Playing with electrons

 As India is battling a brutal humanitarian crisis, any adjective such as 'pathetic', 'abysmal', 'horrible', 'awful', 'catastrophic' or any such word, falls short to describe the misery that has befallen upon our society. Each moment is filled with uncertainty, with fear. Fear of us being that person in the newspaper or TV who's sobbing beside a dead body of their loved one, or of someone in a PPE kit lighting the funeral pyre in a crowded crematorium. Or worse, the fear of waiting for a loved one (struggling for oxygen) to die. This fear is amplified when your loved ones aren't with you, but thousands of kilometers apart.  The front page of the Hindu  (to which I subscribe, in print) is filled with only  covid-related news. Every day. The forwards in Whatsapp, the video clips in Twitter, the photos in the news - they only reinforce my belief that the God of Death is himself roaming on the streets. His soldiers are everywhere in India, mo...

(I wrote parts of it in February, parts of it in March, and the last part in April. So, when I say 'last month', it may mean Jan/Feb/March! As usual, grammatical bugs & typos may please be excused.) Moran is a small town in Assam, split between Sibsagar and Dibrugarh districts. It lies on the primary national highway NH-37 that runs through the state of Assam like its spinal cord.  About a month back, in the soft sunshine of a late February morning at Moran, as I was inclining against a white Toyota Innova decorated with flowers, an elderly person in his 60s approached me in his rather simple attire. I was part of a bride's envoy that was cruising between two districts separated by 7 hours' of road trip on either side of the mighty Brahmaputra, the bride in this case being my (cousin) sister. She was going to be dropped off at her in-law's place, a classic 'bride adieu' trip in our culture. The envoy had stopped at Moran to get tea and snacks, and our cu...

  Today is the last day of 2020. And I am having this irresistible urge to write something. To let my mind wander and weave together random thoughts that bubble in my sub-conscious psyche. Toward the end of a year, I get this urge to look back and contemplate at the year that is just about to fade away, and to pen down my thoughts as we are at the threshold of a new year. I had been thinking of writing something for the last few days, but time has been so scarce that several critical commitments and tasks are piling up even as I am writing now. I was telling my wife yesterday that I needed to write something but if I did, then sending a pending report would be delayed, revising students’ papers and presentations would get pushed to the next year and so on. But then I thought – if I do not write something now, I will not write in a long time because once we step onto 2021, new assignments and tasks would flood in, new hopes of a better tomorrow and renewed vigour toward higher profe...

  I feel good when I write. It makes me happy, calms my mind down. The train of thoughts we have and the myriad of experiences we gain every day get lost and buried under piles of stress and our inherent forgetfulness. Before we can either cherish the moments or digest the lessons they teach us, our experiences become past and recede fast into faint memories. Writing helps us re-live those memories and also enables us to learn better from seemingly unimportant incidents in our daily lives. We are able to gaze into our life more meaningfully when we write because we think back and masticate our experiences. I often contemplate writing. And I want to write on anything which comes to my mind. It helps me understand myself better, scrutinize my activities and my thoughts, my actions and my conversations with people around me. It also helps me think about broader plans in my life, about the things which I have procrastinated (which is not a good thing) and about how I want to feel abo...

Independence Day is a humbling occasion. It reminds us of the unbelievable sacrifices made by our forefathers to give us a free and independent nation, allowing us to live as free citizens.  Independence Day is also an occasion of national introspection, for, at least once a year, we should remind ourselves of the idea that is 'India', and appreciate the uniqueness of the country. To appreciate the idea of India is to understand, embrace and assimilate the astounding diversity that India represents. Our country is a magical tapestry of innumerable communities, tribes, languages, cultures, religions, etc., woven together in an incredible spirit of unity.  India is an amazing idea at work, a great & powerful nation, NOT despite its diversity but BECAUSE OF its diversity. The sheer magnitude of heterogeneity is staggering, and it needs to be preserved, respected and embraced. No matter how small a tribe is, its culture and rituals need to be respected and preserved. Even if a...

( 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...