Hawk Attack

Yesterday, as I was hiking down a trail in Tom Brown park, I was attacked by a hawk.

Bizarre, I know!

For an instant, as I felt the scratching on my head, I thought an old twig had fallen off a tree. But my confusion was dispelled a nanosecond later, as I saw the hawk's wide wings swooshing right in front of my forehead. From there, it swooped up like a jet taking off on a runway, and perched itself on a nearby tree, watching!

The claws had inflicted a minor scratch, but nothing serious (I finished the remaining 3 miles of my hike). Later, I called the nurse, just to see if I should take antibiotics or tetanus shot.

To my mild surprise, she told me that I was up to date on my tetanus shots. She said "your chart says you had your last shot in 2016."

Ah! The sting ray accident, I remembered!

Teacher's Day 2017

I did not expect writing this post would be so bittersweet. Last Teacher's Day, I decided I would use the occasion to highlight specific teachers, who have had an outsized impact on me.

Today, I am going to tell you about Kartic C. Khilar, or KCK as he was called at IIT Bombay. KCK was a central figure, and participant, as I navigated a period of multiple transitions.

Interestingly, I first "met" KCK even before I met him. The year I took the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) to apply for admission to IIT, he was the principal administrator. The only reason I remember is because he had a "killer" last name (so juvenile, I know!).

Like 200,000 other rats, I studied relentlessly for two years. JEE is like academic Olympics. We trained like mental athletes: cardio, weights, pilates, the whole nine yards. Then, the starting gun went off, and we scampered. The first two thousand got in.

Miraculously, I tumbled my way into IIT Bombay first, and then to the chemical engineering department. KCK was the head of the department, when my "batch" arrived.

He taught us fluid mechanics and solid-fluid operations. He was a fantastic teacher - one of the best I've had. His lectures were crisp. He was always cheerful. And he cared about all his students - not just toppers.

He had one striking attribute: no ego. No made up sense of self-importance, which is all the more remarkable given the power gap between teachers and students (especially in India). If you went to his office, he would listen, despite how busy he was, or how unimportant you were.

A highlight of the undergrad program at IIT is the B. Tech project (BTP), which is the undergrad equivalent of a PhD dissertation. Again, due to a random set of circumstances, he ended up being my BTP mentor. Over the course of the last year and half at IIT our interaction deepened, if only because we met one-on-one on a weekly basis to discuss research.

Research in the Fluid Mechanics lab was fun. I don't think I would have embarked on a research career, if I hadn't enjoyed this experience so much. This work on "colloid-facilitated contaminant transport" with KCK and his grad student at that time - Tushar Sen - would end up becoming my first peer-reviewed publication.

I ended up at the University of Michigan as a grad student, in no small part due to his kind word. Michigan was his alma mater too. He visited Ann Arbor twice, while I was there. Once, when I was a PhD student, and later just before I started my new academic job at Florida State. Each time I went to Bombay, I would meet him; usually over lunch or dinner.

Throughout this period, he selflessly offered his mind for me to pick, and his ocean of experience for me to draw from. At several points during this journey, I abandoned hopes of an academic career. Each time, he listened without judgment, and quietly held a mirror to my desire for autonomy and passion for teaching. For better or for worse, he was instrumental in me ending up on the trajectory I am currently on.

And I couldn't be more grateful! Sometimes you try to peek over the horizon, but you can't see what a taller person who has been to more places can (in my case, that is literally true too).


In 2009, I shut the door to my office and wept, when I learnt about his untimely passing. He was 57, in great mental and physical shape, and I always expected him to be around forever.

When I first encountered KCK in 1994, I knew him as an administrator. Later at IIT he became my chairman and teacher, before becoming my BTP supervisor.

Somewhere along the way, he became a mentor, and a close friend; emails that started with "Dear Prof. Khilar" eventually started with "Dear Kartic".

Today, even though I knew it would bounce, I nearly wrote (to his familiar email address), "Dear Kartic, you are sorely missed." 

End of The World

As I sat bewildered and amused, I knew it was a story that I had to be save for her wedding reception.  Next to me, my older daughter was sobbing inconsolably, "why does it all have to end this way?"

Rewind ten minutes. It was not a conversation that was supposed to go like this.

You see, my dad is absolutely fascinated by the night sky. I thought I'd play the role of a good son and father, by testing whether talking about space would ignite my daughter's interest in the subject. Perhaps, next time they met, they could obsess over a shared interest.

