On the Closing lines..

what if i got the poem of life all wrong

what if a certain side of me is all alone

what if my painting has fallen short of a few shades

Before it gets stained with red and gleefully fades

I want to stare at it with all my pride and say

' The painting belongs to me and no one else

No one else... '






____________________ _ _


Well, i guess its about time i pull the curtains on 'his confessions'. Its been a nice ride and it was great to know that i always had a stage where i could go all drunk and come back all light. 'From there to here' was pretty much the whole blog in a single article and a summary of the entire time i spent with it.
I would still keep blogging though.. simply coz its fun but i guess i have hit a certain level of maturity where you aren't supposed to blabber all your personal crap but i guess in that way i cant do it with 'his confessions' coz over here it was always about staying honest , anonymous and true to your heart.

My next blog is ' Cigarettes and Equations '
Its a lighter take on life and world, nature and physics.
So i guess thats about it. See you guys on the other side

Cheers
Chitrodeep

From there to here

Life is funny in the way it drifts by, catching waves that you think you know where they might take you but then you never really reach, its someone else who reaches, someone who is quite like you in some ways and not like you in many other ways. Change of course is inevitable, some negative, some positive but i guess the whole point is to try to evolve with time rather than change. That is how i concluded my long walk from a bad Classical Mechanics exam to my room.. And along the way, my mind kept turning the pages of my journey through last five years, of how i got from there to here. 

The kid i knew..

Year 2008 was when i left my school and my childhood which apparently was gleefully painted with lots of red marks and bad grades. It was like one of those classic tragedies that really deserved a happy ending and to everyone's surprise it did. With a decent average of 85% i passed out along with clearing National maths Olympiad. Thanks to geometry and my die hard passion for it but sadly that was also the year where i had to leave behind my lines, points and circles just like a kid hides his favorite toys before taken away into a boarding school.

Eventually, JEE preparation started and just like a typical Indian high school life, we were more buried in problems than in anything else. School of course had become secondary, i was one of those blue moons in my school. They only saw me 17% of the year which was also my attendance percentage! Eventually i made many new friends.. Piku, Lattu, Ria, Sayan and many others mostly in tuition. Life was simple, wake up, study, go to tuition, come back, study, sleep and the wheel kept rolling just the same way day in and day out as they had expected from me a lot after maths Olympiad which in other words meant 'This boy here, ll be an IITian.'

In these two years, things of course took a long walk out of the bitten track and it took away the possibilities of ever coming back. Along the way i developed a strong passion for physics, it was amazing to know that the lines, points, equations with which i played along for a big part of my childhood can actually come out of the white sheet and explain reality and nature as it is. That was big for me and i got hooked for good. I was good with problem solving but along with the passion came questions like why is there even a magnetic field for a flowing electron? (Newtonially, it shouldn't be there), why is those conservation laws even true?.. and with that went away all the possibilities of ever clearing JEE.. because i was more passionate than motivated.

It was about the same time i met this beautiful girl who also happened to be a good friend of mine. It was like one of those stories where two friends got close, got confused, got awkward and apparently did deserve a nice happy ending but didnt. Eventually the year came to an end, JEE results came out.
I flunked big time and she of course made it to IIT. 
My school life ended and so did all my dreams of getting through JEE, of taking her out, of doing physics and of me being me. I didn't of course ask her out, i couldn't, not like that.
Life moved on and she drifted away in a big cloud of memories, nevertheless i do have a lot of respect for her though.

I was depressed, distorted, unsure and dumped in NIT Calicut with electronics. The campus was nice, i met some really amazing people.. Ashish, Deepraj, Chaubey, Vidhu, Haopu, Dhanish, Rahul and many more. For the first half of my 1st sem, i was pretty dead. It was as if i left a fight not because i was broken but because i didnt have it in me to fight back. It took me a while to get my act together though and eventually i realized what went wrong. I started preparing for jee again and this time i solved a lot of problems and i always had a omr sheet and a stop clock to time me. Things changed eventually, my mock scores soared up but NIT scores crashed big time. I was 4.88 1st sem, 0.00 next sem!
But that's alright, at the end of the year i did get through JEE and because maths was made easy my high scores in maths paper of JEE didnt quite earn me a major advantage and i landed a rank of 1891, just at the levels of okay.
I said bye to NIT and all the beautiful times it gave me with some really good friends and headed towards IIT Delhi.

The man in the making..

