2020 - Annual Summary

This is a personal journal to document my highlights and experiences of this year. It's meant for feeling gratitude and, if possible, personal joy, and is by no means meant as an instrument of self-promotion. Why then do I share it in public? I feel that looking back at your year brings clarity and accountability. One year is a substantial amount of time, a great resource. It's a good exercise to assess how well it was used. Hopefully I will inspire some to take up something similar. Also, my format is there for my readers to use or not use.

This year has been one of the most fruitful years in my life so far. I thought up better technical ideas than before and was able to turn some of them out to the world in the form of papers, articles, talks and such. I clearly took very well to online mode of teaching. I read more than ever before. I drew more than ever before and grew better in my own eyes (which, believe me, is the hardest part!). I wrote a lot both technically and otherwise, though I couldn't publish anything in popular media this year. And I think, I kept improving my singing and my understanding of the nuances of music in tiny little steps. I am about to complete a year of living peacefully with my family under near-lockdown conditions. Knowing how divorces and domestic violence are on the rise all around, I would like to thank my stars on that count. I continued doing Yoga as per the regime started last year, and then diversified to jogging and cycling. Though I could definitely have done better on fitness front, I wouldn't say I did too badly there. I am a kilo or two lighter than I was a year ago.

 

The causes which drove these externally visible changes are deep inside me. It's impossible to write about them without sounding silly. But I will try to share a few reflections in the end of this post. Hope they will be found helpful.

(My near and dear ones! A request. If you see any omission, please remind me through a personal note.)

Research

Conference Publications

1. StaBL: Statechart with Local Variables (ISEC 2020)
2. Automated Testing of Refreshable Braille Display (HCC 2020)
3. Discovering Multiple Design Approaches in Programming Assignment Submissions (SAC 2021)
   

 Workshop

1. A Simulator for State Chart Based Language (Workshop on Research Highlights in Programming Languages, FSTTCS 2020)

Student Milestones

1. State-of-the-art Seminar of Varsha Suresh
2. State-of-the-art Seminar of Nikhila KN
   

Teaching

1. Programming Languages (Spring 2020, iMTech)
2. Fundamentals of Programming (Summer 2020, MSc Digital Society) 
3. Program Analysis for Software Engineering (Autumn 2020, PG Elective)
4. Programming in Python (Autumn 2020, iMTech)

Voluntary teaching. In summer 2020, I taught a short online course on 'Introduction to Programming and Computational Thinking' to some kids of friends and neighbours. As a note of thanks, the parents of the participants committed to contribute to COVID relief work.

Projects. I did a number of projects this year with various students. I consider the willingness of students to work closely with you a very distinctive evidence of your having connected well with them through your teaching. That way, I am very happy with this achievement.

Talks and Panel Discussion

1. Webinar on Online Teaching (July 2020, NIE)
2. Panel Discussion on Online Education (August 2020) 
3. Webinar on AI for Education (November 2020, MINRO)
4. Hindi and Premchand Sahitya (December 2020, IIITB Samvaad)
5. Symbolic Execution in Testing and Verification (December 2020, Philips)
   

 Books Read

1.  ग़बन
2. राग दरबारी
3. Sapiens
4. Talks in Washington (J. Krishnamurthy)
5. The Shape of the Ruins
6. The White Castle
7. The Moor's Last Sigh
8. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

... and many others which I started but left unfinished, as always.

 Art

This year was phenomenal in terms of my productivity in art. This is the first time, I am able to list (almost) all the drawings I have made this year. This itself is a phenomenon for me!

