Enjoy the Silence

One of the most addictive tracks I've ever heard, Enjoy the Silence from Depeche Mode's Violator album (also featuring Personal Jesus, covered later by Marilyn Manson) simply blows my mind away every time i hear it...and the cover by the grindcore band It Dies Today is equally impressive. The main verse of "All i ever wanted, all i ever needed, is here in my arms| words are very unnecessary, they can only do harm" is one that will stick in your head for a while.

It was a good Oasis...made better by the fact that Lounge Piranha comprehensively showed everyone, including hopefully the great organising team, that sophistication and musical sense goes way farther than playing to the crowds....eat your hearts out all you jukebox lovers!

Stop this Rot!

A lot has been said in the past few weeks about how Oasis, my college cultural fest should function and how it isn't living up to all it can be. Here's me two penny worth. Writing about what could be my last Oasis, i see students putting in the usual "enthu" for their clubs and departments. These people, especially the juniors, have a right to know about how the fest that they work for functions and is run.

As someone who's been and still is involved in the fest , i feel that the main problem is in how the "Stuccans" run the it. Instead of working for the students of the college, they stab them in the back with sub-standard planning and ham handed decisions. They act like nothing better than inflated air bags. As if being a "Stuccan" is a rare honour.

My personal grudge is in how my club, ARBITS is treated every year. Our work, as defined in the Oasis charter, is to "do what the Stuccans ask us to do". Without knowing the amount of effort and enthusiasm involved, we are written off and given a bad deal. From calling and conforming the professional rock acts (or being asked to cancel our band a week before the fest to save up money for the "bigger" pop acts) to allotting the prize money for our event Rocktaves we are, in lay terms, royally screwed over. In the second aspect we are not alone, and every club that organises events has valid complaints about the prize money. Even approaching and talking to sponsors for our event is frowned upon, like it is against the fest itself. It isn't seen as something the overall fest could benefit from. Like all clubs, we dont have a say in what sponsors are approached for our own events. EVen after our event is sold to a sponsor, a small fraction of the deal sum trickles in for the event itself. We are simply losing out to other colleges who can better motivate participants for their events with bigger prizes. The IIT-K rock show, which almost coincides with ours promises 4 lacs in prizes. Instead of countering them and going all out to attract better bands, we are content with insignificant improvements in our own prizes. And "professionalism" is a word freely thrown around these days by the stuccans. As someone who also travels around a bit participating in quizzes, i know how much of an incentive attractive prizes are. Its so easy now for a college to buy its fest a reputation. No one goes to fests for the "prestige" anymore. But our Stuccans dont realise that. Our fest made its name when all college fests across the country were broke, and ours stood out because of its high quality student run events .

Its not that we dont get enough money from the sponsors. Its just badly used. The professional pop artistes who are called are the biggest drain on the cash pool. We simply cannot compete with the IITs in calling bigger bands. Performers like KK and Lucky Ali play to arena crowds and hence charge a lot. Even smaller colleges in cities get good, mid-priced artictes who deliver good shows but are minus the glam and the fame. We can learn from them. The money that goes into these channels can be used to increase the prizes for the events, and also bring down the prof. ticket prices. Its the events that lend character to a fest, not the professional performers. Now, most of the events have our own students winning them, only because of a lack of competition. As usual, the isolation of Pilani is blamed for the lack of a suitable turnout. The prof. shows should expose the public to new artistes and areas in music. The assumption that the stuccans make is that since the tickets get sold anyway (the people that stay back for the fest don't have much of a choice), its ok to charge them exorbitant prices for artistes that they listen to everyday. Its all about generating revenue, not the music. The biggest losers are the English rock artistes. A common complaint against is that we get heavy metal artistes who only we listen to. What utter nonsense. The last time a proper metal act came here was three years back. Since the english bands cost a fraction what the mainstream popo acts do, its is assumed that they wont attract an audience or that their standard is lower. Catering to the lowest common level dosent always work. There is absolutely no sophistication in the way the fest functions now, right from the bands to the events, and Oasis is in real danger of losing its character. Again, seeing the tickets sell is the only thing that matters, and its easy for the organizers to pat themselves on the back each year after the fest is over.

