No, I do not code.

I have somehow managed to survive some eight years shuttling from one Physics department to another without gaining the slightest amount of coding experience. In fact, if you ask me what career skills I have actually developed, then I would have to think for a while, because for sure, I am not the problem solving Irodov crunching maniac that people who make it to the top 100 in the IIT-JEE turn into approximately 30 days from the date of the IIT-JEE. Neither did I turn into the superhumanlike creature which usually graduates from Presidency and heads straight into the world of high energy physics (via the usual route of IITK+[insert appropriate US university]/MatScience/CU+TIFR or HRI or SINP). No, somewhat to the shock and horror of my friends (and the delight/frustration of my lab partner) I displayed a disconcerting liking for experiments. This is enough to render one persona non grata in a crowd of people who only need a Casio FX-100 to finish a really complicated experiment involving, say ballistic galvanometers and/or two slit diffraction spectrometry setups. (To this day, I have very little patience for people who cannot focus a spectrometer and level a diffraction setup.)Yes, sad, but true. Shunned by most of my classmates who either chose to ignore me or turned away and muttered/giggled (depending on gender) when I walked by, I chose to invest my time and energy to things that would not despise me.. like two channel oscilloscopes. And I became that most downtrodden of people: an experimentalist. I would sneak away from erudite discussions on beta decay and what not to spend some quality time with LM741 OPAMPs.

Eventually I found myself in a place where other unhappy experimentalists turned up and ran a reverse snobbery club which looked down upon people who did things with Hamiltonians instead of notch filters. True to form, I decided to scoot halfway between the two competing camps and ended up in NMR.. which is this strange transition land between experiments and theory... the nearest parallel I can think of is the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings.. those blokes who walk around in the shadow land between life and death.. neither here nor there. Now this is not a good analogy... I mean we spectroscopists, unlike the Nazgul can actually cross streams.. and we do not ride monstrous birds which have been fed on fell meats in the dark to become .. well.. monstrous birds. But well, you get the point. However, spectroscopists have this amazing ability to switch sides at will and pretend to be either theorists or experimentalists. This has some benefits.. and it is convenient.

Except when I find myself with a dataset which has to be filtered in somewhat convoluted ways.. and I realise that I can neither code to do it in 30 seconds... nor do I have the patience to do it by hand.. like an old fashioned experimentalist. So.... I will have to teach myself to code ... or start dating someone who can. As the latter is not about to happen.... here goes... nose firmly clamped shut by thumb and forefinger.. here I go.. about to take a dive into the uncharted waters of programming..