"It's not even bad, it's horrible" Part 2

Even after the completion of 7th day of the school, the situations at Academic Staff Hostel (where 13-14 participants have been put) have not improved much. I could not find water in the toilets both yesterday and today morning. And today morning at 8 am I could not get hot water as well as running water. Its crazy! I had to take bath with cold water. In fact many people did not take bath even. I have no idea why the organizers are like this. I can keep on complaining, but I am too tired of that now. Already enough conversations have taken place with the organizers regarding this. Similar is the case with the food. They are still giving us no choices in any of the meals. Whatever single item they prepare, you have to eat that. Today I had to eat Parantha in the morning which I am pretty sure, will damage my health if I continue it for few days. I asked the stupid caterers to make bread toast but they did not. I simply cant believe this. The lunch and dinner they make very spicy always, have not seen yellow daal even a single day. I am getting sick of all these, definitely gonna lose weight at the end of this school. Its just the awesome academic side of the school, I am continuing here, otherwise I don't give a damn! May be I should change the title of this post by using some stronger adjectives next time I write again about it.

"It's not even Bad, it's Horrible"

Today was the second day of 25th SERC main school in THEP at Punjab University, Chandigarh. Although today (the 3rd day at the campus) I am feeling much better than the day I arrived (may be I am getting used to the situations), things have not been settled yet. The main problem so far here is the Horrible accommodation we are provided with. Neither we saw such arrangements in any school, conferences nor we are used to such situations in our own academic institutions. They have put fourteen participants including me in a place called Academic Staff College Hostel. Although the rooms are quite okay, the bathrooms were unimaginably pathetic on the very first day we arrived. First of all there is a common bathroom for all of us unlike usual guest houses where we get attached bathrooms. Above all, the floor of the bathroom was covered with water, there was no running water in the toilets as well as the showers. Although they said that in the evening and in the morning running water is there for two hours each yet we did not get that in the toilets. After the tiring long journey from our respective home institutes to here, we were really frustrated with the situations here. We made a formal complaint to the director of the school describing our situations and requesting him to provide us with better accommodations. But he said that's impossible and promised to make the conditions of the bathrooms better. However his reaction to our complaints was not at all satisfactory due to many of his unnecessary comments which I would prefer to avoid here. Yesterday they have however made the situations a bit better but not up-to the mark. But may be because the hectic classes, tutorials have started, the attention of the students have gradually deviated from bathrooms to academics. Anyway that does not mean that we are satisfied with the arrangements. We are unhappy with not only the bathrooms, but with the food we are getting here. We hardly have any choices. For example in the breakfast they provide only one item which of course not all people might prefer. Same is the case with other meals. As one of my fellow victim says "Its not even bad, its horrible" ;-). I hope from next time onwards the SERC national organizing committee will make sure of good arrangements to all students as well as lecturers before deciding the venue. Will update about the academic part next time, I am pretty sure I would be having many things to share as some of the finest lecturers like Prof Goran Senjanovic, Prof Rahul Basu, Prof Borut Bajc among others are giving lectures as well as taking tutorials here.

Leaving for Punjab tomorrow!

I am leaving for Punjab tomorrow evening. The SERC main school will start from 2nd April as I mentioned in one of my previous posts. I hope Chandigarh will be colder than Ahmedabad where the mercury is hanging around 42-43 degree centigrade. The courses look really interesting but recently I have seen the pre-requisites mentioned in the school web-page which look really heavy. For example for the QCD and the LHC course they are asking us to be familiar with QCD basics, non-abelian structure of Lagrangian, structure functions, deep inelastic scattering, scaling, scaling violations etc. Ooops! I hardly know much about these alien topics and have not even looked at it. The pre-requisites for the other courses GUT, AdS-CFT and Hydrodynamics are however much simpler and I am at least familiar to them. And in fact I find these latter two courses more interesting although I am hopeful of learning the first two courses a little bit which look aliens to me now. Apart from academics I am planning to visit some nice places in Chandigarh as well as some neighbouring cities like Shimla. Lets see how things go!

The Happiest Moment!

What can be the happiest moment in a research scholar's life? Well, for me its when I get reply to my mails from my supervisor :P. Today I got reply from my supervisor after a long time regarding some calculations I have done related to gauge coupling unification in some specific models. Thank god he found them quite good. Although the unification in my calculations are still partial, effort is going on to make them perfect may be at the cost of adding some new particles. But the good thing is that the I am getting unification near $ 10^{16} $ GeV (which is allowed from proton decay constraints) with a low intermediate breaking scale of the order of TeV. This looks good as it can have some LHC signatures. Lets see how things go, I am really hopeful of some good output unlike before :)

CSIR NET

Today the CSIR NET result came out, and to my surprise I cracked it. I don't know what to say, but one thing for sure: this is the easiest competitive examination in India probably. I appeared it with almost zero preparation, attempted 50 percent in paper I and 75 percent in paper II and still I got rank 70. Wow...sounds cool, isn't it? The examination was in December last year, I was busy with my semester activities till November end, then went to Guwahati for ten days, came back to Bombay just one week before the NET examination, revised some of my MSc syllabus. And the way we went to appear the exam in Pune was like going for a picnic. We were six together and most of us had no preparation at all. Anyway it was fun. Although this JRF will not be useful for me practically but it will certainly be a tag in my CV :)

Oscar winners!

I watched Hurt Locker two days back. Never heard of it before it got the best motion picture award. Avatar got so much hype this time that all other movies remained quite unknown till the Oscar night. I have a copy of Avatar with me for last 3 months but haven't yet watched it. Hurt Locker was a nice movie based on the life of American soldiers in terror and war hit Iraq. Although the story is not so great but the movie has a good flow, I did not feel bored at any point. Unlike masala movies like Slumdog Millionaire which I still cant believe to be the best motion picture last year, movies like Hurt Locker never get much media attention. I also watched Inglourious Basterds day on Friday night. Christoph Waltz truly deserves the best supporting role award he got. The movie was also good, I just wish Hitler were killed in real life like the way those basterds kill him in the movie along with all senior nazi officers inside a cinema hall in Paris, it would have saved thousands lives. I am planning to watch Crazy Heart today which got the best male actor award, planning to get a copy of The Blind State for which Sandra Bullock got the best female actor award.

A very unusual weekend indeed!

This weekend has started in a very unusual way for me. I used to sleep till 12 or 1 pm during weekends, but today I got up at 7:20 am and went to watch the 8:45 am show of Love, Sex and Dhoka (a hindi movie released yesterday) in a multiplex nearby. It sounds odd, but the reason behind this compromise with good sleep is to save hundred rupees. The morning show tickets cost just 45 bucks. The movie is a low budget one with no known actors in it. But still it was a good entertainer. The movie is based on three different stories with a very tiny link in between, the first one was not so great and has a very sad and brutal end, however the second and third one were funny. The details can be found in standard movie reviews which I don't need to repeat here. However, I wont recommend anyone to spend 150 bucks on it, but it does worth 45 at least :P