I don’t really like the tropical green in general, and indeed I was thinking how ugly all the bushes next to the road side looked, when suddenly a miniature version of the Great Wall of China came interrupting the wild growth. It turned out that the institute is going to be inside the infamous reserve famous for its wild, renegade and usually angry horde of stampeding elephants who frequent the nearby villages and have unwittingly claimed human lives before (hence the walls to stop them). This means even though I might one day fall in love with The Pretty Girl and might want to walk under the moonlight in misty nights with my arm on her waist (with a passionate kiss or two in the offing), an elephant’s bone might prove to be too big a haddi in the Kebab to be overcome.

When we arrived, I was surprised when I noticed that I could hear the birds chirp and flutter.

The Director showed us the construction plans, and The Pretty Girl (she has got dimples) asked him if the academic block was modelled after the first letter of his name (the chic of it!). With a polite laugh, he then went on to explain, “No. You see, these are two spirals, and this end of this spiral here …”

As The Pretty Girl once told me, she is allowed to do everything, but her mom once asked her not to do anything that she would ever have to regret. That probably includes boyfriends, because she feels immensely guilty every time she gets close to a guy! This time, she got somewhat close to The Moustache Guy (when he had his moustache) and then felt terribly guilty about it and suddenly stopped talking to him. On the Rakhi Day, she came with a Rakhi and insisted that The Moustache Guy accept it! Through some curious twistings of words and manners and unintelligible gurgles, The Moustache Guy accepted the Rakhi with the declaration that he is accepting it only to pass it on to me!

I pointed out to him that things were probably over between them anyway. He is cool about the whole deal, because nothing much had happened to start with, but I guess they are not going to be seen together in the library for long hours now. :(

There is a small pond inside, scantily filled with dirty water, but I assume that it’ll be put in shape once we move in, given the amount of fuss people make about co and extra curricular activities. Even though there is a lot of room to be spared in the campus, playing cricket doesn’t seem to be an option. After I expressed my scepticism over the chances of locating a ball after I have hit it, the air was thick with all sorts of poor jokes about the ball coming back on the trunk of an elephant (and similar boring variations).

Some were disappointed given the isolation and the seemingly dull environment, but I felt serenely elevated. The mountain lines could be seen in the distance, and the whole place looks likes a tame opening to an overwhelming wilderness. Wide green fields were to be seen past the ugly bushes next to the road, and their stretch undid the damage their shade of green might have done to their beauty. I hope the construction gets delayed, so that I get to stay there for a few months or so, so that I would have moved out and gone on long before they all lost their charm to familiarity.

To be honest, I don’t think I would mind a brush or two with the infamous elephants. May be I’ll rescue The Pretty Girl from them when she ventures out one day into the Forbidden Forests, rendered reckless with the recurring restlessness of her routine (she is that type), when there is no one to save her but I. And then after I have rescued her, in the unnerving exhilaration of her escape, she might even kiss me in a heedless abandonment of grace. It’ll take some work to draw the girl out of the prude, but thankfully it is not going to be my task. Good luck to The Moustache Guy. :)

And then there was the sysadmin who cracks excellent poor jokes, but they are not probably his own.

So the rabbit and the tortoise (of that famous race where the rabbit lost thanks to his overconfidence) decide to study mathematics. They appear in the entrance, and they score the same. But the tortoise is finally selected over the rabbit. Why?

The answer – sports quota. He cracked this when we were discussing about the reservation issue after someone inquired after the reservation policy of the institute!

Talk about not having a life!

I got really pissed off in the mathematics camp I was attending (I would have written about that, but the place was ten kilometres away from civilisation in every direction and a computer with a decent internet connection was hard to find). I sent an SOS to Anshul, who said that I could finally come over and start my internship. I made a last minute booking and got on the first train available (it wasn’t actually available, but I got on it anyway, praying for a conformation).

My name was the last item in the final chart, thanks to the newly introduced AC coaches. They have beautiful wood panelling, thoughtfully provided reading lights for those who can’t sleep at night, and most importantly, three (as opposed to the conventional two) berths next to the corridor.

