White man's burden

"Research is all fraud", a friend of mine had told me. He is a graduate from IIT, an engineer by training and a trader by profession. "PhD is our national timepass" - CEO of a very successful BPO in India had once spoken these words in a townhall meeting of his company. He too was from IIT and an MBA from a top B-school in the US. When I had told someone that in the pharma company where I work, we design processes to make drugs. He did not believe me. We cannot design chemical processes, we can only 'buy' them. We, the citizens of India, are truly 'third world' in our attitude. And, it is not the common man, but it is the highly educated - even the engineers from the so-called best engineering colleges of the country. We believe we cannot create anything new. As a consequence, all research is fraud, a waste of time for us. This is the reason why I find that the most proactive peers of my undergraduate class are now MBAs and bankers. It is the 'white man's burden' to create technology and drugs and all the good things in life. We are happy to create their replicas and cheap 'jugads', we are happy to manage their finances, we are happy to invest their money in futures and derivatives trading.

Diwali 2009

Diwali 2009, 6.30 PM: I am sitting in my room in New York City and sipping tea. You can’t burst crackers here. No houses around me are decorated with lights. No candles or diyas. To any observer it will be just another day. But, there is traffic in a different domain. Lot of texts are being exchanged, lot of phone calls to old, forgotten friends are being made. Lot of Diwali dinner invitations being sent. Ya, we are celebrating Diwali. Not out loud with crackers, but at our homes or at friends' homes – by gathering together, eating food and lighting some diyas. If it was not for my friends, I would not have cared to do anything this Diwali. But, I am getting a feel of it now. I am getting emotional about it.

Happy

To come early to the lab, go back late.. work hard the whole day, exercise for an hour and read something before sleeping is what gives me ultimate peace and happiness. Nothing matches it.

P.S. - What would give me most pain is to see that somebody else has published what I was about to. So, I should stop blogging and get back to work.

How close to science we actually are?

How will a charged ion move in a uniform magnetic field (assuming only classical physics)? An easy question for most engineering graduates. What keeps the Sun burning? Nuclear fusion of course. But, how about this - why does coke lose dissolved CO2 when salt is added to it? Why do clothes become darker in color when wet? For the past three months, I have been wondering what reaction coordinate best represents protein unfolding. But have I (we) ever wondered what is the best reaction coordinate for our age? A reaction coordinate describing protein unfolding basically is an index to determine the age of the protein - how close it is to unfolding. We take the number of living years as the reaction coordinate for our age. We just assume it is by law, we don't question it, and it is universally used. But, you can die anytime - from 40s to 90s. There is a large standard deviation in this reaction coordinate. But we don't stop to ponder about another one. We would accept it without much thought, just like we accept our surroundings without much thought as to why things happen the way they do. Rather, while pursuing something in the scientific field we focus on more abstract things like, motion of a charged ion (which none of us can see but only know exists because of what we have read), or nuclear fusion, or protein folding. We are very far away from Science, which, losely defined, is understanding the physical nature of the environment around us. I recently heard that JEE is not what it used to be. Now its all multiple choice questions. The idea is to negate the coaching classes' influence. But I dont think they have managed to eliminate these institutes' influence. What if JEE is made into a test of knowledge of how well we understand things around us. Simple questions from what we see daily. Coaching classes will fail because there is no set course to attack this. And interesting would be - who emerge as toppers. Maybe rustic kids who have much more time to ponder about things, have to work with their hands to milk cows and do not sit in isolated air-conditioned environments.

Take a roller and level down the rugged free energy landscape. it has to be flat.. ergodicity is required.. 

Rickshaw walas of IIT

Only two rickshaws were permitted to operate in the IIT Delhi campus. I never rode on them because paying as much as Rs 3-5 for going from one place in the campus to another seemed a lot to me. But I did ride them once. That one day in my fourth year, I took a rickshaw to go from the insti to the kailash gate (kailash gate was the exit from the campus to the Aurobindo marg). I took the rickshaw because my sister was getting married and our entire family from different parts of India had come. Because of the proximity of my campus from my sister's house, I many a times used to sneek out of some ceremonies and marriage preparations to attend classes (although I did skip many). Well, all that is quite extraneous. I have a habit of writing a lot of extraneous stuff. Ok, so when the rickshaw wala dropped me at the gate, I asked him 'bhaiya, kitna kama lete ho' (how much you end up earning?). He stated somewhere between 80-120 rupees. I replied 'par bhahar to aur zyada kama sakte ho' (you can earn much more if you operate outside the campus). To which he replied, 'haan, par yahan log tameez se baat karte hain, bhahar koi dhang se baat nahi karta'. For a rikshaw wala a rupee is much more valuable for us engineers. So, he is paying a big price for the dignity he gets in the campus.

The brain (2)

I stayed back in the lab till 11 PM yesterday to start some simulations. I was hungry, tired but I wanted to start the runs so that I get the night time for my runs. But, today morning I noticed that 8 of my codes have stopped running in the middle of the run because the hard drives had got completely full. It took me a few hours in the morning to clean up the space. I had to call Orbitz to smoothen an issue with an airline ticket and they kept me on hold for 45 mins. When I was finally ready to start my sims, I noticed that some other person had started his sims on the computers I was using. I searched for other nodes where I can restart the sims. While I was trying to run sims, old, unpleasant incidents started coming to my mind and I wanted to shout at somebody. Reminded me of theme of the book 'The Sphere' by Michael Crichton. How delicate is our brain's composure. And how we choose to exhume old incidents as excuses to be angry when the reason is the present.