Sudipta's Life

Fool, oh fool... when will you learn? How much more price do you have to pay before you realise that the world is not what you were told it is? How many more pyres of your dreams and trust need to be torched before you will realise that you have been cheated? You will never learn, dear. You will implicitly trust friends and their words. You will believe them, make way for them, go out of your way to help them. And one fine day you will discover that they didn't stand by you when you needed them the most. You will have fierce loyalty towards your friends: you will neglect your own comfort and priorities just to see a little smile on their faces, or to hear a little sigh of relief from them. And then, when the time comes, you will suddenly be disillusioned: those that you trusted the most will stand on the other side of the bank and watch you sink in the river. They will lose faith in you when it counts the most. At best, they will shrug their shoulders and say, "I'm sorry -...

I receive a lot of emails these days from people, asking me to evaluate their University lists, statements of purpose, whether their GRE scores are good or not, etc. While some of them I answer personally, others are redirected to better places like edulix , or suitably to ask better people: I have no idea in blazes how good the University of Toronto is, for example, in civil engineering. But there is a common thing that I need to tell these people: involving the application process and the statement of purpose, in general what it means to become a graduate student as I perceive it now. The basic point about an SoP is its purpose: what is your purpose in getting an MS or a PhD degree? How much value and priority do you assign to research, to learning, just because it quenches some thirst within you? If you love to do research, to explore and tweak around, it will show through in your daily day-to-day actions. As for example, how dedicatedly can you browse through the archives of endles...

[This, dear readers, is the last in a series of posts of my article. Bear with me, something up close and personal will be coming up soon] A big step towards creating communal harmony will be appealing to the people via the mass media --- the movies. We must take a lesson from the Hollywood movies, and learn how America is portrayed in them. The image of the unknown is crafted very carefully in there, and that is what we too need to try and achieve. Blatant altruism and partisan movies will not work… it will become more of a laughing matter. The message has to be subtle, depicting the power of unity, of integrity, and most importantly, depicting the fact that no religion asks us to kill. The message that needs to be put across is that God does not need you to protect His honour. Another problem that needs to be addressed is poverty. We have to feed the stomach first, before feeding the minds. To an ordinary Indian, everyday necessity is too hideous to allow him to think of anything e...

[continued from the previous post] There is yet another problem. Our fathers still wince at the thought of having to share their bottles of water with a co-passenger who might be from a different community. That, broadly, is the reason it were the big cities more than the rural areas that witnessed the most widespread riots in the recent past. The bigotry is entrenched. No amount of reasoning can change that. The solution lies not in changing for the better the minds of the older generation. It lies in bringing the younger generation up in another mould. For us, thirst dictates the buying of a bottle of water; we don’t stop to think what community the bottle-vendor is from. It is the young minds that can be moulded into the sublimity of secularism while retaining the impressions of their own respective religions. The old and hardened minds can be beaten to pieces; you cannot change them. Sometimes it is just plain ignorance, or sometimes it is just the low self-confidence we have on ...

This post is part of an essay I wrote for a newspaper competition. Unfortunately, this wasn't published :( So I decided to post it here. Since the real post is an essay, I will spare yo uthe torture and post this in 3-4 parts so that you may juse feel like reading through :) When I was a child, I had read a little story. It was of two friends, who went to attend a small get-together. They were the best of friends, and preferred each others company to the general hullabaloo of the party. After they settled themselves comfortably in a corner, they started playing cards, while listening to a radio broadcast. All was well until the radio news came on and announced that there had been an outbreak of ‘religious’ riots at some remote corner of the country. The two friends started an argument, abused, hit, and then finally stabbed each other, all within the span of a minute. When it all ended, the others in the room just saw two buddies dying in a pool of their own blood; two people who we...