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!