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Showing posts from September, 2012

Idle brain is a crazy workshop !

The daily life of almost any person is pretty packed with work, worries, anxieties, etc. and almost every one of us is pre-occupied with myriads of thoughts. We need to worry about our next project deadline, our next assignment, our health, our family members’ health – kids, wife, parents, etc, our bank balance & savings, the economy, the rising fuel price, our career concerns, the weekly groceries - and the list  never ends. In present times, almost no individual has the luxury of sitting idly for hours and pondering philosophically-incomprehensible and scientifically non-provable questions such as ‘Why do we exist?’ or ‘What happens to us after death?’ or ‘What happened before the universe was created?’ and so on. Oftentimes however, when I’m traveling in a bus to a nearby lab within the university campus or just walking to/from my department, I keep wondering some of these bizarre and seemingly silly questions. It’s not a very fun idea because it tends to transport me t...

Can we enhance India's research quality and volume?

There’s always been comparison of research in India to those in China and in USA, and we always end up realizing how much we lag behind those two giants, be it research in basic sciences or in technology, be in the number of papers published (in journals of international repute), be it number of patents filed, be it number of PhDs awarded and so on. Some people blame it on lack of funding, some people blame it on poor resources (equipments for experiments, etc.) available and some people blame it on the inability of the government and research institutes on attracting the talent pool towards research in India. There’ve been lots of discussions, debates and proposals in this regard, both at the blog/media level as well as at the institutional/academic/governmental level. To my understanding, the amount of funds released for research in India (by the government) presently is not so less as it used to be; I heard somewhere that it’s 1% of GDP or something like that. So, funding may not...

Curiosity and 'Curiosity'

Human mind always seeks to know the unknown. That’s called ‘curiosity’, and that’s probably the most important characteristic of human which made not only made us different from all other creatures on this planet but also has enabled us to achieve the present status of science and technology. The immediate ‘profit’ or application or ‘curiosity’ may not be obvious, and so critics might argue about ‘waste’ of taxpayers’ money being pumped into sending a rover to Mars which isn’t going to solve the pressing needs of the society like unemployment, poor economy, poverty, energy problem, etc. But if you kill curiosity, you kill everything – you kill the progress of human civilization, you kill the very quality which has made us achieve all these. You simply make our society stagnate and saturate. Thus, if we completely stop pumping money into the effort towards knowing the unknown and instead divert all those money towards solving basic human problems like poverty, illiteracy, etc., then ...