Category: Personal

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). That blog contained a mixed bag of topics: travel, history, literature, mathematical concepts that I taught in my courses. Many of the themes I explored eventually turned into longer essays for the website 3 Quarks Daily. I haven’t written much since 2018. The break was due to personal circumstances that required me to slow down and retreat for a while.

Now I feel like writing again. 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. I have no formal training in these areas. 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.

But I suppose one has to begin somewhere. That’s what I hope to do in this version of Thirty Letters In My Name: start writing and see where it leads. 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. Let’s see how this turns out!

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.

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I’ve always thought of myself as someone who is more drawn to the humanities than to math or the sciences. 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. 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?

Some follow an ambition stubbornly wherever it takes them and whatever the consequences. I did not have that kind of resolve. 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?). 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. 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. I simply went along, following what high school friends around me were doing. 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.

The ambition to become a writer, meanwhile, bided its time. 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.

Continue reading “One Foot in Engineering, the Other in the Humanities: Reflections on My Career and Interests”

Wrote this back in December 2020 for 3 Quarks Daily, to mark two decades since I moved from India to the United States. This piece is about my grad school years at Arizona State University.

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In the summer of 2000, after completing my bachelor’s degree in engineering, I had to decide where to go next. 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. Most of my friends had assistantships and tuition waivers. I had been admitted to a couple of state universities but did not have any financial support. Out of a feeling that if I stayed back in India, I’d be ‘left behind’ – whatever that meant: it was only a trick of the mind, left unexamined – I took a risk, and decided to try graduate school at Arizona State University. I hoped that funding would work out somehow.

So in August 2000, I found myself traveling across continents to this powerful country that I knew little about. It was my first ever time outside India and my first ever flight. From Chennai, I flew to Kuala Lumpur, then, after an eight-hour layover which I didn’t mind at all, to Los Angeles and finally, after the worry of a missed connection, to Phoenix, Arizona. The gleaming, modern airports, the meals and the movies, the turbulence and the clouds: it was all very exciting, a glimpse of an elite world that had once seemed inaccessible.

At the Phoenix airport, someone from the Indian Students Association at ASU came to pick me up. After what seemed like a recklessly fast drive – in fact it was normal: it’s just that I’d never experienced a 70-miles-an-hour ride on a highway before – he dropped me off at an apartment shared by three Indian grad students. One of them, my host until I found an apartment, wore a veshti, the wraparound skirt common in south India. He spoke Tamil fluently; he spoke it so well that I could well have been in my home state. I had a nagging suspicion at the time that people might change as soon as they landed in a foreign country – that they might change their attire, even forget their mother tongue. It was reassuring to know that wasn’t true. At the heart of such doubts, I see now, was a fear that I would quickly surrender my Indianness.

I slept well on the couch that first night, and when I woke up next morning, everyone was gone.  There was a massive, just-opened bag of potato chips on the dining table. What better way to experience America on your first morning than digging into a big bag of Lays that grad students, making good use of buy-one-get-one-free, always had in good supply? I had never seen a bag that size! I ate some with guilt, consoling myself that nobody would notice. Not that anyone cared, of course. It was only the first of many ‘big’ things I encountered in those early days: a massive warehouse – a Costco store – where you could pick out things in bulk at cheap prices; gleaming red tomatoes as large as cricket balls (but strangely tasteless); monster trucks with 53-foot long trailers hurtling down the highways and interstates, looming behind small cars until they yielded.

Continue reading “Early Years in Arizona”