Rain in Berkeley, winter in Delhi and other assorted thoughts

Semester ends, leaving me with just about enough energy to write in bits and pieces. Also it is raining, which is stupid, because I find it hard to make sense of winter rain. I mean, of course parts of South India have winter rains, but winter in South India is no colder than summer in California (which is saying a lot, because summer in Berkeley was pretty warm), but rain in winter makes it all the more dismal, if it wasn't already. The days are way shorter, and my sleep cycle more or less attempts to follow the sun, which means these days I end up feeling sleepy sometime around 8 (the sun goes down before 5) and on days when it is cloudy and rainy(like today) I find it hard to justify to myself the need for wake-fulness.

Its winter in Delhi, and I guess that means fog and caps and gloves and sweaters and jackets (I haven't really looked at the weather reports, mind!) And there's just so many things I want to do this winter, apart from fulfiling the quite impossible promise of meeting each and every one of my friends that winter this year is going to be a blur. There's also a certain amount of "research" to be carried out, and the fact that I should be "self-motivated" means, as usual, that I will pretend that my ass is on fire.

Which it is not, to say the truth, because this semester has been pretty chill as far as courses and all are concerned. True, I have witnessed, alternatively, moments of crushing self-doubt and moments of inspiration, but I guess that is par for the course. Especially since my usually active emotional life has been flattened out, because of which my out-of-commission amygdala has decided to have some fun with my academic life.

I guess the intensity of my emotional life is pretty much proportional to the number of girls I have around me. I am tempted to qualify the statement to "the number of undergraduate girls I have around me", which becomes kind of like a tautology till the point I actually end up messing around with a graduate girl. However it is kind of true: there's a lot more "life, the universe and everything" quality about undergraduate life, mainly I guess because people around you are of a much greater variety. I mean, it's kind of hard to discuss the usefulness of a "conditional random field" to a physics student, but it is even harder to keep "average precision" out of a talk with a lab mate. Plus, instead of a coffee shop we have a coffee machine at the pantry, which cleverly translates into no more than a few minutes of conversation per coffee break, as opposed to hours of philosophy at the Nescafe stall. Also, they somehow managed to create a lab which has an awesome view of the whole California bay, and of the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, and in doing so completely removed the incentive to go out for a walk. (Why do you want to go out when you can see the Golden Gate bridge from your office floor?) Not that I am complaining of course; the sight of the orange sun falling behind the far away bridge and letting off crimson streaks into the clouds will make me sigh any time of the year.

And finally Berkeley is beautiful. It's an amazing campus, and it's one of the few places that seems as amazing when the clouds are low and the rain is incessant as when the sun is out and the dew glistens on the blades of the grass......