Better an Honest Scoundrel by Stephen T. Watts

I thought I had studied for two decades to become a physicist I must devote at least a decade to be a writer. I put my outside energy to studying science, and writing scientific papers, but my inside desire to write stories kept brewing in the background – until I came to Idaho. Unconsciously, the struggle between my left-brain and my right brain had continued for several decades. There must have been a constant fight within me between the emotional part and the logical part. I didn’t have to – scientific writing didn’t require one.īut somehow, somewhere within me, the idea was alive – that non-rational thought and a contradiction to science. Twenty more years passed by! I didn’t touch a dictionary during these years. So there went the artistic feelings again. Then came the realities of getting a job and settling down. in nuclear engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. While doing research in physics, I also earned an M.S.

in physics from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and a Ph.D. I must get degrees, and strive for the most respectable job possible! Where was the time for nurturing expressions of sensibility? Art? That could wait. I stopped writing again because of the nagging concern of finding my professional place. That reflected my discovery of sadness in affluent America. The first story I wrote was about an old, lonely woman in a retirement home. The fight between the right brain and left brain became prominent and my right brain started to get the upper hand. Those suppressed desires of my brain showed up. Then I came to Philadelphia for graduate studies in physics. I earned a master’s degree in physics with specialization in nuclear physics from the University of Calcutta.

Then whatever artistic inclination you had, you obliterate those impulses and study only science – nothing else. If you are one of the best, you go to physics. You would like to read about those famous people’s lives only when the artists are dead.Īnd, especially, if you find yourself liking math and you can solve geometry problems, you quickly suppress your right brain. Adults would tell us, “Do you want to starve when you grow up?” Starving stories of painters and writers are romantic but not appreciated in India if a family has any brains. You couldn’t afford to nourish your right brain. I was born in India and if a person grew up in India, especially in the late 50s and early 60s – post partition India with its Hindu-Muslim riots – pursuing the arts was not encouraged. I am not the one who loved words from age five and started writing stories as a child.

Better an Honest Scoundrel by Stephen T. Watts