Personal Essays
A collection of personal essays by Saumitra Phatak — a Mumbaikar navigating a Physics PhD at Purdue, one honest reflection at a time.
Start here
Begin with the first flight, the first two weeks in America, and the first trip back home.
Start with India-USA Travel Experience 02Read the graduate-school arc: lab life, research pressure, seasons, publications, and small wins.
Start with Fall 2022 03The essays where physics leaks into ordinary life: confusion, observation, entanglement, collapse.
Start with Life & Quantum PhysicsThe nervous Mumbai–Delhi–Chicago flight. Music as the great distractor. The "wuhuu, landed in USA" feeling that wore off by the time he was eating thepleys at McDonald's and gossiping about Indian stand-up comedy — only to leave a bag on the shuttle home.
Food, cars, privacy culture. America flips everything you thought you knew — cars are necessities here, family time is the luxury. And the discipline! They actually follow the rules.
Almost failing mid-sems, a Schrödinger's COVID test 6 hours before departure, Delhi pollution hitting differently now, and realising: you go out and fail at 100 things, still you come home a superstar in your parents' eyes.
Does success get lonelier as you climb? Why do we only notice the discomfort? And maybe — the way to live is to have floating interests always. Changing phases is the key to being content.
Waking at 7:30 every day without an alarm. Broken coherence when a photo from home arrives mid-workday. The happiest person in the room is the one who thinks the least. And the fall season — everyone in the world should experience it once.
Watching the Argentina–France World Cup final at 35,000 feet. A spiritual trip to Varanasi with 10 friends in their mid-20s. And the last night — crying together as a family before going back to make the American dream come true.
Nearly switching PhD groups. A winter school in Arizona with the best physicists in the world. Trapping a single lithium atom — best imaging accuracy in the world. Teaching atomic physics to Mumbai University students every Saturday.
Chess rating 2000. Driver's license at 27. A school crush who confessed. Learning to make rotis. Discovering classical music. Defending Hinduism with physics. The ones that never go on your CV but define you completely.
India winning the World Cup on a Saturday morning. The solar eclipse — the entire world going dark for three minutes. Two American weddings. And a labmate's words: "It's so weird that after five years, you move on, but the lab stays right where it is."
आई-बाबांची पहिली अमेरिका वारी. शिकागो एअरपोर्टवर त्यांना पाहताच भावनांचा कल्लोळ. बाबांनी पहिल्यांदाच स्कायस्क्रेपर पाहिले आणि म्हणाले, "आपल्या मुंबईच्या इमारती टिचभर वाटतील!"
The Observer Effect. Wavefunction Collapse. Entanglement. Eight fundamental principles of quantum physics — and how each one mirrors the way we actually live, love, and make decisions.
First job at 28. Lafayette → Boston. The river walk at sunset — pure Marine Drive vibes. European public transport that actually works. A 3am horror story with a rod, a flashlight, and drops of blood on the kitchen floor. And riding the quantum computing tide.
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