Almost a month in Singapore !

Most of this post is actually written on 29th ... so its almost a month since I have been here !

I today would be completing a stay of 2 weeks in Singapore, and having seen some parts of the city I realize that even though it is a very small place, it is going to be really difficult to see all the things Singapore has to offer to a visitor !

Something about each person at the lab here:

Navin Gupta : Well .. quiet guy, not bothering much about things other than his work. But whatever little I have got to talk to him, he is a very nice person. Cheerful at all times. A bit aloof from other though, I may say.








Mehul: He is the powerhouse of the lab ! Every 5 mins, you will hear him bursting out into a laughter ! The small project meetings in the lab with him involved are really amazing ! Even though I was involved in it, I could not resist myself from having a laugh when I heard that sound of his laughter ... really amazing guy to have around. From Pune, he has just completed his Engg. last year and is working here as a research engineer. We have some shared interests ... as he was also into tech kidegiri while at MIT, and now, of course, he is officially doing it here at the lab, with loads of hi-tech devices around ! He is our regular company for roaming around Singapore, with myself and Varun. So its now a standard weekend practice - get up sometime, get ready and call up Mehul, he is ready with plans for the day, if not, suggest one and it is accepted ! Then meet at some MRT (Mass Rapid Transport, the trains here) station and leave ! Its been great fun having him around at all times ... and I wouldn't really want to attempt a complete description of this guy here ! He still has some plans charted out for us in weekends to come, one of which is going to Malaysia ... so looking forward to more of his company.

Iulian: Well, I guess I have written all that I could WRITE about him. The rest, I will only be able to narrate ... but working with him has been a different experience. Slightly weird, very humourous ... we are missing him at the lab this last week ... and always ready for a beer !



Parijat: Another guy from Pune ... he was the one whom I first met here at the lab, and he helped me a lot to get settled here, from getting me a place to stay, to giving me a nice place and comp. in the lab ... he has helped me all the way through. Just today, he has handed over a couple of movie tickets to me ... so looking forward to some movie this weekend ! With Parijat and Mehul around, I always felt at home with we people speaking in Marathi most of the times ! As I have mentioned before, there is a majority of Indians working here ... and one particular day, it had so happened that going for lunch, we figured out that out of 9 people having food, only 2 were non-indians ! Now, thats what you would call Indian dominance in the research and education sector ! So Parijat ( or Pari - as he says to people on the phone while trying to communicate his email address, Paris without the 's' ! ) - young, married sometime last year, in fact, going back to India next month as his wife is expecting a baby is a very comforting person and its great to have him sitting just beside me in the lab.


Koay Teong Beng (now try getting that right !) : Its been almost a month now at the lab and I am still not sure whether I am able to pronounce his name right, but it doesn't really matter - whats is a name anyway ! (btw, I do not entirely believe in this, but will mention it here as it seems appropriate) A smiling face at all times, this guy is a Malaysian - chinese. Quite nice to interact with him about things back in Malaysia and Chinese food and traditions and all. Just today, we had a chat of almost 30-40 mins. I guess, wherein some of us tried to explain to him how interesting the game of cricket is ! We started off with him arguing that it is just "throw ball - hit ball" as he put it, and then building up on just his knowledge of some baseball, we ended up explaining him the most intricate rules of the game and made him believe that cricket is indeed a game in which lots of strategic planning is involved ! In the meanwhile, somehow, it also made me realise that really, there is a reason why cricket is more than "just-a-game" for the Indians, I could see that passion while we were talking there at the Engg. canteen - it was amazing ! And now, i am really feeling bad about not getting to watch the test matches going on - WI vs. India - in fact, I am not even aware of the scores. So all in all, this guy is a great person around - and the first non-Indian I have described so far ! Just below Koay is the pic of his wife, Soo Pieng.


Matthias Hoffmann-Kuhnt: He is one guy whom I have not been able to interact with here at the lab, unfortunately. But his distinctive voice and that German accent and style ( I believe his style and accent is German, as he is German ... haven't been to Germany, so its just a guess [:-)] ) is very noticable while he is in the lab. Blends together in the overall friendly and in-formal atmosphere in the lab !



