TIFR-CAM Experience: Day 1 and 2

Recently, I along with my thesis advisor and mentor Dr Sai Jagan Mohan sir (henceforth referred by his popular acronym, SJM) and one of my closest friends Ruchir Dwivedi gave a conference talk at TIFR-CAM, Bangalore. This post is the crux of all the experiences I had in that amazing city.

‘Conference on Computational PDE, Finite Element Meet 2014’ was to begin on 18^th of December 2014. I reached Bangalore on 17^th of December. Since we had submitted our work late, the organizers were unable to accommodate us inside the campus. But fortunately, my mentor’s sister lives in Bangalore. So he had arranged for Ruchir and me to stay at his sister’s place.

I reached Bangalore around 11:30 am. I was completely new to the city. The majestic or formally the Kempegauda bus stand is right in front of the Bangalore city junction railway station. I had no idea how to reach the given address. On top of that, I have no hint about how to interpret Kannada, the vernacular of Karnataka. But most of the people understand Hindi and English and they were helpful. I found the enquiry counter easily and the lady there told me how to reach my destination. I took a bus from there to the house of SJM’s sister. It took me a couple of hours to reach there through the insanely clumsy traffic of Bangalore.

When I reached there, my mentor’s sister, along with her husband was gone out of station for some professional meeting. But SJM’s mother was there and she let me in.

SJM and Ruchir’s flight from New Delhi was delayed due to the fog in the atmosphere. They almost took an extra hour to reach Bangalore. Before they arrived, I must confess I felt a little awkward. But it was refreshing to talk to Sir’s mother. I also talked to her grandchildren. Luckily, there was a Rubik’s cube and they didn’t know how to solve it. So I taught them how to solve a Rubik’s cube.

I must confess a fun-fact. Well, it is slightly embarrassing but the truth is that I learned Rubik’s cube just to impress girls. I know it is stupid, but that was the only motivation for me to continue learning it! I thought it looks cool and I learnt it simply to get admiration from the opposite sex! And so far, I haven’t impressed a single girl with it! Personally, I would have never learned those algorithms and because of the fact that I haven’t been able to impress any girl with it, I sometimes feel it was a waste of time.

But that day, when I completed the cube, I could see that small boy looking curiously at the cube, for he thought it was incredibly cool! And that is how my knowledge of how to solve Rubik’s cube helped me, to get over the initial awkwardness with some stranger.

Once Sir and Ruchir arrived, we went for a walk and talked about various subjects. Mainly, we talked about the city. We went to a nearby mall in the evening and while going there, we were talking about the Finite Element Method. A car almost hit my mentor, for he was lost in the conversation! In the evening, his sister and her husband came back from Mysore and we chatted for a while. They are nice people. SJM’s sister told us stories about sir from their childhood, how he used to help her in her studies and how she used to hate those study sessions! All in all, it was fun!

The next day, we got up early in the morning at 6:00 and using city buses, we managed to reach TIFR-CAM at around 8:10 am. We had a breakfast and registration there and the conference started at 9:00 am as planned. There were talks by mathematicians, engineers and PhD Students from all over the country. The students were predominantly from TIFR or IISc Bangalore. Some of the talks were really nice, where some were too advanced for me. One my friends from BITS Pilani, Abhishek Kumar was also attending the conference. We met a lot of amazing people and more or less everyone there was nice enough to talk to us, the undergraduate students! The food was great and the conference was going as planned. Our presentation was last on the last day of the conference. So we had enough time. Ruchir and I also got accommodation there at TIFR and the organizers were helpful to us.

At the end of the first day, once the conference ended at 5:30 pm, four of us, Sir, Ruchir, Abhishek and I caught a shuttle to IISc Bangalore. We were going there to meet one of our seniors from BITS Pilani, Rohit Varghese. I hadn’t met him before, but he seemed like a cool guy. He had a car with him. We talked about many different subjects. We went to Subway Sandwich just outside IISc and then went to Corner House. Corner House is a famous chain of ice-cream shops in Bangalore and they have this special dish which they title: ‘Death by Chocolate’! SJM challenged me to eat one full bowl of ‘death by chocolate’ and I accepted the challenge. But then, Rohit intervened and warned me about it, for it is humongous to eat, especially when you are not hungry. So Abhishek stepped up. Together, we finished that whole bowl of ‘Death by Chocolate’ and boy was I in for stomach pain! Rohit dropped us somewhere near Hebbal, the central location from where buses go all over the city. We got a bus to SJM’s sister’s house and hence ended the first day of the conference.

TIFR-CAM

Abhishek and I (I don't know what we were talking about! Ruchir is such a weird guy, he didn't even tell us that he was taking a pic! 

Death by Chocolate!

On the second day, we acquired our allotted room which was room no. 311 at TIFR-CAM. The second day was also good. Last year Abhishek and I had done a study project in mathematics department under the guidance of a new professor Dr Sangeeta Yadav. On the second day, we attended a lecture by her PhD advisor! It was indeed a good feeling to see him referring to her publications!

SJM stayed in our room on 19^th December as we had not yet prepared our presentation. We had some slides here and there, and I had all the codes with me, but that needed to be arranged in a proper manner. We had already decided that we were not going to be vague about any of our statements in the presentation. As we were presenting in front of a crowd full of mathematicians, we had to be crisp in the statements that we were going to make. We had divided our work in subparts. SJM was handling the part of presentation related to Group Theory. Ruchir and I were handling the part related to numerical implementation in FreeFem++ and MATLAB.  It took us 2 O’clock in the morning to finish with the presentation. SJM stayed for up for one more hour in order to compile everything in nice format.