Being the incorrigible romantic that I am, I have always wished to be pleasantly surprised to find some pretty girl next to me. My journeys have always been so long, and it is a tough task to spend them by listening to the polite and content-less chatter of strangers. I am not very partial to talking myself, particularly in a group or to strangers, which are exactly what you get inside a train. So I have always wished for something to see rather than something to listen to. Besides, I have not yet grown out of liking pretty girls.

Anyway, what could be more romantic than being seated next to a girl, face to face, next to one of those corridor windows now skilfully designed to be crowded enough so that the people occupying the opposite seats can not help but feel like being on each other’s face. As the TTI was finally leading me to my finalised berth, I wondered if I was going to be placed next to that nice girl at the lonely end of the coach next to a corridor window. That was as much as I could wonder about before I had to say hello as she moved to make room for me.

She was nice, polite, non defensive and pretty. She looked like she had spent the day all by herself, lonely and bored. I liked her, but I was feeling pissed off at my prof at the mathematics camp and though I would have liked talking to her, because I haven’t grown out of feeling like talking to pretty girls either, I wasn’t sure if I could handle it with good humour if she threw something incredibly stupid at me. Pretty or not, I don’t like to be not nice to people, because that spares me getting involved with them. I shouldn’t have minded that, except that I hate people.

So we stayed awake deep into the night trying to completely ignore each other in spite of the close confinement, at which I think we succeeded admirably. The atmosphere was charged with the typical contrast between sexual tension (of the naive kind) and its social denunciation, and as Agatha Christie described in one of her better novels, atmospheres exactly like these provide with excellent opportunities for murder. But the prof at the mathematics camp was a long distance away, and it was hard to find another candidate for murder at such a sort notice.

One of my usual policies is to ignore the usual hints and subtleties which people engage in their hypocritical politeness. I do not read between the lines, and it has almost always spared me the necessity of meaningful interaction with human beings. That probably sounds awfully self congratulatory to the point of pretentiousness, but I am dead tired of meaningful conversations and relationships. I am tired of human beings. Sometimes I think Darwin was wrong. I can not conceive of a way in which I could have evolved from men.

Coming back to that night, well, I went on reading my book and resisting her indirect hints that I might want to go to sleep (I had the upper berth). In the end she had to just ask me right out. I slept on for the next 16 hours. I sleep an awful lot when I travel by trains (I also don’t take any solid food) to avoid having to talk to fellow passengers. My usual strategy is – read through the night, sleep through the day.

The next evening, I got down at Dadar and after a short encounter with a paaji who wanted to rob me with thrice the usual taxi fare, I hired another taxi and went to Anshul’s place. Tired and messed up as I was, Anshul took me right away to a pub where most of us got dunk while I politely tried to look the part with a couple of Breezers for sometime, eventually falling back to good old Sprite. As night moved on, we danced (if you know me, you know that I didn’t dance), ate, drank, watched some uninteresting eurocup match, and in general sang at the top of our voices (if you know me, you know that I sang like a madman). Well, I didn’t sing like a madman, because I was nervous, but I tore my lungs apart nonetheless. The DJ played a lot of the usual classics towards the end, muting in between in order to let us fill up the smallish room with our songs of buoyant drunken uplift, where we all briefly thought we understood what the artist had wanted his music to meant.

Afterwards, it was a bit of a struggle and a bit of a fun to find auto-rickshaws in the incessant rain of Mumbai at two in the night and get drenched in spite of it all. It was my first rain this summer and I wanted to get wet, except that I had only one underwear left dry.

Then I slept.

Note 2: To those who received the drafts – The reference to Robert Kolker was incorrect, which I discovered after going painstalkingly through his mammoth book again in an effort to quote him exactly (it contains the whole of GRE word list many times over). That would explain the delay. He said some nice insightful things though.

Note 3: This story, and its prequel, are officially declared to be ficticious accounts incorporating no characters inspired by anyone living or dead.

The Interview with the Professor

I didn’t understand the conclusion of the movie Micky One when I saw it for the first time. In fact, I didn’t understand it till I had seen almost all of Arthur Penn‘s defining works, till it occurred to me that violence was the underlining theme in his movies, violence overcoming a distance of some kind – distance created by blindness in The Miracle Worker (this is one reason I considered Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black plagiarised, he lifted this motif from Penn’s movie), impotence in Bonnie and Clyde (the doggerel was the immediate cue), paranoia in Mickey One (if you never understood the movie’s ending, this is the clue), the list goes on.

