Live Hard

It has been more than a month since I last posted in this blog. There were too many uncertainties and things beyond our control that one can't simply spend too much time worrying about such matters. Things just need to move. Another aspect is that there are tendencies that academic matters be marred by egoistic drives. Part of my silence is to disentangle such tendencies from my own actions. I am no longer concern about administrative leadership but will shift my attention to scientific leadership which is more critically needed. My own personal attitude has always been that I will contribute wherever I can and whenever or wherever I'm wanted. I've started to focus on matters that go beyond the institute and act on matters that I can have influence on. Think globally and act locally, as some would say. It is also a paradigm that one takes whenever one faces (mathematical) problems: either one generalises the problem (to gain wider perspective) or one looks for simpler problems (to solve problems incrementally) or both. In any case, I will keep giving ideas to help the institute to move on and will also proceed to ensure sustainable progress for theoretical physics in UPM.

One of the things I believe in, is not to be too comfortable with easy things. Wherever manageable, live life the hard way. It makes one appreciates better how hard other people work. In a way, such stance is also why I keep pursuing theoretical physics despite many instances of discouraging efforts by others. Living the hard way allows one to experience better what others have gone through. One of the 'silly' things (some say) that I did during my PhD years was to copy out-of-print books by hand (see the pic below). The purpose is three-fold: first, to have a personal copy of the book and second, to learn the contents while writing them out. It is well-known that you learn better by writing things down, a skill that seems to be eroded away due to habit of online-reading. Third, is to simply experience what the ancient scribes have done in the old days where they need to copy manuscripts to transmit the knowledge around (before printing press is available).

Recently, I was invited to give a talk at a symposium in VIT and Thiruvalluvar University in India. I had the freedom to choose any topic I want though was told to keep it to a level understandable by students. I could have taken an already prepared talk to make things easy for me. Instead I choose to talk on a topic that I'm still learning namely dynamical systems (for the talk at VIT; the talk at Thiruvalluvar was different). The prompt to study dynamical systems also arises from two challenges: one being personal, deemed by others for not being knowledgeable about the subject and another is to make (international) collaboration works. The pressure to have a good respectable talk on this new topic, both for beginners and experts, helped me learn the subject more speedily by focusing on core ideas. Part of the talk has been posted on my technical blog Ketchup Spills. I will continue to post on this blog on what I have learned or anything useful for my group. The blog posts are not essential for the academia (extra burden) and are not in any way counted for personal assessment. However I wish to continue to do so for my own betterment. I have resurrected the blog just before going to India (should have been concentrating then for my India presentation). Writing technical blogs are far more difficult than writing non-technical ones like this. There is a tremendous amount of fact-checking and much more demanding is to have a personal perspective of the blog materials. Thus, one expects a slower rate of posting to Ketchup Spills.

Also recently, we were made aware of suggestions of new levels of KPIs for the institute. Researchers of the institute are expected to perform better than those in the Faculties. Added to this, is now that the administrators (yes, people like me) of the institute are expected to perform better than the institute's members. Blanket KPIs irrespective of fields often do more harm than good and I have written many times, arguing for the case of mathematical sciences with statements by international experts and associations. I do not wish to repeat them and make me sound like a broken record. The higher KPI for the administrators of the institute is another thing that I felt is not very wise. While I'm game for higher (reasonable) targets (live hard, as I said earlier), I certainly do not want these KPIs diminish my chances of promotion or affect my bread-and-butter matters. As such, the perception will be that of threats and the natural reaction to threats are fight-or-flight. Certainly true leaders would not want such reactions from the staff but instead they should motivate us to work better. But perhaps they have thought these matters through and through and there is no better option? Personally for me, this would be a push-away factor from taking up administrative posts. So we will see how it goes.