2012

"... winning gold medals at the math olympiad was just a dangling carrot to get you all motivated. Winning medals there is not a true measure of success of this program. We will know whether our experiment was truly successful after, say, 10 years. Let us meet in 2012. I predict that each of you will have done something truly great. That will be the true measure of success for this program." -- Prof. P.

Well, it's not an exact quote, but it sums up what P meant in 2002. So, the date 1st June 2012 draws closer, just 29 months and few days away. At 6 pm, we are scheduled to meet in Pune. The golden medal guy has promised that, as always, he will be 5 minutes late. Among things changed, some are on their way to getting married already. Some have shifted fields. Mathematics no longer takes up a chunk of our lives. Some don't need it altogether. But the prediction says that we will still have benefited from the program, and I generally agree with it.

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I am scheduled to graduate with a PhD in August 2012. A couple of others might graduate in 2012 too.

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Sometime around 3000 BC (well, historians aren't quite sure about the exact date), the Mayans invented a calendar, that had a last date. Theories suggest that this corresponds to 21 December, 2012. For proof, refer to the movie that goes by the same title.

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The book "Foucault's Pendulum" by Umberto Eco writes about a fictitious conspiracy theory that 3 editors are working on that intends to be "the mother of all theories" and that ties in all myths and legends and reveals a greater Plan. In it, a "normal" character chides one of the leads about such theories saying, that you can choose any number, and any fact, and assign it a greater meaning. Making a conspiracy theory is quite easy and you can make it personal by (forcibly) relating it to events in your life. Maybe I should make a movie based on the above lines, make myself the lead character, and show how I was destined to be the saviour.... or the first one to go in the apocalypse.