If one were to look at the underlining theme behind my fateful interview with Professor SS the next day, he would have discovered Mad Max, women, dope, James Bond, gang rape and Professor KV, all in that order.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning.

To put it without much ado, I have never been the man for the bright sunny mornings, partly because I have never been an early riser, but that was a day well worth making an exception for.

I was up early for a consecutive second day. There was sunshine in my heart and there was sunshine on my face, and it made the world outside look more than it was worth. My heart swelled with the scent of the early morning breeze, cold and generously sprinkled with the dust from the construction sites around C**, and when my heart could hold it no more, it spilled out and became music for my soul. I joined it and sang with gay abandon, though my hostel mates later gave a different description of the events, but that might have been due to the quality of my singing. Nothing could get me down that day. Well, almost nothing, till I remembered my appointment later on that day with Professor SS.

That was my mood when I proceeded to the breakfast table. In retrospect, I think Ni(ved)ita and Pad(mav)ati might have been giving me murderous stares on that occasion, which, I am sad to report, were completely lost on me. An(irb)it did cast the hostile glares in my direction as usual, but that he did always anyway; except when he was mad with anger at me, in which case he took extra pains to be friendly with me and flashed all of his white set of teeth at me at every opportunity. Every time he did that, I would grab someone nearby and ask him to take our photographs together. Two old friends dining amiably. Two old friends looking at each other amiably. Two old friends smiling at each other amiably.

But this is not about that.

I took my usual place next to An(shu)l, Sou(men)dra and Riya on the breakfast table. After some moments of uncertain silence, Sou(men)dra spoke.

“You know what, I have a solution that will solve all your problems at one stroke.”

An(shu)l observed nonchalantly that the last time someone had said that, he came up with the nuclear bomb.

This made all of us contemplative for some time, at the end of which I asked Sou(men)dra about his solution, which turned out to be a bunch of excuses, brilliant and intricate but convoluted excuses, to evade the responsibility for my mail. I like to face the consequences of my actions, however, mostly because they are funny, and Riya supported me in this.

“You realise what you have done, right?”, she asked.

I was going to answer that yes I did, but then I remembered the last time I had said that. I asked what had I missed, and was made devastated in return.

To cut a long story short, SS had thought that my remark was intended for the girls, who also happened to be a minority (only three in the entire undergrad program). It wasn’t until much later that Shree[vat]sa remembered what was to us the only known abuse of Rolypoly, and it was a boy who had been the victim. Had this information come out in time, I could have been saved, but the smart chap who observed that comedy is all about timing forgot to notice that tragedy is all about mistiming irrespective of its Greek or Shakespearean or modern origins. Such is life!

I finished my breakfast and started for SS’ office with a heavy heart dragging my heavier feet.

When I coughed and said my slurred “ess-use me” to SS in his office, he was busy checking his e-mail. He looked back with a questioning glance and I introduced myself. He turned off the monitor, wheeled his chair towards me and rolled his sleeves.

“So you are that Mad Max character, eh? What the hell do you think you are?”

I couldn’t say that I was not pleased by that comparison, but etiquette demanded that I look guilty and sorry.

“You think you are smart huh? You think you can get away with this? What did you mean by that letter?”

I thought it was an invitation to explain myself. I am perpetually in the habit of committing this error. I mistake rhetorical speculations for literal questions and proceed to answer them.

“Sir, I think there has been a misunderstanding, I wasn’t thinking of the girls at all when…”

“Shut up,” he roared, “enough,” he paused for breath, “I thought what anyone in his right mind will think reading that disgusting mail, and you have no excuses to defend yourself. You have behaved very very irresponsibly, and you better be ashamed of it.”

He softened a bit at this point, “You see, women are a minority here, and we have to make them feel safe. What you have done is not only demeaning and insulting, it might also scare them,” his temper seemed to rise at the thought. “What are you, an egomaniac bastard? Do you think you are James Bond or something? Do you think you are so sexy that you can insult any of these girls?”

