Sudipta's Life

"!!! FREE PIZZA & DRINKS !!! Group meeting of Alpha-Phi-Sigma !!! FREE PIZZA & DRINKS !!! Come to XYZ building at 6:30 p.m. on 9/30, Saturday !!! FREE PIZZA & DRINKS !!!" Posters of this kind are in abundance around the campus. Right from group meetings of interest groups in forensics to special meetings and get-togethers of Astrophysics alumni. The common theme you notice in all of these is the free pizza and drinks. Nobody wants to know if you are really interested in forensics or if you really care about dying pandas in China. As long as you are a face in the crowd listening to all they are saying with rapt attention, clapping when the crowd does so and making a suitably sad face to know about the death of a waste recycling factory in eastern Yugoslavia, you are in. In fact, if you can plan properly, I believe you can manage to get all your lunch and dinner sessions taken care of by the university for almost all days of the week. Even a small cottage industry...

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...

My roommate, Das, has a guitar. And he plays it well. Plus, he doesn't mind sharing a lesson or two at times with me. So I have been able to pick up the diatone on C-Major, I know the names of the chords, and with a little practice, I think I may be able to at least play the simple chords. But these chords, these rhythms have rules. They are bound by mathematical precision, and you must practice rigorously to be able to understand them, so that you can transition smoothly from a C-Minor to a G-Major. Yes, it feels good to know that those little flicks of the fingers on the left hand changed the sound so much, but it also feels clumsy when an extra string just presses against your finger and gets suppressed. I sometimes feel as though I am killing the music. Patience, practice, my dear... I tell myself. I too shall do it, some day! One evening, I sat down with the guitar on my lap. I practised the sa-re-ga-ma diatone first, and then tried my hand at some chords which Das had been tr...

I did not say it, the doctor did. Accompanied with the regular rolling eyes, big huhhhh (sigh), and a little sideways nod. Mom, I know that you will read this post, but please rest assured that I am ok. These just happen at times. Ok, so the university was offering a lot of opening-time fiestas and free T-shirts for everyone on the day before the classes started officially. Among other things, there was a little van from the US Army offering undergrads a trial to sign up, and also a little rock-climbing experience replete with harnesses and a 20-foot obstacle wall with very climbable rocks jutting out. I was rushing past it on that day with a bag over my shoulders and 2 free T-shirts under my arms to catch the shuttle home, and so missed the opportunity. But these wishes remain... A couple of days or so after this, (this Friday, actually), a friend and I had ventured into our local gym again to see if there were any raquetball courts around so that we could smash some balls about. The...

"What kind of a computer engineer are you, if you cannot fix this problem?" Sounds familiar? Welcome to the world of ironies. I have faced this question from many different people at different times, with the reason behind such an outburst ranging from not being able to fix a printer to not being able to debug a program in Matlab. The trouble is, it is not just worth trying to make someone understand that the word 'computer' stretches beyond what you commonly perceive as your Desktop machine or your favourite laptop. I was a PC-doctor in my hostels. Which meant that when anyone had a problem with their computer: such as non-booting, bizzare graphics resolutions, no sound, or even programs gone haywire, I was summoned. Of course it took some cajoling (like a free tea at the night canteen --- or the promise at least) to get me there. At other times, the problem itself seemed so interesting (like a program that... well, umm.... never mind) that I went and investigated. A...

A graduate student with no classes, no research who is just settling in has a lot to explore and do around the campus. I had thought that I would be having fun in the campus, but never imagined that things could be so good and so funny! I had come back from my lab, when my roomie suggested, "Lets go play something". We had a basketball at home, and so that was picked, another interested guy found from another apartment and off we went into the evening campus! Deserted-looking streets, dim white lights in the sideways and warm dry winds greeted us as we passed so many imposing buildings and shiny marked-out roads in the car. Once parking was taken care of, we headed for the university basketball grounds. But then classes have not really begun, and so the whole of the university is still under some sort of slumber. The basketball grounds were closed, the flood-lights turned off and there was no-one around as far as we could see. Well, almost no-one around, since there were peop...

One of the strange things that one needs to do in life, I find, is that he or she needs to learn to cook. There is no escape, if you haven't learnt it yet, you will have to: some time or the other. In my case, all these years in hostels I have never learnt or needed to learn to cook. Someone, somehow, was always there to cook food. And I was absolutely efficient in dishwashing! I really mean it --- friends would cook using all the utensils they could find, take all the time they need, while I would lounge about in the sofa in the living room, flipping TV channels. And after a hearty meal, it would take me 15-20 min to get the whole place sparkling clean! Things were so good for me and for everyone else then :) But then I came to America, and found the quintessential invention that will take away my job: the dishwasher! So I woke up the next morning, and found my room-mate in the kitchen area, sipping on a glass of coffee. Jetlagged morning time needed coffee here as well, and I tho...