In search of Good Music

Music has always been so close to my heart, but I never thought the power of music could be so immense. I heard of revolutionary singers like Bob Marley, Paul Robson but this time I could witness the power of music in my own beloved state Assam. Yes, I am talking about the sad demise of Dr Bhupen Hazarika around three weeks back. When his dead body reached Guwahati, the whole city turned into an ocean of humanity, a scene which our generation has never seen in real life. My dad and his generation might have become very nostalgic about the six year old Assam Agitation in the eighties when such ocean of humanity was visible in many parts of the state, not just a city. Around five million people paid their last tribute to Dr Hazarika, no one from my state has ever got such respect and probably no one will in the next hundred years or so. Bhupen da's songs were not very popular among the kids during my days, we were more inclined towards those kind of music where fancy instruments like electric guitar, drum etc are used. But it did not take a long time till I realized the beauty of Bhupen da's heart touching composition and more importantly his lyrics. His lyrics were all about the story of the native people, the songs really appealed to the people to bring peace and harmony in an otherwise violence/insurgency hit area like Assam. Even a thousand page book will be insufficient to talk about his music, forget about a single blog post.

Just before I started writing this post, I was just wondering and worrying about "what next?". No doubt Bhupen da's music will be in our heart forever, but who will carry forward his ideologies to the next generation? who will create such beautiful music again? Are we going to lose the traditional folk music and get into the modernized commercial ones ? Who will carry the legacy of Late Ghazal maestro Jagjit Singh ? It's a matter of serious concern not just because there are not enough people who are trying to create such compositions, also because the recent trend among the youth who nowadays go to a rock concert to promote bhangra(traditional Punjabi dance) and spread hooliganism. Media in this country is already sold to the politicians and corporates, so they always keep promoting the commercial music, never let the real Indian traditional, classical and folk music a chance to come into the limelight. I have respect for all languages, castes, traditions in India, but at the same time I find it so insane to see the whole country promoting a song with crappy lyrics, written in some deformed version of English and with very ordinary music. I am not just sick of the facebook shares I see everyday, but also the newspaper articles. Whenever the song crosses n'th million views (n is a positive integer) in youtube, there comes a new article in the newspaper. If this is what shows the current trend/taste of music then undoubtedly I will not see any future Bhupen da, Jagjit Singh in my life.

Yet, some people are trying to make a difference, they haven't given up yet. For example MTV coke studio and more recently The Dewarists are trying to bring out the real Indian music to the world. It's so amazing to see such innovative shows in Indian Televisions. They are not just bringing the folk, traditional music from various parts of India, but also trying to create a fusion among them, its really amazing. I never could imagine of a fusion between Assam and Tamil Nadu in terms of music until I saw it in MTV Coke Studio. The Dewarists has some other motivations too, apart from music it is also promoting tourism, food from various parts of India. Their episode 6 of season 1 was about Rabbi Shergill from Punjab and Papon from Assam, they put these two singers together in the midst of wild, open, charismatic Kaziranga national park and assign them the job of composing a song about the God of openness (Khule da Rabb). It was so amazing, the video of the song is here (http://youtu.be/5vg9D2wQ9pA). Story of Rabbi is very inspiring as he said in his interview, it was so difficult for him to come up with something so unique and off-track stuff which probably had no chance of commercialization. But he still came up with his own version of music providing a Punjabi sufi flavor to us. Story of Papon is different though, looking at the fact that he was borne in a place where people appreciate folk music more and also in a family of very popular singer. I really liked when Rabbi said, he loves North East because people there don't easily give up their identity. I hope Rabbi's statement about North East will be a message to the entire country so as to keep our traditional music alive. Kudos to MTV Coke Studio, The Dewarists and all those who still believe in India's traditional identity and doing their best to revive it through music.

SUSY11 at Fermilab

Attending SUSY 2011 conference at Fermilab this year was an awesome experience, thanks to department of science and technology (India) and IIT Bombay for providing the necessary financial support. My trip to Chicago was surprisingly very good, I never expected such a good service in Air India. Last year I had very bad experience with Air India flight to London. But this time either they have improved a lot, or may be they provide superior service in the Delhi-Chicago flight. Anyway, I reached O'Hare airport in the morning of 27th August, and it was surprisingly very hot. May be Chicago is like that only during summer. I took a cab to a place near Fermilab where my accommodation was booked. The taxi driver was a funny guy who thought I was from Italy. The place is quite far from the main city and I had to spend around 90 USD to get there. It's a country of the rich after all, no good public transport available. I forgot to mention a great coincidence: I found three known people in the Delhi-Chicago flight one of whom came for the same SUSY conference and the other two had a connecting flight to somewhere else!

Fermilab is a really nice place with a beautiful surroundings. The conference was nicely organized, specially the welcome dinner and the tevatron celebration party was really awesome with unlimited drinks. The only thing which I was worrying about also went well without any trouble. Yes, I am talking about my talk. Thanks to the audience in the parallel session for not screwing it up ;-). The people were more or less depressed because of two things. The tevatron shut down and the LHC results shown in Lepton Photon 2011 conference held in the previous week. But there were lots of optimist and enthusiast as well who will never give up. It was really a memorable experience to be there.

Since Fermilab is located at a very boring place and I couldn't afford to hire a car, I could not explore anything about the place. However one funny thing I noticed was the name of various small towns and villages which resemble so much with those in Europe. For example, the nearest railway station was in a place called Geneva. It was funny that I went to Fermilab in USA and while returning from fermilab to the city I had to take a train from Geneva. Ironically, Fermilab's rival laboratory CERN is located in Geneva, Switzerland. I spend two days in Chicago. It's a beautiful city full of lots of tourists. And I was there during a weekend luckily and could see couple of functions, festivals etc. Chicago jazz festival was also going on that time. The Michigan lake which look like an ocean is really amazing. I kept walking along the lakeside most of the time, the view of the lake with the huge skyscrapers in the background is really amazing. I could in fact identify most of the buildings shown in the recent Transformer movie. It was a great experience indeed.

Back to Blogosphere!

It's been two and a half months I have neither posted anything new nor have opened my blog webpage. I was occupied with too many not-so-interesting activities like applying for visa, applying for financial assistance to attend a conference. The slow and inefficient Indian bureaucracy made me spend lots of time running here and there for some stupid things. Specially the hectic American visa procedures really kill your time and peace of mind. Anyway, I could have talked about many things in the last two months like my visit to Fermilab for the SUSY 2011 conference, my short trip to home, my recent arXiv paper(1109.3363) which I submitted in a hurry fearing that LHC would soon throw the paper into trash, my trip to New Delhi to celebrate my birthday and finally about my newly started life in Montreal, Canada. I will post about some of these (if not all) shortly!

