Damn, you English language

The teacher claimed it was so plain,
I only had to use my brain.
She said the past of throw was threw,
The past of grow - of course - was grew,
So flew must be the past of fly,
And now, my boy, your turn to try.
But when I trew,
I had no clue,
If mow was mew
Like know and knew
(Or is it knowed
Like snow and snowed?)

The teacher frowned at me and said
The past of feed was - plainly - fed.
Fed up, I knew then what I ned;
I took a break, and out I snoke,
She shook and quook (or quaked? or quoke?)
With raging anger out she broke;
Your ignorance you want to hide?
Tell me the past form of collide!
But how on earth should I decide
If it's collid
(Like hide and hid),
Or else - from all that I surmose,
The past of rise was simply rose,
And that of ride was simply rode,
So of collide must be collode?

Oh damn these English verbs, I thought
The whole thing absolutely stought!
Of English I have had enough,
Those verbs of yours are far too tough.
Bolt upright in my chair I sat,
And said to her 'that's that' - I quat.

-Guy Deutscher

God and Russian literature

We all understand that it's all a theater, don't we? That the world as we know it is just a cosmic afterthought, a mere divine joke in which a lot of people take their parts far too seriously and the rest of them have a hearty laugh about it. It's like a friendly banter over beer and you just have to look closely enough to realize that nothing really is sacrosanct. So in this world which appears serious but is actually quite ridiculous, every smart theory must have its stupid, trivial dual. Like god for example. Science works its ass off trying to explain every little detail, checks and rechecks itself innumerable number of times, sweats like a pig, and finally has to contend with so much uncertainty that Heisenberg's cat, in comparison, seems like a sure bet. It's the serious explanation but then there's the joker's explanation which is god. 'It's just the way it was intended' and poof!, there goes all your seriousness.

Anyway, the reason I was thinking on these lines is that while reading a bit of Dostoevsky, it suddenly dawned upon me that all my disappointment in Russian literature might not have anything to do with its content at all. One thing is for sure though, when it comes to depressing, morbid imagination there is no race which trumps the Russian. No other group of people, as a whole, has inflicted as much misery upon the world as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov together have through their stories of the sad farmer whose wife had an affair. But that is probably not the only reason why I find it hard to read Russian literature (actually I very much like Chekhov). The main reason, I think, is the bloody names these Russians have. 'Bezukhovs', 'Drubetskoys', 'Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya', 'Pavel Fyodorovich Smerdyakov', 'Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva' etc. I mean, what the hell? Here I am, trying to wade through an already dense plot where commentaries on human nature are getting intermingled with moral dilemmas and plot twists, and suddenly Ms. Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva walks in and I have to spend the next two minutes dealing with her roadblock of a name. Any race which is sadistic enough to name their young one Katerina Ivanovna Verkhovtseva must necessarily be a depressed one. Their tragedies must necessarily be complex and detailed and heroic and there must necessarily be a complete lack of trivial subject matters. The trivial subject matters are for races which name their children Tom and Rob and Dick. For such races, human life is a travesty to begin with, their coffers have always been full and they have never had to face paucity as a culture, hence, their literature is light on its feet. Imagine an elaborate tragedy with backstabbing siblings and cheating wives and death and misery and moral turpitude and imagine its central character named Bob. Just doesn't cut it. Something tells me that that central character can only be named Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov or some other Russian derivative of the same. Well that's my alternative 'god' theory of the difficulty of Russian literature. It kicks in when I don't feel like thinking or arguing because it's all quite pointless to begin with. There is never a resolution to any argument so I might as well have a bit of fun and indulge in a bit of mockery - very much like the god argument. Did I make any sense? Oh dear god, I sincerely hope not!

A rant

I went to a show today at the Price Center ballroom in UCSD. It was  a humorous, informative effort at raising awareness about social issues like violence against women in some parts of the world with a distinct undertone of strong feminism. Now there is nothing wrong in advocating equality of opportunity and status between the sexes, the only people who truly find problems with this, I must say, either lack the requisite education or are not smart enough to learn from their education. But as with any other large group of people, feminists are a moronic bunch. Although the show began for me on a wrong foot, I liked some of the acts and the fact that it made me more aware of things which are going on in some parts of the world. It was generally a good experience until at the very end when the hosts, while standing on the stage, asked for those of us who would oppose violence against women to stand up. Now it's dumbass questions like these which make me want to throw up everytime they are uttered by simple minded, overgeneralizing groups of activists. First of all, it's a wrong forum of ask such a question. It's not as if the audience comprised of tribal leaders from Afghanistan who would be expected to have a differing opinion. It was an educated gathering and they were there precisely because they sympathized with the issue to begin with. They all stood up which made me think how many of them would really, actively do something to alleviate worldwide feminine distress. Not many I thought. In fact, a lot of them probably would only do what I would do - try to mend things if something in the immediate vicinity is not right. But until something happens in my immediate experience, I must admit, I have too many concerns of my own to bother with the conditions in Sudan.

