Posted in personal, tagged associations, change, email, friends, friendship, happiness, life, love, lovers, memory, past, people, relationships, sadness, sentimental, sentiments, time on May 8, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Rummaging through my old emails, I found this passage, from an email I wrote to someone three years and six months ago.
There are so many things that are close to you at some point of time. People who were important in your life or just friends ; and then there are surroundings and places. They become part [...]
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Posted in libertarianism, personal, tagged beliefs, change, coercion, coming of age, faith, force, freedom of speech, government, growing up, ideology, liberty, life, maturity, personal, rationality, reason, religion, science, scientific spirit on April 28, 2008 | No Comments »
Apropos of nothing…I remembered myself from ten years back.
When I hated all mongerers of superstition; when I simply could not fathom why the government did not declare the practice of astrology, quackery, faith-healing and all related unscientific mumbo-jumbo illegal; when I would have liked all religious extremists and preachers of hate put behind bars; when the ultimate [...]
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Posted in math, personal, tagged automorphic forms, barry mazur, bulletin, journal, l functions, math, mathematics, number theory, paper, popular science on April 16, 2008 | No Comments »
Most people, on coming to know that I do research in pure math, respond with a nod or a wide-eyed, “Ohh, that must be so hard!” Occasionally however, someone goes further and asks me what my research is really about. And then, I am usually in a fix.
How do I respond? There’s no way to [...]
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Posted in personal, travel and getaways, tagged angeles national forest, bear, camp, campground, camping, chantry flats, forest, hike, hiking, hoegees, life, math, mountain, Mozart, nature, san gabriels, scenery, seclusion, solitude, tent, travel, weekend, wilderness on April 8, 2008 | No Comments »
The reason there were no posts over the weekend is that I went solo-camping in the San Gabriel mountains just north of Pasadena.
The idea of spending a weekend alone in the wilderness first occurred to me during a hike I did in the San Gabriels with a couple of friends last summer. I was awestruck by the utter [...]
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Posted in personal, travel and getaways, tagged 58, driving, eerie, freeway, freeways, journey, moon, night, rural highway on March 20, 2008 | No Comments »
I was driving from Pasadena to Palo Alto on Tuesday when at one point the freeway started looking rather unfamiliar - too much traffic, too many exits. A short investigation revealed that as a result of staying on the wrong lane about twenty miles back, I was going north along the 99 rather than north-west along the [...]
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Posted in math, on certain arts, writings and performances, personal, tagged blog, blogging, grad student, graduate student, life, math, Mozart, music, personal, phd, research, student, student life on March 17, 2008 | No Comments »
I haven’t had much time to blog this weekend. Ideas for posts came and went. News broke, and got stale. I gave them all a haughty ignore and, with single minded devotion, concentrated on my L-functions.
One of the drawbacks of being a fourth year grad student is that you need to do a lot of research quickly enough [...]
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Online reading has its merits, but there’s nothing like sitting in a comfortable couch and flipping the pages of a favourite magazine. So, four weeks ago, I signed up for a year’s subscription of Reason, and my first copy arrived today. Delicious.
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Posted in personal, sci, tech and gizmos, tagged bias, computer, downgrade, drivers, funny, laptop, life, vista, windows, windows vista, windows xp, xp on March 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I have posted about the anti-Vista bias before. Now, there’s nothing wrong with not liking a product- but the strange thing is that Vista loathing seems to be strongest among those who have never used the software (or barely used it). The latest example is my officemate who bought a new laptop the other day that came pre-loaded [...]
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Posted in personal, tagged grad life, grad student, grocery shopping, housemate, humor, life, personal, roommate, student life on February 1, 2008 | No Comments »
My housemate sent me an email yesterday which I thought was rather funny and am reproducing in full below.
No pathbreaking results in research; no car to take me places; not particularly proficient at arts or sports; and now the house has run out of eggs, milk and veggies too. But there’s a part of me [...]
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Posted in belles-lettres, personal, tagged beauty, cafe, children, coffee-shop, life, morning, outdoor cafe, pasadena, personal, sunshine, winter on December 8, 2007 | No Comments »
It’s a brilliant morning. The air is cool and fresh, the sunshine abundant and there’s not a cloud in the sky. I sit on a metal chair outside Corner Bakery sipping my coffee.
The road is full of colourful kids. It’s the annual parade day. They walk, they smile, some wobble along on their tiny bikes wearing their impossibly cute red [...]
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Clive Crook is an excellent essayist and this passage -from his sterling tribute to Milton Friedman- is particularly close to my heart.
There is no great mystery about the reason for this double standard. Freedoms that express themselves through market relations—the freedom to buy and sell—are widely regarded as ethically compromised. This is the freedom to [...]
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Went to meet Anshul today. It was nice to talk of old times.
He informed me that there is a True-Lies website. The articles on 29 and the monthly PJ awards are by me. And oh, the first year at ISI! The first term in particular! Has there ever been a time like that? It was [...]
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Posted in imported-from-old-blog, personal on August 11, 2005 | Enter your password to view comments
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Isn’t it reasonable that the expression of the most intense emotions, the most powerful feelings should lead to good art? No, dear reader, it usually leads to bad writing. A hotchpotch, a conglom of crap. You wish it would move her, but it doesn’t, and how can it, when it doesn’t even move you when [...]
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On a stream of consciousness from my last post…one of Robert Frost’s best poems
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
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