1. Milind Mulick's water colouring workshop -- July 2020
2. Stockholm Water painting -- August 2020
3. Laapataa -- Dishwashing
4. Laapataa -- Meditation
5. Laapataa -- Online Antyakshari
6. Laapataa -- Why PhD 1
7. Laapataa -- Why PhD 2
8. Laapataa -- Digital Migration
9. Laapataa -- Nothing works in India
   
10. Untitled comic strip -- Watering plants
11. How to do Studies
    
12. Motu Patlu
13. Autism -- Hold Mamma's Hand
14. Autism -- Do not drop things from the Balcony
15. Autism -- Behave Well in Shops
16. Pen Sketch -- Deserted Electronics City
17. Pen Sketch -- Landscape for Vigyan's Project
18. Lonely culvert

Photo links: My Drawings Laapataa

Highlights

1. Migration to online teaching
2. Migration to digital art
3. Vigyan's injury
   
4. Commitment to physical fitness
   
5. Promotion
6. Entry to Instagram
   

Entry

1. Kiki. My neighbour and friend Sabyasachi and his wife Jhuma was blessed with a daughter this year. Kiki's arrival and growing up through the last few months has been a source of much joy for our entire family.
   
2. Hasuni's grandchild. Our domestic help Hasuni got a grandchild -- her daughter's son.
   

Exit

This year has been one of the worst in terms of the number of demises that happened in my extended circles. A major killer, expectedly, was COVID. But there were other reasons too.

Personal acquaintances

1. Tridib Roy Choudhury
2. Aseem Banerjee
3. Arun Kumar
4. Sunil Shetty
5. Surendra Mule
6. PVN Murthy
7. Sheetal Amte
   

Celebrities

1. Irrfan Khan
   
2. Sushant Singh Rajput
   
3. Rishi Kapoor
   
4. Soumitra Chatterjee
   
5. S P Balasubramium
6. Pranab Mukherjee
7. Rahat Indori
   
8. Edmund Clarke
   

Reflection

1. Problem decomposition. I can't trace back to the origin of this idea that big problems can be broken down to smaller manageable chunks. Over the years, I have started more and more interested in this idea. So much so that the act of trying to do something difficult has started turning into an exercise of problem decomposition. It won't be wrong to say that the whole fun of doing anything now is centred around this aspect. In 2020, I made significant progress in this direction.
   
2. Keeping journal. I have been planning my days for at least a decade if not longer. Recently, I came across an interesting variant of maintaining to-do lists: bullet journal. For the last one month or so, I have migrated to bullet journal. It's working well so far.
   
3. Looking at obstacles as milestones. This is very much a part of problem decomposition idea. You may start with a very restricted definition of the problem you want to solve. But you realise that to start taking the steps leading to its solution, you need to get certain things out of your way. It's been long an attitude to look at this secondary elements as hurdles or obstacles in the way of my doing what I want to do. However, a recent realisation has been that being able to look at unforeseen obstacles as an integral part of the problem is a very important part of keeping calm and staying focused.
   
4. Benefits of solitude. The pandemic has many evil aspects to it. And they talk a lot about them. And they are all true. But one thing that's true and not evil is the fact that the solitude and isolation it has brought has been soothing for the introvert part of me, which likes to sit quietly and talk to itself, and imagine and brood and create. It's hard to pin down, but it could well be that the reason why this year has been one of the most productive and rewarding years of my life so far could be this disappearance of the overhead of meeting lots and lots of people: students barging into the office, classroom of more students staring at you during the lectures, visitors, colleagues stopping by to say Hi. No, none of them is really bad. It's just that when we were working from office, it used to be just too many of them. It was draining and unhelpful beyond a point. Now, I am protected by this screen I face. Each meeting must be scheduled. I am allowed to not pick a call if I don't feel like. Yet, surprisingly, I feel I have had more meetings during this pandemic period than ever before. I have collaborated more. I have done more teamwork than in a face-to-face mode. Or may be, it's just that I have been able to make my interactions with other count more as I have been able to prevent my energies from getting dissipated in futile and unproductive socialisation.

Thoughts about the Coming Year

I definitely would like to see the pandemic losing its iron grip on humanity this year. I would like us all to be free to move around more: attend schools, colleges and offices, socialise more fearlessly and travel. I hope people who have lost their livelihood, things should brighten up for them.

