Life and Lies of M R Maiti

Many years ago, I was working on a poem. It went on like this: Had Icarus known He was going to burn Would he still have flown That close to the Sun I never came around to finishing that poem. And now, I am suddenly reminded of it by none other than an aging RDJ whose words travel across the open space to reach me. "Amateurs chase the sun and get burned. Power stays in the shadows." Watching the movie once wasn't enough for me. So I went a second time. Thoughts meandered in my head again making me want to reach for a notebook and a pen and note down everything. I appreciated/related to the movie on three levels. First, the rendezvous with an old friend: Science. Protons, Electrons, and Neutrons. Fission and fusion. The universe and the atom. I had barely glimpsed the world of quantum physics through my high school textbooks and random internet searches. Einstein, Neils Bohr, Heisenberg, and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds appeared on the screen one

Back in school, when we were learning about numbers - whole, natural, integers, rational, irrational, and more, there used to be a mathematical question. Prove that √2 is irrational. I found it very amusing when the teacher announced to the class, the first step of the proof. Assume that √2 is rational. Then came the second step, the mandatory condition that every rational number followed, i.e., it can be written in the form of p/q, in which p and q are co-prime integers and q is not equal to zero. So on went the next steps which I have no recollection of, but in the end, we ended up proving that √2 is irrational. What I am trying to say is that in life, it is the same with people. We often meet people who don't come across as rational beings given their first impression. But we shouldn't carry on with that. Try the other route. Why not, to begin with, we can assume even the most irrational people as rational only. Then follow the steps to find if our starting assumption was va

He was having a really good time. She, too. She was finally in the same place as he was. In love. Until this moment, she had never before confessed her true feelings to him. She took his hand and interlocked it with hers. Then she put her head on his shoulder. The cool breeze ruffled her hair. He tucked them back. In doing so, his hand brushed her cheek. She welcomed his touch. They didn't say anything, just sat there until they realised it was time to go back. But he didn't want to move from there; just sit there till the whole eternity came to pass. Nevertheless, they both got up. She was smiling. How he wished for the time to stop, the moment preserved forever. He took her hand and kissed the tip of her fingers. Daylight was fading. Soon, they left for their homes. They were saying their goodbyes at the street crossing when someone from behind pulled him by his shoulders. He turned around and saw his mother. He could feel the anger on her face burn through him. And before he