Playing with electrons

 "What is the most resilient parasite in the world ? A bacteria ? A virus ? ... An idea.. highly resilient, highly contagious..." True, it's Inception - the movie that baffled one's senses last year, a movie where the viewer has to participate in it's story building process to decide or wonder at its end if that rotating top would stop spinning. The most captivating concept in that movie, to me, was the concept involving a dream inside a dream inside a dream inside a dream. God ! Four layers of dream ! That's unbelievable in real life. I mean, I have never come across any real world person claiming to have had experienced four layers of dream while sleeping. A couple of movie's dialogues however, were very catchy, for example "when you dream, you do not know that it is dream. You think that's reality.", and another one: "Time's slower in dream than in reality.". Well, let me keep the movie aside, for that wasn't my ...

Snippets from the past – I An unusual night (or late evening) Winter in Guwahati is not as bad as I have experienced in some other places where I have had the fortune/misfortune of staying. Guwahati is the biggest city in and houses the capital of, my native state Assam, a state that belongs to ‘north-east’ India although technically it lies far east in the map of India.   It’s a pretty big city though not certainly as big as other metropolitans in India like Delhi or Mumbai. Encased by valleys and hills all around, it is, or rather was beautiful, the ‘was’ replacing ‘is’ due to increasing man-induced disorder and dirt in the city which is so poorly overlooked by the administration. Guwahati serves as the gateway to the entire region of north-east India which is so isolated from the mainstream India, both geographically and otherwise. So although connectivity in various other regions of north-east India has been bettered to some extent over the years, yet Guwahati still serves ...

Sunset  Every time I take a walk on the streets in the late evening close to sunset, I become more convinced that life is worth living. Sunset has been my favorite between sunrise and sunset, of course, because every day I wake up late enough to miss the freshness of sunrise. So invariably, I am left with one option – the sunset. Ever since my high school days, I have always enjoyed a walk at sunset, and almost every evening, I make a conscious effort to take even a five minute walk close to sunset. Else, a sub-conscious feeling of suffocation lingers about me for the rest of the night. However, being far away from sea-shore or even from any big river or vast plain land, I do not literally see the sun kissing the horizon in the literal sense. It is the evening colors which the setting sun weave in the sky that I refer to as my ‘sunset experience’. A work-burdened day of course restricts me from taking my favorite evening walk. Back in Golaghat (Assam, India) which is where my pa...

It was a very cold and snowy day. There was this tall Indian guy walking beside me. A colleague of mine that he was, I kept talking to him more of course, than to the other really short stranger who was also walking beside me. The snow was really very bad on that particular early February noon in 2010, in Columbus, Ohio, with nothing but an all-enveloping, thick white blanket engulfing our boot-covered feet as we tried to put our steps forward slowly. I was very hungry, and hence I was not so enthused to drag my feet indefinitely along with my Indian colleague in an effort to help find a single bedroom apartment for this rather reserved and short Italian stranger who had arrived in Columbus, to become another colleague in our research group. With heavy boots and thick jackets around our bodies, it was really a pain to walk even a mile which seemed like a light year. The dense whitish snowy ambience mocked cruelly at the sun trying desperately to throw a beam of extremely faint ray no...

          Well, this is a question discussed, debated and pondered over very often, and for really time in my colleagues' (or friends') circle. By the way, if you spend most of the time of the day in the lab, with your lab-mates, and almost every day of the week, then, your lab-mates or colleagues become your personal friends too (not a general rule though !), provided they are not nut-heads or introverts or fierce rivals. I can not generalize it, but at least for some members in our group (and including a couple of co-PhD students from an another group with similar research area as mine), the borderline between personal friends and professional colleagues is kind of a diffused one. It is a really good thing, where you not only work towards a healthy research ambiance with an extremely helpful attitude sans rivalry and competitions but also share personal stories of happiness and sorrows very often. More on this later !            ...

  I was reading a very recent article “Graduate students: Aspirations and anxieties” published in Nature Jobs ( http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2011/110728/pdf/nj7357-533a.pdf ) which was comical but very true at the same time. It reflects what I and many of my colleagues (or personal friends) are feeling right now as I am writing this blog. The article, which consisted of statistical results based on a survey of about 5000 PhD students scattered across a dozen countries, shows how with each passing year, in an average five year period of a typical PhD student, things like - satisfaction in one’s PhD, interest in one’s work, guidance received from one’s adviser and probability of commencing a research career after PhD – decrease gradually. The dip is the sharpest in 3 rd year although it rises a little bit in 4 th year for some parameters and eventually decreases for the final year. I am going to complete my 3 rd year of PhD in a month, which speaks about my mentality, att...