My First Entry

Good Morning, You Guys. This is indeed my first foray into the remarkable world of blogging. I shall (hopefully) be posting blogs daily. I make no promises, though.

IIT Madras is one hell of a place to be in right now. We have an amazingly fast internet right in our rooms, we have amazing climate right now (Chennai Becomes extremely tolerable in Winter, which is like summer in most temperate parts of the world).

I have not read any blog as yet I am assuming that a blog is something like a conversation with someone I do not know. So I started by talking about the weather. Now that I have talked about the weather already (rendering the same an unusable force henceforth in today's blog), I shall start talking about other things.

Let's talk about apping now. Well, I have decided to apply nine (9!) universities for a doctorate. Quite desperate to get somewhere. Though that does sound desperate, I assure you that I know lots of others who are applying to places in excess of 10. Looks like IITians are really keen on getting out of India. Why? Why are IITs (and Indian Universities in general) not as sought after as those American colleges?

I am reluctant to accept that the professors at IIT Madras are in any way inferior to those anywhere else in the world. The undergraduate and graduate research that I have helped do in my lab just tells me that there is a lot of untapped expertise and curiosity in the labs. I guess the main difference is Industrial funding. If these professors start doing more industrial projects, then they shall need more students.

Perhaps another way to get IITs out of this research rut is to increase the professors' pay to levels comparable with the Industry. Or at least give them some sort of incentive to work on Industrial problems. The problem, I feel, is that the country is still languishing in the anti-progress socialist era.

I conclude my first blog. I shall try to rake up issues in every blog.