এটি অকবিতা

কেতিয়াবা কবিতা লিখিবলৈও মন যায়,
এনে এক কবিতা যি তোমাৰ বুকুত প্ৰেমৰ কঠিয়া সিঁচে,
কিন্তু দুৰ্ভিক্ষত আক্ৰান্ত এই হৃদয়ে আজি শব্দ বিচাৰি কৰিছে হাহাকাৰ,
শুনা পাইছানে তুমি সেই হৃদয়ৰ আৰ্তনাদ ?
শুনা পালে পঠাবা মোলৈ শব্দৰ এজাক বৰষুণ
মোৰ হৃদয়তো গজালি মেলিব কবিতাই
তোমালৈ বুলি কবিতা লিখিম
তোমাক ভাল পাবলৈ শিকিম.........

Independence Day!

15th August is approaching, and India is going to celebrate her 65th Independence day. The country, although got freedom from the British rule in 1947, is yet to get freedom from many other things: poverty, illiteracy, insurgency, unemployment, corruption, illegal immigration are few of them. Specially the people of rural India are yet to understand what independence or freedom actually means. Situation is even worse in North East(NE) India, an alien land to rest of India as well as the central government. All the above listed parasites are there in this part of land since the day India got her freedom. The step motherly attitude of the central government as well as the lack of good leaders from this region are possibly the main reasons why NE, a paradise on earth so to say, has always been affected by the above mentioned problems. There are huge number of articles or books related to NE India and its problems which I am not going to repeat here, neither I have studied enough to suggest effective solutions to all these issues. It's just that I feel very nostalgic as this day approaches. Although I have been outside NE India since 2003, yet I come to know from my family and friends there about the celebrations, fears, anxieties in the minds of people there as the Independence day approaches. Things have not changed there, Independence day means a holiday, a holiday of a different kind when people prefer to stay inside home, shop owners never open their shops and car owners never hit the streets. Few government officers come to their respective offices for flag hoisting amidst tight security. Even the Indian railways cancel their trains for around 1 week fearing attacks creating lots of problems for common people who have to travel everyday. I am sure most of the people would even wish if this 15th August day had never come to their lives, they would have probably lived a better life. I wonder how soon these things will change there, I haven't seen any change throughout my life but still hopeful of seeing some changes so that people can come out of their homes to celebrate Independence day without fear but with the pride of being an Indian. Jai Hind!

Physical Review has changed my opinion about peer review!

Couple of months ago, I posted something expressing my anger and frustration about scientific peer review. I had a hard time then dealing with the referee's comments related to one of my papers. Sometimes referee suggest some more work, and after I actually do them and resubmit, the referee comes up with some other objections and reject the whole paper and the whole process cost me several months. Sometimes the situation is even worse. The editor responds like this: "One referee recommends publishing your paper and one referee doesn't. Hence I decide not to publish your paper." I am not kidding, this indeed happened with me. But after I started sending papers to Physical Review, my opinions about scientific peer review have changed. No matter they publish your article or not, the comments of criticism they send are really helpful. It helped me learn much beyond the content of my paper, and in some cases improved the quality of the paper by several times. Rejection on the basis of concrete justifications is never depressing, it is rather encouraging to do better. I have become a big fan of Physical Review now and would always prefer to send my articles to them without worrying too much about impact factors. But of course, I have not communicated with many other publishers, so can't comment on whether they will be better or worse than Physical Review in terms of reviewers comments.

1107.5438

I am happy to be back in blogosphere after a gap of around one and a half months. There were too many things I was involved in related to the administrative branch of my home institute. Slow and inefficient Indian bureaucracy takes too much time to get things done, can't help it. Anyway, I am feeling quite blank regarding what to post. The easiest thing to post is about my latest paper which appeared in arxiv last week. The title of this post is the arxiv pre-print number of my article.

The paper titled as " Spontaneous Parity Breaking and Supersymmetry Breaking in Metastable Vacua with Consistent Cosmology" is all about study of some cosmological issues in a model where Left-Right symmetry can be broken spontaneously as well as Supersymmetry can be broken in a metastable vacua without any reference to hidden sectors (like in usual Supersymmetry breaking models) . Such a model was constructed recently by a Japanese group, we study it in details and point out some cosmological issues which needs to be addressed. The issue is related to the formation of domain walls (extended two dimensional topological objects) which are formed after the phase transition accompanying the discrete left right symmetry breaking. These domain walls have very high energy density compared to usual matter or radiation and if they start dominating the Universe, the standard cosmology will be in trouble in view of recent experimental data from WMAP (Wilkinson Mass Anisotropy Probe). We discussed some techniques to get rid of such unwanted walls in earlier works also and the basic idea is to incorporate gravitational effects which break the discrete symmetry explicitly leading to a pressure difference across the walls. Thus the true vacuum will expand and occupy the entire observable Universe. The model we are studying in this present paper is however different from earlier models in the sense that here both left right symmetry breaking and supersymmetry breaking mechanisms are specifically mentioned, that too without talking about hidden sectors. Such theories are based on Seiberg duality which relates a UV free supersymmetric gauge theory to an IR free magnetic theory thereby making computations easier in both the regimes. The magnetic theory , if assumed to describe the low energy world, also breaks Supersymmetry spontaneously. Supersymmetry preserving vacua also appear dynamically in the magnetic theory leading to metastable vacua. The work I have done, studied the constraints coming from such long lifetime of metastable vacua as well as domain wall disappearance in the left right symmetric model. The life time constraint gives a lower bound on the left right symmetry breaking scale whereas the domain wall disappearance puts an upper bound on that scale. Fortunately these bounds don't conflict each other and more excitingly the lower bound coming from long life time of metastable vacua requirement lies pretty close to the TeV scale. Anyway much more work needs to be done in these models and our work just tells a tiny part of it concerning mainly the domain wall disappearance!

Another Black Friday

With the anti-corruption movement shaking the whole country, the Indian state Assam seems to be witnessing a lot more than that. Although corruption is a problem affecting the whole country, there are other serious problems (some of them are historic so to say) affecting North East India as well as Assam for a long time: sometimes due to the negligence of central government, sometimes due to the state government elected by our own people. Two days back there was a public protest led by Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) in the capital of Assam which turned violent claiming three lives including a minor. They were protesting the recent Assam government plan to evict thousands of Assamese people from hills and wetland areas around Guwahati. Surprisingly the government put up polling booths in all these areas during election. And after looting the public votes, now they are planning to turn them homeless. It should also be mentioned that the government has not taken any such steps so far to evict millions of illegal Bangladesh immigrants from various such government places including Kaziranga National Park.