Me: Do you know the name of our galaxy, M.?
M.: Of course, the Milky Way!
Me: Good! They teach you good stuff in school. Now, harder question; do you know which galaxy is right next to ours?
M.: No, which is it, Baba?
Me: Andromeda. And I bet you haven't heard this. Billions of years later, Andromeda and the Milky Way are going to smash into each other. It is going to be spectacular!

M.: (troubled) Can't we do anything to stop it?

I cracked open a laptop, and fired up a browser.

Me: Look this is Tallahassee. This is Florida. This is the Earth. This is the solar system (zooming out each time). This is the Milky Way, and this is Andromeda. We are too tiny to do anything meaningful.
M.: (definitely worried) What does that mean? Does it mean we all die?
Me: (scoffing) Oh, don't worry about that. This is going to happen after BILLIONS of years. We will all be dead long before that. In fact, perhaps the Earth will be gone before that.
M.: What do you mean, Baba?
Me: You know how the sun is a star, right?  Like all stars, it shines by burning gas. It has tons of gas, kinda like Baba's tummy. But once it runs out of most of that gas, it might expand to about 3 times its size, and gobble up Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth.

I noticed tears streaming down her cheeks. I had to console her. And I had do it fast.

Me: But don't worry. Dont' worry! This is not going to happen for  BILLIONS of years more. We will all be gone by then.
M.: (now sobbing inconsolably) why does it all have to end this way?

After a few minutes, she regained her composure. I was debating whether it would be tone-deaf to talk about the real things to be scared of, like global warming, or pandemics, or..., when she interrupted me with a plea.

"Baba, can we please not talk about space, anymore?"

Teacher's Day

Long before Hallmark completely littered the calendar with "special days", we celebrated September 5, in India, as Teacher's Day; a day when we paused to reflect over how our teachers had shaped us.

I have been fortunate to have had many wonderful teachers. So I thought it might be a good idea to rekindle the spirit of the day, by highlighting one such teacher, every year.

Today, let me tell you about Ms. Mary Fernandes, who taught us English in 8th and 9th grade.

Like many kids, I liked to read books mostly for the stories they told. I had no appreciation for the art of good-writing until Mary teacher (as we called her) brought it sharply into focus.

The difference between good and mediocre writing is often not content, but how that content is skillfully unwrapped. A good writer understands the state of the reader's mind, which once ensnared, can be coaxed to go wherever the writer wants.

Before Mary teacher, I had no love for poetry; mostly because of how we were tested on them. We had to memorize long quirky poems, including the goddamn punctuation! Any deviation was penalized. It was like memorizing a page of computer code; any small error in reproduction, and the code wouldn't compile. I hated it then, and its memory makes me angry even after all these years.

In 8th and 9th grade, I learnt how to let myself enjoy poems. I still hated the way we were tested; but I began the slow process of forgiving William Wordsworth, John Milton, and their ilk for their years of torture. The most important thing I learnt was that the best way to read poems, was to read them aloud - even if people around you gave you strange looks.

In terms of our writing ability, all of us are a work in progress. We read, we learn, we change. And our writing changes with us. In many ways, it is like our signature. With age, there are subtle shifts, lots of rounding of edges, and a move towards directness and simplicity.

Most of the time, this change is gradual, but sometimes there are drastic  "phase transitions". High-school was like that for me - I heard my own voice for the first time.

Perhaps the most enduring lesson I learnt was the irresistible pull of a story well told. I remember laughing uncontrollably, while we read a Don Quixote story in Mary teacher's class. I wanted to stop laughing; I knew I was embarrassing myself. But I just couldn't. The harder I tried, the worse it got.

The bulk of my writing these days is technical or semi-technical. The goal is to illuminate, rather than to entertain. While this imposes some constraints, narratives are just as important (unless you are writing a manual), in technical writing. It is perhaps the only writing lesson I try to actively cultivate in my students.

People like stories, and scientists are people. The papers I enjoy the most have many elements of good story-telling. How did we get into this bind? Who/what are the key actors/methods? How do things unfold? What is the moral of the story/paper?

For that lesson alone, I am forever grateful to Mary teacher's role!

Stung by A Ray!

Last weekend, I was at the beach, wading around in the shallow waters on a beach off of beautiful Florida's Gulf coast.

