Playing with electrons

( Prologue: Toasting to the occasion of completing six years at IISc! Wait, this pic is from Aug 2014, six years back, & the toast was to the start of a new chapter in life, i.e. life as a faculty at IISc, but since we can't go to pub due to covid-19 now, I'm putting up this old pic. And wait, that's not me in the pic but my buddy VR Supradeepa, who joined CeNSE, IISc exactly on the same day that I joined. We signed the joining documents together & over the months & years, developed such a real good friendship besides professional camaraderie that my wife.... err... let me not write it here. Anyway, he looks quite young & fit in this pic, I did too! But now in 2020, the two of us are the unhealthiest obese faculty at CeNSE! ) Today I complete six years of service at IISc Bangalore. I joined on Aug 01, 2014, at Centre for Nano Science & Engg. here at IISc. So, a bit of retrospection is due, to take some time out to indulge in nostalgia. It's been a gr

7 years is a long time to have abstained from writing a blog. I maintained a blog (this one!) back in the day when I was doing my PhD, and I had named it 'Playing with Electrons' because my PhD research was to engineer devices & fabricate them wherein I'd trick the electrons to my advantage by tailoring their energy landscape. And then I stopped blogging, since Nov 2013. That's nearly 7 years. I often thought of creating a new blog but gave up on that idea for reasons I don't remember now. Finally, I thought I'd revive my old blog & continue where I had left. Yesterday, I tried to read a few blogs I had written back in 2012/13, and I realized how much one's thoughts, expectations and understanding of things change over time. Growing old makes one wiser though not necessarily smarter - I recently read somewhere. So here I am, welcoming myself back to my old blog, growing wiser (perhaps), coached by life and shaped by experiences.  I will try to w