Again, I was flattered by the comparison and the compliment, but couldn’t thank him for it. He went on bellowing at me. Inspired by the excitement of the moment, he even stood up from his chair and started moving towards me little by little as he continued shouting at me. I thought it might be safer to stay close to the door and started inching towards it as he tried to corner me. At the end of ten minutes, we had both moved on to the corridor, and he had moved on to the gang rape part of my mail.

“And how, how could you write about such a sensitive issue like that? You think joking about rape is funny? Do you think gang rape is funny?” From there on, he went on to talk about something related to Dalits and Gang Rapes and the social problem that it is. He must have yelled “sex,” “dope,” “rape” and “gang rape” at least a dozen times within a span of a minute, at the end of which Professor KV, whose room was next to that of Professor SS, came out of his office to take active part in the discussion.

He listened silently for the next five minutes as Prof SS cruised through me. And then came the conclusion, “One should never do such irresponsible things. I think an apology mail should be sent.”

Finally seeing his chance to participate, Prof KV intervened timely, “Yes yes, I think that will be appropriate. You should immediately send a mail apologising.”

Except that he said it to Prof SS.

I was stunned for a moment. So was Prof SS. Then he recovered his speech and started yelling at Prof KV. “What do you mean I should send a mail? Why should I be sorry? What are you talking about?”

As the explanations and arguments grew in length and intensity, I decided that it was time I gave them a slip.

Everyone lived happily ever after.

And gave birth to that greatest of all date rape drugs?

Sweet Rolypoly, make my inbox immortal with thy presence.

It was one of those rare mornings when I stepped out of my room after a night of peaceful slumber and not a night spent in doing whatever it is that idle hostellers do while not sleeping in the nights while fitful gusts whisper here and there outside among the bushes half leafless and dry, and while stars look very cold about the Chennai sky. Keats, sonnet IX.

I am a bit fanciful as far as the outside world is concerned. I spend almost all of my time in tiny rooms, so I feel excited whenever I have a chance to step outside. My brain might have been culturally preprogrammed, but I like the feel of bright warm sun on my skin, and I like the way my hair feels when the wind brushes past my neck and my ear.

As I stepped outside, the coolness of the morning breeze filled my lungs. The almost dewy air touching my cheek felt like pricks, but they softened the sight of the bright sun rays. It looked almost as radiant as that bright morning scene in a Tim Burton movie where the hero, pronounced dead in the Vietnam war, had returned to kiss his betrothed. It was my first morning sun in two months.

To many the best part of waking up early in C** might seem to be the beautiful mornings. But as beautiful as the mornings are, to a more discerning mind, no doubt it is the breakfast in the mess which would be the best part, particularly when one didn’t have it in the past two months in spite of being charged for it. I guess all undergrad hostels are full of such optimists who plan turning a new leaf in their lives starting with regular breakfasts, but never wake up in time.

Since I had neither been pronounced dead nor was I engaged to any girl waiting for me to be kissed, not that I mind kissing girls I am not engaged to, I proceeded towards the canteen.

As I was making my way, I spotted Riya in the distance. The basket in her hand was full of Jasmine. Her white dress and the white flowers and her wet hair filled up my head, and I yelled to ask her if the spring had arrived. She stopped near me while passing and like always, bent her head slightly, looking at me from the corner of her eyes with a nice smile that always demands reciprocation. Usually she speaks coyly after this ritual acknowledging my existence, “Yeh tum ho kya (Is that you)?” But today she only offered me a flower and went away. I wanted to stop and tell her that she had made me a fine day, or a fine morning at least. After a moment of hesitation, however, I decided that not missing my breakfast was more important.

The first hints of grey clouds appeared in the horizon when Jay(ant)h stopped me while I was entering the mess and exclaimed, “What were you thinking?” I was going to observe that that he looked incredibly handsome, but he did not wait to hear the compliment. I realised that the question had not been literal. It meant there was something I did not know, something I should have known, something I must know at once.