Anyway, I decided to keep sitting - not to make a point but because I could not help but think that standing up was such an empty gesture to such a pointless question. Which brings me to my other point. I find that individuals are in general fun to be with, they are diverse and generally smart, and they add much needed variety to life. It's when they start belonging to groups and having agendas they work towards and common goals they fight for, that their company becomes positively unbearable. All our terms that signify such groups are loaded with implicit meanings their members never understood and nuances that most of them were never too smart/careful to acknowledge. Nationalism appeals to the irrationality of individuals and sells them murder in nicely ribboned boxes, religion all but benumbs their power of critical thinking, every group an individual blindly belongs to takes away a chunk of his individuality until all his life is defined by sets of rules, expectations, and duties. And finally he has not brains enough to realize that in this world of subtle shades, there is really no logical place for hard coded laws and bullet points and agendas. Hell, something as apparently positive as 'trying to save the planet' begs the question, 'What the fuck do they mean, save the planet?' The planet will take anything they throw at it and survive. But if they meant saving their own asses, well, that's a different thing. Who doesn't want to do that? My problem with groups, especially those driven by emotions, is that this honesty with oneself is easily lost in all the general bullshit they teach their members. But here is the thing. I do not know of any other way by which things could be done and changes could be  made at large enough scales. If I were to weigh the potential of great change that lies in huge groups of people against the ossification that groups generally do to their members, I would grudgingly accept them as necessary evils - as long as I can avoid being a part of them and their ideologies. Oh! how did I come here? I think I was thinking of a group called feminists.

Research

I must say I have been slacking off in the blog department for the last few months, part of the reason for which is my relatively busier schedule as a post-doc. But that's definitely not all. Writing, like sketching, reading, or any other hobby, is just an alternate reality for me. In both ordinary and depressing times, it provides me with a version of life which is neither plagued by the truth of reality nor its sorry limitations. In other words, when the daily routine is just a routine, imagination finds its last refuge in writing. The reason that I have not really been writing or even reading for the last couple of months is that I'm thoroughly engrossed in my current research. My adviser, Dr. Nemat-Nasser, is the sort of researcher I have always imagined good scientists to be like. He has achieved every accolade his field has to offer and has contributed immensely to research, but the twinkle in his eye and the enthusiasm in his voice that appear when he is discussing a new problem betrays how much he still loves the pure, unadulterated joy of trying to understand how nature ticks. His is a very non-utilitarian, almost an artistic take on research - which is the only way good research should be carried out - with its only aim being understanding the subject matter and having almost no stake in the results. It isn't always possible because it's the taxpayer's money which supports research in the hope that its fruits would benefit society. Society, therefore, automatically has a vested interest in results and as a consequence a large number of researchers wither under this social pressure and produce results which, if anything, are of only minor consequences and almost no insight. But there are people who manage to strike a good balance and my current adviser is definitely one of them.

I am currently working on trying to understand how acoustic waves travel in a material which is not uniform. Several interesting physical phenomenon are seen in such materials. If the non-uniformity is controlled properly, intriguing physics like complete stoppage of sound at certain frequencies and negative energy propagation at some other frequencies are seen. More complex materials give rise to other effects with interesting physics. I'll update my research page with more details, in case someone finds it interesting.

Melancholy Maiden

Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.

I have not see thy sunny face,
Nor heard thy silver laughter;
No thought of me shall find a place
In thy young life's hereafter-
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.

A tale begun in other days
When summer suns were glowing-
A simple chime, that served to time
The rhythm of our rowing-
Whose echoes live in memory yet.
Though envious years would say "forget."

Come, hearken then, ere voice of dread,
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
A melancholy maiden!
We are but older children, dear,
Who fret to find our bedtime near.

Without, the frost, the blinding snow,
The storm-wind's moody madness-
Within, the fireflight's ruddy glow
And childhood's nest of gladness,
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the raving blast.

And though the shadow of a sigh
May tremble through the story,
For "happy summer days" gone by,
And vanish'd summer glory-
It shall not touch with breath of bale,
The pleasance of our fairy-tale.

-Lewis Carroll from 'Alice: Through the looking glass.'

How... poignant and pertinent!