What I would not want to change is the calm I hear from the road, the purity of air I breathe and the enjoyable experience of driving due to lessened traffic congestion. If the pandemic has taught people a few lessons about doing more with less, about finding methods of self-employment and self-reliance, I hope they don't quickly forget them once the pandemic goes away.

Personally, lockdown taught me many valuable lessons: about online teaching and collaboration, digital art, and most importantly about myself and my natural preferences, which indeed lean towards peace and solitude and not towards unbridled socialisation. I manifested in my productivity and the general pleasantness of my disposition. I would like to continue to give myself this peace and solitude even when things open up outside.

अनुसंधान क्या है?

अपने दैनंदिन जीवन में बेहतरी की कोशिश में किए गए काम से भी शोध और अनुसंधान संभव है। गोरों ने सदियों यही किया और आज कहीं पहुँचे हैं । अब हम वही करें तो हमारे सर पे लिटरेचर का पहाड़ पटक दिया जाता है कि  ये पढ़ो फिर ही कुछ करने की सोचो। आधी ज़िन्दगी उस पहाड़ पे चढ़ने में गुज़र जाए और आधी उस पहाड़ की ऊंचाई को थोड़ा और बढ़ाने के लिए कुछ और कंकड़ पत्थर बटोरने में, ताकि हम जैसा गरीब आगे उस पहाड़ को लांघने की सोचे भी ना । इस चक्कर में आदमी भूल ही जाए की वो करना क्या चाहता है। इतने बड़े गोरख धंधे ने आज करोड़ो लोगों को ये सोचने पे मजबूर कर रखा है की वे किसी काम के नहीं। 

Doing Research in India

It is an uphill journey for a researcher working in India in many ways. One of the cited reasons talks about lack of resources or of top researchers who can really do game-changing research. I find that to be the least of the reasons.

First of all, let me try and define what I consider to be a normal researcher's career goals. There are these dreams to be a top researcher whose work is cited in every conversation happening in a particular area of scholarship. This is a very lofty dream. It will not be fructified for most of us. Aiming for that just like that is a prescription for depression and disappointment. Instead, a more realistic goal is find a valid groove for oneself in the research ecosystem. That groove may be big or small -- that's secondary. It should provide a continual opportunity to think and work, to contribute, to communicate. Fame, recognition and riches may come, but as happy side-effects. The main product being a sustainable opportunity to work and produce, all while leading a reasonably happy life.

I know, there are subjectivity and loose ends in the above description. But that's Okay! As long as it shifts the focus from lofty and unrealistic dreams of greatness to realistic goals of day to day satisfaction and fulfilment. And one of the first hurdles to building fruitful research career in India is related with unrealistic goals. Please don't get me wrong in that I am trying to persuade you to give up your dreams. But dreams should arise out of your deep understanding about some problems, and an irresistible wish to solve it; it shouldn't arise out of images of heroic achievement flashed over the media. This only leads to vacuous ambitions, unrelated with the immediately surrounding reality. Work whose only meaning is associated with the fulfilment of an ambition, whether materialistic or otherwise, is by definition a chore, and can never give happiness.

So, if a person opts to do research in India with his or her expectations placed correctly, is it a cakewalk? No! So, what other problems? A list of some of the important problems in my view are presented in my cartoon that appeared today in Club SciWri, reproduced here:

The Strong Links

1. Talent. High talent density is made highly probable among Indian researchers by the sheer amount of competition they surmount before ending up in any prestigious graduate school. I am fully aware of the caveats in this assumption, though.
2. Motivation. The dampening influences which will be discussed below start playing out much before a student steps into a graduate school. If, in spite of them all, a student makes it to the doorsteps of a higher research degree, he/she has proved at least one point, that he/she is highly motivated.

