....Its over, finally

"...it took me long long time" i love hearing Lobo and this song. So good to be back and scribble here again. Sooo... its over, i dearly wish i could say, its all over for me! alas! i can not. delivering this book took me five times more than what a pregnant woman takes for delivering her baby and pain also 5 times more! The thesis came with an extremely heavy price tag, much of it i couldn't bear finally. Quality? you certainly have to ask my examiners including my thesis supervisor, at the days end it does not matter what i feel about it, i wonder whether it mattered any time?

Here comes the desertion submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy titled

"Grain boundary processes in high temperature densification and deformation of nanocrystalline zirconia"

This thesis concentrated on few important structural behaviour which is strongly influenced by the grain boundaries. Grain growth, grain boundary diffusion, densification and creep are to name a few. Important findings? there were few with significant impact, well i have talked about it to so many people and so many times... i will do it in a separate post...important thing is its more or less over...
How did it feel? does that 186 page dissertation changed anything? Yes it did, certainly it did, but frankly speaking i did not feel anything, whether sadness or happiness. I shed couple of drops of tears i dont know for what. This realization, although cliche, that this book willfully will be read only by me and except me on earth it really did not matter to anyone, hits hard at time. not to mention i longed that it would have some impact...alas!no...so practically no point in discussing it... but hey, you know, its over.....thanks...

Advices

I never did this earlier, but i just couldn't stop myself writing this in my post. I have a motivated friend who always wanted to serve the country and resisted all kind of temptation to go abroad for higher education or any kind of visit. He always believed if once we had the best scientific minds in our country then they must be here now too, and it is our responsibility to preserve it. We praised him a lot, infact he was a motivation for many of us to stay back. So he joined a famous national lab here in India, i had very little contact for last 4 yrs., yesterday i got a mail, he said he has quit the job! and decided to go abroad, he added he'll try his best not to come back! . he read pretty sentimental, he had some advice for me too, i want to keep this piece of advice here in my space:

.....I am requesting you too do something similar, i hope you will agree, dont join any R&D lab in India immediately after PhD, go for a Post Doc abroad and then come back to India, because we are great we dont have any faith on our abilities. if you go abroad and come back then at least people listens to you, this marks that you are worth paying attention, otherwise you are worthless. I HAVE EXPERIENCED THIS, I am not cooking up anything. I felt it and faced it also.
You know well that for us the big national labs are a dream place to work but really it is not like that. I term it as SCIENTIFIC MAFIA DEN, Believe me i have experienced it.
Inspite of all these I have proved what we can do. They did realize the point i wanted to make, but it was late and i ran out of patient. I have decided to quit and wanted to a take a revenge, not in a usual way, i made them to depend on me and gave them this shock in once nice morning, i just had put my resignation, i guess they understood. This was certainly a shock, they started to depend, exploit me and was becoming greedier. I also helped them. I wanted that. I wanted to make them realize what youngsters can do. You cant imagine in our lab the young people are so enthusiastic and motivated, i am sure that they can shape our country better than USA in science and technology. But the authority and superiors are demoralizing them.
Anyway I am telling some worthless thing, there is no point in raising such issues once i am quiting the battle, thats why i am writing to you, ponder over it, I couldn't change their attitude and if a new person goes there, he/she would face similar pain. I am not sentimental it is the real world of research i am talking about....

Disclaimer: If you are angry over me for writing such thing about research here, then my answer is: this quote is fictitious and no such guy exist in this world, sorry i just wrote a fiction.

..Its really touchy

....today Abi's post on first women scientist in IISc was really a touchy one. I hope things have changed quite a bit now but still it is very upsetting to know about plights of women scholars, especially in places like indian institute of science in 30s. I am sure there are more real life stories and i feel quite depressed everytime i hear them... Guru's comments to this post also contains some interesting links.