When someone you didn't like passes away.........

Rest of the above statement should be obvious.............you wouldn't care a damn. But thats if you never realized his importance and contribution in your life. The person I am talking about was my maths teacher in school.More than the maths he used to teach, he was known for his strict, and sometimes harsh, punishments. And naturally not many of his students liked him. I wasn't different from others. But as I grew older and learnt more, I realized how important his contribution was towards my development. Agreed that his methods were harsh but they were effective. He taught me maths and got me interested in it though I was initially not interested in it, like many children my age. Only a stone that goes under a hammer and chisel will end up being a sculpture. His contribution in my life, to put in mildly, is inestimable. I pray for his soul to rest in peace.

Good Day !!!!!!!!!

Today was a good day at work, for a change. It started off in a "not so exciting" way just like any other day but now at the end of it, I can feel the elation which Archimedes experienced when he started running straight to the palace from his bath tub. What happened with me isn't exactly as good as that though. But things can always be scaled down. Well, the day started with one of my supervisors informing me that he was not at all happy with the abstract that I had prepared for participating in a conference. I have to redo that all over again. Though I hadn't spent too much sweat on preparing the first draft, I was still disappointed. I got over the disappointment of having been informed to work on the abstract all over again and started working on standardizing the setup that I have been working on for the past ten days. I have been trying different combinations and trying to fiddle around with different things but nothing seemed to work, at least till now. I really get frustrated when things don't work even when everything seems OK. But that's an integral part of my work. That's how people develop endless amounts of patience by the time they finish PhD, especially the biology variety. Coming back, today at last all the nuts, bolts and all sorts of tiny parameters seem to have fallen in place. Late in the afternoon things started looking the way they are supposed to look. At last my experimental setup is ready. Not yet. There is still some fine tuning to be done. But I am almost there. The best part was when my supervisor said " good job". When I look back at my last ten days, it was all a worthy investment for today. And for that day when I will defend my thesis.

My first blog

I have just created my blog space and am not sure what to scribble here. So the question now is why did I create this if I don't have anything to put down. Its because everyone around me seems to have a blog spot and I would seem to be lagging behind in exploiting the technological advances of the mankind if I don't have one. Anyway since I have decided to post my first blog, let me put down what I do or what I feign to be doing. I am a PhD student which implies that I think about something no one else has though about, discover something no one has ever discovered, and thus further the knowledge of the mankind by a little more. But what really happens is that I cook up some crazy ideas, publish lots of papers and look to get a good position somewhere in the world. After that............. wait!!!!!!!!! I sometimes wonder if this is what I wanted to do when I decided to take up research as a career. I am probably stuck up in some old world where scientist actually practiced science not to keep the funding agencies happy or to publish but for the "Pleasure of finding things out" (in Feynman's words). But the world has moved and changed. As one of my seniors advised me, in today's scientific community you either publish or perish.