The Weak Links

1. Unrealistic Goals. The first weak link that saps much of a young starry eyed researcher's energies are his ignorance about what research involves. He starts off at a high note thinking he can pull it off only on the basis of his intelligence, knowledge, hard work and what not. Disillusionment sets in when he finds that these qualities barely enable him to make any dent. 
2. Communication. Most of us hardly ever start at working on our communication skills. Those of us who do start hardly ever graduate beyond thinking of it as good English and confidence and all that. Communication is a much deeper skill. It has its roots in a practice of thinking with clarity, ability to sense lack in clarity, and seeking clarity by acquiring information through the means of listening, reading, guessing and imagining.
3. Selling Skills. My PhD got over before I got over the feeling that no one cares about my research. This lack of confidence sits so deep in our soul that we are never able to utter a single word about our work to others with an honest fervour. Yes, many of us pick up styles from here and there by noticing 'what sells'. But, to a trained eye, they look artificial and disgusting. The marketability that arises out of a calm and peaceful confidence in the meaningfulness of our work is widely lacking in us. This again has a lot to do with the fact that we start our journey by setting unrealistic goals.
4. Collaboration Ecosystem. A sense of deep mistrust pervades the Indian research scenario. Industries think researchers just want to talk crap. Researchers and academicians think that industries only care about money and short term goals. Both cling to their IPs like ... I don't know ... which is that animal which clings?! Yes. They cling to their IPs. And they sign such watertight MoUs that it chokes the life out of any effort. Funding agencies wait endlessly before releasing the first cheque. And they play safe by funding well known candidates. Institutes over commit, thinking that the money will take its own sweet time to flow in, if ever it flows in; so we might as well write ten other proposals. Institutes hesitate to share students, equipments, information ... unless shown businesslike incentives. What are they afraid of? Hard earned status? Disappointment on working with a bogus partner? I don't know. But, there's something in the air that prevents us from collaborating with each other. And collaborate we must, if we want to exist at all.
5. Financial Stability. Finally, the whole process of doing a PhD simply stops making sense when it fails to get us a commensurately paying job. 5-6 years appear like a sunk investment of precious youth and avenues of securing financial stability when it doesn't even give us a foothold in the market. If a PhD student in India decides to live off Government stipend, in a bachelor hostel, eating subsidised mess food, he can easily be fooled into thinking of himself as a king. If he thinks of letting the other aspects of his life move on in a normal way -- getting married, investing, owning a house -- he will wake up to his real penury. This financially unstable condition is the cause of many a casualty.

The Stumbling Blocks

1. Lab Politics. The stresses generated primarily by the above sources hits the individuals so hard so as to cause the internal environment of most labs to become completely toxic. Lab-mates, who should be working closely with each other (without it being forced by the supervisor), should take interest in each others work, evade each others' eyes, hide their data, lie to and about each other. Essentially, the broken collaboration ecosystem invades the very home of research -- the lab. What these labs end up being are pressure cookers with stressed out and lonely souls afraid of their inmates. It creates a terrible prospect for the work that can be expected to come out of such places. No wonder, much of the research that comes out of Indian labs is toothless. 
2. Social Pressures. All the above topped up with social pressures deals a deadly blow to the Indian researcher's will to put in that extra amount of effort which will tip the balance favourably for him.
• Get married.
• Support your family.
• Finish fast.
• IISc? What's that? Tell me one great invention that came out that place! Why didn't you do it abroad? 
• Dress like a human being, you geek! Smile. Attend the party... Be, or at least look, more like us all.

 An Indian research student functions in presence of continuous squabble created by his relatives, friends and immediate society. Many wickets fall under these Yorkers; any vessels are sunk by this torrent.

So, there you go. If you are contemplating taking up a research career here, please consider taking help of the above points in doing a bit of soul searching. For God's sake, start with realistic goals. There's a lot of ways in which a PhD can contribute to nation building in India. These ways mayn't quite look like those idolised by science books, magazines and journals. Preparing a society that has forgotten the faith in deductive reasoning and knowledge to start using systematic thinking for finding its way up, is challenging enough. This may need us to drop our ivory tower images of a scientist and get down on the field and get our hands a bit dirty.

Thank you Mom and Dad!

Research is a way to continue to wonder like a child all your life. It's not about how smart you are. It's not about how you did in your exams in schools. It's not even about fame and recognition. It's about the thrill in discovering an added level of order in the chaos around.

