Oh. What a hectic time I went through on the last few days. A flurry of activity. Completely non-academic, boring, dull and a drudgery. Hell!!! Did not even manage time to stitch together some bits of mind to pour all my disgust, agony, bitterness on blogrolls. They are all littered on the floor, fragmented, sore and raw. Anyone who has had applied for a Canadian Temporary Resident Visa in the past, ought to remember the annoying questions that are included in the application form (the feeling may be funny depending on the mood you are in). Among other questions about your family and relatives (even if they are not at all connected with the proposed trip nor have they ever lived in Canada) the one that irritates you the most is on the number of children of your siblings. Am I supposed to know all these to qualify for a visa to Canada? So I called home and shook my brother out of sleep and asked him about all his illegitimate children that he had hid from us. The application form also warns that, in case of discrepant answers, you may be refused a visa, if not this time then may be the next time. Now, what if my brother lies to me about all his clandestine affairs? What if my brother denies the paternity of the grandson of the prime minister of Canada? Is it justified that I be denied a healthy research collaboration with some other even-minded Canadians because of a few paranoid monkeys.

To add salt to injury another unexpected problem, that sprang up today, cost me a bit of time and at a time looked to have no way out at all. The audit committee served me a notice that, unless I submit a few invoices in the original, the reimbursement of a few payments that I made on my earlier Australian trip, would never be cleared. Anyway, this is rather a long story of how I succeeded in cracking this deadlock very quickly (thanks to European professionalism) and felt futile satisfaction for something useless.

Anyway, on the academic front, seem to have got an interesting result. When such things do happen, it is required to complete the work as fast as possible and announce them lest the ownership of the work may change hands (I myself had some painful experience of such kind). It is a rat race folks and the state-of-the-art of the field changes every second. However, I need some serious help from my student with programming to flesh out that result to make it suitable for presentation, but he seems to have taken to the woods. I did not see him at his desk for the last couple of days. I have to be a little strict with him. He might have taken me for granted, something which is completely unacceptable to me.

Well. And a different kind of research project involving algebraic attacks that I started a month ago is now put on backburner amidst these visa, university registration and all such bloody menial stuffs. The first phase of this project has to be finished by the end of September. By hook or by crook.