He sits there the whole day with his chin on his wrist… at the top of the staircase… like he is David the Thinker lost in deep Socratic philosophical thoughts such as… “Is God married?” (Quoted from Sue Townsend).
All he does is sleep, eat and have us clean after him when he has his bowel movements!!
It is a dog’s life, they say. My left foot!!
I do not smoke at all but the evenings with Avi at the local cigar bar are always memorable. First, there are all the new folks I meet (last night met somebody who was born in Finland and another person – Robert – who is moving right next to where we lived in the Dallas area). Then there are the old folks – the owners, the barpersons – Susan, April, the cigar guy – Mason. It is always great to catch up with them.
And then after everybody leaves – the deep discussions and reflections on life we two do. Last night we were there till about 12:30 am before we slipped out from the outside gate. The previous time was about the Declaration of Independence. This time it was about relationships of human beings. We both agreed that we need to pick up from where we left next time we meet. It is too long a topic to finish in a day or two.
Great times!!
It was long time in the making. Finally caught up with the Das family. I recollect meeting them for the first time when Atanu was the invited artist to sing at my 50th birthday. That was about four and a half years back. Gita used to come to Chalupa – the local running group – but I think she dropped out and in any case, I started running at different times than the group.
Caught up on a lot of stuff in one evening! How is an evening with the Das-es, you ask? “Das” ist good!! 🙂
Needed to work a little late last night. In between did some chapters on random sampling methods (in stats) with Niki. Looks like she is taking a liking to statistics just like me. (I started studying statistics in my junior year to – but that was in 1983).
Anyways, after everything was over – joined Sharmila, Dipanjan and Parijat for a quick drink at the local pub.
After moving to Atlanta in 2007, it took me quite some time to realize that my classmate from my department in college – Aluru Srinivas – also is in the same city. Met him after 1989 for the first time in 2014. Then three years later, in 2017, met him again along with some of our other hostel mates visiting at that time.
And then another three years later, I met him again yesterday. Good discussions around all our classmates and what they are up to these days. One of the topics I learnt about is how marketable a CS degree is – especially in academia. I have a CS degree too but I was never good enough for academia. My journey took me to the corporate side.
It was good seeing Aluru again!
Seven years back, Prabasaj-da had surprised me by walking up to me at the local Durga Puja and asking me if I was Rajib Roy. Prior to that, I had last seen Prabasaj-da in Narendrapur, way back in 1984. He was an year senior to me in high school and that is when he had left our residential school campus.
My blog site reminded me of that meeting a couple of days back and that led me to reach out to Prabasaj-da and set up the meeting today. It is a pity that I waited for such a long time. He was a legend in academics in school. But what had impressed me always was his independence in thinking. From deciding not to go for engineering or medical sciences (which is what just about everybody did those days – certainly the ones who laid any claim to fame in academic prowess) to the subsequent life journey that has taken him from Utah to Cameroon (he volunteered for the Peace Corps to teach Physics in a very small school there) to moving from Physics to Epidemiology sure makes for a fascinating story.
He came to our agreed upon coffee place riding in his bicycle that he has had from 1992!! His other bike apparently had to be paid as ransom so that they could go free from a village in the marshy lands of Darien Gap (in the border of Panama and Colombia). He and a friend of his were riding thru Central America in their bikes and you can read up about Darien Gap to realize how scary it is.
After enquiring about our common friends and teachers, most of my questions for Prabasaj-da was around the pivotal learning moments in his multi faceted life. We talked about why being an SME (Subject Matter Expertise) is something we should be afraid of and why our tendency to model any problem in the constructs of the one field we are experts of is fundamentally a flawed one.
The conversations also included why icebergs are in an unstable state (got to do with the center of buoyancy and center of gravity) or rather metastable state. One famous line from Prabasaj-da – “Reality is for people who cannot deal with animation”!
Since he is in CDC now, of course, we touched upon the topic of Covid – but more from mathematical and statistical modeling point of view. In a conversation reminiscent of what Madhav had once explained to me, Prabasaj-da explained how when the large pharma companies try to model where the highest concentrations of Covid is likely to be (so they can do A-B tests) – that knowledge of the model output itself changes behaviors of the the population (taking more precautions) that render the model invalid!! Madhav had explained this as the challenge in forecasting variables that are endogenous to the system.
I had the time of my life! We agreed to get Sharmila, Kathleen and ourselves together soon in the next few weeks!!