Lots of public as well as private properties were destroyed, blame it on both the protesters as well as the government who did not take necessary measures. The role of police forces while those properties were destroyed also raises doubts in everyone's minds. They were just silent spectators and did not make any effort to stop it. Around 170 private vehicles were damaged and 2-3 city buses were put on fire in the incident. While KMSS has denied such destruction of public properties, the government is blaming the protesters, specially their leader as well as RTI activist Akhil Gogoi for this. But the role of police force while the properties were destroyed forces one to doubt whether this was a conspiracy by the government itself to put Akhil Gogoi behind bars. They tried to do it before the election also blaming Akhil Gogoi of violating election protocol, but had to release him within hours due to public protests. Today, the government has done the same mistake again by sending him to custody for three days. Already public protests have started at various places in Assam, specially Guwahati. People have blocked national highways, the streets have become deserted with shops, offices closing down. Hope this protest won't turn as violent as the one two days back. Assam might have witnesses hundreds of such black Fridays, but nothing has changed. Forget about such day or month long protests, even the six year long Assam agitation could not fulfill it's sole purpose and both the public as well as the government are responsible for this. Like we were betrayed by the government before, now also there is no good reason to expect something better, but hope the public will act in a matured manner this time onwards both in electing a government as well as raising voice against anything which threaten their existence and make them homeless in their own soil.

Alternative ways to fight against corruption?

With the recent movement in India led by Anna Hazare and others against corruption, there have been mixed reactions from the people of India. Although I have seen very few who are doubting Anna Hazare and his crusade against corruption calling them unconstitutional and all, it is worth looking into any alternative way(if any) in the minds of these people to bring the corruption down in India. Anna team are putting pressure on the government to implement the Jan Lokpal bill which will bring an autonomous body called Lokpal into existence. This will handle everything like speedy probe, trials and awarding punishments to the culprits without asking the government. I don't know why people are opposing this move? I have not seen any strong reason from anyone why Lokpal is not going to work. Most of the people who are complaining it seems, are not a fan of the way Anna is pressurizing the government. I would request them to suggest an alternative way. And even if there is an alternative, let Anna and his team fight in the way they prefer. After all they learned it from Gandhi, the father of the nation. Before independence also, people did not agree with each other in their ways to fight against the British. And they indeed fought in different ways, although the whole credit went to Gandhi and his followers only. So this time also, it's perfectly alright if someone think he or she does not believe in Anna's way. May he(she) fight in his(her) preferred way. As long as people support the cause (which is fight against corruption now) and choose their own way to fight for it, the solution will come in one way or the other. But just criticizing the Anna and his team (which now the Congress led government is doing to save their own political leaders who will be nowhere is Lokpal come to existence) is not enough, people should come up with proper logic why they think Anna's crusade is wrong and also suggest alternative ways to fight against corruption if they at all think corruption is a big problem India is facing nowadays.

Where is this country heading for?

The kind of things happening in this country (India of course) in past few months are really shameful. With the multi-billion dollar scams coming into light and sending the culprits like Raja, Kanimozhi, Kalmadi etc to jail, the anti-corruption movement led by Anna Hazare and later by Ramdev and all have gained a new momentum recently. The way the government has used brutal police force against the peaceful protesters in Ramlila maidan, New Delhi has in fact increased the momentum of the anti-corruption movement with every possible party, organization (except Congress) condemning it. The Congress led government seem to be playing a dual role: they accept the Jan lokpal bill demand of Anna Hazare team on one hand and on the other hand they order heavy crackdown on Ramdev led peaceful protesters. Their recent action has forced all of us to doubt whether the govt is serious at all about the Jan Lokpal Bill which if come into play will leave no room for the corrupted leaders and bureaucrats. Congress seem to be afraid of this bill a lot as many big leaders of the ruling government have been sent to jail already and if this bill becomes operational, may be all of the Congress leaders will be sent to jail. Unable to fight against the mass supporters of anti corruption movement, they government is now taking this issue personally against the leaders like Ramdev by putting income-tax, CBI behind him to probe some issues claimed by the government. The government is even claiming the aide of Ramdev to be a Nepalese criminal and trying to probe how he managed to get an Indian passport. The same Congress government however issue Indian voter ID's to millions of Bangladeshi immigrants who illegally infiltrate into Indian territory. It's unfortunate to see that the opposition parties like BJP are not taking full advantage of such a situation to fight against the Congress led government and their atrocities on innocent people. Even self-acclaimed common men's friend Rahul Gandhi seems to have disappeared instead of raising his Italian origin voice against the inhuman crackdown on the innocent people. He was shouting a lot recently for the Uttar Pradesh farmers against the land acquisition by the Mayawati led government in Uttar Pradesh. But now, when the same kind of situation has arisen sponsored by Congress although, he is silent. This clearly shows how fake Rahul Gandhi and his activities are. Hope the youth of this nation will stop calling him an idol of this country or future Prime Minister of this country or similar bullshits. Anyway, as long as we, the citizens or India are united against corruption, we do not need any false sympathies of people like Rahul Gandhi. Hope this movement turns into a revolution in this country and bring food, cloth and home to the millions of poor instead of increasing the Swiss bank account balance of Politicians.

Monsoon 2011

Season's first rain has finally arrived on June 2nd in the city of Bombay giving the much needed relief from the scorching heat and humidity. Although full fledged monsoon is going to arrive only after June 10th, these pre-monsoon showers are serving a good purpose as well. First rain brings a festive mood to the people of any Indian city I guess, a festive spirit beyond religious boundaries where everyone just come out of their home, office to celebrate by getting drenched in the rain. Although the first rain of the season could be dangerous to get drenched in, yet nobody seems to care about that. Being from Assam, where rain comes very often I am not so much enthusiastic although to go out and get drenched, but yet I love rain a lot, I always keep looking forward to it, it reminds me of my home, my childhood...it feels just awesome. In most parts of India, rain brings an end to the depressing brownish look of the hills, forests and covers them with a fresh green envelope. I know, it sounds exactly opposite to most of Europe where rain brings depression ;-) My landlord in Munich, Germany went crazy when I told him that Indians love rain a lot and we welcome it with immense pleasure. Anyway hope rain lasts longer this time, keeping Bombay cool and enjoyable :)

