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