Life as a Physicist

The President of India has a Ph.D. in physics. The current prime minister of India has a Ph.D. too. I wish…

The President gave a 30 minute speech on the GRID, education, and India. As the fellow next to me said “he did his homework.” By nature the President is a scientist: he is responsible for India’s missile program. Indeed, it sounds like he used to work in TIFR, so this is a home crowd. His talk was full of details — and it sounded like he had taken a bunch of time to look at things on the web last night as well. How cool is that? He was asked to put his slides up on the conference web site — when he does I’ll repost them here so you can see what I’m talking about.

It took two days to prepare for the president’s 2 hour arrival. He was delayed (fog). It is funny feeling that your time is now your own. His schedule dictated everything we did this morning: talks were rearranged on an almost 10 minute basis.

I found out a little more about how the President is selected. I’d thought he was elected — but that isn’t quite right; at least, not as I was thinking. He is elected by Parliament — an indirect election. They frequently have famous people or other notables — often not politicians — in the post. His name was put forward by the last government and no one opposed, and here he is.

At any rate, that is the closest I’ve been of a major government functionary (2 or 3 meters away for the photo above). I must admit it was a bit of a rush. Never been that close to anyone in the US. Maybe oneday a president will address one of our Washington meetings. Though the security would be painful!