A promise kept

If I was any less theatrical about it, then the point would be lost. Almost eleven years ago I made some friends, who to this day remain close to my heart. They remind me of a time when I was different. When the world was constantly intimidating, and yet frequently awesome. A time when the canvas of my imagination was untainted. Hopes and dreams pranced playfully behind my embarrassing photochromatic spectacles.

An Indian kid in New York. I learned so much in that city. I learned about love, as much as I learned about humiliation. I learned about ambition and about race. I learnt about money and the fact that I didnt have any. I learnt about promiscuous girls and about blondes. It was tritely put ' the best of times and the worst of times'.

The shy and awkward kid I was became less shy and more awkward. I was trying to fit in into a world that I had no understanding of. People making out in stairwells, hot teachers, kids the size of school buses ( maybe a little smaller), tattoos, piercings, and unwanted pregnancies . All of these things were uniquely American and very new to me. Yet in the maelstrom of changes, I found some friends who have forever remained close to me.

The years I spent in Delhi, I wrote them and they wrote back. I even kept all the correspondence from each and every one of them . But then I grew jaded and shed my sentimentality of these things. But we all stayed in touch. Through the years, I had made a promise that I would come back.

Well, I did. So much was the same. A lot was different. People grow over time, people get caught up with lives - theirs and others. But the spark always remains. Old friends are difficult to shed. They remind one so much of what one was and so much of how far one has come.

To old friends and memories.

Life of a EE grad student

Its 4 in the morning. Its white all around. The crunch of the snow underneath my foot keep me company on my walk home. Its 17 degree below zero. There sidewalk is frozen solid underneath the snow. Had it not been for the snow, the ice would have been twice as dangerous. On some nights, there is no snow and the ice is treacherous. I have no tracion, and sometimes find myself standing at the same spot trying to avoid a fall.

And yet I never take the cab home. The university provides free cab rides to students after 2 in the morning, because thats when the buses stop running. Its just that the cabs take 20-30 minutes of waiting time, and since it takes me about 20 minutes of a leisurely stroll to get home, I dont see the point in waiting. Of course, now that I know more people, I get a ride back very often, but only if I am leaving by midnight or so.

The cold is very refreshing, especially since I spend from 10 in the morning to 3 or 4 the next morning hunched over a computer. I generally do longer hours than most of my colleagues, largely because I am so far behind them. When I was in DCE, I never understood any of the Electronics basics. I barely passed those classes. I attribute it mostly to lack of interest and poor quality of professors. I never quite understood KCL and KVL till about fourth semester or so. When I arrived, I didn't know anything about transistor theory, did not have any experience with transistor design, and in my three years in Infineon, I moved as far from those fundamental concepts as could have been possible.

I sit in an empty library, surrounded by a few familiar faces long after the crowd has left. And most of these faces are EECS majors. Given a 10AM-3AM day, I put in 17 hours every weekday and close to 10 hour days on weekends.. These are my 100 hour weeks. Now I have gotten to a point where I can no longer sleep. On the rare days I come back early, I still stay up till 3-4 wasting time - doing nothing. I wonder from time to time, if all this will be worth it.

In terms of what I have learned, its already worth it. It is an incredible sense of achievement what this kind of drudgery will do to your skills. I am more concerned about how this will fit into my career. I have very high expectations from the industry, so high that I am sure I will be disappointed - which is a strange cocktail of feelings. What I expect is nothing short of a quantum leap in my standard of living and not the gradual next step.

The costs have been great. Above all the cost to my health. I am concerned. I get no exercise. And I eat crap. I have cooked less than 5% of the meals I have eaten in the US. Its the price I paid to do well. I feel I am falling apart, I cant even climb a flight of stairs without panting. Its horrible, and I know I need to do something about it. But I dont have the strength, When will I work out? At 3 in the morning? I have thought about it. Well, didnt get me far.