IIT Delhi was one of those anti climaxes in my life. It was like Bond is about to pull the trigger in between the villain's eyes and right at that very moment his pants went down! 
i took up engineering physics but eventually during my 1st year i realized it wasn't about looking at how the physics of the atom defies Newton's mechanics, it wasn't about how gravity falls apart to understand causality, it was more about finding thickness of thin films and switching on light inside fibers and seeing what comes out through the other side.
So all in all, my 1st year was pretty depressing, i had brawls with people, feuds in groups, i got into smoking (which i dont regret.... davidoff classics are the thing! \m/ :D ) and some amount of drinking. The year ended with a shitty reputation and a 7.2 gpa...

The next year started and i finally got into physics. Physics was amazing now because these were the basic theoretical courses but i landed myself with a lung infection and i had to withdraw the sem at the end. I came back next sem and i had some pretty good courses this time too. Quantum mechanics by Ajit Kumar was amazing but i was detached from studies for about 1 n half year so it all became a little tough to concentrate and bring in the same old momentum. 
I met some really amazing people my 2nd year and most of them were exchange students... Steph, Cyril, Claire, Antoinne and Charlez. We went to Darjeeling on a 15 days' trip and it sure was a blast!
http://chitrodeep.blogspot.com/2013/03/our-times-with-darjeeling.html

Claire and I used to study together in R2 and  Steph got me into nude art.. many nights we hung out in clubs and it was like IIT life was finally coming alive! But just like every season ends, this one ended on a pretty sad note, the guys left as the year ended. We said our good byes and caught our own waves along divergent world lines.
But thats alright, life is like that i guess, moments flow, we grab a few, we miss a few.. the special ones stay special always but you leave them behind knowing they ll always give you a happy sight when you look back.

At the end of the year i did a summer intern along with Nilesh under Prof. Ravishankar who is a visting faculty from IITk and a theoretical physicist working in Quantum Field Theory. Nilesh and I made an amazing team and we equally had a great time solving the problem on Supersymmetric landau levels. At the end of the summer we did solve and we got some new results and Prof. was really excited about it. We are still trying to understand it though, the underlying physics behind the singular potential we discovered. We most probably ll get a paper published at the end of this year.

After my exchange friends left i was lonely for a while, walked the halls like a ghost but through Nilesh i made some great friends.. Sengar, Charul and Co. Hehe... I have made some other good friends too.. Shantanu, Arnav and Preeti... life is great in the way of how wide is the spectrum of different people can be and through the last five years, now i know there's no good way of defining good people with whom you can connect with : ) 

The summer intern was amazing in a way that i finally realized what i want to do. I want to become a theoretical physicist some day and i will because thats how i am. A dream seen is a dream to die for.
The next sem was full Theoretical physics and mathematics and Einstein's General Relativity by Prof. Ravishankar. Because of the ups and downs along the way, my momentum with studies isnt as amazing as it used to be but i am still in the game of playing around with equations.. because thats the only thing i do and i know and in some ways give meaning to my identity.

Things have changed a lot in many ways in last five years.. Now i know what i want to do, i also work as the editorial cartoonist for BSP and i am still working on my physics. I hope someday i will regain the same passion i had with physics, apparently my classical mechanics says i have to work harder to be the same old guy who could solve any problem of Irodov mechanics or from anywhere what so ever. But thats alright, the fight aint over yet and besides a good theoretical physicist never leaves an unsolved problem behind because if you have dreamed of knowing why nature is the way she is, you need to be wild enough to never let her go.

PS: I am sorry if it went a lil over sized but 5 years are a lot to process.

On the Other Side of the Smoke..

I didnt sleep the last whole night, had an exam today at 8. So apparently my head is on a non thinking, non working mode and all that it wants is to crash on a bed. But if i do however go back to hostel i ll crash and miss my lunch at 12! which i dont want coz my wallet is more broke than the brokeback mountains.. didnt get the joke? neva mind, it was a 'gay' joke anyway! 3:D
So what do you do basically in such a situation? you drop by in your ever so abandoned blog and write ever so 'never written before' classic crap! 
Ladies and gentleman, this post is dedicated to the age old question that has left a part of the mankind baffled for a long time....

'What really lies on the other side of the smoke?'
Why do smokers smoke? i mean they definitely know they are stabbing their lungs and killing themselves at the end of the day then why do these idiots do it? what is the 'reason'?

Imagine you are sitting on a moonlit corner seat of a pub with a glass of scotch in one hand and eyes staring at the big mix of old, classy, young, nice, sad, happy people and all that you want to think is not to think anymore of any thing.. Slowly as time flows by you keep drifting into the mild soft rock going on and the tired eyes are unable to make out all those people mixing away in a big bloated mix of paints with every sip of your chilled humble scotch..