All of a sudden, I felt a swift, sharp, barb strike my right calf. I couldn't help screaming a non-family friendly synonym of "ouch!".

My instinct was to run away from the scene towards the beach. I noticed blood trickling out of a narrow gash, about a quarter of an inch long.

It turned out that I had been stung by a sting ray, although I did not know it at the time. The pain was excruciating, and lingered around for well over six hours.

Here's what I learned: (i) you should "shuffle" or "skate" along the sea; not "step" walk. When approached laterally, sting rays know how to get out of the way, and don't feel threatened, and (ii) douse the wound in really hot water, as soon (and for as long) as possible. The hot water breaks down some of the proteins in the venom, and dramatically reduces the pain.

Santa's Lesson

I watched with amusement as my 6-year old rushed from her bed to the Christmas tree, and simply stood still; her hands folded, and her eye-brows intensely furrowed.

When asked why she wasn't opening her gift, she seemed upset, and barked, "Hmmpf. That's our wrapping paper. I saw it in the closet!"

Moments later, her 7-year old cousin rushed downstairs, picked up her gift, and began reading the accompanying letter that Santa had left her. "Hmm," she murmured, "this looks like my mom's handwriting!"

When her mom swung by shortly thereafter, she remarked, "Santa's handwriting is a lot like yours." That was the only possible explanation consistent with her beliefs, and empirical data.



I couldn't help but notice the striking parallels between the evolution of my daughter's belief in Santa, and my belief in God.

Mandatory disclaimer: My religious beliefs are hard to explain; especially, to myself. On Mondays, I am an atheist; on Tuesdays, I am Buddhist; on Wednesdays, I am agnostic; on Thursdays, I am born-again, etc.

When you are young, belief in Santa or God is imposed by authority, usually parents. The wider community perpetuates the myth by suppressing contradictory evidence. It is further encouraged by fun rituals and traditions (gifts, festivals, family and food), which plaster on a positive atmosphere around the whole shebang. Both involve prolonged singing and chanting.

Like God, Santa is opportunistically leveraged by those in power to regulate behavior. "Do you want to be on the good-list this year?" is but an age-appropriate translation of "Do you want to go to hell, mister?"

God and  Santa don't communicate directly, and even when they supposedly do, they are not particularly articulate ("Ho, ho, ho" anyone?).

Once you are old or wise enough, you begin noticing discrepancies in the narrative. "How does Santa fit inside our tiny chimney?", or perhaps "why does Santa's handwriting match my mom's?", or perhaps, as my sister's daughter once asked about a Hindu God, "do the four heads of Brahma talk to each other?"

As always, "that's funny!" is the prelude to "Eureka!"

When explanations to reconcile new data with existing beliefs start sounding too contrived, progress can be made by abandoning or revising beliefs to allow for simpler explanations.



If I were a betting man, I'd wager that the illusion of Santa would disappear before next Christmas, for both, my daughter, and my niece.

One part of me feels sad about Santa's impending transition from the real to the imaginary axis. The other part is thrilled in anticipation of this moment of metamorphosis.

The moment when they realize that they can throw away the crutch, and yet retain the spirit of Santa or God, to be merry, and do good.

Shooting at Florida State University

On Thursday morning, I woke up groggy in a hotel room in Atlanta, after my phone buzzed for the third time. It was 6am, and I was at the AIChE annual meeting.

In a few minutes, I found out about the shooting at Strozier Library on campus.

Shortly after midnight, a gunman, later identified as Myron May, had opened fire and injured three unsuspecting students, whose only fault was that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The library had been unusually packed, due to exams and project deadlines that mark a semester rolling to its end.

Obviously, this one struck really close. I stroll past Strozier library and Landis Green almost daily, because it is one of the most beautiful parts of the campus.

Even as the University is struggling to make peace with this senseless random act, a cloud of confusion envelops me.

Personally, I am firmly anti-gun. There are a few things, I am absolutely clear about: (i) assault style rifles have no place in a civilized society, (ii) some background checks/licensing are absolutely needed to prevent criminals and psychotics from picking up a gun from the nearest Walmart.

An outright national ban on guns would probably please me, but it is politically difficult. I also haven't sorted out this issue in my mind completely, and a number of discussions I've had with friends and colleagues have left me with a lot of nuance.