What would I have done if I hadn't known to wonder? To ask questions? And to seek their answers? What a drudgery life would be devoid of questions! I would have had to seek pleasure in owning cars, houses, being in top positions...being successful, in convincing myself of the meaningfulness of my existence by spotting envy and admiration for me in others!

My parents. They didn't send me to the best schools. They didn't expose me to the best sources of knowledge. They just left me free to wonder. I feel thankful to them!

About Value

Why do we do research, man?! In fact, why anything?
One simple answer is: to make ourselves happy, prosperous, richer etc. That's OK.
But the 'why' becomes significant when we are talking about making choices between various things.
Often, there's a question raised about the practicality of the topic of research. For example, should a person do research on philosophy, or on digital electronics. Simplistic answers are:
- Whatever you feel like.
- Whichever is funded well.

These formulae may work in very clear cases. But, sometimes, things aren't clear enough. For example, whether you have enough funds for a research project depends a lot on whether you are interested enough in it or not. As long as the settlement of this balance between interest and funding is with one person, it may reach a steady state after some soul-searching. But what happens when the researcher is not the one who funds the research? His interest will hardly work as a great motivation for the military general who may be the one to sign the funding cheque.

Framing the whole problem of deciding research can be framed conveniently as a business problem where everyone has different (sometimes conflicting) motives. But the motive of profit-making unites all motives. Economic forces reign supreme. A capitalistic model.

But ignoring the fact that this model is insufficient to define motives of research could have disastrous effects on everyone. If economic forces are allowed to decide all research policies, it will drive the frontlines of knowledge in such directions as will mutate the whole body of human knowledge into an ugly monster.

The point is: what really is the meaning of the word 'useful'? What are those basic acts A, B, C... etc which are useful. If we are able to define that set, we could just argue on that basis to define the usefulness of other activities on the basis of laws like the following ones:
Law of composite activities: Say, some other composite act X is a combination of acts A and B. If A and B are known to be useful, we may conclude that X is useful.
Law of enabling activities: Say, an activity X results in increase in the ability of people to do activities A and B, then we may conclude that X is useful.

There might be many such laws if we give it a thought. That's the easy part to come up with such laws. The difficult part is to define a fundamental tenet of usefulness. The law that lets us conclude that atomic activities like A and B are useful. Their usefulness isn't derived from the usefulness of some other activities.

Let me dwell a bit on why our current knowledge falls short of achieving the above. Say, arbitrarily assign some positive value to some activities. If more of such acts are done, there is an overall rise in the 'value'. Thus, these acts are useful in that sense.

Say, one such act is 'eating'. A person who eats feels happy. So, there's a sense in assigning some positive value to eating. The more people eat, the more value there is. Nice and simple!

But there's trouble brewing there. If I eat too much, I get indigestion. My arteries may clog and I may die of heart attack. So, eating too much now may result in my dying early reducing the total number of times I enjoy eating. Also, suppose I am a criminal psychopath. I like killing people. The more I eat, the longer I live. The longer I live, the more number of people I murder. Hence, my eating results in many other people not living enough to enjoy eating. Hence, whether my eating indeed is valuable overall depends on what other activities it enables or disables, and the value contained in them.

Both the difficulties above are operational. They talk about the difficulties in computing the actual value of an activity. The difficulty arises from our inability in determining what other activities it may enable/disable. This difficulty, though significant, is not fundamental. It doesn't still present the fundamental difficulty of defining usefulness, or 'value', to be more precise.

The sense of that fundamental difficulty can be got from the apparent vacuousness of the idea of assigning value to such mundane things like eating, sleeping, having sex, etc. To me, doing this makes the whole idea of life appear vulgar! So, it's all about maximising eating and making merry?! There's nothing more than that?! Even computer programs, which can be broken down into a sequence of bits, or an electronic circuit, which can be looked at as a combination of numerous gates, seem to have a more respectable existence. At least when brought together, they serve purposes which can't be served by individual bits or logic gates. On the other hand, it appears blasphemous to compute the value of the most elevated life on the basis of the number of meals, sleeps and copulations it eventually results in.

