Dhruv Apte

Dhruv Apte

Ph.D. Student at Virginia Tech

Selection of letters

3 minute read

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Hello down there! Concerning the recent events, I guess from wherever this blog is getting its traffic, you are sitting at home thinking as to why the hell this dang virus had to happen and trying to work at the same efficiency.

  • In cse you are someone after 2021, this blog post was written during the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak. I enjoyed reading about Feynman and working out math.

This virus thing has got me down with work at home too. I recenty shifted all my stuff back at my apartment and have been trying to ever since. I also have been completed the book, “Perfectly Deviations from the Beaten Track” which has sevevral letters written to and by Dr. Richard Feynman. That reminds me I never told you guys how is this book and my blog title related. Well, the beaten track here refers to Ph.D. which is what I tend to do in my free time and Perfectly reasonable deviations mean I am deviating from a day of research to write about my life in a post. That’s perfectly reasonable and dopey I must say.

Coming back to the book, I am almost finishing it and saw two letters I like to share. First the funny one:

Letter 1:

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In case the letter seems in a different language, tilt that head of yours and see: it’s written in English. It is a letter by Prof. Feynman to a conference he was invited to attend. The moment I read “On item 1 what the hell…” I started hearing his “what the hell” from the audo “Los Alamos from Below” and started laughing for a solid 5 minutes. The goofiness in Prof. Feynman is something we should try to emulate no matter who we are. It’s dopey and makes the other person smile. Now, if that person be someone you have a liking to, best of luck to your endeavors! That’ what I like aboyt Prof. Feynman. Nobel Prize Winner, Princeton grad, CalTech prof..who in the world cares? Just enjoy life with a spoonful of goofines in it.

Letter 2

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This is more of a serious letter from a lecturer Frank Potter to Prof. Feynman who used to go with him to Hughes Research Lab every weekend. Bruce Winstein once asked Prof. Feynman “If you could do something different in your career, wat would it be” to which Prof. Feynman replied “I would try to forget how I had solved a problem. Then each time the problem arose, I would solve it in a different way….” This is very similar to his quote: “There is pleasure in recognizing old things from a new viewpoint.” You try to look at anything, not just a academic problem but perhaps a life experience now and compare how you were reacting to it and it might make you happy that you have done better (or worse). I see the spring 2018 about how dejected I was over some stuff and now that I have put it all behind and am enjoying here doing research and what have you. It totally makes the absolute sense. In case it does, I would advise you to go to hell.

A lot of these letters are very funny or motivating .It is indeed funny to see the thoughts of such a man outside his celebrity life. I was thinking once this book is completed I might go complete Chief of Station Congo or reread Feynman’s Rainbow another awesome book about Prof. Feynman by Leonard Mlodinow.

Well, I have told you about the blog’s title and shared some snapshots about a book. That’s it for today,see y’all!

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La conte des colombes foncees

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Rebonjour ! Ça fait environ quatre mois que j’écris quelque nouveau. Mais, j’était occupé avec beaucoup de choses à faire et j’ai pas l’inspiration à écrire quelque chose intéressant. En plus, cette fois, j’ai trouvé écrire quelque truc très difficile (vous connaîtrez bientôt !) L’été pour moi, c’était époustouflant. Je suis allé en France pour la première fois et j’étais complètement surpris que je parle français sans difficulté. J’ai souvent fait des conversations banales à l’arrêt du bus ou des restos ou des gares et beaucoup de gens m’ont apprécié. Ça me fait très encourageant et motivant. Quand j’aurais dit que je viens des États-Unis, on m’a souvent demandé si j’ai grandi en France car mon français était génial. Mais moi, vous connaissez si vous coupez ma main, à place de sang, vous allez voir le merlot qui vient de Bordeaux :P