Let there be humans...

I was talking to MV about evolution and he recommended a Nat-Geo documentary titled 'The human family tree' for me to watch. To anyone who is interested in knowing about the origins of us humans in a lucid and interesting way, I would also recommend this highly engrossing documentary.

I have an intense peeve against most of my teachers during my early formative years, a trait that they share with an overwhelming majority of all teachers - they were either too incompetent or too inconsiderate. The fact that they could make 'acquisition of knowledge' boring is almost too difficult for me to comprehend now. Biology, for instance, is a subject that I remember with a special hatred but I also realize that my boredom with it was more a result of how it was taught rather than what was taught. Despite all my formal education then, I have managed to save 'curiosity' from the deathly throes of uninspiring teachers. And I have lately become curious about the origins of humans and what legacy we share with other creatures on Earth. That science decodes the labyrinthine links and interlinks between all existing living organisms today with the help of genetic studies, fossil records, and radioactive dating is fascinating in itself, but I'm more thrilled by what they have found.

Mitochondrial DNA is one of only two parts (The other is Y-chromosome) of the genome which are not shuffled around by evolutionary processes. It gets passed down the generations unchanged. It is amazing that every single one of us 6.7 billions living humans has the same Mitochondrial DNA - one that they have inherited from a woman who lived in Africa about 160,000 years ago. She has been termed the 'Mitochondrial Eve' and is, in some sense, the scientific mother of all humans alive today. Her descendants, in what is termed as the Out of Africa theory, left Africa for the first time around 60,000 years ago and moved on to populate the rest of the world. Starting from Middle-East, South Asia was colonized 50,000 years ago, Australia and Europe by 40, and East Asia (Korea and Japan) by 30, and North America by 16,000 (although this last date is controversial). In their quest for territory, our direct ancestors met the already existing species from the Homo genus like the Homo Erectus and Neanderthals and did to them what we are naturally good at doing - annihilation. I find it amazing to think that most of our early literature which is religious and mythical in nature and derives inspiration from otherwise ordinary battles and natural phenomena concerns but a minuscule fraction of the total human experience. Imagine how much more rich our history and our culture would have been, if only it had the resources to tap into the thousands of stories of hardships and courage that must dot our existence during the last 200,000 years.

Then again, the last 200,000 years is nothing but a slight flutter in the larger story of evolution of life on Earth. It is often naively suggested that we have descended from monkeys. The truth is that all the living species, both animals and plants, are cousins and not one of them has descended from the other. And in this family tree, the closest cousins to us modern humans are Chimpanzees and Bonobos, and the common ancestor to all 3 of us lived about 5 million years ago in Africa. It was a bit like humans and a bit like Chimps but nowhere like monkeys (it had no tail). So our branch of the family tree joins Chimps and Bonobos at 5 million years from now. This combined branch joins Gorillas in Africa at a common ancestor who lived 7 million years ago. This branch of our common ancestor joins the common ancestors of Orangutans at about 14 million years ago in Asia! Gibbons join us about 18 million years, and it is only if we go back 25 million years ago that we find the common ancestor who gave birth to all apes including us and so called Old World monkeys like langoors and baboons.

Ancestors of other species join us as we keep going back (New World monkeys at 40 mya, Tarsiers at 58 mya, Lemurs etc. at 63 mya) and we finally reach the K-T boundary - 65 million years ago. There is a thin layer of Iridium present all across the world at a depth in the Earth's crust which corresponds to a time 65 million years in the past. While Iridium is rare in Earth, it is common in meteorites. The Chicxulub crater is a titanic impact crater - 100 miles wide and 30 miles deep - buried below the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico and it has been dated at 65 mya. And the last fossils of terrestrial dinosaurs date back to 65 mya. It was only after the K-T boundary that the age of mammals began when their dinosaurial predators went extinct. It is weird to think that had that meteorite not impacted the Earth and wiped off the dinosaurs, humanity might not have had the chance to begin. On that fateful day 65 mya, all of our ancestors all across the world most probably went deaf and blind from the catastrophic impact, and were hanging in there by the skin of their teeth - all they could perhaps manage was to live long enough to reproduce - but that was enough...

If you really think about it, even 65 million years is but a small drop in the ocean of galactic time. As someone very smart once said, 'humans are what happens when you give 14 billion years to the hydrogen atom.'

Orange!

In the screeched symphony of cursive love the ebonimous violas strum their swan songs.

The nervous bows in shivering fits dot the dark with disdainful disobedience and the breathless flute is but the sound of a scratched nail on a blackboard.

