PhD: before and after it

Toy-Box

A strange thing stuck me today as I was on my way back home with the u-bahn. ( for those learning German, its Untergrundbahn and for others underground metro, German is easy, once you know the male, female and neutral). A bunch of kids, teenagers I suppose, boarded the train. Within a sec, smartphones of different colours, shapes and sizes popped out from their pockets. For the next 20 minutes, they did not speak a single word to each other, just typing, making expressions to themselves and typing again. I got down after that, but I believe they wouldn't have changed their habit soon after. 

Over the dinner, I said this to my wife, while our 5 month old son, Viaan slept. She just looked at him and we just smiled at each other - mocking or feeling sad at the inevitable, I am not sure.

I am Indian by birth, looks and accent. My formative years were spent in an industrial town, 100 miles north of Calcutta which is one of the main business centres of eastern India. Being raised in a colony, I was fortunate to have come across other youngsters, socialise, make friends and grow up playing in sun. This is still early 90s, one family in the neighbourhood had a landline phone and very few a colour television. Hence, you can find rational in my decision to spend time in the sun, yes there were no such thing as watsapp, imo, facebook or lets say smartphone. Trust me, I had fun.

I spent my holidays, fixing a cricket bat or opening up an old radio, or trying to devise some ingenious techniques to create a toy car driven by a 3volt motor. Even if the alignment of the motor was not perfect, or the belt was slaggy, I had fun designing it and see it at least move few meters. I had a metal box containing what nots, from soldering wire, capacitors, leds, expired 9V batteries and even a design book to create your own toy circuits. We even made the best out of the summer holidays. Since its suicidal to play cricket during the day,  we played early morning, 5-8am. Each one of us invariably reached the field, just a verbal commitment the previous day worked perfectly.  As I grew up, things started to change. Friends lost, friends made, places changed, people around me changed.  With change, I had to adapt. Adapt fast and effectively to be in the leading place. Be it high school, college, university, even job: the rat race was on. Everyone around you was running fast, really fast. In an attempt to catch speed, I left my cricket bat, or my prized toy metal box behind.

Now when I look back, I wish I could time-travel and fix few things. I wish, someone had told me then that its going to be me alone with whom I have to compete with. This is the best competitor you can have. You, yourself. Excel yourself each day. Now, when I look around myself, I do not see a single of my childhood friends. They are fine, some good, some worse, but end of the day what makes me feel awesome is myself. Over the years,  I have realised it and I try hard to excel myself. Logically, you are competing with someone who is equally as strong as you are and you really have to push yourself to get that edge. That makes you feel awesome; to emerge as the winner.

Sometimes, I feel sad for the kids of this generation. I wish I could tell them, go and play for an hour, get dirty. fix a bike tyre, or just sit and follow an ant. Just shut down the electronic world for a moment. In few years, it will eventually drag you in, please do not waste your time hooked into it. In the process, you will find yourself. You will find thousands other sources of fun, way more valuable than the facebook likes. I found my interest in circuits and ended up in an Engineering degree in Electronics. It evolved and I finally did my PhD in Artificial Intelligence.  Once you find the inner cord of yours, you will also know how to improve it. The rest is easy. Finding it is the hardest part. So lets find those small toy boxes of ours. Who knows we might have the better counterparts of us locked there?