Life as it is

I haven't blogged for a while; in fact, did not even check the blogs I usually follow. It is Friday afternoon. I skipped office in favor of work from home, and this post is clear evidence of my penchant for hard work.

I am eagerly waiting for my trip to Kolkata in August. Furthermore, there are plans to visit Arunachal Pradesh, Mumbai and Durgapur. The countdown has begun.

During the last few weeks I felt extremely motivated to master the art of procrastination, read some Bengali novels by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, and finally finish the 900 page volume "India After Gandhi". I want to dedicate a blog post for reviewing this fascinating account of independent India, together with "The Last Mughal", a book on the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 that I read couple of months back. Unfortunately, right now I am too lazy to do any serious writing.

Perhaps I should start teaching a crash course on procrastination; prospective students will be able to get inspiration from my unmatched personal achievements in this front, accrued over a period of no less than two years of graduate study. Let me know if you are interested.

Before signing off, here is my first attempt at a short (micro?) story.

Once upon a time there was a boy.
He loved a girl.
She did not reciprocate his feelings.
Yet he could not stop loving her. WHY??









Because he was fond of wasting a whole lot of time. :)

My thesis topic and an announcement

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.