I finished by breakfast as soon as possible and went to the lab to check my mailbox. There was only one mail waiting for me there. It was from Professor SS, who had no business sending any kind of mail to me. I opened it anyway. It had two lines, and all the letters were capitalised. It ran thus -

WHO IS THIS INCORRIGIBLE INTROVERT?

REPORT TO ME AT 9AM SHARP TOMORROW.

I noticed that the mail had been CCed to all undergraduates. It was true that I had attended only one of his lectures that semester, but that was not reason enough for such a rude mail, particularly when one considers my attendance in other classes. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t even know who I was, because he had once chastised A(cha)l mistaking him for me.

Then I checked the mail it came in reply to, and my heart sank.

An(irb)it, whenever he is inspired to be kind to his fellow human beings, sends them spam. On the previous night, he had sent us a spam about some phoney Date Rape Drug called RolyPoly, and had warned us that someone might want to try it on us.

I found the suggestion extremely ridiculous, of course. For one thing, a significant proportion of the population wouldn’t even mind being date raped (yes, scarcity of girls can do that to you. it’s all hormones.). And who in his right mind would want to dope and date rape a C** student anyway?!

Before going to sleep, I said as much in reply to his mail -

Who in his right mind would want to dope and date rape a C** student anyway?!

For some inscrutable reason, An(irb)it’s recipient list had included SS, which I did not notice before hitting on the “reply all” button. That explained the state of the affairs that far.

My mail had been an instant success. Everyone who had considered me a waste of space before now wanted to give me all sorts of advice, and assured me that even though he lacked that thing called temper, SS was fundamentally a nice man. I couldn’t go through the corridor without being interrupted by people who wanted to know all about the affair. I was an instant celebrity.

I tried to live up to everyone’s expectation for a while and tried being miserable. After being miserable for some time, I went on to join An(shu)l in watching a movie in his room. That night, I went to bed early so that I could wake up in time to meet him. With a curious sense of foreboding, I fell asleep.

To Be Continued… (very soon)

2) Invariance of c:
The speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant (c) which is independent of the motion of the light source. Just the assumption that there was a maximum velocity might not have been that profound. But add to that the insignificance of the light source, and you have got an Einstein in your hands.

However, to be more fair, the profundity lies in the mathematics behind special relativity, the credit for which goes also to Maxwell and Poincare.

3) Gravity:
There is nothing worthwhile that I can say about this, almost everything I might want to point out has been said already. I particularly liked the biography by James Gleick, where he tries to tell us how Newton was the least Newtonian entity in a world that was rapidly becoming Newtonian.

Not withstanding A(nir)bit’s qualms, the world we live in is still Newtonian.

However, I don’t count Newton’s invention of calculus as a fundamentally new idea. Calculus had been in making for a long time, and Newton happened to be one of the few first rate minds who simply stepped in and put it all together.

At the heart of Calculus lies Continuity and Differentiability. I have already mentioned Continuity, and Differentiability is an extension/generalisation of Continuity.

4) Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle:
My views of him (and his principle) are biased because of my intense admiration for the man. I rationalised my initial fascination later when I struggled to understand his principle of uncertainty in its mathematical rigour without getting lost in idle philosophical speculations.

For me, he was the coolest physicist, almost failing his practicals yet getting his degree by a brilliant thesis, he epitomised the arrogance of the theorists who look down upon the practical work (I am not saying it was his personal attitude, but one couldn’t find a better idol to imitate).

5) Godel’s incompleteness theorem:
I finally shook up the philosophical rants and looked through the theorem itself only recently. I had a misconception about the way Lobachevsky went about the fifth postulate of Euclid, which A(rule) corrected sometime back.

I forget who said this – “God exists because mathematics is consistent. The Devil exists because we can’t prove it.”

1)B(han)u and A(rna)b were chatting.

S(hou)vik – A(rna)b, don’t listen to him, he is gay.
B(han)u (indignantly) – I am not gay, I am broadminded.

2) S(hou)vik – Are you changing your room partner to Ramprasad?
Bhanu – No no, it’s difficult to make a new relationship in such a short time.

For the sake of records, Beli was Bhanu’s partner in room (and anything else that we don’t know of yet).

3) S(hou)vik – I am a narcissist. I look at myself in the mirror and masturbate.

