The stage is set
and the world awaits,
and yet you sleep
just never to awake.
Promises to you
are long gone
and humans are not
your friends,
A little cry for help
won’t move us
to make any more amends.
We are a failure,
we are a disappearing promise,
we are what I say
devilish and way to lavish.
Brownie,
this letter is to you,
You are long gone,
but my heart is for you
and is true,
and I am sorry
for the promises
I made to you.
I promise you,
there is another life,
where you won’t be hurt
Or pained,
where you are born free,
and you can choose
what you want to be.
I promise you,
there is another life,
where love,
and hate,
are fruitless words
where your real mom and dad
are just your own thoughts.
I promise you,
there is another life
where sad thoughts
are happy,
where I am clean as water
and you are
sweet as honey.
I promise you,
that there is another life
and my promises
are sincerely true,
and all that you want
belongs just to you,
and where you can sleep
as long as you want,
and not wake up,
If you really
choose to.
What is it when you mean about moving on in life? Is it finding love, building a relationship and then ending it to relive it all over again? How can you define actual progress? Is it finding mistakes in your code and rewriting it again to make it efficient but only to come up with a set of new problems? Is it also about solving the problems of civilizations with technology, medicine, and empowering the economy?
It has come to my realization that you never really do progress in life. You are just in a perpetual illusion of progress. It’s like the ever-increasing Shepards tone. It creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends, yet which ultimately seems to go no higher or lower. We, humans, have evolved to the point that we seek for a utopian future. For that we have perfected technology, medicines, build complex civilizations that corrects the mistakes of our past ancestors. Every generation believes they are better in every sense than their previous mortal ones. But are we?
With every generation, with every inch of technology that we humans have made, with every line of complex code or software that has ever been written, we have also invented our own problems. With each bit of technology, we have spiralled into a society that although thinks better of themselves, but has become shallow in our emotional complex lives. As technology came, so came a lot of social, health, and environmental problems. We live in a society that is now a thousand times polluted than where our previous generations lived, and yet we think we are better than them. Just like us trying to solve the problems or mistakes of our previous generations, we have now added many to it. It is with utmost certainty that our next generations will try to fix the problems and mistakes that we did, and with it, they will create some more. And so on it will go, like a perpetual machine, life will be just an endless circle of events repeating itself ever so similarly.
And we move on, we struggle, we live, we find love, we lose it, we move on, we struggle, and we live. Time does not stop.
And I travel, and I although don’t travel a lot, but its just very beautiful here in Switzerland. On a sunny morning day as I travel from Basel to Zurich around 10 in the morning, numerous thoughts cross my mind. It is just so wonderful to travel by train in Switzerland. With the Swiss Alps in the background and a song “Aftermath” by Muse playing, it just makes your day a lot better than you had expected. I can tell you, it’s just how I imagined when I was about to come to Switzerland a year ago for my PhD interview. I never ever in my wildest dreams expected that I would be living here; a place abode to many beautiful stories, many beautiful landscapes, many beautiful dreams and the story of my PhD.
“From this moment, from this moment….
You will never be alone…. we are bound together….”
The perfect song of Muse makes this short journey to Zurich even better. I have so many journeys to make, so many stories to tell. I cannot tell you how it feels to look outside. The pictures above will make it clearer I guess. It’s just so scenic, and spring on the onset, makes it even more beautiful. But what worries me more now, is that 20 years from now, this might never be beautiful anymore than it is now. Why? Time. Uncertainty. Time does not stop. You don’t know what will happen in 20 years from now! This is a moment that will only be in my mind, cornered and tucked away deep inside. Only I will know how I felt, when I looked outside the window. This is strange.
Life is way too comfortable in Switzerland. As I stay here more, the more I want to stay and make this my home. But I will not. I just cannot. I have to go back. I have to make India a better place to live. Whatever I can do I will do to make my home a better place. Today is Sunday and I am travelling back to Zurich and going to my University to finish some work.
I am hardly getting time to do my project. The project, which is full of uncertainties; I wonder whether it will lead to any possible answers that I am desperately searching for. I am scared. I am petrified that I may end up as a failure. PhD is tough. My supervisors believe in my abilities a lot, but the irony is I don’t. I somehow keep thinking that I am deceiving them, faking that I am good enough for this PhD. This scares me a lot. Will I be able to do justice to this PhD? What if I end up as a failure? What is this PhD leading me to? I never ever imagined that I would land myself up in these circumstances. I am confused of my abilities; I am scared of this PhD. Life is tough amidst this beautiful journey that I am taking, where will it lead me to? I am in search for a higher truth, a theory that connects a quantitative trait to population collapse. Will I be successful? I don’t know, I am scared to find out the truth. In a month or two, I will know where I stand. In a month or two…
“…it’s no place for the faint hearted,
But my heart is strong, coz now I know where I belong
we are free from this moment…from this moment…”
More than a month passed after my sister’s wedding. A lot of events have happened since then. The first week is always tough when you come back from home, Arpat said, my supervisor. Yes indeed it was. I was feeling left alone, drained of enthusiasm , drained of energy and lack of concentration. My PhD is not going the way I visualised. PhD is not easy. Not easy at all. And the level of research, the level of intelligence is way better than what I visualised; way better than all the IISERs. But that is what is compelling me to drive forward perhaps. I love the atmosphere and the excellent professionalism here in Zurich.
