![]() I could either take up a job offer at a motorcycle manufacturing plant in south India, or I could, like many of my college friends, head to a university in the United States. In the summer of 2000, after completing my bachelor’s degree in engineering, I had to decide where to go next. This piece is about my grad school years at Arizona State University. Wrote this back in December 2020 for 3 Quarks Daily, to mark two decades since I moved from India to the United States. All you had to do was write one breakthrough novel, something like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, become famous, then write full time: that was the naïve worldview that sustained me for a long time.Ĭontinue reading “One Foot in Engineering, the Other in the Humanities: Reflections on My Career and Interests” Author hbalasub Posted on DecemCategories Personal Leave a comment on One Foot in Engineering, the Other in the Humanities: Reflections on My Career and Interests Early Years in Arizona The ambition to become a writer, meanwhile, bided its time. After toying with majors as diverse as electronics and metallurgy I finally settled on something called production engineering. In 1996, I left home and attended what was then called the Regional Engineering College, twenty kilometers from the south Indian city of Tiruchirappalli: a semi-industrial, semi-rural middle of nowhere kind of campus where teenagers from far flung states of India came and lived in packed hostels for four years. I simply went along, following what high school friends around me were doing. Like many middle class families, my parents felt I had to get into an engineering or medical college since both offered the promise of financial stability. The ambition was strong enough to have a grip on my thoughts for the next two decades, but never strong enough to counter practical concerns. Growing up in west and central India, I read a lot English and American fiction – Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, Alistair Maclean – and decided that I must become a writer (English only of course for the mentally colonized, why would I write in Tamil or Hindi?). Some follow an ambition stubbornly wherever it takes them and whatever the consequences. Even I am stumped sometimes – how did I get so deep into a quantitative field when all my life I’ve held that literature (literary fiction in particular), history and travel are far better at revealing something about the human condition than any other pursuit? This can seem very puzzling to someone who looks at my career details: degrees in engineering and a career in academia in a branch of applied mathematics called operations research. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who is more drawn to the humanities than to math or the sciences. This essay, first published in at 3 Quarks Daily, is summary of the themes spanning the humanities and sciences that have interested me over two decades. Let’s see how this turns out! Author hbalasub Posted on DecemCategories Personal Leave a comment on A new version of ‘Thirty Letters in My Name’ One Foot in Engineering, the Other in the Humanities: Reflections on My Career and Interests Although I expect many pieces to be nature-focused, my other interests - literary fiction, history, travel, movies, concepts in mathematics and probability - are all likely to make a regular appearance I will also post edited versions of my previously published 3 Quarks Daily essays. That’s what I hope to do in this version of Thirty Letters In My Name: start writing and see where it leads. What little I’ve learned of the natural world comes from bits and pieces assembled from regular hikes in the mountains, forests, and coasts of the American Northeast, and then reading about them in books.īut I suppose one has to begin somewhere. I have no formal training in these areas. This time, I want to work my way through themes that are close to my heart: wonders of the natural world, the history and diversity of life on earth, ecology and environmental conservation. ![]() The break was due to personal circumstances that required me to slow down and retreat for a while. Many of the themes I explored eventually turned into longer essays for the website 3 Quarks Daily. That blog contained a mixed bag of topics: travel, history, literature, mathematical concepts that I taught in my courses. ![]() From 2005-2018, I used to write a blog called Thirty Letters In My Name - the title, as you might guess, refers to the imposing length of my first (Hari Jagannathan) and last name (Balasubramanian).
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