The Annie Hall Effect

And this one time in our hostel ;), we watched Annie Hall after I insisted that everyone does so. The following scene inspired us, and a string of comments followed -

Alvy Singer: Oh stop it, you’re having an affair with your college professor, that jerk that teaches that incredible crap course, Contemporary Crisis in Western Man…
Annie Hall: Existential Motifs in Russian Literature. You’re really close.
Alvy Singer: What’s the difference? It’s all mental masturbation.
Annie Hall: Oh, well, now we’re finally getting to a subject you know something about.
Alvy Singer: Hey, don’t knock masturbation. It’s sex with someone I love.

4) Ar(ghy)a (when An(shu)l suggested that we should have a GBM (general body meeting) as soon as possible) -
What’s the point? Democracy is just vocal masturbation.

5) S(hou)vik (when I asked about his physics experiment report) -
That is experimental masturbation.

6) S(hou)vik (on Einstein and Philosophers and their futility) -
All philosophical orgasms are faked.

7) I don’t remember who came up with the question, but we all seeemed to come up with the answer at the same time, though independently.

Q: What’ll A(nir)bit’s autobiography be called?
A: Physical Masturbation!

8) An(shu)l (when I said I am going to put all that in my blog) -
History will be on your side, because you’ll be masturbating it.

1) When Puneet joined C** as a research scholar, he had only two seniors, Prakash and Saket. Those were his greener days, and he didn’t know better than to call them Prakash Sir and Saket Sir.

Eventually, bored with the tedium of formality, Saket told him one day, “Don’t call me Saket Sir, just Saket will do!”

As it happened, Prakash told him the next day, “Don’t call me Prakash Sir, just Sir will do!”

2) Here is a conversation overheard in a Computer Science Seminar -

Unwary Stranger: So, what is your area of research?

Prakash: Pardon?

Unwary Stranger: What is your area of research?

Prakash: Oh, (shrugs) Siruseri.

(Siruseri is where C** is situated!)

1) SS‘s common quote before exams – Each man for himself and God against all.

2) SS: You guys have some ideological problems with mathematics or what?
(When (Jay)anth and Ar(pit)h, Physics students, failed to answer one of his questions)

3) Sourav: My father did his postdoctrol from BHU.
Vemuri: When did he do his postdoctrol… ?
Sourav: must be early 70′s…
Vemuri: Oh, I am sorry, I could not meet him because I was busy being born at that time.

———- The Story ———-

As I lay there on the sofa contemplating about the deeper issues of life, the creamy walls of my study were replaced by a vision of pink as my pretty little sister sailed in bubbling with excitement.

“See here, I bought a Cadbury for my zoology teacher,” she did not stop for me to react, “do you think it will do?”

I couldn’t see why a free bar of chocolate wouldn’t do for anybody, but experience has taught me better than to argue with girls. In this instance, however, before plunging into the usual acts of inattentive affirmation, I took a moment or two to feel puzzled. The age-old relationship between brothers and sisters is already going down the drains anyway, without the sisters buying expensive chocolates for their teachers.

“What for?”, I ejaculated, shocked at her frivolity in not spending that money to buy my protection against my future tyranny, unscheduled but inevitable.

“Ooph, it’s the birthday tomorrow.”, she said in a voice that teachers reserve for the student who has failed to grasp the obvious. In hindsight, it occurs to me that she might have thrown a contemptuous look or two as well, which, I am sad to report, were unceremoniously lost on me.

“Lucky bastard,” I thought to myself. Nobody ever gave me chocolates on my birthday. On all my birthdays after I turned twelve, I had to be away from home and my friends on one pretext or the other. I did get a chance to spend my last birthday at home, but it only served to demonstrate what idiots I had for friends. In spite of my chronic aversion to cards of any sort, many of them gifted me the same birthday card in an effort to outspend each other.

My reverie was presently broken by the return of my sister who, before I could say anything further, again said breathlessly, “I bought this one for my botany teacher, do you think he will mind?”

I never knew if the botany teacher minded it or not, but I certainly did. I mean, what sort of people give away presents to botany teachers to celebrate the birthdays of zoology teachers? And why are brothers not included in this scheme of public charity? I again asked, choked with incredulity, “What for?”