Its time to stop the rot from spreading. From demanding greater accountability from the stuccans to turning out and discussing issues of real importance (not petty squabbles) at the review meetings, its time the average BITSian stands up for what is his as much as anyone elses's - his own college fest.

Mumbai meri jaan

Pool in bandra, Quiz at Khar, Beach resort at Arnala, meal with friends at Pali hill, show at Andheri or HRC, Worli, etc. , are fun to go to but they take hours of traveling by the local trains, and thats one thing I've become quite good at. Balancing schedules and peak hours, changing trains and stations have become second nature now, not something I've really wanted. Oh well..

The works

July 8, 2008

"The works", a Mumbai band just under a year old, gave a solid performance at the venue mentioned (Fun Republic Mall, Andheri W). The place was good, a restro-bar themed like a European inn.

The performance was energetic, and the band is tight. Their song selection could improve, though. They played what a 80's jukebox would. Agreed, they were catering to a non-musical crowd, but they could definetly move beyond the standard stuff. The band is fronted by Mihir (a "musicman"), someone who keeps himself (and the audience) on their feet, and moved around the venue among the crowd with ease. The lead guitarist is good, and didn't go overboard with his stage act. The show started an hour behind schedule and ended at 12.

Anxiety started to build up as i reached the station only at 12:40, thanks to the lax bus services at that time (cant blame them) and took the 12:50 to Dadar. By the time i reached there, my worst fears had come true. The central line had shut down for the night. To cut a long story short, after using all the survival instincts at my disposal, i trooped home at 3 am. Not a bad night's work.

Sid

Life At PRL

I'm into my last two days in Ahmedabad. Life at PRL has been good. I've just finished giving my final presentation of my project "Extreme Value Statistics in Atomic Eigenvectors", and i must say now that i enjoyed working here. Hopefully the comin months should see the scientists here (Dilip Angom and M.S.Santhanam, now in Pune) continuing the work on this topic, and a paper or two published. The overall treatment of the trainees has been excellent, and we were allowed to use all the facilities available to the researchers and PhD students. I'll definetly miss the unlimited printing access and the fast internet speeds (those hours of youtube!). I also am thankful for the oppurtunity to learn and use MATLAB and improve my coding skills in general, though i may not get to use it anywhere in the future.

This brings me to life at PRL, and research institutuions in general. As was pointed out by Dr. Singhvi before the final presentation, being a scientist is a thrill that few get to enjoy. You're shielded from the hustle and bustle of the outside world, and work on an exotic concept safe in your ivory towers. You're basically getting paid for pursuing a hobby, a passion. While i agree with this, its a very idealistic picture. The years one spends pursuing a PhD and a post-doctoral research is a major deterrent. And yes, the money is not good. Notwithstanding the frequent foriegn trips and conferences one gets to go on, life as a researcher requires a lot of patience, so I feel. And i have a pretty good idea by now.

"Physicists settle down late. If you want to settle down fast, marry early, and enjoy life, its not for you". So said my guide, Dr. Dilip Angom, a smart, young-ish chap, real fun to work with. He's abroad now, addressing a conference on many body calculations in atomic physics in Seattle. All the best to him.

Life here is laid back, to say the least. Long term deadlines are all that one worries about. The frequent tea breaks, the mess-type breakfasts and lunches and the 5 day weeks give me the impression that these people really love the settled environment of a place of learning. The extensive library, well stocked with magazines and journals (and books) is a place you can get lost in. Indeed, the relaxed, entertaining discussions that i've had with the theoretical physicists here are worth remembering. The scholarly charm of the place is what attracts people here. One can imagine what spending years here would be like.

What i've also learnt is that this place inevitably functions like a govt. institution, where things move at their own pace. One can hear the employees indulging in idle chat long after the lunch is over - "Kemcho, Kedar bhai!"

Ahmedabad itself, as i found it, is a neat little city. Not a real bustling place, things here seem orderly. A real vegetarian's paradise, dont expect to find a KFC here. The roads are good, and the place isn't very crowded. I'll miss the city too. The past 45 odd days have been time well spent, so i think.

Siddharth

Hands off my language!