There is a Wagnerian march of drums like bullet holes in a gossamer - a lover's doe eyed present promptly tossed aside.

The chorus is incoherent like a sanguine arabesque over surprised charcoal and wails of individual incompetence fill up the ambiance like confused lines of graphite in a novice's sketch.

I am searching, in this staccato, for that little note of assurance, that one single pure crisp nod of familiarity. In the sea of disfigured, bobbing, cacochromic monstrosity there must be svelte orange streak, but it's so hard to find.

And it has happened before, I remember. That metaphorical orange streak of lost memories has preserved in its embrace entirely different drawings - beautiful perfect drawings in my mind but which always melted away when their feathered edges met the iron fist of reality.

You know how, in the mind's eye, mountains are perfect triangles, rivers perfect splines, houses perfect clown hats and Sun a perfect circle... And how that orange streak is perfectly beautiful, smart and loving? Huh...

En route Houston

It's the fourth day of the trip and I have decided to take a day's break at my friend's (N V Pavan) place in Houston Texas. We go back to the IIT days where he was the volley captain, sport secretary, and subsequently President of India gold medalist and all my academic achievements during college were due to the fact that he did not consider them worth fighting for. And for all his brilliance, he has been a disgustingly humble fellow! I have covered about 1600 miles till now and my phone has a nifty little feature which tracks and records the trip in real time,

Tracker

So how has it been? Tiring as expected. And mesmerizing as expected. Anyone who has done any sort of road trip in America knows how magnificent the American landscape is. Its sheer size and almost profligate geography is humbling and because of the fact that the country extends into such a wide spectrum of climate and space, its landscape has a stunning variety that would be hard to find in a smaller country. In east California, the morose, unforgiving desert extends to the point where it is clipped by the sky and every now and then a confused, spatially anachronistic hill rises and seems to question its own existence. In New Mexico, the scale of this insanity is extended so there are places where a straight road starts from a mountain and ends into another 20 miles away - like a cursing, reluctant interpreter between two persons who not only do not speak a common language but don't even like each other very much. At such places, you get the feeling that the American landscape has molded itself to be a better representative of the simple, direct, and strictly utilitarian nature of the American West. Her geography offers no frills in the same way that her work ethics are efficient and honest.

But as soon as I started to gloat over this ingenious connection, the geography gave way to a stunner of a road. Between Las Cruces New Mexico and Roswell lies a winding ribbon that was more beautiful and exciting than any other that I have driven on. Beautiful green mountains with proud upright pine trees, and svelte silky lakes with hints of snow on their banks. The sky, a sprightly shade of blue with flourishes of snowy clouds for good measure. And in this perfection of nature's effort, man has carved his own little squiggly lines - his tarmacic creations like perfect curves of graphite on a flowery, scented paper.

The I-10 in Texas passes through a surprisingly beautiful landscape. I was expecting more like hundreds of miles of unending, depressing desert but was pleasantly  surprised to find vast arenas of green table-top mesas. And as far as the eye could see, they were studded with windmills in a periodic formation of almost devilish contraption. Imagine driving on this fast beautiful road with these giants towering on all sides, their visage that of a grumpy old man, and their rotating mechanical hair standing up in a fit of rage. The road for a long part consists of two lanes in either directions - one lane is white in color and one black - and how stunning this little visual trick is!

Ending it with a Bang!

Although I haven't felt quite the same sort of feeling of exhilaration and release after crossing the doctorate milestone that a lot of other people might get, it's a distinct milestone nevertheless - one that punctuates a significant chunk of life, and eviscerates from it a tangible, heavy piece of warm, throbbing time. If only life could be compartmentalized into such convenient boxes of 4 years, it would quietly, happily, and anticlimactically end by the time the lid on the 18th such box is opened! Unfortunately though, future doesn't promise such beautiful little milestones, neatly tucked on to the side of the highway, so any that we do get needs to be celebrated for what it is. So I have decided on my small way of marking the occasion, like a quiet little break on the banks of a river - except that it's not going to be quiet, or little and there is no river. There would be a car and significant amount of driving during the next 12 days. Here is a link of the trip that is in the plans,

Trip Map

Hopefully a lot of experiences are in store!

Elementary, Dr. Ankit

So now that I'm allowed to officially add the prefix of Dr. in front of my name, it would be interesting to look back and evaluate the 4 years which culminated in this title. Because we do not do it often, stages of our lives which are like liquids of different densities often merge into puddles of muddy water when inspected under the lens of inaccurate reminiscences. And it is for this reason that I want to 'ankit' or inscribe my impressions of this very important temporal chunk while the memories are still sharp around the edges and their flavor still spicy at the tip of my tongue.