Eventually a girl in black gown, pretty tall; may be a few inches short of 6 ft with long open hair falling all around her, a spanish cut light caramel face with bright red lipstick on and a cigarette in one hand while a glass of red wine in the other approaching towards you..

and this is what she says..

Hi, apparently the world has deserted serial killers but i dont think you would mind sharing a drink and walking me home..

Would you go?
well, i would and many other people who love smoking would...

People want to know what lies on the other side of the smoke..
Well, nothing lies on the other side of the smoke and even if anything does, its immaterial; its never about how you get burnt out at the end, its about getting lost in the smoke along the way.... 

___________

Hopefully i did justice to your stupid question; by the way if you don't smoke, dont start. I wouldnt like attending your funeral.. live long, stay happy.. and leave the serial killers in black gowns for us! :D~
Now if you excuse me, there's a shitty lunch, a stack of davidoff Classics, a lovely undone bed and lots of studies for two back to back exams waiting for me.. 

Untill then... here is an honest smoker signing off!

11 thoughts in Dark Humour

1. I always thought that life would open up after iit. It did, n it chewed too.... now i am just waiting when it would go for a dump n flush me out....

2. Every wednesday our mess serves chicken. If the piece is bigger than 2 inches you get 1! If its less than that you get 2.. Its more of a way of showing that chicken is still not extinct actually..

3. I dreamed of becoming a physicist. N then i look at my electrodynamics prof. and realize that any dream no matter how big, can go horribly wrong n still come true!

4. I was sitting at the wind tunnel a couple of days back n i saw this girl i was about to hit on. But i didnt coz i found out she aint single. Its wrong you know.. Its like i am trying to walk into society n it looks at my Y chromosomes... n then says, 'Sorry sir, those aren't allowed!'

5. There are two types of people who have eaten up our society. People with money and people with religion. N then there are two types of people who have been eaten up- people who lived for money and people who craved for religion...
Frankly, everywhere i go i get to see a lot of eaten up digested zombies dancing around and going.... gaaaaaa.... n i am like 'oh yeah, sure, thats exotic, now fuck off!'

6. At times, oh well actually lotsa times, people tell me that smoking kills and i would die and shit this, shit that n bla bla bla.... 
n i think, ' Okay, so i would die and he would live... well, if god really had to make so many immortals, we sure could use a lil less talkative ones! '

7. At times people tell me unemployment stories and what i would do with a physics degree... 
i just tell them that i would go back home, build a massage parlor, give random massages to fat-arse aunties while telling them physics stories of fast electrons and bending time!

8. So she was really drunk and beautiful that night so i gave her a lift home, kissed her and returned back to iit. I guess that was the 2nd time i said no to alcohol flavored sex(1st time on iit roof)... 
I still feel both the girls no matter where they are now and all my sperm cells in my sperm city must be laughing at me.. saying, 'Aaaah, that helpful worthless clown!'
I dont blame them, i think the same. But i dont regret it though... oh well, may be a lil bit. 

9. As a high-school kid iit was all about going abroad at the end of 2nd yr, 3rd yr and then going away n never coming back at the end of the 4th. This summer i left my foreign intern just to work in IIT Delhi to work under a theoretical physicist who has come from IITk. Honestly, all that i come to know now is that dreams dont commute. 
Guess Hisenberg just left that for us to figure out on our own....

10. So i had this friend in my room that day n i was like... dude what is the 1st thing you see in a girl? he kept on going from eyes to face to waist to personality n all... i guess the clusters came in at 8th n 9th. 
N then i was like... 'guys are going gay, n its worse coz this time gays are equipped well for producing more gays!!' I still doubt it though ;-)

11. I had a friend during the summers and we were working under the same prof, different projects though. Being physics interns working in hardcore theory we were proud people. And at times in reading room, he would see photos in fb of engineers in gown, graduating and he would be like..
'look, one more useless engineer enters the world'
me- ' yeah kinda amazing how happy they become... to become nothing at all!'
n then we laughed..
I am pretty sure some engineer right now is looking at it from the other side of the screen n saying...
'look, one more unemployed worthless physicist is about to crowd the over-crowded world' n having a laugh with his other engineer friend at the same time.
I dont mind. Nature is relative n so are you n I. ;-)

Face to face with Feynman

Personally the entire idea of looking up to a role model never seemed attractive or worth appreciating to me. One's journey should be independent and an unguided walk towards a self chosen horizon on a self contained highway.. But then along the way you do come across people and get to know about their stories and every once in a blue moon you do come to admire a few of them truly and get deeply inspired by them. 
One of those few people for me is Richard Feynman.