1105.5006

The title of this post refers to the pre-print of my paper which appeared in arxiv.org today. It's about domain wall formation in spontaneous R-parity breaking models and one possible way to get rid of them by introducing gravity induced higher dimensional operators. Before I go one step further may be I should say something about various technical terms appearing in the last sentence. Domain walls are two dimensional objects which are formed whenever a discrete symmetry gets spontaneously broken. They have a finite topological charge and hence are stable. In our work, this discrete symmetry is the left-right symmetry under which the left handed chiral fields are exchanged with right handed chiral fields and vice versa. Left(right) handed means direction of spin is opposite(same) to (as) the direction of momentum. This discrete symmetry arises in one very promising extension of standard model of particle physics where tiny neutrino masses naturally arise by seesaw mechanism. These domain walls are extended objects and hence will start dominating the Universe after the matter and radiation energy density decreases below a certain limit. However this is against observation, as we know our Universe is mostly matter dominated (+ a cosmological constant) from WMAP and other related experiments. Thus there needs to be some mechanism to make these walls disappear. One possible idea is to create a small pressure difference between two sides of the wall so that the true vacuum expands to occupy the entire causal Universe. We have talked about gravity induced higher dimensional terms (> dimension 4) which break the discrete symmetry explicitly creating the required pressure difference. How these higher dimensional terms break parity is a part of some higher theory (may be hidden sector supersymmetry breaking models, or some quantum gravity models) and we do not discuss that further in our paper. The domain wall disappearance through this mechanism however puts strict constraints on the discrete symmetry breaking scale. In one class of models (having Higgs triplets and hence type II seesaw), this symmetry breaking scale has to be pretty low (< 10^5 - 10^7 GeV) . But if this theory is a part of some higher theory such as SO(10) grand unified theory, then this left-right symmetry breaking scale has to be pretty high and hence is in disagreement with the constraints coming from domain wall removal. We also discuss another class of models (with Higgs doublets and hence type III or inverse seesaw) where both these constraints can be satisfied simultaneously. The good thing about models with Higgs doublets is that domain wall removal does not put very strict constraints on the symmetry breaking scales and hence do not give rise to conflict with grand unification which usually forces the symmetry breaking scale to be very high. Comments and criticism are welcome :)

Adios Shane Warne..we will miss you!

Yesterday the iconic leg spinner Shane Warne had his last match of his life and I was quite fortunate to watch it live at Wankhede Stadium, Mumbai. It was an Indian Premiere League (IPL) match between Rajasthan Royals and Mumbai Indians. It was the first time for me to watch a match live in a stadium. And it was a damn good experience. Wankhede is a beautiful stadium specially under floodlights. The cool breeze from the Arabian sea keep passing through the stadium all the time. And it also changed my earlier perception that people hardly can recognize any player on the ground, I could actually locate each and every player on the ground and it was really fantastic. Regarding cricket, the match was totally one-sided with Rajasthan Royals winning by 10 wicket giving their captain Warne a perfect farewell. The crowd was pretty cool as well. Although Mumbai Indians were losing the match in front of their home supporters, yet the crowd was not taking any side much. They were cheering for Rajasthan Royals players like Watson, Dravid as well. An awesome stadium, a superb crowd and a couple of perfect cricketers in the match will make my first ever experience in a stadium memorable forever :)

A new course, a new institute: No big deal?

New institutes, new Universities are coming up in many places across India. Although the need of such new institutes in a country with second largest population in the world can not be ruled out, the question often asked is whether the new institutions are living up to the expectations of the students, their parents or other fellow countrymen. Of course the academic reputation of an institute can not be purchased or built instantaneously and it takes some time, the government should at least make sure some of the minimum requirements before opening new institutes or universities. The same is true when an institute introduces a new course. The government often hurries a lot in the process it seems, may be because of the coming elections or some other sacred reasons which I can't think of. Couple of new IIT's were introduced four years back, and most of them without proper infra-structure. Most of them did not even have their own campus, the respective state governments were yet to allot land for the campus. So the new IIT's were either operating from some state government engineering college campus (like refugees) or in extreme cases operating from a different state within the campus of its mentor IIT. The students who might have got a place in a good NIT with good infra-structure and reputation opted for several such new IIT's thinking that the brand name will work. Is that enough? People don't come to IIT just for the tag. The life in IIT has more than just a tag. After spending five years in a premier institute like IIT Bombay, I know how much valuable the life here is, and at the same time I feel sad to see the new IIT's not yet having their own campus. The first 3-4 batches of these IIT's won't even see their own campus. Apart from that, the government also increased the intake of students in the IIT's introducing reservations. Even the older IIT's have become too much populated now, with many hostels are being under construction, reducing the green coverage as well. I can imagine how crowded the new IIT's will be which are operating from other colleges by occupying a small portion of the campus. It would have been much better if these IIT's were started at least after the land for the campus were allotted and are in a position to operate from their own campus.

Similar is true when an institute introduces a new course. They often overlook the fact that the infrastructure in the institute might not support that new course as well as the new students who will opt for the course. For example, the MSc-PhD dual degree course introduced in IITB in 2005 still sounds like alien to many of the academic office people. They have not yet mentioned this course in various certificates and we need to write our course name by hand there. They do not even know that after finishing MSc coursework we should get as much fellowship as other regular PhD students get. They are also confused whether they should give PhD, MSc or both the degrees after we complete the course. In short they are yet to introduce a proper booklet mentioning the rules and regulations about this new course. They just introduced the course six years back without giving much thought about it. One more problem this course facing is the availability of PhD supervisors. The institute takes regular PhD students twice a year, and every year one batch of Dual Degree with seven students are getting added to the list. So around 15-20 people are getting admitted to a course in the department which will ultimately lead to PhD degree. But do the department has as much infrastructure or faculty for that? Nobody seems to have an answer. Earlier the students had lots of freedom in choosing their topic as well as guide, but that no longer seems to be there since many faculty members have stopped offering projects due to overload. The institute should think about all these issues before taking new students every year. Hope to see some changes soon!

Boring Summer!

This summer seems really boring with no plans to go to some school or conferences. I don't remember when I spent the whole summer in the institute in last five years. Either I used to go home or to some other institutes for summer internships or schools, workshops. Although the summer internship option is no longer available, I did not find any conference suitable for me. There were two three of them but of so much high standards that registration limit had crossed limit much before I came to know about them. Most conferences nowadays ask to pay registration fees(a huge sum of money for a grad student in India) before applying which is a big headache nowadays. Although there are some options to get these money reimbursed from various funding agencies in India, the process takes some time. ICTP school is a very good option to look for, but I already attended previous year's Cosmology school. I would have preferred to attend the Particle Physics school this year, but it's impossible to get the funding for two consecutive years, and our institute provides funding only when we go for oral presentation and not for attending schools abroad. Even if I had not applied for the Cosmology school and applied for the Particle Physics school this year, I am not sure if I would have got selected. This time the selection was a bit strange to me since many people with publications did not get selected, may be the organizers are looking for fresh participants who have just joined PhD. It at least gives me the good feeling that I at least attended the Cosmology school last year which was a real good experience. I am looking for the SUSY conference this year in Batavia, Illinois but not sure if will get selected. This is considered to be largest conference for people working in supersymmetry theory and phenomenology. Keeping fingers crossed right now. Anyway, spending the summer in the institute has at least one advantage it seems: the campus is far less crowded and takes me back to my earlier days in 2006 at IIT except one difference in the sense that there are not as many trees in the campus now.

Another five years of corruption, illegal influx and so on...