The worst of the best

Fueled by insomnia, I will hunt down the greatest metal song with the SHITTIEST videos. One might point out that all metal songs have crappy videos, but I will insist that these are the WORST. Don't get me wrong, if you ridicule any of these songs themselves, I will KILL you, MAIM you, DESTROY you. This is a place of worship, not for the faint of heart!

Holy wars - Naked dudes all in a circle!

Death- Lack of comprehension- I worship this man, but boy does he show up in a bunch of crap!


DIO - Holy diver - This one is one of my favorites

Sepultura - Territory - Its all great ... till the band decides to show up! Oh the anger!! Try 1:26 - HILARIOUS!!!

Testament - Electric Crown - OH WHY??? WHY??? SOME PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED IN FRONT OF CAMERAS

Michaelangelo Batio - What can I say he is funny and EXTREMELY GIFTED!


Amon Amarth - Gotta check the swirling heads! They actually do this in all their vides

The places in my head

One of the more compelling reasons that i wanted to come to america, was so that I could see the world. Its 1 in the morning and I have been sleeping at 5 for the past week and so I am wide awake. I figure I will make a list of all the places I can think of that i want to see.

1. Hawaii
2. Yellowstone
3. Niagara
4. Bhutan
5. Egypt
6. Lhasa
7. Leh
8. Japan
9. New Zealand
10. Australia.
11. Singapore

After ten random names I realized that I probably want to go everywhere.

Broken Guitars and broken promises

My first guitar was an ancient dusty wooden box which I discovered underneath the bed, I think it belonged to mom many years ago. I had not heard of pearl jam then, and thus the fact that it was a Hawaiian Steal guitar wasn’t of much consequence to me. Little did I know, that my future as a metal-head was almost severely jeopardized. I was sent off to the local guitar maestro, who taught me more about the English language and eccentricity than I would care to write about. He also taught me to play a Bengali song (which I do not remember). Playing my first guitar could only be described as painful and being instructed by the man even more so.

My second guitar was a work of inspired labor. It was as if the luthier had decided to make a chair and halfway through changed his mind and made a guitar instead. His inspired work cost my dad a whopping hundred and fifty rupees and cost me bruised fingers for several months until my mother came to my rescue. The guitar’s fret board was almost an inch below the strings, and was an excellent example of warping and bad intonation. But there was indeed something very special about this guitar. It was a Spanish style acoustic. I don’t remember whether it was my insistence or the fact that it was the cheapest guitar available which swayed my father’s decision in its favor. I like to believe it was my insistence, contrary to everything I know about my father. My teacher however, insisted that this was a honest-to-god Hawaiian and continued my instruction for the same. He didn’t have much of a choice as he did not know anything about Spanish guitars. But since the guitar was so poorly constructed, it did serve as a decent hawaiian.

One day, I came back home from school to find the guitar smashed. I held up my close friend in its death woes, and slowly watched it die. I was angry, I wanted to know who had done this. I discovered that my mother driven to another mad rage by my father had gone on a rampage, and my guitar had fallen victim to her pent-up frustrations. I was furious with my mother, but in retrospect I thank her for it.

My father promptly dispatched us to the guitar-shop where he had bought the guitar to get them to repair it. The luthier laughed and said something about firewood. Thus began my guitar deprived months. My father promised to buy me a nice guitar, and I waited excitedly, and then waited some more. The puja season came and I was given money by all my relatives. I had been saving and had not spent the money I had received last puja either. The total was now at Rs. 1200 and I gave this money to mom for safe-keeping. I still waited for the guitar. Then one day my dad came home with a nice acoustic jumbo. It was the most beautiful thing I had heard. The smell of fresh wood and the sound of new strings marked the beginning of a long love-affair. I never saw my money again. So I came to the conclusion that I had paid for my own guitar. She lasted me almost eight years and still lies at home – old and neglected.