For example, I recently heard the argument that gun laws should be local: the rules in downtown New York City need not be the same as the rules in a rural Minnesota village, where hunting is woven into the fabric of the society. At face value, this certainly seems to be a reasonable proposition. Furthermore, banning firearms from a jurisdiction is probably not going to deter a criminal, who is bent on breaking the law in any case. Background checks can help, but someone could buy a weapon when they are sane, and retain the weapon, unless gun licenses are renewed annually.

But perhaps, the issue gnawing at me most uncomfortably is whether all this talk about banning guns lets us avoid looking at the issue of serious mental illness. In all of the recent school and campus shootings, guns and mental illness have co-conspired to create a deadly cocktail. Guns seem like an issue that can be divided into a neat binary position - you have them or you don't.

Mental illness, on the other hand, is a much more complicated. It is already stigmatized, and a part of me worries that when the spotlight is turned towards the issue, people will say "put all these loonies away", or "snatch away their guns", rather than having a honest discussion of how to restructure community and safety nets so that mentally ill people can get the help they deserve.

In summary, there are a few things I feel certain about. I would rather see "passionate incrementalism" (a phrase I learned recently and have grown to love) to move the issue forward in little steps, rather than attempting impossibly large leaps that circle us back to the beginning.

Identify the Thief

We are terrible at remembering faces shown to us fleetingly. This video, for example, admirably demonstrates this effect: 4/5 people pick the wrong guy!

On a trip from Denver, we were unfortunate enough to see this play out in practice. We were returning from a very satisfying trip to Yellowstone National Park. After returning our rental van (4 adults and 2 kids), we boarded an Avis bus that was supposed to take us to the terminal. We were tired, anxious to get back home, and somewhat distracted.

There is always plenty of distraction when travelling with two little kids.

There were three other people in the same Avis bus: two guys and a lady. One of the guys (who turned out to be a thief) even dropped something during the trip. I watched him get out of his seat, pick it up, and get back in.

After the bus stopped, one of the guys and the lady got off, and I almost bumped into the thief, and politely gave him the right of way. He said, "after you, please", and I got off, and ran to a get a trolley to haul our luggage.

When I returned, I saw that one of our backpacks was missing. I tried running into the airport terminal to find this guy, but I'm embarrassed to confess that seriously I only had the vaguest idea what he looked like.

And I had two "good" looks at him.

This memory effect is especially not good when you're in a sea of people at Denver International Airport.

In any case, we lost a couple of passports, which led to some irritation, and an old digital camera.

More significantly, I  lost a little more trust in strangers, which unfortunately, is less easy to replace.

Text Editors

When I began coding in earnest as an undergraduate student, we had a few servers which had to be accessed using non-graphical "dumb" terminals. The only thing they could handle was text; even web-browsing was powered a non-graphical program called "lynx".

Boy, what fun it was!

Those times seem as old as dinosaurs.

Of course, in the technology world obsolescence always lurks around the bend; even the original iPhone looks somewhat clunky today.

During those good old days, the text-editor of choice for most programmers was either pico/nano or vi/vim. Since there were no "mice", one had to perform gymnastics with ones fingers on the keyboard to invoke commands. There are many key-bindings that are still deeply etched into residual muscle memory.

While these editors are still capable and retain large fan-bases (vim was the most popular editor among Linux Journal readers in 2006), after I moved to graduate school, I jumped over to the Emacs camp.

Emacs was awesome and I loved it.

It opened up whole new ways of doing standard tasks. It was very extensible, configurable, and greatly facilitated code development. Syntax highlighting, auto-indentation, regex search and replace - you name it! You could open multiple files in the same window, and have access to the command-line from within the program.

There were many instances in which entire days were spent in the confines of a single Emacs window.

I've used Emacs for almost a decade now. I've resisted the urge to "upgrade" to a full-scale IDE like Eclipse, because a subset of the primary languages in which I program (C++, Fortran 90 and GNU Octave)  tend to be poorly supported. Yes, there is a lot of support for C++ because of its use in traditional software development (as opposed to Scientific Computing where Fortran's influence is very persistent), but would like to develop all my code using the same editor.

Earlier this year, I decided to give Geany a try. It supports C++ and Fortran quite competently, and inherits most of the advantages of Emacs. Unlike Emacs, many of the keyboard shortcuts are more mainstream (Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V), which given my increasing propensity to forget things is convenient.

It makes moving around code a lot easier, auto-completes variable names, and allows code to be "folded", which I never imagined would be so useful. It also has a lot of plugins, and despite it capabilities does not feel "heavy" like Eclipse.