Friday, the 13th could not have been worse than this for the people of Assam. While the people of West Bengal were celebrating the much awaited end of CPM (Communist Party of India) rule for 34 consecutive years in the state, the neighboring state Assam has given its fate for next five years in the hands of Indian National Congress (INC) party. It's the third consecutive victory for Tarun Gogoi led INC government in Assam. It is surprising that, although the image of INC has been shattered by the never before corruptions in 2G spectrum, Commonwealth Games scam and many others, although the country woke up to fight against corruption led by Anna Hazare the recent assembly election results did not really hamper INC's image. In Tamil Nadu, although INC ally DMK has lost to AIADMK , it's not very surprising there. Such shift from one party to the another is very common there after a gap of 5-10 years. But the other state's results more or less went in favor of the ruling party at the center, with Assam showing the largest support for INC may be, allowing the party to come into power for 3rd consecutive term.

Inefficient opposition has led to the rise of INC, no doubt. But what sets the alarm in the state this time is that a local party called AIUDF, formed less than a decade ago with mass support from the religious minorities (99% of whom have illegally infiltrated to the state through the Bangladesh border) has become the party with second highest majority. The local mainstream party like AGP, or national party like BJP were completely devastated in this election. Another sad thing is that, no party has gained the minimum number of seats to stand as an opposition in the assembly which means the ruling party won't have any opposition for the next five years, nothing can be more shameful than this in the largest democracy of the world. Although INC and AIUDF had many pre-election differences, the results have shown that both of them are the gainers. Only AGP-BJP are losing the battle. It also raises a doubt whether there were any secret tie up between INC and AIUDF before the election although they never made it public. This has an advantage in the sense that INC will never lose the votes of Assamese people who otherwise won't have supported INC if there was a INC-AIUDF tie up. AGP-BJP did not seem to play any game at all this time, last time at least there was a tie up between them, but this time the division of vote between them cost them a lot. But what AGP might have thought that, if they declared a tie up with BJP, the road to form a coalition government with AIUDF would be closed. So AGP fought their battle alone whereas INC had its declared partner BPF (Bodoland People's Forum), and may be unofficial tie up with AIUDF. And the result is clear, these three parties have got the first three positions in number of seats pushing AGP BJP to 4th and 5th positions respectively.

No matter how INC has won the election, the question now to ask is what can the people of Assam can expect from INC government for the next five years. Obviously INC will continue various schemes it introduced in last few years and common people will enjoy its benefit and will continue supporting INC no matter what the overall development of the state, what the government is doing to stop illegal infiltration from Bangladesh, whether corruption has become low or not and similar issues of broader interest. Yesterday, Chief Minister of Assam Tarun Gogoi said in an interview that the issue of illegal immigration is largely exaggerated which clearly indicates that like in the previous years, the government will keep encouraging illegal immigration for the next five years as well. This is a serious warning, out of the 126 constituencies in Assam, the fate of more than 25 seats are now decided by the immigrants which will definitely increase to 35 or so after five years. We, the mainstream Assamese people will become minorities in our own state within 20 years if the public do not put any effort. May be we need another Assam Agitation to fight for our survival. May God help us, Amen!

SUSY..hope you are still there!

Couple of weeks back there were lots of hue and cry among young researchers who might have heard about SUSY but have not worked on it in great details. It's because of the ATLAS and CMS experiment at Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN (Geneva) publishing two independent results related to supersymmetry (SUSY) searches in the 7 TeV run of LHC. One of them looked for missing energy+ jet signatures whereas the other looked for lepton+jet signatures, but their conclusion was more or less similar. They ruled out significant amount of parameter space of Constrained Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (CMSSM). This is a rather constrained version of MSSM where the number of free parameters are just 5 compared to 124 or so parameters in the MSSM. So obviously the CMSSM has far more predictability and hence getting almost ruled out. Although its really heartbreaking to see such predictable models losing their fight, yet this does not really mean SUSY is not there. We still need more data and scan of other available models to rule out TeV scale SUSY. And even if LHC rule out TeV scale SUSY, it can not say anything about existence of SUSY at even higher energies. But many of the theoretical advantages of SUSY would be lost if we keep pushing SUSY towards higher and higher scales and will be as good as having no SUSY at all. Anyway, hope LHC will soon confirm its presence around the TeV corner. But nevertheless, the ATLAS/CMS result created lots of hype among both experts as well as others. One of our over-curious mate in the department got pumped up so much (may be after reading about it in some newspapers and not in the arxiv papers) that he asked one of our senior prof, what's the point of doing SUSY as LHC has already ruled it out? I don't know what was the professor's reaction at that moment, but I can imagine how shocking such a news (if true) to a person working in particle physics for a long time. Blame it on popular news sites or news papers which put the title of such news in such a way that young kids easily get misled. Anyway, hope many such news (positive I mean) about SUSY would be coming soon from the heart of LHC :)

Pawan Hans Tragedies and North East!

Just few days back there was a chopper accident in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, India (China claims this part as its own land although ;) ) killing around 17 people including 1 or 2 foreigners. There were couple of such incidents before as well. There was a huge demand at that time to suspend the services of Pawan Hans helicopter in North East regions. It was also in the news that the choppers declared as unsuitable for use or outdated, are sent to North East region which are claiming human lives frequently. North East Student Association (NESO) demanded the halt of Pawan Hans service just after this incident last week. But the service of this deadly helicopter was still on. Today the same Pawan Hans helicopter with Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister on board with four other people has gone missing and the Government now is taking the help of ISRO to locate the chopper. Hope the government will wake up after this incident at least and either suspend the operation of this killer chopper or look into their maintenance.

Wish I were a collider physicist...........

Tevatron at Fermilab although gonna be shut down soon, producing lots of excitement among the high energy physics community. Although LHC has lot claimed any new physics so far, recent Tevatron data are showing deviations from the Standard Model predictions at 2.5-3 sigma confidence level. Although these can not be taken as a discovery of new physics and we need to wait till more data come out and analyzed, they give physicists lots of opportunities to publish papers with high citations. Initially it was about like sign dimuon charge asymmetry, then it was about top quark forward backward asymmetry and now its about dijet excess of events in the range 120-160 GeV all of which do not agree with the Standard Model predictions. It would be really sad to see Tevatron dying amidst such excitements. But anyway, LHC will take this charge from Tevatron very soon and will continue this excitement. For PhD students like me, I think it would be the smartest step to switch to collider physics as long as these colliders are alive and publish as many papers as possible ;)

No Work For last one month :(

Since the quarter final match of ICC cricket world cup, I have been doing no work at all. Just after the World Cup, I went to PRL, Ahmedabad for a meeting on Dark Matter and then to Assam. The meeting on dark matter was not as good as I was expecting. This might be because, there was a big international workshop cum conference at SINP, Calcutta on the same topic in January. Anyway, it was nevertheless useful for me, the hospitality at PRL was as good as before. Just after returning from PRL, I left for home in Assam. It was really tiring to do consecutive journeys but you usually don't feel it much when you are going towards home sweet home after a gap of six months. This home trip was special for me in the sense that I was at home during the occasion of Bohag (Rongali) Bihu. Although the fever of Assembly Elections in Assam somehow diminished the excitement for Bihu, for me it was special. It was great to be at home on this occasion after a gap of 9-10 years. I could also cast my vote for the first time in my life, and that was quite exciting. I also visited the physics department of Tezpur University (a Central University located in a town called Tezpur) and gave a talk on my work. Apart from preparing the talk, I have done nothing for the last one month or so. Trying hard to get back to work now..it seems really difficult after a long gap :(

The Best Indo-Pak encounter I have ever watched!