Feynman was a theoretical physicist of mid 20th century. Nobel laureate for his theory on Quantum Electrodynamics and an eternal figure in physics for many other contributions; Feynman, apart from being one of the most gifted scientists of his times was also a very colorful person- a bongo player, a nude artist, a womanizer n yet a dedicated lover, an eternal enthusiast, a safe cracker, a humorous show-offer, a truly talented lecturer and so much more...
Every physicist like every footballer or every musician has his own style. Feynman was known for his intuition, his very visual imagination and his capability of mathsifying them to equations that in turn could speak for his thoughts loud and clear..

Interesting thing is I came to know of Feynman long after i started pursuing physics. Truth is my entry into physics was very mathematical. As a kid back in school i guess the only thing that i tried and did was mathematics. Even though school maths was pretty trivial and stupid but i still had my own times with classical geometry and algebra. And when i entered in my higher secondary and got into physics, it was truly enlightening in the sense that i got to know that all those lines and circles, xs and ys weren't just little games i used to play on white sheets but those were 'real' as in i could use them to understand things going on in the real world! I guess thats when i got hooked for good. It was only after i finished school, entered iit and while chatting with a friend in fb (i guess Ojas) that he told me that there's this guy called Feynman and " dude's lectures are actually pretty great! " :D

 
____

I wanted to talk about Feynman's path integral formulation of quantum mechanics but then i figured the man truly needs to get a sexy intro! I appreciated Feynman before as a great historical figure but his science was beyond me then so i never could truly appreciate him as a scientist... but a few days back i reached the chapter on path integrals and the Lagrangian formulation in Shankar's QM book and i finally came to see Feynman's work. One word -' amazing ' 

So that's why I dropped by here today to talk about it but then may be many of you dont know about him which is of course not required to appreciate his work but still... dude was awesome so i guess its okay to waste a post just like that and get back to path integrals on the next post! : )

and here are some photos.... enjoy! ;-)

___________________________________________ __ __

the 3 vol.s of Feynman's lectures are still very famous amongst physics students... 

That's Arline, Feynman's colg. time girl friend. She had Tuberculosis. Nevertheless he did marry her even after knowing that she would die soon so that he could take care of her... she died n he went into 'bang everyone phase'

 'lets get banging, shall we??' ;-)

Feynman playing bongos! 
' On the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.'







These are some of his sketches.....

that's i guess one of his rough notes... every physics student ends up with a huge collection of these of his own... apparently his doodles were of the same quality as his work unlike us of course! :D














_____

' A poet once said, "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. '

' I have a friend who's an artist and he's sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree, I think. And he says - "you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing." And I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension of one centimetre, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colours in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pllinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the colour. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kins of interesting questions which shows that science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don't understand how it subtracts. '

    

Ambiguity

I was happy
I was a happy sperm when i won the race.
Scared, i cried like hell
Seeing the old nurse's tired face.
I was a dreamer
I dreamed of free wings and a newer horizon,
the world on the other side and a bright new sun.
But then hey, 
They never taught me how to dream,
A lil too grey.. A lil less did i say..
That their reality always lacked the cream.

I was a traveller
I travelled through the stagnant planes, ups, downs
Pretty strangers who walked by in glossy gowns..
But then this heart that i carried along 
Always bore this undefined , unrealized ambiguity
A soul drifting by in sheer anonymity..

I am still me
Anonymous, obscure, confused..
and yet there's always one more dream to see
One more highway that wants me to flee.
And why so hard is it even now
That this empty soul cant give up on reality?..

The Empty Dance Floor...

I sketched her and i sketched her nice
With empty eyes and unreal lies.
Empty dance floors and forbidden rythms
Confused me to uncanny rhymes.
I stared at her and i wont anymore
I find she never was singing the single lore
But i still stand here beside the empty floor
With a single heart that wants to soar.
Man, i should have known she wasnt single
Never was the friendly stranger up to mingle
But then again the poor boy walks
and he walks away from the empty dance floor
With piercing eyes set across the big blue shore.

The cigarette burnt, the dj stopped
The girls left and reality dropped
The smoke cleared
and i could finally see whats left
moonlit, my corner seat
did finally get me in its debt..
The last sip of my scotch that i did save
Didnt quite save me anymore...
But nevertheless i did embrace the empty dance floor..... . .


PS: Next blog post would be on my project and physics... I have had it with stupid despo chick-hunting times...... -_-