment when he is talking about physics with a boyish twinkle in his eyes I feel rejuvenated, optimistic and far less cynical. I met singers and musicians and dancers and they would ask me what instrument do I play - a fish on land. The professional performance was in the evening in a little open air amphitheater. Flamenco guitarists jamming to complex turbulent tunes and professional dancers tapping away on the stage - their graceful, womanly and strong presence against the painted backdrop of riffing tunes. I was deeply impressed by the beauty of the spectacle, having never witnessed something like this live and from such close quarters. The dancers shot quick powerful glances and their hands would be leading their bodies in a fluid series of steps, their feet tapping to the beats of the music in the midst of palmas and shouts of olay from the audience. The juxtaposition of their quiet grace and the intense music was breathtaking. I sat in the middle of it all clapping like an excited little kid as the spectacle unfolded in the green and blue and red lights beneath a quiet dark sky with the circular white moon staring from a corner. And I was thinking about that music and that dance and how happy people were and how free, and I was thinking about the world outside that little temporary commune with its deadlines and its ridiculous grind and its little heartbreaks. I was trying to preserve the image of that little island of unmitigated joy, illuminated in its ridiculous colors, as it lay truncated in a vast dark sea infested with tremendous circular waves borne out of their own vicious logic.

Adieu

Posted by Ankit On July 15th, 2011

K2 is finally leaving the 1 Miramar apartment that I shared with him for a little more than 2 years and I went to see him and my old place for perhaps the last time. I now realize that I have a special attachment to that place because I associate the 2 years that I spent there as the most formative and definitive years in making the person that I am today. More than all my childhood and more than all my college years. It's hard to explain why should such a seemingly nondescript place be associated with such importance. After all it was just an apartment!

Maybe this attachment has to do with the fact that during those 2 years I had the fortune of interacting with some exceedingly sharp people whom I have come to respect a lot. Their smartness isn't necessarily academic but has deeper origins. Wide ranging knowledge, a perpetually questioning attitude, varied interests, views in which nothing is sacrosanct, an almost artistic anarchy of disposition, passion of some form or the other, and sustained intelligence. I believe that this set of people was special and that I would have been at a loss had I been almost anywhere else during my grad studies. For all my cynicism and, as MV never tires to impress upon me, elitism, for all the disconnect that I now feel with conventional social expectations, I do believe that I have learned to derive pleasure from things which have a more personal, more individual, and more innocent origin - and I would not trade it for anything.

More than just meeting such intelligent people I associate the place with being a roller-coaster of an emotional ride. Some windowed lights which never really extinguished, scattered shards of promises, caffeinated memories, a slowly swinging gaze into nothingness, surreal stories with abrupt endings, hope in the glass and aural disappointment, full moon and cloudy skies. Periodic taps on the plastic table, phantom impressions on the grass, cold touch of iron and rustle of concrete, a melange of academic woes, the reassuring release of a single shot, some sketches half sketched, and some stories half told.

I entered the place for the last time today and was instantly aware of its distinctive, although extremely faint, smell. And the past came rushing back to me - in flashes, more vivid, more immediate, more real than reality itself. The present had been deformed, disintegrated, and dismantled to give way to the form of reality that I felt so nostalgic about. And I fit the missing pieces, very indulgently and very carefully, with nuggets from my recollections. That faint smell which I knew so well reminded me of a few lines by Proust:

'But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.'

Good luck K2. I had a good time :).

Taos, Santa Fe, NM

Posted by Ankit On June 4th, 2011

I have been in Santa Fe, New Mexico for the whole last week to attend the 'Phononics and Metamaterials 2011' conference. Professor Nemat-Nasser was giving the principal lecture of the conference and he asked Ali and me to attend it in order to learn what the other groups have been up to. It has been a fascinating experience to listen to some of the most ingenious minds in the field and to see how much they have been able to achieve on the experimental fronts of the field of acoustic metamaterials. I realized, for the first time here, that interesting physics like negative refraction can be achieved by at least two independent paths. While our group has been working on achieving that by the use of doubly negative materials (negative density and compliance tensors), several other groups have made substantial progress by following the route of Bragg diffraction. It remains to be seen if there are advantages to following one over the other and I'm excited about the possibilities which seem to be in the offing in the next few months. Since we have the essential theoretical understanding, I expect experimental demonstrations of the doubly negative materials soon by our group.

It's not that I have been spending all my time here just going to technical talks, although doing that and thinking about the talks has occupied a much larger percentage of my time than it ever used to be the case. During the last week, I also had wide ranging discussions with Ali and came to the conclusion that he knows more about everything under the Sun than I'll ever be able to know and that he has the extremely rare talent of combining his encyclopedic knowledge with an acutely analytical mind.

I also came across a lot of interesting characters who seem to inhabit this world, which I have come to associate with a certain logic, with a rationale completely at odds with mine. But I like to listen to them with genuine curiosity, trying to find in the scales and notes of their lives, the missing song which is my own world view. I try to find in the colors of their palette, the antithesis of my own colorless (largely logical) existence. I am absolutely fascinated by the stories and experiences of such people and the cities of Santa Fe and Taos seem to throw them up with more regularity than any other place that I have visited. It's not that I necessarily want their lives for my own, but I appreciate that they have interesting stories to recount and that they lack the skepticism to believe in a fantastic, beautiful, and imaginative reality. I can listen to such people in rapt attention for hours whereas I almost instantly shut down whenever someone starts teaching me how to invest my money and hedge my bets so that I can have a comfortable retirement. Therefore, I am thankful for all those individuals who made this little trip interesting. While I don't necessarily agree with them, I am very appreciative of the fact that they exist and make life more colorful and more non-utilitarian. There was Ryan, the barista of the Santa Fe cafe 'Father sky and Mother Earth' who narrated to me his journey across the US, his experiences with meditation and the mystical traditions of the native Indian people of New Mexico, and his belief in the apocalypse of 2012. Then there was Bobby, the guitarist of the band HN88 who gifted me a CD consisting of a collection of his songs. Marianne was the barista of the great 'World Cup' cafe in Taos and told me about her transition from DC to SF to Taos and I ended up adding to the cafe's collection of foreign currencies by donating a 100 rupee note. There was a German (I forget the name) who has spent the last 20 years of his life in the little town of Taos and described himself as a starving artist. He was trying to convey to me his vision of the world as a conceptual artist but I guess my brain has ossified under the influence of logic to an extent where it's not flexible enough to appreciate orthogonal logic. Annamelia was the singer and Matt was the forest officer and finally Johnny was the ex-physicist from Los Alamos who has been collecting obscure memorabilia relating to the automobile and the transportation industry for the last 20 years.

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