Here's a toast to the English Language.
I'm what linguists call a "non-native speaker", and it is true, technically. But in all other respects, I contest that. I love the language, in all it's oddities, exceptions in grammar and difficult spellings and pronunciations. In fact, these are the very things I love about it. This Anglo-Saxon language, with its cold Germanic and Norse roots, has in my heart a place dearer than my own tropical, native tongue. Agreed, I'm no expert. I'm as prone to simple errors of mis-pronunciation and spelling as the next guy. But I think in this language, swear in this language, and even dream in it. That, according to accepted scientific theories, cannot happen, as one is always conditioned to dream in his native tongue. Nope, not me.
It seems odd, even to me, that today I have decided to register some sort of protest (i'll start with this post) against the manhandling of "my" language by the various other "non-native speakers" around the world. Why should I stand up for this language, the relic of my country's colonial past? I'm as uncomfortable understanding the accents and pronunciations of the "native" speakers, whether they are English, Scottish, American, Australian or Canadian, as anyone else from my background.
But an article in New Scientist magazine (29 March 2008) I was recently reading shocked, and surprised me. It says that the "non-native speakers" are hastening the transformation of the English Language into various dialects which will eventually be unintelligible to speakers of other dialects. Examples are Singaporean English (a bastard mixture of English, Tamil and Malay), Pidgin and Creole, and our very own Hinglish. The article also says that these peoples add native words into the mixture, and, more disturbingly, fail to correct their mis-pronunciations as long as they deal only with each other. Examples of this we can see in our own day to day lives. The "th" sounds in "the", and "thin" are losing out in many places to "d" and "z", "friend" becomes "frien", "succeed" becomes "suss-see", etc. Also, mass nouns like "information" and "furniture" are carelessly being pluraled as "informations" and "furnitures", and this is increasingly becoming accepted. Also, as English reaches out to more and more people, irregular varbs tend to become regularised. Example - "wed", whose past tense "wedded" is now accepted, though "wed" is its past tense form. Our own Hinglish puts me to shame sometimes. Agreed, Hindi-Urdu has been a major contributor to the English language, but the Hinglish thats spoken on the streets here is quite repulsive to me. I dont need to go into the examples of that, I hope.
Ok, fine, I'm a heartless purist. I'd rather hear the Metallica originals than the orchestrated versions of the S&M. But the point here is that I think we're losing something that cant be restored. In another century, the English spoken around the world will be vastly different. But thankfully, I'm not the only lamenting it.

Sid

Daman Diaries

Daman, (nearest town Vapi, Gujarat, half an hour away), is a nice little Union Territory 6 hours from Ahmedabad. Easily accesible by all means of transport (especially rail, as Vapi lies on the regular Mumbai-Surat-Ahmedabad line), this place is worth a visit if you've exhausted all the standard places of interset in and around Mumbai, or if you stay in Ahmedabad or Baroda, which means you have nowhere else to go.

The first thing that stands out about this place is that every second shop, literally, sells booze. Every restaurant is a restaurant-and-bar, and the wine shops are inescapable. They almost invite you to step up and have a cold one for the road. Which is not a bad idea, cause the weather's muggier than one can tolerate.

In case i didn't mention it so far, this place is on the coast, and has a couple of decent beaches. The first of these, Devka , is 10 minutes away from the main town,Moti Daman, and is full of beachside hotels and expensive restaurants. This is, in fact the reason most people go to Devka, and the beach dosent get very crowded. A bit rocky at places, and the sand quite dark, it may not be the most attractive beach you'll ever see.

A note of caution: Travel with gujjus like I did. The more, the better. The hunt for cheap hotel accomodation took the better part of the forenoon the first day. At the end of it, I had given up and was ready to stay anyhere. Thats where the my companions took over and continued the search. We started hunting at Devka and quickly realised that that was the upmarket part of town. Back in the main town, the costs were much lower and after some serious hunting, we found a real good hotel room, comfortable and cheap. Hotel Gurukripa it was called, and here comes the best part: it had a midnight menu with room delivery (and 'wine', obvously), which went well with our plans for that night.

