Soumya's Weird Musings

 Before 2013, I had never stayed in one school – or really, in one place – for more than…three years? Sure, let’s go with that. In a school? I considered it a stroke of luck to be able to return for the next academic year. So depending on how you count, I have been in anywhere from nine to eleven schools in the fifteen years (nursery-12 th ) of my schooling. (The school I joined in 2013 ended up also being my high school where I spent from eighth to twelfth – the longest I have stayed in any school.) So it should probably (read: hopefully) be no surprise that I have ample experience with being the “new kid.” It gave me a few skills that I find useful, such as being able to silently analyze class dynamics, inferring names so I didn’t have to bother too much with awkward introductions, and getting a read on my classmates, especially the ones that stood out (for whatever reason). Sometimes I would even be able to find out how their names were spelled by sneaking peeks into atte...

The feeling of guilt is internalized and normalized. That feeling that if the work is bigger than me, then I have to shape myself to match it. Getting ripped apart in the process is my own weakness. Some experiences make me wonder if my feelings are my own, And some others have me wondering whom to trust. And apparently, there's something wrong with that. Apparently, I need to heal from that. "You're digging up the past," they say when I try to vocalize it. "Is our support not enough?" They wonder if I try to seek help. And help is what I need now. Help me because I live the knowledge of shouldered heartache that went unlabeled. Help me because I have lived the ideal even when they try to convince me that the ideal doesn't exist. Help me because I am trying to shape myself to the size of my completely normal  load... ...and I haven't noticed those frayed seams until their structural integrity failed me. I want to be resolute in helping myself now. Ne...

 On May 18, 2016, a blog was born. Were it still active today, it would have been active for five years. Alas, it was not meant to be. This is the story of what Amateur Astronomy meant to me.     At one point, it was not a frequent occurrence for me to find someone as passionate about astronomy or astrophysics as I consider myself to be. So I was glad to make a friend who had the idea to publish our ideas in the form of a blog. But call it circumstance. Call it accountability. I don’t know. At one point, the frequency of posts was reduced suddenly. At the time, even I didn’t know the cause for it. I suppose I should have taken it as a warning of this blog’s dismal future. We were only two students with a lot to share and enthusiastic to do so. But you can only escape schooling for so long. That is exactly what happened. I make no secret of how my final year of high school affected me. And so, I bear no anger towards the person I was supposed to run the blo...

 How wonderful it is to have a national holiday dedicated to science. I want to make a preemptive statement here that I have been on a visit to RRCAT twice before: once in 2016 and once in 2017. (That would put me in tenth and eleventh class respectively.) As a result, I already had an idea of what to expect from the webinar. That being said, I feel that Science Day this year was at an advantage due to being virtual. It goes against intuition, I know. But I do have a justification for saying that. A lot of the work that happens at RRCAT – which is also what puts it at the frontiers of research – is high-energy research, or even research that requires extreme environments. Even in an in-person visit, it would not have been possible to look at those experiments as closely as we would have liked. Thus, that is a parameter that remained largely unchanged over a virtual meet. By virtue of having visited RRCAT before, I feel justified saying that in terms of the material that was...

“You’re like Hanuman,” said my mother. I started. “Excuse me?” “You always need to be reminded of your own ability.” Abilities, indeed. It can be difficult for me to toot my own horn. It’s not a good thing to do to begin with, but in some sense, I could use the ability. What are my skills? What can I be confident about? Granted, these are questions I’ll keep asking myself for a long time, maybe even for the rest of my life. However, certain things I would like to be confident about. I’m hoping that opening up about it will help somehow. And maybe along the way, I may answer a question I have been asked so many times that it’s gotten stale for me. Honestly, even beginning to write this article is a huge step for me, one I struggled to take as I typed this. Astrophysics and astronomy. That’s what this article is about. And even then, there’s so much I’d like to encapsulate. This…subject (let’s call it that for now) has been an important part of my life for thirteen years now. As...