Overall, I find that my coding productivity has clearly gone up.

Koodle: A trip

Koodle is a tiny hamlet (about 15 families, give or take), situated on the backwaters of the river Sharavati, that my maternal grandmother once called home. I have many fond memories of the place and its people, from my childhood - many of which have no doubt been embellished by the usual romanticism associated with good memories from bygone times.

This past December, I revisited Koodle, after a really long time.

Signboard saying Koodle in Kannada

They say no man visits the same river twice, because it is not the same man, and it is not the same river. 

Koodle is definitely not the same. It has continuous electric power, internet, a western-style toilet etc. (all of which my daughter appreciated!). A few familiar people and voices have disappeared, while the ones that remain sound older, and wiser.

The soul of the place has not changed - it is still stuck in some strange time capsule. The raw beauty of the place and its people is still palpable. The vast forests of coconut trees are still glorious. They looked more impressive in person, than in my recollections.

A view from the hilltop

My uncle (who lives in the old house) is still the same old bundle of limitless energy. Just like old times, he took us places, and showed us amazing things. We went on a walk by the river, late at night. He showed us how to fish with only a flashlight. (There is a species of fish that becomes motionless when you flash a light on it like a deer. You can then scoop it out with a butterfly net.)

My uncle Anandu seen with his ancient rifle

Speaking of fish - we ate so much!  My aunt, a tireless hostess, kept churning out amazing stuff from the kitchen.

Backwaters

There are very few pleasures in life that can rival eating fish for dinner - fish - that were alive and well during lunch time.

We had an amazing time!

On English accents

You may have heard this before, but the great state of Arizona thinks that heavily accented teachers may be a bad influence on school kids, who are still in the process of developing their language skills. 

As an academic, and non-native speaker of English, the issue strikes fairly close to home. But the exact nature of my discomfort is somewhat indirect.

Let me explain.

I came to the United States almost exactly 11 years ago. Like almost everyone else, I was initially amused by differences in American spellings ("color" not "colour","check" not "cheque") , pronunciations ("zee" not "zed", "semi"), and syntax ("meet with me"). However, over a period of time, I internalized this "fork" of standard English, like almost everybody else around me. 

Indeed, many Americanisms felt more natural, and less contrived ("meter" over "metre").

Over the last decade, I have also noticed that my speech indeed sounds different, depending on the environment I find myself in. The amount of "Indian" or "American" accent that gets dialed in, is variable - even at the risk of sounding inauthentic or phony.

Recently, I visited my 7 year old niece, who has lived in England for the past five years. During the first 2-3 days, I was amazed that she had not yet fully picked up a British accent, since most immigrant kids of that age in the US usually do.

Then, one day we visited one of her friends, and boy, did she sound different! She spoke without the slightest trace of an Indian accent. 

Even as a kid, she was calibrating her speech to her audience!

Whether the motivation was efficient communication, or not sounding like an outsider, I still don't know.

Bike to work week

Generally, "Hallmark events", which seem to have strangely proliferated in recent years, evoke a mildly derisive response in me, for their crass commercialism. That way they can sell more cards, restaurants can populate slow week-nights, and essentially somebody, somewhere, can get the wheels of businesses rolling.

Last week (May 17-21) was national "bike to work" week, and it was a pleasure to see more than the usual number of folks grinding away the streets of Tallahassee. As for myself, I could not avoid driving on Tuesday, but still 4/5 is not too shabby.

Here are a few nice local bicycling related links:

1. Capital City Cyclists: a Tallahassee based cycling club, mostly focused on biking for recreation, and competitions - but useful local information for commuters as well.

2. Tallahassee Mountain Bike Association: maps of trails and pictures, which are useful because you don't have to commute the same route as you drive.

3. SharetheRoad: a Canadian site with plenty of interesting information (so not really local :) )

Why do you follow the news?

A few years ago, a friend I played ultimate frisbee with in Ann Arbor, asked me that question.

"Why do you follow the news?"

I bumbled a five-minute response, which was sprinkled with phrases like "it is a good habit", "we do not live in isolation", "it allows me to respond to emergencies", and other such platitudes.

Truth be revealed: I thought my answer was pathetic, and figured that if I really thought about the question for sometime, I would be able to come up with something less wimpy.

