Dhruv Apte

Dhruv Apte

Ph.D. Student at Virginia Tech

Essentials

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Hello down there! It’s been a month now since I wrote the last post but I have been really serious about the fact that I won’t write regularly. I recently shifted to Florida sometime back and have been living here since a month now. The reason is also that I don’t know what I am supposed to write and I don’t want ramblings to be written here; this is a blog not a teenager’s stupid diary.

Looking at recent surge of COVID19 cases in the states of Arizona, Florida and California and new cases in Beijing and New Zealand, there is a opinion that a second COVID19 wave will begin and may have to work form home again next year. One thing to note here is that most workplaces and colleges in the country have decided to operate on-campus for the Fall before resorting to online format in the Spring. I am a bit of glad and cautious about thi: I can finally leave my small cubbyhole of a room for the lab for some time and interact in-face with people while being a little less safer. Could the world BE any more unsafe?

One important thing to note here is the resurgence of cases in China which has meant the country will go gain in lockdown except for essential services like hospitals. The services which will lock down include schools- that means school were never essential. And that is bloody true for one learns everything by self-study only. To quote the great John Nash, Jr, “classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity”. You need to think stuff, not just memorize it.

One thing where I feel weakened is my technical writing skills- I suck at writing and now this feels like a giant task- writing papers and in the future , grants in academia. And I am reading blog posts and asking to friends in research but I have hit a wall- seems I need to break through the wall to learn it.

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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.