Who’s buying — The Tipsy Professor

Ink and wash drawing of a bearded man with his hair in a bun, hands in his pockets, standing at a wooden railing above a red-roofed town with mountains beyond. — **Plate 1** The subject above Cusco, reunited with his luggage and wearing clean clothes for the first time in four days, three of them spent in Aguas Calientes.

The title turned up one evening in Delft, in the second year of a master’s. Amitabh and Pradeep were both in precisely the condition it names, and neither can now say which of them said it first, or which of them it was meant to describe. He kept it because the alternative was explaining himself.1Tipsy on espresso, mostly. It’s a real condition: sharp enough to argue, too wired to stop, and certain the next idea would be the good one. Both halves of it were meant seriously — they were tipsy in the way described, and they were also, unfashionably, in love with the work. The teaching is real. So is the wandering, which the teaching has conspicuously failed to cure.

What ends up here is whatever survives the walk home: an argument that seemed airtight on the last tram and looks thinner in daylight, a four-hour bus ride that turned out to be the whole point of the trip, a sentence overheard in a language he has no business understanding. Occasionally a proof. Occasionally an apology.

If it can’t be explained on the back of a napkin, it hasn’t been understood yet — only memorised.

He writes at the wrong hours, in the wrong order, and revises less than he should. Every essay carries the city it was written in and the clock time it was finished at, because both of those explain more about a piece of writing than any category ever has.

The person

The Tipsy Professor is Amitabh, or possibly Pradeep, depending which of them you ask and how settled you need the question. Amitabh is the one who bought the domain, so the rest of this is about him. He designs chips — very small, very low-power ones, for reading signals off the brain — and is doing a doctorate about it in Switzerland. Before that there were particle accelerators, a national laboratory and a quantum processor, in roughly that order and across three countries. He grew up in India and lives in Geneva.

He still teaches, which is what keeps the second half of the name honest. The proof about the second cup of coffee is, regrettably, the sort of thing he does for fun.

Interviews, corrections and arguments: tipsy@amitabh.ch.