Yesterday was the best Indo-Pak cricket encounter I have ever watched in my life. Although it was such a high octane World Cup semi-final over-hyped by media and the presence of diplomats, Prime Ministers of both the nations, celebrities etc, the players did not lose their cool at all. Sehwag started it off with his usual spirit putting a score of 50 in first five overs. Then Pakistani bowlers taken the game under control with superb spin and seam combination from Ajmal, Hafeez and Wahab Riaz and restricted India to a score of 260 in a ground where people don't consider a score below 300 as defendable. But Indian bowlers fought really well specially Nehra and Munaf. There were lots of doubts when Dhoni included Nehra in place of Ashwin (who was performing very well in fielding as well as bowling), but Nehra did not let the pressure get into him and performed much beyond expectations. Yuvi and Bhajji also did a great job with their spin attack. From Indian side it was a perfect team-work which led them to victory, but in the Pakistan camp, there was one guy who performed exceptionally. Yes he is none other than he young bowler Wahab Riaz..I don't remember when I saw such reverse swing before. He was the best performer in yesterday's match although that was not enough for Pakistan to win.

One thing which surprised me was the friendly attitude of both the teams during the entire course of the game. In every Indo-Pak encounters I have ever seen, there were couple of heated exchanges between players and of course people were expecting similar drama yesterday as well. But the players played with such a good spirit that there were no rooms for such vulgarity. The friendly gestures, comments from players like Afridi, Ajmal were really mind-blowing. It was a victory of cricket I would say, not just a victory for India. Hope these two neighboring nations will show such spirit both in and off the field in future :)

What a match it was....

While making my first post here about the world cup cricket, I hardly thought that I will have to mention about it again and probably that has made my first post look like an essay describing India's world cup campaign as someone pointed out. But things seem to be changing a lot. India registered their first ever victory over Australia since 1987 in a super-entertaining world cup match at Motera, Ahmedabad. Since I have started watching television or following cricket, this is something which has happened for the first time. I was thinking India will be under tremendous pressure due to their earlier losses to the Aussies (specially in 2003 world cup final), and being in a home ground would add more to it rather than taking it off. But the way they performed was simply brilliant. Unlike in the earlier matches they played in this tournament, I did not have a single world of criticism for them yesterday. They looked quite energetic in bowling as well as fielding in the first innings. Although the Aussies were restricted to a score of 260, the tension was not yet over since India's lower-middle order batting have not performed at all in this tournament. They performed like chokers (which South Africans used to do) in most of the games. But yesterday was special, except Dhoni, there were no single digit score by any of the seven batsmen who played. Three of them scored half century as well which I consider much better performance than one batsman scoring more than 150 and rest having single digit scores. Indians did a great teamwork in all three departments and this is the very thing which was missing in them in earlier matches. And with such teamwork, Indians are simply unbeatable in this tournament. Hope they will play with this same spirit in the biggest ever match in this tournament coming on Wednesday: clash of two arch-rivals India and Pakistan.

Bharat Bandh 24th March!

One of my friend from Germany (who never heard of Sachin Tendulkar) today was asking whether we will get food in the mess tomorrow or not. I asked him what makes him think so, and he said he heard somewhere that tomorrow India is going to play a very crucial match against Australia and it could be possible that everything in India comes to a standstill. Well, up to a little exaggeration, this is true in fact. Such things won't surprise anyone in a cricket crazy nation like India. People across the country must have postponed or preponed various things so that they don't clash with the match timings tomorrow. In our department also, we have postponed one discussion session from tomorrow evening to sometime in the next week. But fortunately our mess will remain open and we will continue to get food ;) Hope tomorrow's match will live up to the expectations of these crazy cricket lovers!

ICC World Cup 2011

I had couple of posts during the FIFA world cup last year and it will be surprising if I don't have a single post about the ICC world cup this year where India is considered to be one of the favorites. But, no matter India plays or not, watching football has always been very exciting to me. I was a great supporter of Brazil as well as Argentina during my childhood just because most of the people around me were supporting either of this two teams. On the other hand, cricket does not seem to be so interesting to watch nowadays. But playing cricket feels as good as it did in childhood. Cricket has grown to a very different stage in the last couple of years with couple of new rules introduced, a new format of the game called 20-20 introduced etc. Watching cricket has become boring because of too much cricket happening around I guess, for example 20-20 world cup, Indian Premier League happens every year plus there will be at least three different tours India will make to some other cricket playing nations, and some home series as well. I wonder when these players get any rest. Anyway, ICC cricket world cup is still the most interesting one among all these tournaments and this time its happening in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Unfortunately India is not playing up to the mark in the home grounds. In the group stage, they had struggled to win against minnows also. They could not even defend a score of 327 against England, they always face the problem of losing too many wickets within few overs towards the end, their fielding never improved etc etc. There were serious errors in decision making steps which also cost a lot, for example, the batting order. India never seemed to stick to a batting order, they tried to change it in every match and got the treatment. Fortunately the team management accepted that abrupt changes in batting order was in fact a big mistake and they stick to the initial batting order in the last match against West Indies. But they are yet to overcome the problem of rapid fall of wickets during the slog overs or during power-play. Hope it won't happen in the big match on Thursday against Australia. India can make much better with the existing resources and hope they will. I also hope Indian fans, media will be with the players, won't put unnecessary pressure on them. It often happens that, Indians think a cricket match can be won by one-man effort(Sachin for example) and similarly it can be lost due to one man (Nehra for example). This kind of attitude create too much pressure on the players which is good for nothing. We need to realize that cricket is not a one-man game and only a combined team effort can make us win. Like Sachin's two tons in this WC could not save those two matches for India, similarly one bad over or spell from a bowler can't be held responsible for the defeat. Hope the cricket fans will realize this and be with the players all through the tournament.

Japan 2011 disaster!

Japan has been one of the worst sufferer of natural as well as war disasters throughout the ages. And none of them could stop them from becoming one of the most developed nation in the world. The latest such disaster in the March 10th quake of 8.9 magnitude in the Richter scale which brought Tsunami as well as nuclear disasters by triggering blast at couple of nuclear power plants. Japanese premier has called it the worst disaster since world war II. So far there have been three blasts in the nuclear power plants which is slowly increasing the radiation leak. Even the city of Tokyo which is around 25o km away from one of such nuclear plant, has detected a minute increase in radiation level (not a threat to human life so far). If further such radiation leak is not controlled, this can prove to be much worse than the Tsunami itself which killed more than 10 thousand people. Not a single good news is coming in the media till now about the situations in Japan. Instead of asking the people to be united and calm at this time of disaster, some stupid media is trying to related this quake with a possible end of the world hypothesis in 2012, creating a panic among the common people. There is nothing new happening, such natural disasters have been happening since the beginning of life. This time the situation has become critical due to the blasts at Nuclear power plants. But I hope Japan will prove to be strong like before and will restore their development, their economy. Hope the whole world will stand united and will do whatever then can for this beautiful country and its people.

