Welcome! My name is Rajendra and I am a physicist by training. My Ph. D. is in Scanning Probe Microscopy.
After a few years of doing research in Probe Microscopy, I was getting bored. Spending all of your life studying a narrow field was not my cup of chai. When I was doing research, I had to restrain myself from delving too much into a favourite book or learning a new language.
Our identities today are largely determined by our professions. So a lawyer may sing well but you will not know it reading her bio or even after meeting her. Most of us have a primary skill or profession. Anything else that we may be good at are all dumped under “hobbies.”
Imagine if you could go back in time to Florence in the Fifteenth century and meet Leonardo da Vinci. You ask him the one question that we all are obsessed with, “What do you do?”
Leonardo : I am a painter, sculptor, inventor, musician, mathematician, engineer, writer, astronomer, botanist, historian, geologist, cartographer.
Yes, he was all those things and much more. Unfortunately, the educational system today ensures that once you are qualified for a profession, it is very difficult to make a switch. Think about how bizarre that is. While there can only be one Leonardo, the genius that he was, perhaps us mortals can take some inspiration from his example.
You buy a new shirt and you like it very much. You wear it many times and slowly the thrill begins to wear off. You don’t like it as much and you go buy 10 more. This also happens with cars, houses, sometimes even relationships. People are allowed to get new cars or houses but the one thing they rarely change is their profession. You study to become a doctor and it is expected that you will like it for the rest of your life. If you don’t, and many don’t, nothing much can be done about it. It’s too late to go back to school and start again.
Physics and astronomy were my favourite subjects. They still are. But when you are a professional physicist, you go deeper into your area of expertise and you have little time for anything else. This works well for people with sharp focus. In my case, I began to get tired of it.
So I have decided to become a polymath on a limited basis – polymath lite if you will. Wiki defines a polymath as “A person whose expertise spans a significant number of subject areas, known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems.”
I don’t want to become an expert in many areas. I just want to know enough about them so that I can write about them. That’s the other thing I discovered during my research period. I enjoyed writing papers on my research much more than doing the actual research. I love writing about stuff that interests me.
My ikigai is “learn, experience and write.”
So on this website, you will find articles on various topics that I pick up on my journey. Obviously, there will be science and science fiction but there are also articles on movies and acting, books, technology, music, and much more.
One thing I love while writing about different topics is the connections that pop up between them. Connections that would not have been visible had I stuck to writing about one particular area.
आते हैं ग़ैब से ये मज़ामीं ख़याल में
ग़ालिब सरीर-ए-ख़ामा नवा-ए-सरोश है