I arrived earlier this afternoon in Boca Raton with my dad. While he is here for a business conference, I made use of the opportunity to make a getaway from the Boston freeze. As he got busy with his meetings immediately on arrival, I sought to explore the place on my own. Besides it had been a while since I could afford to go out on the roads with only one layer of clothing and roam around in shorts. The absence of public transport was expected; so, armed with my i-pod (which was resurrected from idleness after a whole semester), I started walking on the street right off the coast listening to my favorite Jim Morrison songs. They somehow fit snugly into the mood. The sun, somber yellow now, was on its way home mixing its warm benedictions with the cool sea breeze blowing soft and flat. I passed by a group of fat men smoking cheroots in a communion after a swim in the sea; behind them stood a bunch of pretty young girls drying themselves up and playing some sort of catch-and-run while at it. Their liveliness seemed inviting but I don't think they would have been even slightly impressed if I removed my t-shirt and joined them in their game. Besides, it seemed the boys they came along with were playing volleyball at a distance, so I looked askance and trod along the concrete road with 'Feast of Friends' playing inside my ears. Morrison's songs were getting somber and heavy down the playlist. It was then that I passed by a car whose music seemed to overpower the volume of my i-pod and my attention was all of a sudden beleagured. The driver of a car, a man of about twenty-five, had his stereo on full volume and was singing along in the loudest and the most monochromatic of voices:
How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?
This man's appropriation of any other singer/group would have put me off, but this was just the change I needed. And I was happy to search and find that my derelict i-pod had all of Bob Dylan. I walked aimlessly for another hour or so (no intended metaphor with the song there please) and returned back to the hotel to find my dad still engaged in his meetings. He was finally relieved and we went out for dinner at an Indian place with a couple of his colleages. The were busy discussing business over dinner and there was very little I could participate in it except when they discussed current political affairs. I was quite up-to-date on the Satyam story and I was found useful when the others were trying to remember names from the new board of directors, their older CFO and CEO (I have a useless memory for such details; I wish I could remember facts from molecular biology/biochemistry with the same level of comfort). As I was relishing an especially good Masala Dosa, they started speculating on some M&A plans for the future. Though by then I had stopped paying attention and was on my own stream of thought, I could hear fancy words like profitability, revenue model, core-competency come up again and again. I recollected then the short period of my IITB life when I engaged in some serious preparation for interviews with consulting firms with some of my favourite people. Little less than a year before, I could fancy myself being quite interested in making sense of such conversations and trying to show off some of my own gyaan on this matter, given that I had the pride of being recruited on a hot-shot consulting job swelling up my chest. Presently however, the time, the thrill and the illusions are long gone. An ordinary graduate student with ideals in his mind and a hope of finding vitality in his work is all that remains.
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My dad is an interesting character. In spite of being a pucca man of business (which he undoubtedly is) he sometimes shows a childlike curiosity for matters of science that are of little use to him. When we were still in Boston yesterday, after relishing a lunch of rasam and pongal that his soon assiduously prepared, he asked me to sit down and explain what 'entropy' and the 'Gibbs free energy' meant. He confessed that he had never understood these things while he was himself a student of chemical engineering and all the books he read subsequently never really provided a clear understanding of these concepts. Over the twenty minutes or so, I tried my best to use simple examples (which included a most wonderful example I stole from Richard Feynman's Cornell lecture titled 'The distinction between past and future', the video recording of which I had seen recently during MIT IAP series. Interested people can find it in his collection of popular lectures called 'The Character of Physical law' available in paperback) and illustrations to explain the general concept of thermodynamic potentials and the corresponding consequences of the second law. My dad would incessently interrupt me to ask questions and make me constantly reflect on whether I was being effective in transferring what I understood about these quantities to him. He smiled when he finally understood one of the points I was trying to make - that the law of increasing disorder was not a consequence of some cosmic force in the universe but that it can be simply understood as the sheer statistical preponderence of disordered states over ordered states (once again here, Dawkins' nice analogy with a 'library' presented in his essay 'Darwin Triumphant' from 'The Devil's Chaplain' proved handy) and then he said that would be enough for the time being. I am not sure I entirely convinced him at the end and it made me realize that it's difficult teaching someone who has had a principal role to play in shaping your own conventional wisdom both by nature and nurture. I am sure he took his siesta that afternoon thinking that he sent me to all these colleges and bought me all the books I wanted in my 'pursuit of learning' but that the returns of those investments were not entirely evident at the moment. :-)
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My dad is an interesting character. In spite of being a pucca man of business (which he undoubtedly is) he sometimes shows a childlike curiosity for matters of science that are of little use to him. When we were still in Boston yesterday, after relishing a lunch of rasam and pongal that his soon assiduously prepared, he asked me to sit down and explain what 'entropy' and the 'Gibbs free energy' meant. He confessed that he had never understood these things while he was himself a student of chemical engineering and all the books he read subsequently never really provided a clear understanding of these concepts. Over the twenty minutes or so, I tried my best to use simple examples (which included a most wonderful example I stole from Richard Feynman's Cornell lecture titled 'The distinction between past and future', the video recording of which I had seen recently during MIT IAP series. Interested people can find it in his collection of popular lectures called 'The Character of Physical law' available in paperback) and illustrations to explain the general concept of thermodynamic potentials and the corresponding consequences of the second law. My dad would incessently interrupt me to ask questions and make me constantly reflect on whether I was being effective in transferring what I understood about these quantities to him. He smiled when he finally understood one of the points I was trying to make - that the law of increasing disorder was not a consequence of some cosmic force in the universe but that it can be simply understood as the sheer statistical preponderence of disordered states over ordered states (once again here, Dawkins' nice analogy with a 'library' presented in his essay 'Darwin Triumphant' from 'The Devil's Chaplain' proved handy) and then he said that would be enough for the time being. I am not sure I entirely convinced him at the end and it made me realize that it's difficult teaching someone who has had a principal role to play in shaping your own conventional wisdom both by nature and nurture. I am sure he took his siesta that afternoon thinking that he sent me to all these colleges and bought me all the books I wanted in my 'pursuit of learning' but that the returns of those investments were not entirely evident at the moment. :-)
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