I was reading "The Story of Philosophy" by Will Durant. The author mentions an anecdote from Voltaire's life that made me smile. I hope you will enjoy it as well.
A visitor from Albrecht von Haller's place meets Voltaire for the first time. Voltaire begins the conversation by praising Haller.
"He is a great man, a great poet, a great naturalist, a great philosopher, almost a universal genius."
The visitor is surprised, "What you say, sir, is the most admirable, as Mr. Haller does not do you the same justice."
"Ah, perhaps we are both mistaken." Voltaire quips back.
I am happy to be a student of Computer Science specializing in design and analysis of algorithms. But the question remains whether there is some other profession where I would have fared reasonably well. Had destiny wanted me not to grow up as a nerdy scientist, what would have been my Plan B?
One should possess a couple of qualities in order to succeed in any job: passion and caliber. The situation is quite similar to winning a girl's heart. I may have a passion for Sania Mirza, unfortunately though, she is way beyond my reach. On the other hand, I don't have a passion for Rakhi Sawant, and fortunately enough, I am way beyond her reach.
Just like millions of Indians growing up in the nineties, Cricket was my first love. Unless distracted by unimportant, mundane events such as going to school, I watched every game of team India. I attended each and every match at Eden Gardens. Further, at the cost of being immodest, let me say I had a reasonable amount of cricketing sense. But I lacked the physical stamina and eyesight to become a cricketer. Someone jokingly said, "Sayan bats like an Anil Kumble, bowls like a Rahul Dravid, and fields like a Sourav Ganguly". Can you imagine anyone else simultaneously being compared to three greats of all time!
I am extremely fond of listening to music, and a huge fan of Kishore Kumar. Once I took a serious attempt at learning how to sing. What transpired next was not much different from this clip.
So I tried my hand at painting. It took a couple of lessons and one slap from my teacher (I was only six years old at that time) to induce me to drop both my ambition to become a painter and my name from the class.
Finally, I stumbled upon something I could do well and was really passionate about, namely, reading books. It has remained a passion since early childhood. What a pity that I cannot take it up as a profession, nobody pays you for reading short stories, novels and history.
I am enjoying a lazy vacation since the beginning of August. In spite of having plenty of free time, I was not able to produce a single post, and I sincerely apologize for this terrible disaster to the superior race of people consisting of regular readers of my blog.
Any post in this blog is an output of the following simple program.
Write some garbage that instantaneously comes to your mind.
FOR( ; ; ){
IF(satisfied with the write-up) BREAK.
ELSE edit post. }
Publish post.
A "writer's block" is encountered if the program runs into an infinite for loop during execution time. I decided to modify the program a little bit in order to get out of "writer's block".
Write some garbage that instantaneously comes to your mind.
FOR(i = 1 ; i <= 0 ; i++){
IF(satisfied with the write-up) BREAK.
ELSE edit post. }
Publish post.
Moral of the story: This post is garbage. Furthermore, one way to get out of writer's block is to write a post on writer's block.
Last few posts dealt with the rather interesting topic of politics. This one is to cheer myself (and the multitude of four people who still follow this blog) up.
Suppose a man in his early twenties embarks on a grand voyage in India by public transport; and providence dictates that he has to sit right next to a young member of the fairer sex. Without loss (lots?) of generality, his fellow traveler will fall into one of the four categories.
1. Normal type: She spends most of her time reading books, looking outside through the window, or sleeping, and can be easily put up with.
2. How Dare You type: She feels every single (pun intended) gentleman on this planet earth is eagerly waiting for the opportune moment to propose to her, and it is her holy duty to nip in the bud even the most innocuous looking approaches. For example, if she has occupied the window seat in a bus, and the poor mortal asks where her destination is just to know when he can grab the vantage point, she will deliberate vehemently in her mind before (if at all) condescending to give an answer.
3. I have a Boyfriend type: She loudly chats on her cellphone, consciously conveying the message to people around her that she is talking to her boyfriend.
4. I am a Princess type: She travels by train, and cannot stoop to carry her own luggage. Moreover, it is incumbent upon her fellow passengers to place her bags in the upper bunks before settling down themselves.
PS:
1) Types 2, 3 and 4 are not mutually exclusive.
2) This post is entirely in good humor. No offense meant.
3) Feel free to point out if I missed some other types. :)
I have finally decided upon my dissertation topic. The thesis title will be "An approximately optimal strategy for procrastinating in graduate school". It is easy to see that finding the exact optimal strategy is undecidable. The proof is by contradiction: First of all, you cannot procrastinate indefinitely, otherwise good sense will prevail and you will be kicked out of the department. Now suppose there is an optimal strategy that enables you to waste "x" amount of time during the course of your PhD, while leaving room to convince the professors that you are actually doing some work. Then surely you can waste "x + \epsilon" amount of time for arbitrarily small "\epsilon" and no one will notice. Thus, the strategy you chose was not optimal to begin with, and we have reached a contradiction.
The good thing about this project is that I can provide experimental evidence supporting the claims (citing my own procrastinating journey through graduate life) in addition with theoretical results. The work will have serious practical impact and this in turn will increase the chances of me getting a job after graduation.
Announcement: From today onwards, I will be posting once a week (possibly every Sunday). It should help the viewers better digest and dissect the intelligent opinions propounded by this humble author.
I met her in the library a couple of months back. She was mysterious and beautiful. I immediately fell in love.
Now I keep thinking about her for hours, being unable to concentrate on anything else. I have tried my best to approach her but it has not been easy; progress has been very erratic so far. Sometime she opens up, sometime she ignores me completely.
If you are a true friend, wish me luck.
Want to know who she is? She is the problem I am currently working on.
I was born in Mumbai. Before committing myself to a life of deprivation, boredom and poverty (in other words, before joining a PhD program), I spent twenty one years in a beautiful place called Kolkata. And I started this blog to express my thoughts on a beautiful journey called life. Cheers!
