I remember being an 11-year old kid in the 6th standard sitting in my math class when our maths teacher told us about exponents. I remember being in awe, feeling mature, thinking ‘Wow, we’re learning big boy stuff now, this is so cool!’.

I remember being a 16-year old kid in the 11th standard sitting in my physics class when our physics teacher told us that moment of inertia is a tensor. He further elaborated a bit on how tenors are different from vectors. I remember being in awe, feeling mature, thinking ‘Wow, we’re learning big boy stuff now, this is so cool!’.

I remember being a 20-year old kid in my 3rd year of college sitting in my General Relativity class when our instructor used variation of the Lagrangian to derive Einstein’s equation. I remember being in awe, feeling mature, thinking ‘Wow, this is what being a big boy feels like, this is so cool!’.

If you would have told the 11-year old me about tenors and that I would one day learn about them, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. If you would have told the 16-year old about Einstein’s equation and how one day I would have known how to derive it, I probably wouldn’t have believed you. Now, if you tell the 21-year old me anything, I probably will believe you, because I know that my knowledge is only restricted by how far I am willing to go. And guess what? I don’t think there is a limit.

I am not one of those people who were extremely good at something since the age of 10 or so and knew what they wanted to do in life. Prodigies; I guess that is what they are called. My goal in life at the age of 10 changed every week depending on the movie that I had recently watched or the comic I had recently read. I wanted to become Iron Man on one day and India’s best batsman on another. At the age of 14, I remember our maths teacher asking all of us what we wanted to become when we grew up, I remember telling him that I wanted to be an Aeronautical and Aerospace Engineer. Why? Because that was one field that sounded cool- build rockets for a living, hell yeah!

When I was 15, I used to watch Doraemon and Kitretsu. Both the shows involved using numerous sci-fi gadgets to carry out day-to-day tasks. I remember trying to figure out a way to build them. Once, in my chemistry class, our teacher told us that if you remove an electron from a neutral atom, the resulting cation will be smaller in size than the neutral atom as the same number of protons will now be attracting a smaller number of electrons. I remember how happy I was to know this because I thought I had just figured out how one of the Doraemon gadgets could be made, the small light, which when is made to illuminate an object shrinks it. My idea was that the small light will somehow knock off an electron from each atom in the object leading to shrinking of all the atoms and consequently the object itself. However, my dreams of a patent were broken when my teacher told me how I had not considered what I would do with all the free electrons and how I would prevent them from recombining with the cation.

When I was somewhere close to 17, I was watching a program on discovery in which the scientist (I don’t remember if it was Stephen Hawking or Michio Kaku, so I’ll stick with ‘scientist’) said that if a train was travelling around the earth at the speed of light it would make seven revolutions around the earth in one second. Now, if a kid started running from the back to the front in this moving train, one would think that the kid will be moving faster than the speed of light with respect to the earth. But that would be false, as time would have slowed down inside the train preventing the kid from ever travelling faster than the speed of light. Nature just wouldn’t allow it. This intrigued me. Time slowing down was new to me, rather fascinating to know that it wasn’t just sci-fi, this stuff was real. This was the first time I decided to do something about my curiosity, I decided to know more about this ‘time slowing down business’. That is how I learned the basics of special relativity; when I say basics I mean as much as the Wikipedia article could teach me. I felt a sense of accomplishment, a sense of satisfaction. This was not my first time experiencing these emotions, but this time it felt different.

I have always found it difficult to answer the question, ‘So, when did you start getting into physics?’. I always thought that there can’t be a single moment to point. Seems to me that all that I have told you till now is the best I can do. I was probably into physics as a 14-year old aeronautics enthusiast, or as a 15-year old ‘small gun’ builder, but I only realised it due to relativity. No points for guessing what I want to work on during my PhD! :D