Part of the obsession to stay on top of the news was certainly an addiction. Reading the news/blogs was a daily fix. But addictions are hard to defend. So I gave up on that.

Part of the motivation was very pedestrian: reading the news helped with small-talk, which, while easy to belittle, lubricates conversations with people, just outside your first circle of friends. For example, following college football closely, allowed me to engage people I shared nothing else with, for long hours. Following a little celebrity gossip, likewise, had some twisted merit.

"Hmm, I may be getting somewhere with this",  I thought. I tried to generalize that sentiment into something grand: "following the news helps us participate in a shared culture", or some such BS.

But even that approach had a problem.

If that "shared culture" was being synthesized by the popular media (which I don't have a very high regard for), then perhaps it really wasn't that desirable!

In the end, I came up with something that went along the lines of, "We live in a democracy. Leaders that we elect, influence our futures. The process of choosing our leaders is best served, if we are aware of the world. Ergo."

Wimpy, I know.

Where are the QuickStar and Amway guys?

When I was in Ann Arbor, MI, my friends and I would bump into these Amway/QuickStar folks all the time (coffee shops, bookstores, grocery store etc.) I was talking to my wife last week, and it seems like we haven't been "approached" even once in three years, since coming to Florida.

It's surprising, but of course, I am not complaining.

It got me thinking about an old incident.

* * *

Once, while still at Michigan, I got a call from this guy - Mr. X - who claimed to be a friend of a friend. He had just moved into the Detroit area. We talked on the phone over multiple weekends, and to be honest, the conversations themselves were quite entertaining.

Then one day, he asked if we could meet, and since we had become "pally" by then, I said yeah.

At his place, I talked with him and his wife, over a cup of tea and cake. He asked me more about what I was doing. At that particular point, I was in grad school wondering whether I should go to industry or academia, and more susceptible to suggestion, than I would have liked.

In short, I was a great bakra.

After about 20 minutes of small talk, I thought I should leave, and got up to say bye. All of a sudden, both Mr. and Mrs. X stood up, and asked me to have more tea.

"Hmmmm. Fisshhhy!", I thought to myself. Something was amiss.

They didn't waste any more time. He started talking about "the business", and "financial independence", "asset creation", and "who wants to be a millionaire?".

When I did not react with the overflowing enthusiasm that was expected, he must have thought, I was the nerdy type, and needed a different approach. Very skillfully, he started spewing out an alphabet soup consisting of "B2B, ..., B2P, ... P2P...", essentially connecting random letters with a "2".

I said, "I am a chemical engineer, and don't know what all this means." It was a rare, but honest concession of ignorance.

He said, I should go to this amazing "once-in-a-lifetime" seminar in Southfield the following weekend. I said I was busy, and he said, "but it will change your life."

Of course registration was about $100, at which point I had completely tuned out, but just to be polite, still asked, "what will I learn?".

I endured another litany of management bullshit, after which I had to go outside and gasp for fresh air.

As I emerged out, the chilly, subzero Michigan air had  lost its bite.

* * *

Society of Rheology meeting - Madison, WI.

I was in Madison, WI  for my annual pilgrimage to the Society of Rheology annual meeting. Of the several meetings I go (or, have gone) to, this is easily my favorite. It is very focused - I learn a lot, and always come back with ideas to try, things to check, and papers to read.

It is small, fun, very good value for money, and has plenty of good food and drink.

Here are some pictures I took in Madison, when my colleague and I went for a run from our hotel near the state capitol to the University. It is always great to catch fall in the northern states, especially having been away from Michigan for a while.

 

 

 

Calvin is funny!

We were trying to take passport-size pictures of our daughter recently, and to say it was a circus, is putting it mildly.

I remembered the Calvin and Hobbes strip, where Calvin makes all sorts of faces, when his dad wants to get a good picture for their Christmas card.

To recall, this is what he gets when he develops his film:

Our experience wasn't very different! Thank God for digital cameras.

Ajoba - a truly remarkable man!

My Ajoba (maternal grandfather) died in his sleep last week. He was 98.

As anybody who met him will say, he was a truly remarkable man.

Remarkable, not simply due to the sheer length of his life which allowed him to witness historical events like World War I and II, the rise and fall of communism,  the emergence of Mahatma Gandhi and the modern Indian nation, the Great Depression, the shift from newspapers to radio to television to the internet etc.

No.