Losing the last motivation I had for an extra fermion family!

As we all know, the Standard Model(SM) of particle physics is a gauge theory of three families of quarks and leptons. Recently there were lots of discussions in the community regarding one more family of quarks and leptons, bounds on their masses and mixing with the observed fermions etc etc. Although the precision electroweak data still allows the inclusion of one more chiral family into the SM (not more than one), it hardly provides a solution to any of the problems SM suffers from. But "anything which is not forbidden must happen" attitude forces one to study the implications of four generation SM in colliders as well as cosmology. LEP II results constrains the mass of the fourth generation neutrino to lie above the Z-boson mass threshold i.e. around 45 GeV. Similarly there are various lower bounds on the charged fermions coming from precision data at LEP as well as null searches at Tevatron. From cosmology also, there are restrictions on number of light (~eV) neutrinos which prevents us from incorporating one more light neutrino into the model. One additional problem arises with the perturbativity. Since the fourth generation fermions get masses have to lie above the experimental lower bounds, their Yukawa couplings are quite large. And they become non-perturbative around few TeV scale when evolved under the Renormalization Group Equations (RGE). This demands new physics around the TeV scale which can keep the couplings perturbative. However, I have not seen any good candidate so far which can achieve this purpose. Enlarging the gauge symmetry or incorporating Supersymmetry do not help. TeV scale Extra dimensions might help although. Adding a large number of vector like particles in an ad-hoc fashion seems to work. This serious issue has to be addressed in any models involving four generations and no good models have come up so far. One motivation for fourth generation seems to come from the like sign dimuon charge asymmetry seen in Tevatron last year which was around 3 sigma deviation from SM predictions. Four generation models seems to have an explanation for this. But there are many other new physics explanation for this anomaly and there is no good reason to prefer four generation models over others. One more motivation could be related to Dark Matter. However it turns out that such a heavy neutrino will have very little abundance in the present Universe due to too much self annihilation. However if it's mass is as heavy as few TeVs then it can account for the correct abundance of Dark Matter in the present Universe. But to explain the origin of mass of such a heavy neutrino, we need non-perturbative Yukawa couplings. Also, such a heavy neutrino with SM couplings to the Z boson will give too high cross-section with a nuclei in direct detection experiments and hence will be ruled out from CDMS and XENON upper limits. Thus four generation scenario do not seem to be very motivating like the other beyond standard model frameworks. I would not be surprised if LHC rules out its existence :-)

Bye bye winter :(

My most favorite season in India, the winter has suddenly disappeared. For me specially it has become difficult to adjust to this sudden change in Bombay weather as I was in Delhi where the winter was departing very slowly with couple of frequent showers in the evening. Bombay is awfully hot now and comparatively dry than usual. The sudden change has brought cold, cough, sneezing etc etc and I am really sick of all these. The weather in Bombay will be like this only till the arrival of monsoon and there are still three more months to go for that. I have no idea how I will spend these three months. Thank God, I made a sudden plan last month of going home in April. At least 20-22 days will be spent in a place with much better weather than this. Usually there are lots of pre-monsoon rain in Assam in the month of April. I hope they will visit Assam this time as well. After all, rain and mango are among the very few things I like about summer.

Railway Budget 2011: Ignoring North East once again!

When Mamata Banerjee became Railway Minister of the country, it raised some hope among the people of east India (specially North East India) where the railway sector is least developed. But as couple of years have passed, it has become clear that she is no better than the former railway minister Lalu Yadav, or may be even worse. Lalu's budgets were Bihar centric and Mamata's budget nowadays are Bengal centric. She has crossed all limits probably this year, ahead of Bengal assembly elections. Sacrificing the national interests she is mainly trying to woo the voters in Bengal. The budget 2011 has brought 56 new express trains in India and like it has happened many times before, none of these new express trains connect North East to the rest of India. Earlier Mamata Banerjee introduced a special class of trains called "Duronto" (with no official stoppage between upto the final destination) which became very popular due to their efficiency. But she did not think of sending one such train to North East (seven states). This time she has given a consolation to the North East people saying that out of these 56 new trains, one train will be running between Guwahati and Dimapur. But is it enough? In fact, we would have been happy even if this train was not introduced. There are other trains between these two stations and people often travel by bus also. What North Eastern people need more is couple of good trains to places like Bombay, Pune, Bangalore, Chennai where there are large number of students, workers from North East are living. To Delhi at least we have a good train called Rajdhani Express. She is also proposing that Manipur capital Imphal will be connected by railway network very soon..let's see how soon it happens. Such budgets which are being proposed with an eye to grab some votes in state assembly elections(Bihar, Bengal or whatever) will never be able to satisfy the needs of the country and North East will always be ignored like before.

My last SERC school :)

The days I spent in Delhi during the SERC school 2011 were simply amazing and they were pretty much same as my BSc days there. I never thought I will be commuting everyday from North Delhi to Jamia to attend the lectures which starts at 9:15 am and that was the very reason I sent couple of requests to some of the people in CTP, Jamia I know, to provide me an accommodation. And I am very thankful to them for making my accommodation ready after 3-4 days of my arrival in Delhi. But once I started staying with my ccousins/friends in North Campus, it became really difficult to shift to Jamia. As a result I continued to travel everyday back and forth. My everyday journey used to start at 7:30 am, I took metro from GTB Nagar to Nehru Place and then took bus to Jamia and somehow managed to reach the classroom on time. Although my plan was to attend only the LHC course, I could not stop myself from attending the other two lectures, namely Black Hole thermodynamics and Inflation. Although I was not following the black hole lectures towards the end, yet it was always pleasant to attend lectures by a speaker like Prof Ashoke Sen. The inflation course was a bit fast specially for those who had not studied it earlier. But to me this course was very much kind of informative in the sense that I got to know the usual path which one should follow to build his/her own inflationary model. The LHC course part II was as good as the first one. Both Gautam and Sreerup did a great job.