I remember a Friday evening, much like many others, in visions of blurred lamps, svelte waitresses, sumptuous portions, and intoxicating aromas, in a Mexican restaurant in La Jolla downtown; I was sitting with some friends and someone asked a general question to the effect of, 'which were your most satisfying/memorable years?' In the gushing spring of romantic nostalgia, my friends remembered their school times and college times with sad, hollow eyes fixed into the distance, as if trying to grope for a memory hopelessly lost to the brutality and crudeness of passing time. I remember being disconcerted to find that I was the only one who rated my time doing the Ph.D as the most memorable. This is not to say that I don't remember my earlier years with fondness but if the metric of one's life's worth is how much one has grown as a person as a consequence of the various experiences one is subjected to (which is probably the most important metric for me) I would be hard pressed to think that my cocooned, illiterate, spoon-fed earlier time would rate higher than the more recent one. Yes, there is a lot of nostalgia involved, and if someone were to ask me during one of those infrequent periods of depression, I would probably crave for the innocence and simplicity of the times when chocolates cost a fraction of a dollar but in saner times, I realize that it is better to live with the realization of satisfaction and the knowledge of a changing person (hopefully better) than just being happy in hindsight. And it is scaringly easy to get bottled up into a sedentary useless waste of the gift of human intelligence - one just needs a TV with a cable connection, a remote, and a couch. In a world infested with the perils of easy comfort and blessed with a body which has an evolutionary inclination to avoid all risks/experiences once the basic necessities of survival are met, I feel happy that I was able to keep alight a slight flame of adventure and curiosity. Mnemosyne, in her supple grace, fills me with pride with images of 150mph on my motorcycle's speedometer, golden gate's deck in fog, distant sands on the bank of La Jolla shores, graphite streaks on paper, discordant notes of ivory and ebony, intellectual satisfaction of being the temporary but sole possessor of a secret of physical reality, and of having had relations with vibrant interesting people.

I am happy that somewhere along the way I ditched religion and understood, within reasonable bounds of uncertainty, that it is a sham of massive proportions, no better than other frauds which exploit human gullibility and his need for 'believing' like homeopathy and other 'alternative' balderdash. The skepticism and cynicism which came with reading masses upon masses of mediocre publications at least instilled enough intelligence for me to realize when a really stupid person is bullshitting. But it has not yet instilled enough intelligence for me to call out on the bullshits of smart folks. Richard Dawkins might be making things up, Nabokov might just be horsing around - I realize that I am yet not intelligent enough to know but I at least have the doubt which lacks in a 'man of faith'. I like to think of life as a long and winded struggle for demanding more and more intelligence from those who are smart enough to swindle you. It's the least that we simple people can do for our own intellectual ego. What is important is to have that doubt and I owe this doubt to the last 4 years which saw innumerable discussions with some really intelligent friends, and painstaking but ultimately enjoyable and humbling studies in physics, intelligence, evolution etc.

At the cost of sounding immodest but at the demand of honesty, I would have to say that the journey en route to the Ph.D was never too stressful. It might be attributed to an easy going adviser but it should not be attributed to mediocre work. And the fact that I liked bits and pieces of the work a lot made it all, quite uncharacteristically for a grad student, memorable.

Yes, it was a memorable trip, the last 4 years. In its white watered wake, I have lost most of my friends and relatives. When I stand aloof on the quarterdeck and look down into the turbulent waters of the past, I see them in vaguely recognizable images of camaraderie - the distance separating us is not just temporal but is made of a fundamental difference in outlook, which is not to say that one's is better than the other but that they are different. But this is a chasm which is probably harder to cross than any other. So I stand on the quarterdeck and instead raise my gaze to the beautiful horizon, the artist's horizon. The Sun will go down in a few moments, completing a chore it has kept doing for the last 5 billion years in a universe that has existed for a few more. I get lost in the vastness of it all and the next obvious question of the meanings of our lives and contributions. There are visions of enormous explosions across mindboggling scales until the first bacterias take breath in an insignificant part of the inhospitable world. They replicate and mutate across ages and give rise to the first humans about 200,000 years ago. And in another 200 millenniums these humans are closer than ever to understanding what the holy fuck happened! If this quest is not grand then what is? It is made up of small contributions from different individuals across centuries. The simple beauty and ultimate purpose of wanting to understand how the world ticks. I am happy to have made a very small contribution in this grand scheme of things - not related to elementary physics yet furthering our understanding of a small subset of physical reality... Good times, surely.

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