I’m not really quite sure what prompted me to start this blog. Okay, I lied. Between watching Tim crunch out PDE’s by hand on the white board infront of me, checking the weather every ten minutes, and attempting (yet failing miserably) to solve even one Putnam problem a day, I grew listless. But I have so much to say! So many things to discuss! Why must I succumb to this dormant, static lifestyle within my research cubicle? A sense of intellectual liberation soon overwhelmed me; the things I could talk about if I wrote them down! Alas, vengayasambar.wordpress.com was born.
I have always discussed writing a blog with my uncle - Dr. B. Ravikumar, Professor of Computer Science, at Sonoma State University. Every summer, I hop on a plane and jettison roughly 6 hours to a small, quiet surburban city outside of San Francisco – Petaluma. It is within his home, overseeing the grand Petaluma hills and the city beneath us, that our dialogue (or for my Tamil readers, our ”penathal”) begins.
Much of this blog will revisit many topics that have caused insomnia between me and Ravi. Although I do pride myself in possessing a smidgeon of literary ability, I do not consider myself a writer. If what comes out on these pages appears to be well written, interesting, and thought provoking, then perhaps what they say is true – every dog does indeed have his day. My job more importantly I feel, is to entertain and bring some of the most obscure subjects within our discussions to life. It should come as no surprise that as a graduate student of engineering, and Ravi himself, a Professor of Computer Science – that many of our topics stem from the sciences. However, they soon take a rather unpredictable turn thereafter. It takes a rather curious duo to dive from the Chinese Remainder Theorem to parallel universes, and then onto cousin couples, and finally stop (if only for the night) at the rituals performed at a South Indian Brahmin Wedding. Then rinse, and repeat.
A long first post, I know. Originally, I had intended the first post to discuss sambar, a delicious south indian dish as well as the url of this blog. Feeling the need for an introduction of some sort, I left the title as is and wandered off into this prefatory piece of writing. Sambar, and all its related entities will be covered in the next post. Until then!