His legacy is not built around being a passive spectator of history as it quickened its pace of change to unprecedented levels over the last century. He was an active participant, a man who made interesting choices in his life - many that directly affect and guide me today.

He was born in a business family in a small town, became enamored with physics, and decided that he wanted to do a PhD, and went to Gottingen, Germany in the early 1930s.

Germany, early 20th century and physics were like Silicon Valley, late 20th century, and computers.

He got to meet and interact with some of the brightest minds of that time (my Aaji - his wife - loves to tell us the story of how she once had Nobel Laureate Milliken for tea). He got out of Germany, and came back to India just as the Nazi regime was taking hold.

He joined the physics staff at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in a department that then included another Nobel Laureate, C.V. Raman. A few years later, in a move I've never really understood even after asking him several times, he came back to his little home town - the same place where I spent the first 18 years of my life.

He immersed himself in science education at the school and college levels. In the meantime, he fathered 9 children - 8 of whom were girls. His education brushed off on all of his children (including my mother). In a time and age when few women ventured out - three of his girls became doctors, four of them got a masters in science, and one of them became a practicing lawyer. He really was far ahead of his times.

He was a voracious reader, and immersed himself in his study for several hours every day. It was a little, quiet, sunny room, with diploma-laden walls, and the scent of old books. He made his own tea and walked almost a kilometer to the college he built and loved, well into his 90s. He led a simple, active, and intellectually full life.

My favorite story about him - something that I derive direct inspiration from - happened on the eve of his 85th birthday. I saw him in his study working out a calculus problem from a graduate textbook. I was puzzled, and asked him why he was doing it. He replied "If I don't practice, I will forget." He worried about forgetting how to integrate a function by parts, when most people his age had trouble remembering their names. His devotion to learning is what kept his mind surprisingly sharp, till a very advanced age. It is only after his eyesight became too weak to read, that the overall deterioration of his health commenced.

The last time I met him in 2008 at Anju mavashi's place - I talked to him about his time in graduate school. He was surprisingly coherent, and laughed often, as he told me stories of his advisor, his defense, and his work.

For almost a full hour.

I never knew, at that time, that this was my last chance to watch, as he vicariously re-lived some of his fondest memories.

Like someone said, "We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will".

And he did.

Medha

Our daughter Medha was born *exactly* on her due date, which still caught us unprepared. With her first few cries the world around us underwent a massive transformation, without really changing one bit. (Morons like oxymorons, you must be thinking, and honestly I am growing tired of this pattern.)

Throughout the pregnancy, whenever friends warned us about the loss of freedom, hours of sleep and sanity, that lay yonder, I always thought, "C'mon there have been at least about 10 billion births before this. If all sorts of people could handle it without any additional qualification, I think I can handle it too." Today, while I stand behind my statement, I can't help but think about how much easier it was to transition from bachelorhood to matrimony, than from there to parenthood.

There is lots of freely available advice on childcare. Most of the good stuff comes with a killer caveat: each child is also fiercely unique. The situation boils down to something like this. You have user's manuals for ten thousand different VCRs. However, you don't have the manual for the exact model you have. So if you browse through enough different manuals, the instructions for operating your VCR would probably be a proper subset of that accumulated wisdom. But then again, it might not - since remember every VCR here is unique!

I, me, myself. An Enigma.

Many many years ago there was nothing. Then there was me. I fiddled with a few stray molecules and compressed them to infinite density. It went bang. Then, for some unfathomable reason, I couldn't suppress an irresistible urge to fart. "BANG!", it violently echoed down the crisp new corridors of Time. This one was Big. Many years later scientists proposed a theory about it...

I am all powerful. When the Gods feel helpless they pray to me. I can collapse parallel multidimensional probabilities to singularities, and tear through the fabric of space-time. I can outrun a photon, and travel at the speed of thought. The arrow of time means nothing to me, I can twist, and turn, and reverse and transform it into a toothpick.

When I am in a particularly good mood I like to resurrect the dead. When my medications wear off, I usually liquidate them again. My unpredictability makes my followers exclaim, "Mysterious are His ways!"

I love food. I consume pesticide for mega-vitamin supplements. I created Monsanto to compete with Centrum. My brain, consequently, has a hyper-intelligence drive. Once I took an IQ test. The test failed, saying it couldn't handle four digit IQs. I can solve hyperbolic partial differential equations with mixed Dirichlet and Neuman boundary conditions, orally. I can recite the value of "pi" backwards. With a pencil and paper I can do 36 billion floating point operations per second. In double precision. Armed with a cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee, I can double that performance.