A few years later, my family and I went to a music store in New York. And there were these electronic keyboards on display. I gazed at them with admiration. I wondered at what music could come of these black and white keys. Infinite possibilities loomed. I was distracted by loud voices in the store, and recognized one to be my father’s. He was complaining about something, and the clerk was trying to tell him that he wasn’t finished with the last customer. The fact that my father waited for a while as the clerk finished with the last customer equated to racial profiling to my father and he made his displeasure known clearly. He kept saying he was a diplomat, which I found embarrassing and amusing at the same time. The clerk told him that he wasn’t behaving like one. So my father countered by saying that he could buy the whole shop if he wanted to. And my mom pitched in to defend him, and said, he would buy anything for his son. After we were told to leave, my mom explained to me that my father meant well, and would indeed buy me a keyboard, because I had such potential. My father also told me all about how these white people don’t like catering to us brown people. I was very excited at the thought of learning the keyboards and I waited for my mother to make good on her promises. I was fourteen and today I am twenty-five, I have never owned a keyboard and I stopped waiting a long time ago.

Patriotica incognita

Well, I guess I AM a patriot! But I hide this feeling, I hide it beneath some other pressing emotions...mostly disgust and dissappointment...

There was a time not long ago, that I believed that living in India sucks real bad!
And believe it or not, I had/have my reasons. But I was told,
"Its just as bad everywhere!"
"Oh! You will get used to it!"
"But, you will be a second rate citizen!"
"You will have to do your own dishes!"
etc.. etc..

I am a first-rate citizen as opposed to anywhere else right, why should I complain?
Well, on a average 30 minute ride, roughly 30 autorickshaw drivers will suddenly cut into my path, some 20 odd taxi-drivers will honk incessantly, even though there are ten cars in a jam in front of me...

Almost everytime I stand in a queue, at least two three people bypass it. Of course by the time I am done with the third guy, the fourth guy gets the picture. And this happens everywhere, railway tickets, airline check-in counters, public bathrooms, you name it...

In india you stand in queue for everything, want your hair cut, wait in a queue!! want to arrange transport , wait in a queue! wanna take a piss, wait in a queue! There are just so many people, that everything is a struggle. Of course, thats just how I feel , for the rest of the people, or at least a sizable portion of them, a queue is a synonym for "Hey! Fuck all these idiots standing in the queue, lets just walk to the front!"

By the time I get to work, My hair is caked with dust, and I travel in a rickety BMTC bus, whose manufacturers think of a suspension as a design overhead. As I bump and grind through the traffic at work, I am pretty much done for the day...

There are rats in the mall!!! Yes! You heard it right! The singaporean company that runs the IT park, of course, does not care much because ... "it's indians we are dealing with... the first 100 or so complaints are ok!! Surely we can wait for some mass epidemic of some sorts"

And this is one of the best software parks in Bangalore, or so they say!!

The postal service is so inept that they take forvever to deliver my passport to me, they sit on it for ten days, when I go to the post office they send me back saying that it hasn't arrived yet!

Well, if by now I am not feeling like a first grade citizen, then there's more...

...to be continued...

Variable Performance Happiness

I remember the joy I experienced when I found out that I had landed a job at Infineon. Some guy at the hostel came up to me and told me that two guys were through and I was one of them.
I was incredulous, and walked to the placement block in the hot afternoon. After searching the display boards for a while, I found it. There it was- the key to my happiness - my name in bold along with Saurabh's. The joy I felt that day I remember. I could even say that I was happy.

"The dissection of happiness"

I wonder what was it that made me feel that way, or what is it that makes me happy.
I wonder coz it would great help to know in which direction I should be headed towards.
Doing something extra-ordinary always has made me happy and so has doing something creative. But beyond that I am not sure. Winning makes me happy, so does eating exotic food.
Company makes me happy and so does intellectual debate. A full day of doing very diverse stuff makes me very happy. Like ...

"Hey Ori! Why dont we hit the ice skating rink after your performance at the wembley stadium?"

Or

"Hey Ori! I know flying around in a fighter jet can be tiring, but why dont we spend the rest of the day climbing all the stairs in the petronas towers?"

I am crazy right? perhaps, but these rising expectations of what is the minimum threshld to tickle me is very frustrating to keep up with...