The other popular beach, Jampor beach, is farther away from the town but should not be missed. The road to it from the town passes over a bridge which was rebuilt only recently after getting knocked down in a storm a few years back, and dosent allow any motor vehicles over it except two wheelers. This means that the quickest way to get to Jampor is to walk to the bridge from the town and take a rickshaw after that. But i strongly recommend walking all the way. On the other side of the bridge lies Daman Fort, and cannot be enjoyed in any way other than by walking through it. More on the fort in a while. After the fort the road passes through a rustic expanse of small houses, palm trees and more wine shops. Now around 5 kms. away, it took half an hour to walk to Jampor, and the walk itself was quite pleasant, except in the hot afternoon, and that was when we did it.

Oh well, you can't do everything right. But you can have fun while not doing it. And thats what we did. The walk was long, but we got to go to the un-crowded part of the beach, away from the people and the wine shops. This would be a good time to introduce another peculiarity of the Daman beaches. In most beach resorts, you time your visit to the beach depending on whether it's hot outside or if it is populated by those worth watching. But here, you go depending on the tides. And the tides here are crazy. In the afternoons, the water recedes so far back that you can barely see it. Nah, just kidding. But recede it does. The deeper we went into the water, the more it kept receding. After an hour of chasing the tide and ingesting salt water, we got up to leave. The beach was long and good, and the sand was nice and fine. And not black.

Now hot and hungry as hell, we went to the more crowded parts for a place to grub, and saw that there was only one hotel. Only one hotel in that whole stretch, and as monopoly rules, the lesser said the better. Back in the town, we found a good restaurant, called Nana's close to our hotel. Good food, good range of cocktails and decent amience. A bit stiff on the wallet, but we didnt really care. trudging back to the room, we crashed like trees, Timberrrr! We got up a few hours later but were too lazy to go anywhere just then. The TV came to our rescue. Still later, we decided to sample the 'nightlife'.

Daman visibly improves in the night. The weather finally tolerable, with the sea breeze and all, the roads were crowded with shoppers, revellers and weirdly dressed men in unmentionable professions. Armed with my second wind that day, I get my lazy fellow travellers to walk a bit, and walk we did, all the way to Devka. The journey was good, this time, and walking on the beach, with the water in a spate of high tide and the sky full of stars was more than worth it. Later, we headed back to the town to grub some more, and were happy to find that the area around our hotel was full of decent eateries. A good meal later, we stockedp on supplies for the night. Again, enough said.

The 'morning' after was uneventful. Arguments over where to go next and the TV ,(the right combination of trip-wasters) took up whatever was left of it. Lunchtime came to the rescue, and matters of the stomach took priority. We would have made Pavlov proud. Anyway, the restaurant attached to our hotel, Daman Delite was really good, and like our lunch the previous day, left us quite empty of wallet. With only a couple of hours to spend before our train, we walked to the bridge not far from the town. Instead of walking over it, we decided to enjoy a touristey boat ferry to the other side. The fort handsomely overlooked that channel, the purpose for which it was built.

Here's a short history: captured from the local ruler by the Portuguese, they strengthened it and held onto it till independence. The inside of the fort was like a piece of history come alive. The churches and memorials were very well preserved, and the ancestral houses were quaint and attractive. The fort itself enclosed a little town, and we felt real stupid for not spending more time over it. A lighthouse at the top tier of the fort overlooks the entire seaface of Moti Daman, where the Daman Ganga river empties into the sea. after taking in the view for some time, we head over to the church. A textbook baroque Portuguese specimen, it was large and well preserved.

Then came the time to leave. A rickshaw back to Vapi railway station takes around half an hour and 20 bucks per head, and that was what we used.
Almost like a little Goad all in itself, Daman is, as i mentioned, a neat little place worth a visit. Nuff said.

Sid

\mm/

The Greatest Movie ever made

The year: 1972. The scene: Afternoon tea in Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study. The camera pans around the Common Room, passing by several Princetonians in tweeds and corduroys, then zooms in on Hugh Montgomery, boyish Midwestern number theorist with sideburns. He has just been introduced to Freeman Dyson, dapper British physicist.

Dyson: So tell me, Montgomery, what have you been up to?

Montgomery: Well, lately I've been looking into the distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta function.

Dyson: Yes? And?