She really lost her patience this time. “What’s wrong with you? For the birthday!”

I was amazed. So far, I had encountered coincident birthdays only in probability textbooks, where you had to lock up 23 people in a single room to have it more likely than unlikely that two of them have the same birthday. I imagine that this fact, had it been known to the victims of the black hole of Calcutta, could have been a source of some solace to them. Instead for struggling for space and air which only hastened their end, they could have spent their time more amicably inquiring after each other’s birthdays. With 146 (probably more) people in one room, some two of them were bound to have the same birthday (I am too lazy to compute the exact probability). It was a remarkable probabilistic event by any standard. But alas! We are perpetually occluded to the future, both immediate and distant, that many a times robs us of the simple pleasures of finding out the birthdays of our fellow human beings.

I speak from experience. Had I known my own fate that followed, I would definitely have made sure that I slept each night with a list of birthdays under my pillow. However, at that moment, unaware of the future tidings of hatred and disgust and physical assault about to be unleashed on me, I was busy contemplating possible shift of my research interests to the theory of probability, where I could imagine spending the rest of my life peacefully dropping pins on a rug and drawing coloured balls from urns, occasionally with the pleasant task of putting them back. I’ll probably not get a chance to lock more than 23 people in the same room; but then, one can not have everything in life.

My little sister broke in at this point, asking me what I was frowning about. I broke into a smile, said it was nothing. As an afterthought, I added that it was a curious fact that both her zoology and botany teachers had the same birthday.

While I took the beating of a lifetime, I am sure that the victims of the Calcutta black hole smiled from the heaven above on my presumptive folly in advising them to find each other’s birthday.

Keep your sisters close, and a list of their birthdays closer.

Here are five reasons why I haven’t written exclusively about myself in my blog so far -

1. I can never think of a suitable title for describing my bland (notice that this adjective is only a mode of speech, a pose) life. I have been struggling for a title for this post too.
2. I diverge into too many off topics whenever I try to write about myself, to the point of being irritating.
3. Anything I write about myself, if not narcissistic and megalomaniac, is so completely dull that I can’t for the life of me imagine why someone would be interested in reading it. And anyway I have only bad things to write about me.
4. I can always write about my bad qualities attributing them to someone else.
5. I don’t want to turn into a bloody exhibitionist.

So what prompted me to depart from my own rules? Is it a tragedy that I think the world should know about? Or is it a triumph I want to impress my blog readers with? May be it is to confess some terrible secret from my past that has been eating me up for years!

I just erased my Computational Physics assignment and that is all I want to talk about. Yeah, the disk space ran out (may be it was already full, didn’t think of checking it from my remote comp) while I was editing my program, so that when I tried to save it (I was done with the program itself, the only thing left being the instruction to write the outcomes to a file), it failed and due to some weird logic in Linux (Debian), it erased the original file itself, thank you very much.

I was not upset, because I remembered having taken a backup sometime back. My backup, however, turned out to be the version in Python (basically, I was rewriting the whole program in C after Python turned out to be damn too slow).

I was still not upset, because I remembered the sysadmin telling me that a backup of the files was taken everyday at midnight. After working on it for a week, I had not touched my program in the last two days, which meant that a complete copy was lying somewhere in the darkness of the backup storage.

Then it dawned on me. The file was in Aux1 folder, which was local to the computer I was using, which meant no backup was ever taken of that erased file.

That was a moment to panic.

But my first reaction was one of sheer optimism. I immediately turned to the monitor to start converting my Python program to C. A lot of people would have said that it was not particularly a bright idea, and they would have been right in saying so. For one thing, there is no dynamic memory allocation to arrays in C (yeah I know about malloc, but I didn’t exactly have the time (deadline in 12 hours) to write codes to deal with such issues), which meant that I’ll have to code carefully looking for one-off error in array boundaries. Okay, the list goes on, and I don’t think the reader wants to know much about that.

I finally managed though. I copied B(eli)’s program (something he claimed he had been hinting all the while) and made all sorts of minor superficial altercations (with his help), making sure that the compiled programs had very different sizes. But, of course, I had no time to incorporate all those minute improvements my original program contained.