And after I came, I finally had a good chat of how my PhD should shape and perhaps I cannot agree more with Chris and Arpat. Theoretical, Simulation and experimental based! Its tough to formulate a theory from scratch and to see its applicability in nature. But that is supposed to be my first chapter. A high risk, high gain project; a project that might lead me nowhere, or might lead me to a higher understanding about how evolutionary dynamics of a trait and ecological dynamics shape how a population responds to stochastic environmental change. Lets see how this works out!
And there is so much to tell!! Fortunately, life is working out great.
Grindelwald: And finally i had the courage to go to Grindelwald, after repeated coercing from Koen (PhD student in my group). He was like “you should really go now, or otherwise the snow will melt and you will have to go next year, trust me, you should go.” Well thanks Koen. It was indeed an amazing experience, a tough hike, but it was really great! The pictures just looked perfect.Grindelwald, a village in Switzerland’s Bernese Alps, is a popular gateway for Jungfrau region. A great place for skiing and hiking in the alps. The pictures will let you know 🙂
Beside Lake Brienz in Interlaken
The Jungfrau region from Interalken
I love this picture. The streets and then the alps. We had lunch to this amazing view!
While we travel to grindelwald from Interlaken, we see this amazing picture!
Interlaken to grindelwald journey
This is Grindelwald! The skiing resort! Not much people were there in this amazing weather
The hike we did, with the snow and the sun!
And then we climbed down to the bottom of the foothills!
How this picture captures everything: serenity, freedom and a lonely walk! (Pragya is the lady ahead walking though! 🙂 )
This is Switzerland, I just cannot get enough of this picture.
Its almost a tragedy everytime I leave the country. I cannot imagine the intricacies involved when the time for me to leave the country arrives. I am amazed and very rightly surprised how my mind works and how my emotions fluctuate erratically flickering between two basic emotions. I am sad as I write this and as I write I move farther away from home. As I look into the inflight communicator, I currently find myself above the Black Sea, thousands of miles away from home. It all started from my sister’s wedding, ‘the great Indian wedding’, they say. And indeed it was. Grandeur and majestic.
I already miss my family, and this is a sacrifice and nothing else, to achieve something that you are not guaranteed, in 3 years. Peer pressure, societal pressure, and the pressure to show people that I can succeed, all these are the reasons behind why I am doing this PhD. I won’t deny that there are personal ambitions stuck somewhere between all this, but that is not enough to explain why I am sitting on this plane travelling thousands of miles away from the place I know so well. The wedding is over, and with it all the emotions, the euphoria, the majestic happiness, the movie-like dances, the drama! Sigh, it pains to look at the pictures where I stand beside my sister in the beautiful wedding attire. The great Indian wedding it was and nobody denied that. Nobody. Life is going to change for everyone after this wedding. My sister won’t be available anymore like she was, that’s married life for you. My mother and father will feel the emptiness in the house.
What is the role of me sitting here in this plane and writing this? Why do I have to do this PhD? Does all this make sense? Where is the higher truth? Why do I have to leave my hometown, and the happiness with it? I am a foreigner in Zurich, a foreigner trying to blend in, but while doing so I can only guess that I am becoming more of an outcast. I cannot blend in; all I do is creep into my own wormhole, my own comfort zone. My comfort zone was back where I was not alone, where I was too happy or too busy to even let millions of thoughts cross my mind. It was back in my hometown, not where I right now sit. But that is life and perhaps ‘you learn from it’, this is what everyone would say. I will just sit down and let time pass by and watch this drama like an adult comedy theatrical. Time has never stopped since the big bang, if only it was otherwise! Sigh!
Coldplay music makes this blog even more sad. And I did not even want it to sound like that, perhaps it was the effect of their songs. I think I will stop, or this will just go on. Long story short : I am very sad as I travel back to Zurich, the place where I am doing my PhD. It will never be like home. Perhaps, all these fleeting thoughts are added to by the fact that she is coming to Switzerland only to never meet me again, ‘never’. Never. Maybe it’s the multiplicative effect of all her fleeting memories crossing my mind and the fact that I am leaving home without getting the time to say goodbye!
Goodbye then!
Not sure if all the songs in my playlist have been played; Not sure whether I can ever walk perfectly again. I still feel the sip from the glass was anything but bitter. I am afraid to walk ahead ever again. I am afraid the songs won’t even last a step with me. I am afraid without all those words in the playlist.
And then you say, the future is scary and dark! All is lost if without a further step. We are just all animals. Just animals. Our existence itself is a question to me now! What is dark is scary and what is scary are infinite possibilities. I am afraid to take a chance. I am afraid to move ahead.
But you then say, so lets count the stars and make something happen while we get lost in the darkness. I say no! Lets just count the alpahbets and take 100 years to complete, while hours starts ticking in milliseconds! Yes we can do that! And we will forever be together and even the songs won’t all be played. YES, we can watch everything go by and live our life in milli-hours!
I am afraid i will get lost and cower at the darkness ahead. I cannot fight this! Everything ahead is dark and social implications on this will make it more scarier.
And then you say again, the future is dark and scary!
Lets pull down the curtains off our face. Let us sit down and breathe for a while so that we can understand our puzzling conversations. Yes we can drench in this morning rain and be happy for the rest of our lives. Yes we can!
I saw you yesterday and it felt like its never going to come back. I wish to talk countless stars by the moon side river. I wish to remember the chocolates that I ate so that we can talk about it all night. I acknowledge my guilt. Yes I do. But then we can get together and remember all the names of the animals! And we can scribble our names on a tree and laugh at it. Or we can just drift apart slowly and cower at the sight of infinity.
Sometimes in moments like these, i feel that nature is nothing but a beautiful broadcasting station of God working at a divine frequency…..God is speaking through it ever since but we all just forgot how to tune in….
life 