Shiraz: A great guy, very young ... completed his masters I guess recently. Has completed his graduation from NUS itself, so well acquainted with the things here. It has been nice to discuss many things with him - ranging from "Tourism posters in India and elsewhere" to "Behaviour of different layers in a typical TCP stack" ! Generally quiet in the lab, one of the very few pure-vegetarians around ... and a great fan of Indian food - I haven't seen him eat anything else in a month here ! Very cheerful and helpful ... from his appearance he would give you the feeling he is very serious, but I must say, he's not very close to being that way ! A fantastic Pool player and I just love that huge bike that he rides - its amazing !


Mandar: Well ... how do I start off describing him ! This person has got an amazing brain on those shoulders of his. He is involved in almost all the projects here at the ARL, has just completed his PhD in "Underwater Acoustics in Shallow Warm Water Channels" and has an almost to anything and everything you can ask ! There is so much of inspiration one can derive from the people here at the lab, and Mandar would have a very large contribution to it. Again, a person from Pune ... but he has been here for a long enough time to really get mixed with the style and language here. I was lucky to be here at the right time, so I had a party after he successfully completed his PhD defence a week after I landed here. He is also my bridge-guru, having given me a head-start in the basics of the game ! Starting to get a lot of interest in the game ... it is one of the games which I felt is so deeply studied, yet just the gigantic number of combinations that can arise out of the random distribution of a deck of 52 cards adds so much of interesting things to it, that its mind-boggling ! Hope to continue learning this wonderful game here as well as after coming back to India. The other day, a chat which I had with Mandar was quite revealing - he was telling me about the general work culture here in Singapore and that I shouldn't be misled by the kind of environment that I am seeing in the lab here, becuase that is NOT how it is like outside in the other work places in Singapore. Not many places appreciate the idea of having a enjoy @ work kind of philosophy, which is the basic principle behind the working of the lab. So, Singaporeans apparently are very hard workers, and though they seem to have adopted much of the western ideas in terms of facilities and way of living superficially, deep within, still an Asian mindset of working hard, trying to accumulate enough wealth to own a house, buy a car and provide for the education of your children is very common - much like what we see back in India.

While at it, something I find great about this place is the way they have developed rapidly after the 1970s ... its amazing how they have grown from a small port into a major tourist place and one of the best (or probably THE best port) in the world - with the port having facilities which enable the shifting of cargo from one ship to another in about a couple of hours, whereas at some of the other ports, the same process can take upto 3-4 days ! So, they have ships coming to their port just to get their cargo moved to some other ship and continue transporting it on some other ship ... quite amazing ! Also, the tourist places they have developed here are too good, and I guess Indian tourism authorities have a hell lot of things to learn from them ! Very limited resources, but through perfect planning and strict implementation of rules, they have made this tiny place a wonderful city and country - a very pleasant place to live in.

Hmm ... back to some other guys at the lab !


Jolyn: One of the two members of the fairer sex working at the lab. ( The other is Teong Beng's wife, Soo Pieng, whose place I have occupied currently while she is on maternity leave ... and hence her description wouldn't be found here ! ) I haven't interacted much with Jolyn but she is an interesting person ... she was a dolphin trainer before she joined the lab some time back ! One of the professional divers for the lab (the others being Mandar and John, the head of the lab), again a very young and sweet lady ! Interestingly, she was the first person whom I met who pointed out that I have exceptionally long and lovely eye-lashes ... well, I hadn't noticed that before !


Paul: (This section will be completed by my friend Varun - who is doing his project under Paul ... so I am taking a break for bath !)
Hmmm....Paul, where do I begin. What is most interesting about this jolly English guy? Is it the fact that he rides his bicycle to the lab dressed in nothing but his banian and a pair of shorts that look more like underwear? Or maybe that he plays the Sitar and the electric guitar? Or maybe that he loves Pink Floyd and that one can almost always hear music from his cubicle? Probably the fact that in his spare time he's a surrealist painter? Or maybe that he has married a Malayali woman who calls him everyday at the lab and nags him ( It's almost a daily ritual hearing Paul talk to his wife..." Yes Baby....NO Baby.....I'm coming home early baby.....yes baby......very early baby...")? Or maybe that he holds a doctorate in applied math and has lost his PhD certificate that he needs to apply for PR status? Easily the funniest guy in the lab.

