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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
