Aloke Kumar's Blog

Should Dharmic Fiction get married to Science Fiction? Second essay of a series. Read first essay here. Have you seen the latest Star Wars movie - The Last Jedi? Do you remember the scene, when Luke Skywalker explains to Rey what the 'Force' is? Rey realizes that the 'Force' is an energy field that exists between all living things; it also exists within her and that through meditation she can learn to unleash and control the Force. Did a part of you recognize the old wine of Vedanta in a new bottle? I did. When I discovered the movie’s premiere showing earned $45 million US, I could not help but feel that themes such as these should be basic precepts of India’s movie industry. Yet, it is not so. Is it because of our inexperience in the art of story-telling? Obviously not. Many Indian movies can shine as bright as any other on this front. Where we are lagging behind is in story-lines that involve futuristic/technological themes. Hollywood movies such as Matrix, ...

Our recent Cover Art in Soft Matter I am not a worshiper of Large-N . Large-N worshipers refers to those   scientists who believe that scientific output is proportional to the number of published manuscripts, Hence their ambition is simply to publish as many papers as possible.  As an experimental research group, we believe   experimental repeatability and robustness   are sacred cornerstones of research. In this yagna 1 of research, we believe that our tapasya 2 cannot be measured by the quantity of publications, but rather by the quality of our manuscripts. So, as 2017 draws to a close, let me tell you the story of our only peer-reviewed manuscript published this year. Our research group works at the intersection of physical and biological sciences, and over the last few years we have concentrated significant research effort on a class of biophysical problems related to bacteria. As you may already be aware, bacteria represent one of the most an...