COLUMN: Why did a brilliant alum of IIT Kharagpur, Stanford, become a killer?
NEW YORK: Was Mainak Sarkar a cold blooded murderer who plotted with precision to shoot down without mercy his ex-wife Ashley Hasti, in Minnesota, and then drove down to the University of California Los Angeles campus armed with two semi-automatic guns to mow down his former Ph.D. advisor Prof. William Klug, before remorse finally engulfed him, turned the gun on himself; or was he a brilliant Ph.D. student and researcher, an aeronautical engineering graduate from India’s premier institute IIT Kharagpur who later got a master’s degree from Stanford University, but became frustrated to the point of being mentally deranged after 10 years of fruitless labor at a doctoral degree at UCLA, with his professional and personal life unwinding haphazardly like a spool of ribbon, shattering not only his dreams but confidence in his very existence?
It’s not an easy question to decipher, answers perhaps now irrelevant.
Police teams are combing every shred of evidence they can find to try establish Sarkar’s motives for the double homicide and suicide. There’s chilling revelation that Sarkar had a third murder plotted in a ‘kill list’ he left behind in his apartment in Minnesota: an unnamed professor at UCLA, who was not present on campus when Klug was shot dead, on June 1.
No doubt, in the days to come, more details will emerge of Sarkar’s life, who was 38-years-old when he committed suicide. Perhaps nasty tales of marital discord, domestic abuse or an affair might emerge, to explain why he killed Hasti; perhaps his former classmates might portray him as a quiet, erudite man who reveled most in his academic work and ambitions, to carve an extraordinary future for himself; was developing a computer code which he hoped would have launched a famous career. But perhaps, it got all dashed by ego battles between Sarkar and Klug, with the 39-year-old Klug perhaps crushing Sarkar’s ideas and potential, delaying his graduation.
Perhaps, Sarkar’s family will paint him as a man who could never hurt anybody, a gentle easy-going soul who loved people, trusted his innate abilities; a child prodigy who excelled in every sphere. Or perhaps dark truths will emerge, of Sarkar displaying streaks of violent tendencies.
For now, what we do know for a fact is that Sarkar got his undergraduate degree from IIT Kharagpur in 2000. After working in Bangalore as a software developer, he emigrated to the US in 2003, to enroll for a master’s degree program from Stanford. In 2006, he was accepted as a Ph.D. student at UCLA with Klug, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, as his advisor.
Reports say Sarkar got married to Hasti in 2011. Details are yet to emerge as to what led to rancor in their relationship, divorce or separation. At the time of her death, the 31-year-old Hasti was a resident physician at the University of Minnesota.
What is also now known is that Sarkar had gotten increasingly frustrated with Klug as his advisor in recent months. It’s not known yet for how long Sarkar endured what he felt was agony working under Klug, but he lambasted the professor in social media posts, warning other graduate students to be wary of him. Sarkar also had a conspiracy theory: he accused Klug of stealing his computer code, giving it to another student.
Here’s what Sarkar wrote in a blog post on March 10, titled ‘Long Dark Tunnel’: “William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy. I was this guy’s Phd student. We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it to another student. He made me really sick.” Sarkar added: “Your enemy is your enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust. Stay away from this sick guy.”
The Los Angeles Times carried quotes from unnamed sources who praised Klug and blasted Sarkar as a “subpar student.”
“Bill was extremely generous to this student, who was a subpar student,” an unnamed source told the Times. “He helped him out and interceded for him academically.”
But can Sarkar, a graduate of IIT Kharagpur and Stanford, who got acceptance into the UCLA doctoral program, really be ‘subpar’? Then why was Sarkar part of the Klug Research Group – a team of six postdoctoral and Ph.D. students on a project to develop a computer-generated virtual heart?
It would be hard to get all the answers. But there’s no taking away the fact that Sarkar committed two heinous murders. Nothing can explain that away, has to be strongly condoned.
Hypothetically, it’s likely that Sarkar, one of the brightest students India churned out from IIT Kharagpur, was going through slow devolution of his right senses and mind, deprecation from a nightmarish immigrant’s hell of achieving nothing special, dejected peers had overtaken him, while he was aging, felt worthless. Decided he had only a noose to escape to from the ‘Long Dark Tunnel’ with no light in sight; sought vengeance against people whom he liked and loved once. Perhaps, not a born psychopath. But a killer all the same.
Interestingly, the award-winning film ‘Dark Matter’, directed by Chen Shi-zheng – released in 2007, a year after Sarkar enrolled at UCLA – was based loosely on the life of Chinese student Gang Lu, 28, a former graduate student of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa, who killed four members of the university faculty and one student, and seriously wounded another student, before taking his own life, on Nov. 1, 1991.
Although Lu had received his doctoral degree from the university in May 1991, he was infuriated because his dissertation did not receive the prestigious D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize.
There’s no knowing if Sarkar was an egomaniac like Lu, resented his ambitions being thwarted; even if he had gotten his doctoral degree, perhaps would have nurtured some other grouse to kill people, including Hasti and Klug.
Or just perhaps, life might have turned out different for Sarkar: he might have got his doctorate degree, become rich and famous for an innovative computer code; the Bengali boy who fulfilled his potential; lived happily ever after with his wife Hasti, and their children.
(Sujeet Rajan is Editor-in-Chief, The American Bazaar. Follow him @SujeetRajan1)
2 Comments
“…really be ‘subpar’? Then why was Sarkar part of the Klug Research Group – a team of six postdoctoral and Ph.D. students on a project to develop a computer-generated virtual heart?”
“Klug research group” is not some elite research group at UCLA. Most departments at American universities have research groups. And its uncommon for a Phd candidate to not be part of his advisers research group. Klug was an Assistant Professor when he accepted Sarkar. And typically, its hard for an Assistant Professor to attract Phd students, since they too are at the beginning of their career and rarely have much research experience. Typically brilliant students go and join seasoned, established professors. And also the fact that Sarkar didn’t continue into a Phd program at Stanford (which is a *better* university) might mean he was not such a great student. Because, changing University would mean Sarkar will have to do course work all over again at UCLA adding to his program time. Which, students typically try and avoid.
Coding is the easiest of jobs. Coming up with the hypothesis, building the theory and the abstractions, devising the Algorithms, validating the models, etc. is the really tough job.
All the news articles are propogating the same stupid idea that he was stuck in an endless phd for more than 10 years. Fact is he finished and obtained his phd in 2013 and had even thanked his supervisor in his final thesis report. So please don’t do baseless speculations