The Theory of Renormalization Groups

Now now, I have been getting all serious and super intellectual, boring y'all to death. My sincere apologies. May you rest in peace.

- In ancient times, when life was tumultous and violent, the typical student (say, studying Philosophy under Socrates) would have paid 5 gold coins for a nice weekend by the beach, free from the murder, deceit and bertrayal that soaked his everyday life. However, in modern times, with efficient police departments and sufficient jails, life has become boring and sanitized, and the average gradutate student is forced to spice his life up getting himself thrown out of a plane at 14,000 ft. Yes, you guessed right. I am commiting suicide in a rather expensive (and classy) manner. No actually, I am going skydiving tomorrow.

Psst - If I don't reply to comments it means that I have become one with the rather boring prairie of the midwest. As a tribute to how much I have enriched your life, and as a sign of how much you are going to miss me, please send a cheque (in multiples of $1000, min $2000) to No 3 East Coastal Cross St, Kalakshetra Colony, Chennai 90. My parents can assuage their intense pain by treating themselves to a nice cruise. My rather cool brother also has been bugging me for a double kick pedal. So, through your contributions, he will remember me for a week or two.

- There is something that keeps bugging me. We keep saying that how we are liberated and modern and all that. It just sounds so fake to me, because, I really cannot understand how as a species we can change in 50 years. I work in this thing called Computational Biology. We basically write programs that look at how the DNA of one species differs from the DNA of another. Even in 50,000 years, at the most a species will undergo some barely discernable extremely minor change. Some things like sexual behaviour are loathe to change. Because, if it changes you don't have anyone to have sex with :), and you cannot propagate and you die (like that fat ugly guy). So, most of the so called 'forward' things have been around forever, and it's just that in our sense of bloated self - importance, we would like to think we are indeed different from those a generation before us. Do you think that the baby elephant is any different the mama elephant? Or the baby centipede is any different from the mama centipede? Why should we be any different?

I feel that, by historical standards we are actually rather stuck up. Unlike in the past, today can I build a temple full of statues of naked people getting all worked up, or write a book cataloguing different reproductive techniques, and still be legit (except maybe if I was in Amsterdam)? No!

- I have also had a rather painful last few months. Most of the pain has come from the fact that I have started playing soccer. First, I sprained my left ankle. Then, I sprained my right ankle. 2 weeks back, some stupid guy kicked the ball into my face and knocked off half my left incisor. That was the fun highlight of my soccer playing experience. (Actually, I was his project partner in a course the previous semester. I just hope it didn't have anything to do with that.) In a recent development, I sprained my right ankle (yet again). Its a huge swollen ball that erupts in pain whenever my step slips a bit. No, I cannot run. See, I can barely walk. Did I tell you that, I play with a bunch of crazy people who in addition to traumatizing me in the aforesaid manner, also feel the need to elbow me in the ribs and kick out my shins. Wonderful. Its the modern equivalent of those great big battles with screaming hordes of people rushing at each other with assorted pieces of sharp metal and doing nasty things.

In 20/20 hindsight, I am rather thankful that my dad put me in Tennis. Before Tennis, he put my in Bharatanatyam class with the Dhananjayans (show off show off, I know). I feel that the single biggest mistake of my life was to get all red faced and bail out of dancing. What was I thinking?? All those random kids would have made fun of me, but today I would have had the acquaintance of a most huge number of "extremely good looking sophisticated cultured people" (*ahem*). Also, as a guy, being able to dance would have been my single biggest selling point. Those same kids would be begging me today to "put intro". My life would have been one long list of instances where I would say "Yeah, I like you but I don't like you like that" and "Yeah, I like you but you know we really aren't going to work out", as opposed to "Please please please I will do whatever you want if you would talk to me for 30 seconds".

- There was another incident where in a shoe shop I got into a rather long conversation with this guy who turned out to have served in Iraq. He was the bodyguard of a 3 Star General. Those who know me will know that, unlike many others, the less I know the more I ask. So, in my nice diplomatic manner I kept asking him this and that. There is a reasonably reliable technique to question people - first say something that makes them feel good and affirms them, then obliquely ask what you want. Its very important to be able to backtrack when things get hairy. So, I rather innocently asked him "So, did you talk to the Iraqis ? How did they feel about the war?". He said, " I spoke to a couple and they seemed to be very happy that they were being liberated". I quoted some of the recent Iraqi news and asked him if he has been following it. He said no. He said he wanted to be out of it. Then I asked him how it was being a bodyguard to a general - " Were you witness to any of the battles?". He told me that he was. "How did you feel about the death and destruction? I am sure you would have seen quite a bit of the battlefront". When I told him that he got rather disturbed. He was visibly agitated and tried to exit.

Rather than answering my question, he started giving me a spiel about how the war was for the liberation of Iraq etc. Since I just asked him how he felt, he had no real need to get defensive. He just had to tell me how he felt. The only reason why he needed to get defensive was because he couldn't tell me how he really felt. Even before we started talking, he kind of struck me as needy and lonely. He asked me like 3 times if he could help me look for a shoe, and actually started the conversation by asking me what I did etc - which I found very weird because shoe shop guys really don't ask such things. I am willing to take a bet that he got out of the army because he got sick of it, and is having a bout of post traumatic stress disorder. I felt a little bit sorry for him. He seemed to have a blind belief in the 'cause' as was spelt out for him - and was in denial of how really he felt about what was happening. You can say what you will , but it really doesn't make him any different from the average Jihadi who is made to think that blowing himself up with 20 others will gain him entry into paradise.