26th SERC in Delhi-25

I am in Delhi currently attending the SERC school at CTP, Jamia. I reached last Sunday and I must mention that Indian Railways did a much better job this time, I reached Delhi half an hour before the scheduled arrival time ( 20 hours delay last time I came to Delhi). Half an hour vs twenty hours seemed fair enough to me as far as Indian Railways is concerned. Anyway, Delhi was quite cold few days back, but now its becoming hotter and hotter. The school is going pretty good with Prof Ashoke Sen and Prof Gautam Bhattacharyya doing an awesome job with their courses on Black Hole Thermodynamics and New Physics at LHC respectively. The Black hole course started with basics of General Relativity followed by specific examples of Schwarzschild, Kerr and Reissner-Nordstrom solutions and then going into the thermodynamic aspects. There are still four more lectures to go and Prof Sen will talk about the quantum aspects of Black Hole thermodynamics in the remaining lectures. The New Physics at LHC course started with basics of gauge theory, spontaneous symmetry breaking, introduction to standard model, the LEP results etc. Currently the course is dealing with the experimental constraints on various parameters in the theory and how we can constrain new physics beyond standard model based on LEP II results. There is not much QCD happening since the discussions so far is about LEP only and that probably makes the lectures easier to follow. He might discuss these things from LHC perspective as well and that will be slightly harder due to various QCD effects which were not there in case of LEP. This course seems much more interesting than the course "Top and Higgs Physics at LHC" in last year SERC school. That's primarily because the Professor has started with very basics and gradually moving into harder stuffs giving most of the students a feeling of what is going on. Usually it happens that in any SERC school, students do not follow both the lectures running during the first half, but this time most of us are following both the courses. Looking forward to an equally interesting second half of the school as well :)

Off to Delhi for three weeks!

Finally its decided. I am going to Delhi to attend to XXVI SERC school on Theoretical High Energy Physics at Center for Theoretical Physics, Jamia (as an unofficial participant this time). It was very hard for me to decide whether to go there or do some work in the institute itself. As two of my papers were under review, I had couple of things to do for the last few months. But on 26th January, one of them got accepted in Physical Review D and brought tremendous relief. But just around that time the reviewers comments came for the other paper. One of those comments was a bit technical and I had to re-do some calculations and re-draw some of the plots. Thankfully I could finish them from my side yesterday and now completely ready to go to the SERC school with almost zero load on my head. My fellow friends might complain that I travel too much, as is obvious from my blog also. But truly speaking, I enjoy it although I have hard time in Indian Railways most of the time. Last time I went to Delhi on New Years eve, the train was 20 hours delayed (9 hours on the station +11 hours on the way). But this time I just called up Indian Railways information center and they said that my train is delayed by 1 minute. I felt great not because of the delay by just one minute but because of the fact that Indian Railways count up to the precision of 1 minute ;-) But the train this time is a chair car train (where it is easier to get reservation within 1 week of departure date), so it might be tiring to travel for 16 hours. But anyway I believe it will be better than a sleeper coach travel for 30 hours. Looking forward to a great school this time (unlike the not so great school in Panjab University, Chandigarh last year)....

Dhobi Ghaat

I went to watch the movie Dhobi Ghaat on the very first day of it's release. Although in Delhi, I used to go for movies on the very first day of it's release, in Bombay I do not do it very often. There are two reasons: the ticket prices are very high in Bombay (specially on the 1st day of release) and its hectic to go out of the institute campus for me. But somehow I managed to do it on Friday. I went with an open mind to watch the movie and I guess that was a good attitude. This movie is certainly not like Aamir Khan's earlier movies. In fact, this is not a one man leading movie, every character has got equal importance: Munna (the Dhobi), Shai (the NRI banker), The newly married woman (I forgot the name of her character) as well as Aamir Khan. The movie is not like a story which begins somewhere and ends somewhere. There is no beginning and there is no end I think. Its a 90 minutes snapshots of typical Bombay life. It shows how different people from very different backgrounds come to this city and how their lives affect each other. Let me not tell you how the story goes since that you can find anywhere now. But I found this movie very different from any bollywood movies I have seen so far. The background music (Mostly acoustic guitar) by Gustavo Santaolalla was cool as well and reminds me of movies like Brokeback Mountain, the Motorcycle Diaries etc. And when my friend asked me whether I liked it or not (just after the movie was over), I was not being able to give a very straightforward answer, I had to think for sometime to realize that yes, I liked it :) I know this movie won't be a big hit in India where people like unrealistic movies with too many songs and dancing, but it's good to see that some people at least are trying to make a difference without worrying too much about their earnings. Hope it continues...

XXVI SERC THEP Main School

The XXVI SERC school in THEP will be in CTP, Jamia (New Delhi) from 31st January to 20th February'2011. The format this time is slightly different in the sense that instead of usual four courses in every main schools, this school will have three courses only: Black Hole Physics (9 lectures by Ashoke Sen), Inflation (9 lectures by Sreeramkumar) and New Physics at LHC (18 lectures by Sreerup and Gautam). I would have loved to attend the third course but I already disqualified myself by attending two main schools already. I am still thinking of attending this course unofficially, but there some issues with accommodation in Delhi and all. Although I am not in a mood of traveling yet the courses as well as the lecturers this time are so awesome that it's worth making an effort.

SYMPHY 2011

The SYMPHY 2011 was a great success. Keeping an eye on the fact that, it was the very first time that the physics department is organizing such an in-house symposium, the responses from the students as well as the faculties were quite good. Couple of undergraduates also turned up (we don't expect them to come to in-house symposium on a weekend as they hardly come to attend their classes on weekdays). The responses from the research scholars were awesome, most of them showed up sooner or later. Among the faculties, we probably had expected a bit more. Prof Yajnik, Prof P.P.Singh and Prof Varma were there with us from the very beginning till the end of the symposium (9 am to 6:30 pm) which was remarkable. Some other faculty members showed up later as well. The invited speakers' talks were also good, Deepak Dhar talked about pattern formation in biological systems and Sandip Trivedi gave a basic summary of CMBR, Dark Energy, Cosmological constant etc at an undergraduate level. My talk went alright although I did not have much audience at 9 30 am, but at least two-three people (including my guide) could follow the talk and asked questions at the end. During the condensed matter talks however, there were lots of discussions, comments from students as well as faculties (since majority of the research scholars as well as faculties in the department work in Cond-mat). It was good to see such active discussions specially among the students for the first time probably for me. I hope this will continue in future with many more active participants as well as speakers.

SYMPHY 2011

Physics Department, IIT Bombay is organizing the first ever in-house symposium SYMPHY 2011 on 15th January 2011. The idea is to have a formal communication among all the research scholars working in various fields in the department. Looking at the fact that there is very little interaction among the students in the department, hopefully this symposium will initiate such a process rather in a formal way. To make the event look more attractive, there will be two invited speakers Deepak Dhar and Sandip Trivedi (both from Tata Institute). The research scholars have the option to present their work either through poster or oral presentation (15+5 mins). Although initially there was a doubt that a one-day symposium won't be enough for a department which has around 50 research scholars or more. But from the submission of abstracts, it seems that one day is just perfect as we are not getting too many students willing to give talk. The list of participants as well as their talk titles have been put up in the website already. The organizers are also planning to prepare a e-booklet containing all the talk titles+abstracts which will be put in the website later. Hope SYMPHY 2011 will take off with a grand success!!