Aujourd’hui j’apporte un poème qui je n’ai pas écrit. Le poème était originalement en espagnol par M. Federico García Lorca au nom de « Casida de las palomas oscuras ». C’était un très beau poème avec beaucoup de sens caché surtout sa sexualité. Pour moi, il représente l’idée du secret et comment on cache notre identité à s’intégrer dans un groupe ou car on ne semble pas comme faible ou sensible. Puisque le poème est écrit en espagnol, j’ai dû comprendre sa traduction, son sens et essaie à traduire en français mais pas perdre sa signification. Donc, pour les mecs qui comprennent tous les deux ou seulement espagnol, voici le poème original :

Casidade las palomas oscuras

Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas oscuras.
La una era el sol,
la otra la luna.
«Vecinita», les dije,
«¿dónde está mi sepultura?»
«En mi cola», dijo el sol.
«En mi garganta», dijo la luna.
Y yo que estaba caminando
con la tierra por la cintura
vi dos águilas de nieve
y una muchacha desnuda.
La una era la otra
y la muchacha era ninguna.
«Aguilitas», les dije,
«¿dónde está mi sepultura?»
«En mi cola», dijo el sol.
«En mi garganta», dijo la luna.
Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas desnudas.
La una era la otra
y las dos eran ninguna.

Les Amoureux

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Bonjour encore ! Ça fait longtemps que je viens ici mais vous me connaissiez : j’ai souvent l’air d’humeur changeante ou, comment est qu’on dit, peut-être lunatique ? Comme je m’ennuie et j’essaye de trouver quelques bons passe-temps, j’ai commencé à lire et, bien-sûr, à écrire de nouveau des poèmes. L’anglais, c’est une langue pour les insipides et j’ai trouvé la poésie de langues romans sont très belle- de quoi m’inspirer ! Ce n’est pas facile mais on trouve de faire quelque chose qui représente un défi, n’est-ce pas ? Et ce n’est pas mon premier poème en français (je vous dirai plus tard). J’espère que vous le trouvez satirique, comme je l’ai fait. Le rythme est inspiré par un poème du M. Georges Brassens, au nom de *Les Copains d’abord *. Il a pu l’air de sophistication mais si vous ne comprenez pas, ne vous inquiétez pas !

Les Amoureux de l’année

Supposedly six months later

4 minute read

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Hello there, how are you doing? Well as the title suggests, I was planning to wite a post six months later but what the hell, you were not expecting me to fulfill that ‘commitment’ on the 4th of july, right? Well, we can just assume it is six months in the pandemic time; that’s a pretty good scale. But yeah,a lot of things have happened since we visited this rusty old blog which somehow still comes up on like the 5th site when you google my name (Goddamnit, Google): 1) I completed my spring semester with retaining almost perfect sanity 2) Decided to become more social- can’t stay in the shell anymore. 3) Went on two trips- one to this country place called Duffield on the Virginia-Tennesse border in April and later to Cape Canaveral,FL for two days. Now, I have laos later visited DC and my family in the Tri-State area but the Cape Canaveral visit is somehow one of the best trips of my life. The reason itself was so interesting- to see a launch at 3 am on a lakeside and it was magical. Of course, it’s Florida, so we hit the beach too. And the company was great. Imagine just some crazy people driving down south just to see a launch we could have seen on television: but it was fun and worth it: we could not have seen it that cool on the damn TV and could n’t have been that interesting.

New Year

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Hello, down there! Happy new year 2021! Well January 1 is just a date to start a new Gregorian calender but looking from the events of last year, it seemed 31st Dec 2020 11:59:59 would turn into 31st Dec 2020 11:60:00. That would have been insanely scary. But 2020 has vanished and off we are to a new year with new things on the bucket list piled upon the old things we have had and new ‘resolutions’ This resolution thingy seems not dopey for an undisciplined person like me- I don’t remember the last time I had made any resolution. Maybe it was because I decided to start on a resolution immediately when I thought of it and not wait for it on the 1st of January. And all over you see people being glad as if this Covid-19 virus will leave on 1st Jan 2021. We have had some variants of the virus now but thankfully science and the hard work of thouands of researchers and healthcare workers has won with some vaccines in the market and vaccination programs beginnning to happen and we might see some sort of the normalcy later.