Personal Reminiscence of My Grandfather - 1
In this blog, I will share some memories I have of my grandfather. He is a person who has shaped my life and made a lifelong impact.
PERSONAL WRITEUPS
My grandfather remains one of my favourite people in the world. Today marks nine years since the tragic accident that took his life and started my journey alone in this world. He shaped me in countless ways, leaving an incredible mark on who I am. In this blog, I want to focus on one aspect that has had the most profound impact on my life: my career in physics and my passion for understanding the universe, all of which can be traced back to him (who was not a science major).
My journey in physics began with the poems of Rabindranath Tagore. From the age of six until days before he passed away, my grandfather would read Tagore's poetry to me. If you've ever delved into Tagore's works, you'll notice a deep sense of philosophical inquiry about existence and life. Through these readings, my grandfather inspired me to ask life's fundamental questions. I found myself asking, "How are we here? What caused the universe to begin?"In a gentle way, he steered my curiosity towards the vast unknown.
As these questions grew more complex, I realized that poems and philosophical musings could only take me so far. Determined to find answers supported by logic and proof, I turned to science. I consumed numerous popular science books that attempted to unravel the mysteries of cosmology, starting with "A Brief History of Time" by Stephen Hawking and "Parallel Worlds" by Michio Kaku, among others. This ultimately led me to questions that I still ask today although in a more matured and logical way through the lens of physics and mathematics. Today the questions I deal with are still the same although the mathematical and physical basis of these have become extremely complicated and extremely beautiful. To have a mathematical and theoretical basis of these questions is something that still drives me towards understanding nature.
In this way, my grandfather ignited a lifelong passion for learning and discovery. Even though he's no longer with me, his influence continues to guide my pursuit of knowledge and my desire to understand the universe on both cosmological scales and the scale of the smallest objects/particles in nature.