Well ... after that short spell of good pleasant words from my friend and room-mate Varun, I am back to continue writing about some other people at the lab.

Mohan: He is the lab officer and I must say he is doing an awesome job of keeping the lab in some sort of order, which is difficult to do, given that there is a bunch of very crazy people working in it ! But Mohan is a very calm person, always busy with something or the other, and has been very nice to help me get settled in the lab giving me anything I needed. He has a cubicle near Paul - so God bless him !




Dr. Venu: Dr. Venugopal from Kerala is the seniormost person in the lab. Apart from being involved in a lot of projects, he is the person who looks after all the administrative stuff at the lab and hence was the one whom I had to correspond with to get my formalities completed before coming here. Though he is not young as others, the enthusiasm has not really dropped with his age ... he is very excited about anything and everything - be it some good design someone has come up with in CAD for an AUV or be it playing football with some huge ball lying just outside the lab, while going for lunch,or even playing pool while having a mug of beer during Mandar's party ! He has been very nice to share with us his experiences in Singapore, about the life here and his visit to India recently, when he got to meet some DRDO officials and access some information as a senior researcher at a Singaporean lab, but which he otherwise wouldn't have been allowed to, as a doctorate from a university in India ! But thats how these things work - I guess one can't really look for the most obvious common sense to prevail in all situations. Dr. Venu was telling us the other day about an incident when his son had fallen off his bike and was suspected to have got a fractured left arm. The doctor called for an X-ray of his left arm and after trying to analyze the X-ray, he called for an X-ray of the other arm to be taken as well because he couldn't make out whether that arm was normal or fractured and he needed something for comparison ! The point to be made was that some of the doctors here are so heavily realiant on technology that they are not really good at the diagnosis which still has to be done by humans ! And supposedly the system here is that to practise medicine here, you need to be a graduate of some Singapore based medical college - so, wish all the people here the very best of luck !

Now, last but not the least, John Potter, the founder and head of the ARL and associate director of TMSI - The Tropical Marine Science Institute:
He is probably too great a person for me to write anything about him ... so just copying his description given on the ARL website. Its definitely worth a read !






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Starting with a joint honours Mathematics and Physics Degree from Bristol, UK, John went on to a PhD in Glaciology and Oceanography (in association with the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Univ. Camb. UK) while working for the British Antarctic Survey doing research in the Antarctic, where he spent four consecutive summers. In stunning testimony to the inscrutable methods of the British Empire he was graciously awarded the Polar Medal for this work by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988. John migrated into Underwater Acoustics in 1986, moving to Italy to work for NATO on high-frequency acoustics for 5 years, where he met and married his beautiful and amazing partner, Caroline. After a 7-month sail across the Atlantic the Italian caffeine rush subsided to find John and Caroline washed up at Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in California where he worked with Prof Mike Buckingham on Acoustic Daylight, leading the team that built ADONIS, the first camera to produce real-time moving images using only ambient noise and which gave rise to an ASA award for best scientific paper, published in Scientific American. In 1994 his family (now expanded to include two sons and two cats) sailed across the Pacific to Singapore, where he founded the ARL and helped launch the Tropical Marine Science Institute. In August 2004 A/Prof Potter embarked on a 14-month 'sabbatical' with his family to sail round the Indian Ocean on an expedition of marine research, education and environmental awareness. Check out Jocara Indian Ocean Quest for more information! Miraculously, he and family returned intact (though the sailing boat fared rather less well). John has now resumed work at the ARL and TMSI, albeit in a altered state of consciousness about the appalling state of the environment and mankind's failed stewardship of this unique and beautiful planet. A/Prof Potter is a Senior Member of the IEEE, an Associate Editor for the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering, PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer and an International Fellow of the Explorer's Club, among other things (some of them unmentionable in polite company).

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That much for this post ... I guess it has already been too lengthy. Thanks a lot if anyone has made it all the way down !