There lies the problem of value. That hunch: That the value of elevated acts must lie in something less vulgar than can be reduced to a large series of mindless animal acts. I haven't read much of ethics, but I surmise that this is, in some way, the essential problem of that subject.

...and that's also my underlying thought when I ask: 'Why do we do research?'

Note: I foresee a link to this post appearing in many many of my future posts.

The Enemy Within

I want to draw your attention to a subtle point I have tried making
many times: "Don't give in to fear." For me, the importance of these
words can't be overstated. How hard I try to stay calm and
composed when it's the question of drawing motivation to work! I have
let go waste tonnes and tonnes of fear which I could easily have used
to push myself into working hard and getting professionally benefited.
I daresay, I would have been able to prove quite a few points had I
let that happen. I have tried very hard to never let that happen
(though I don't always succeed). Same has been true with other sources
of motivation like rivalry, ambition and professional conceit. I have
always shunned them when I could have used them. The central idea was:
"My research is the purest and most beautiful thing I do. I will not
malign it by letting it get driven by things I consider negative." I
mayn't have been always correct in being so pedantic about the matter.
I sometimes wonder if I hadn't looked at certain things like fear,
anger, rivalry and ambition as out and out negative things, I could
have found it easier to get into a habit of working hard. Once the
habit set in, perhaps, I could have worked towards purifying my
thoughts, and then driving myself with purer sources of motivation
then on. Well, perhaps. I will hopefully get a chance to validate that
hypothesis in future. But, let's not talk about that aspect right now.

The above maxim can be partially stated as: "Never let negative
thoughts drive you to do anything good." But it gets completed when we
say: "Never let negative thoughts stop you from doing what you truly
want to do."

That second part of the maxim came to my rescue two and half years
ago, when I had almost got paralysed after suffering nearly 2 years of
fruitless toil on a problem which wasn't moving anywhere. By some
miracle (which is also called 'introspection'), I realised that,
bigger and more immediate than the problem of my research not going
anywhere, it was that deep fear of having to face failure and
disappointment which was my problem. Slowly, I could get clearer and
clearer sight of that 'fear' which used to draw away my energy
whenever I would decide to sit and do something towards my research.
This fear was born and had grown within me; and yet, I could see it as
an external thing -- something which I had cut and throw away from my
system, something I should take pleasure in killing.

When I succeeded in looking at this fear as something not essential to
my personality, but rather something that I could easily throw out of
my system, and survive, I could actually get up and do something about
my plight. I realised that, for the immediate moment, my success lay,
not in doing successful research, but in honestly trying to do so. And
I wouldn't let my fear stop me from doing that.

I think I won that little battle. But the fear is still there and
sometimes becomes overpowering. But, due to that one triumphant
experience during my PhD, I know that it exists somewhere inside me,
am far more capable to identify it in many of its clever disguises,
and with hardly any delay, am able to get up and start smothering it
back to its little dark hole whenever it raises its head.

I do think (may be it's a fallacy) that this tussle with fear is an
essential experience of doing PhD. Perhaps the most important one.
People who have got that momentum right from the first day, due to whatever reason, mayn't perhaps face this problem now.
Perhaps, they already had faced this problem earlier, and have,
consciously or unconsciously, devised ways of handling it. Perhaps, we
haven't been so lucky (or wise) enough to have faced this problem
earlier in our lives. But, whenever someone is trying to do something
non-trivial, I think, this hurdle is bound to be faced. And only when
one learns to combat one's own fear (which is the mother of laziness
and procrastination), one is really going to have a smooth sail to his
or her destination.

All this is not an advice. I just want you to know something now which
I spent an unnecessary amount of time and toil to understand. I don't
know if it's one of those things which can be learned only the hard
way of experience. But, in case it isn't one of those things, I
wouldn't like to miss this chance to share with you this little
thought which was almost life-changing for me.