Montgomery: It seems the two-point correlations go as.... (turning to write on a nearby blackboard):

Dyson: Extraordinary! Do you realize that's the pair-correlation function for the eigenvalues of a random Hermitian matrix? It's also a model of the energy levels in a heavy nucleus—say U-238.

I present this anecdote in cinematic form because I expect to see it on the big screen someday, now that mathematicians outgun cowboys and secret agents at the box office. Besides, the screenplay genre gives me license to dramatize and embellish a little. By the time the movie opens at your local multiplex, the script doctors will have taken further liberties with the facts. For example, the equation for nuclear energy levels will have become the secret formula of the atomic bomb.

Random Matrix Theory Rules!

(Courtesy:American Scientist)

Some Reviews

It's 6:30 pm and I have nothing to do.
This isn't a normal holiday, and I find myself into my second week in Ahmedabad, interning in PRL. More on that later.
Just to keep the blog ball rolling, i'm reviewing two albums by two lesser known bands that have realy impressed me.
The first is Amorphis's Am Universum. While die-hard fans of the band's conventional Finnish Death Metal Style would disagree with me, I think this (and to a lesser extent, Tuonela, their previous album, from which this is like a step forward) is their best ever, simply because this stands out from all the other albums of the genre released by them. This is probably the closest metal has come to being psychedelic. The moody atmosphere created by the keyboards and the mellowed down guitars (but still heavy at the right places), and most importantly, the clean, soulful vocals and the occasional sax solo instantly went down well with me. Sadly, the band returned to a heavier, metal-oriented sound after this album. A semi-experimental album, it is a solid block of music and the listener can go from song to song without losing anything of the general mood of the album.
The second album is Pagan's Mind's Enigmatic Calling. This progressive metal band from Norway, with its science and fantasy themed music has often been called an old Dream Theater clone. While that is debatable, that shouldn't stop anyone from enjoying their music. Filled with catchy heavy riffs and attractive keyboard interludes, it is indeed worth enjoying. While the riffs are undoubtedly heavy, that word can't be used to characterise their music. Progressive would be the most apt, with a touch of studio-introduced processing and a clearly discernable scandinavian quality to it, that sets it apart from DT. The vocals, though raw at places, clearly has an epic quality to it, and the solos are just fantastic. Indeed, though the average song length might be around 7 to 8 minutes, their songs just don't drag on and on. And no over the top guitar antics that sometimes turns you off. All said and done, a great album to own
Enough said.
Sid \m/

Descent

I know i don't have a life...it's just that i can't prove it mathematically...yet.

Stay tuned for more updates as physics eats into my being...

Strange Frequencies - 2

[Wrote this in 10 mins while high...attempt #4 for CF...have actually stopped caring...
Another tribute to the twin gods of Asimov - Clarke]


What is the craziest you have done?
I'd say it was the time when i acheived the ultimate triumph over my fellow men.

I write this as the civilisation slowly dies and as men everywhere lose themselves to a force i have unleashed upon them.I was born totally tone deaf,lacking relative pitch, the ability to discriminate between musical notes, and i was always made conscious of this fact.My normal hearing is perfectly normal, but my inability to enjoy music really hurt, especially when i see others around me doing so.I always hated them for it.
Strangely i was always drawn to the branch of bio-acoustics, a new branch of science which studies the effects of sound waves on the human physiology, and of which i am now, unarguably the greatest scientist.
I closely studied why only a small fraction of songs become so popular among the masses and whether sounds of certain frequencies affect the brain differently.I studied the frequency profiles of most of the popular tunes and rhythms of the present day and probed them for patterns and other distinguishable features.
What i discovered was astounding.It seems that every song that was ever popular shared a characteristic pattern of a certain family of frequencies.This is something most of you would find ridiculously obvious, and some who would find it just ridiculous.But this is such a taken for granted assumption that precious little work was ever done on it.Before me, that is.
In a few months i had created what could be described as the greatest song ever.THE greatest ever.By putting together the most optimum mix of the frequencies of the family in the pattern i just mentioned, i created something that will ring in a man's brain for ever, a tune so good that it rings for ever in one's head, paralysing the brain into inactivity for good.
After that, it was just a simple of matter of getting a few microphones to transmit the song as a discrete digital signal to various broadcast receivers around the world, and now you probably know what i'm getting at.