I am adventurous. I have been through eight hijacks. I supervised half of them. I got the license to kill before I got my driver's license. I've been hunted by the Mossad since more than a quarter of a century. They don't know why and my friends neither do I. I foiled seven assassination attempts on me before I had the right to vote. I haven't voted even once.

I am unpredictable. If someone draws three aces from a pack of cards, I go ahead and calmly draw three more. I have rejected three Nobel Prizes, and one Miss Universe crown on principle.

I am ruthless. When someone makes a wise-crack at me, I put it up on his epitaph an average of 1 minute 22 seconds thence. Treachery and betrayal by the closest of friends has rendered me a rock. And an island. And I love Paul Simon. And the Beatles.

I have been there. I have done that. I have commanded a troop of men in a famous covert operation for the FBI, danced around in careless glee as a shepherd in the mountain valleys of Kashmir, worked in the rain clogged sewers of Bombay, served as President for consecutive terms, written astrology columns for several newspapers, struck Olympic Golds in sumo-wrestling and figure skating in Seoul '88, built my own house on the banks of the Amazon, recovered from an ugly bout of drug-addiction, launched a geo-synchronous satellite and developed several constitutive equations for entangled polymer melts. I built my first grenade when I was five. By the time I was in high school I had an entire arsenal of nuclear tipped, laser-guided, heat-seeking, precision missiles in my backyard with the Middle East eagerly coveting them. I was knighted for life-time achievement as a teenager.

I am a defender of liberty and champion of free-will. I wish I could be as free as a majestic eagle in flight ... Or a nocturnal cold-blooded slimy amphibian with two heads and bloodshot, probe-like eyes which feasts on human blood and reproduces asexually. I am electrically positive, chemically alkaline and physically volatile.

When I'm bored I make accurate meterological predictions for the upcoming week. I play with the dangerous. Chance, fire, evil spirits .... I use asbestos underwear and strongly recommend them. My resume' is more impressive than God's, and if the Universe were a meritocracy, I would be running it. I am a part of the collective conciousness, thought and matter-energy continuum. I love Linux, Pink Floyd and my family. I really do!

I wish the day had one extra hour - so I could sleep some more.

PS: I found this writeup from my grad-school webpage archived on some hard-disk somewhere. It was heavily inspired(!) at that time by a statement-of-purpose by a college applicant to NYU. I thought I'll regurgitate some of my older material, since parts of it still tickle my fancy.

Computing and Me

My first brush with a computer was in the summer of 1986, when my dad bought me a ZX Spectrum with 48Kb RAM (wikipedia). The first six months or so, I spent endless afternoons being wowed by games such as Dynamite Dan and Commando, until I realized that more could be done.

The computer had a primitive BASIC language compiler, and slowly at first, and later with great enthusiasm (like the one that characterizes kids who've just learnt to bicycle), I began writing programs, and that was when I essentially fell in love with the machine. My grades at school suffered initially, but if I can make any claims to being somewhat logical, then that slice of history ('86-'92) had a lot to do with it. It was a great time.

Later at IIT Bombay (95-99) I was introduced to this thing called Unix (which atleast then was the dominant if not only OS on campus), and later during my senior undergrad thesis to Linux. I remember the fun and suffering as the gurus (more "keedas", really) unleashed "write"s to remote machines with ominous messages, popping up "xeyes" on unsuspecting classmates surfing the web for naughty stuff on lynx :). It was my introduction to the networked environment, and I loved it.

During graduate school at Michigan, we were forced in large part to use Apples, which were the only computers with departmental support. Although things did get better after OS X, it wasn't until in 2004, that I switched back to Linux, pretty much full time. Now about 5 years thence, all my machines run some kind of Linux, including the Ubuntu laptop on which I am doing my writing right now.

I am immensely impressed with what I can do, both personally and professionally using extremely high quality and free software (programs on my University webpage). I routinely use Gnuplot, Octave, OpenOffice, GIMP, Maxima (occasionally), awk, JabRef, LaTeX , which run gracefully under Linux. Other things that I like are the (i) ability to automate routine tasks with shell scripts (ii) the ability to schedule jobs and control their priority from anywhere, and (iii) multiple Desktops, which I cannot live without anymore.

There is much more I have to say about this topic, but I'll come back to it later.