Since I couldn’t risk missing the shuttle to the class next day, I had to stay awake the whole night, and that’s how I am writing this post, at 6 in the morning. I got bored of switching through the channels in the television.

I should mention this movie I had a glimpse of. It’s called Dahleez – Raj Babbar, Jackie Shroff and Meenakshi Seshadri. There was this song, something about someone being young and in love and with a tune on his lips and roaming around with a light heart in a bright world. Anyway, Meenakshi Seshadri wore a three-piece that was simply awesome. The skirt was strikingly designed with a mixture of dark and bright colours dominated by Red. It wasn’t intricately designed, it was designed to bring out its striking combination of colours. The top was red, and plain for my tests. However, she had this beautiful and long scarf (not a duppatta, a scarf as worn by the Scouts and Guides) on it that matched with the skirt. It was lovely. She was very lovely too, but I always felt she had a very bad hair style.

I’ll attribute this fascination for the three-piece dress to my lack of sleep.

The movie was bad, as usual. A(shis)h assures me that the movie is set around 1985, during the terrorist movements for Khalistan (It finally led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi (following operation bluestar), then the Prime Minister of India, which in turn prompted the Anit-Sikh Riots of 1984, which in its turn prompted the bombing of Kanishka, which was the the single deadliest terrorist attack involving aircraft till 9/11. All of this goes on to show how short the human life is to keep hating each other. By the way, these wikipedia articles contain many factual inaccuracies and exaggerations.).

Anyway, coming back to the point, the movie used the backdrop of the Khalistan Movement way too cheaply and absurdly. For example, why couldn’t the hero keep the crucial appointment with the heroine (and had to rely on his intimate friend who with an evil smile tore up the crucial note from the hero to the heroine. why? because the hero had knocked him out in a boxing match earlier in the movie with two amateurish punches.)? Because, two random guys for no apparent reason thought it was a good idea to randomly open fire on random people, one of whom might be the hero’s mother.

1) Map is an extremely useful function and shortly we’ll see why it is not used.
(Prof Madhavan, in the Haskell course)

2) Arpith: Is the plane a convex set?
Prof Parthasarthy: (flapping his hands) No… it has wings etc etc!
(In the CalculusI course)

3) Recently, a few mathematicians have started to do mathematics devoid of points… other mathematicians quip this as pointless geometry.
(Prof ShivShankar)

4) The ring need not have a multiplicative identity. Infact a ring without an identity is called rng, which shows the sense of humour that mathematicians possess.
(Prof Shivshankar)

5) So (1,2,4) means 1->2, 2->4 and 4->1. But where can the rest go? They can go to hell!
(Prof Shivshankar, discussing permutations)

6) My idea of an overview is to just give you an overview.
(Prof Rajasekharan, in his overview of modern physics)

Not all of these are first hand.

1) If there is any justice in the world, then this should be the derivative!
2) I don’t know why I am doing this. (on the theorem he was proving)
(Vemuri, during his course on functions in several variables)

3) Ignorance is not a crime, ignorance of ignorance is.
(Ramanan, in the Global Calculus course, when the students failed to reply clearly whether or not they knew some particular theorem)

4) Here is a similar one I found when I was googling to see if Ramanan was just quoting somebody -
To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of ignorance.
(A. Bronson Alcott)

5) This corollary is proved by staring hard at the blackboard.
(Nagrajan, humouring us when we failed to prove a relatively simple corollary in the classroom and sought refuse in staring vaccantly at the blackboard as if we were going to come up with the solution any moment)

6) But what can we do? It’s a theorem, it is true! That’s Life.
(Loic Dubois, to Anirbit, when he insisted that the inverse function theorem (or was it the implicit function theorem? I wasn’t there.) could not be true because some jacobian somewhere was not symmetric.)

7) The purpose of mathematics is data collection.
(By P. J., apparently in a workshop in the AMS-India conference.)

8) Pi meson is a recognized and a perfectly respectable particle.
(Prof. R Parthasarthy in a quantum mech class when Anirbit said that there is debate going on over pi meson being a particle.)