Ajay's pensieve

CHAPTER 20- THINGS I OVERLOOKED (GUEST WRITER WANTED)

2010-01-04T14:35:00.004+05:30

CHAPTER 20- THINGS I OVERLOOKED (GUEST WRITER WANTED)

Initially, I planned to write in this post, all the stuff that I had missed writing about in my previous 19 posts and were pointed out to be by comments from people or stuff I remembered later. But, seeing how big the previous posts have been, it would be an onerous task for me to go through all the posts again and all its comments and write a huge post. And so I am chucking this post...
UNLESS.....
........
ONE OF THE GUYS WHO WERE WITH ME AND WENT THROUGH WHAT I WENT THROUGH (JB, MS, AZ 'n JD) WANT TO WRITE THIS POST.
So guys, if any of you are jobless enough to fill up this space, you re totally welcome. It would be good to have a guest writer in the final post in the series too.

SIGNING OFF,
AJAY

CHAPTER 19- SOME GOOD NEWS, NOSTALGIA AT BERKELEY AND THE END OF THE TRIP

2010-01-04T12:29:00.013+05:30

CHAPTER 19- SOME GOOD NEWS, NOSTALGIA AT BERKELEY AND THE END OF THE TRIP

It was in the middle of the quarter that I got an amazing piece of news- my first admit for grad school- at UC Davis. I had got a rejects from a couple of big guns I had applied to, Princeton, UC San Diego and so I was quite anxious about whether I would get any admits. And I had ambitiously put in my application for a Phd at UC Davis, which is generally more selective than a masters.

One evening, when I was shopping, Varun called me and told me that he had got a mail from UC Davis for the Phd that he had also applied to. I was happy for him, but was sure mine wouldn’t have come as his profile was way better than mine and it is only fair that he gets his admit before mine. I went home and checked my mail to find nothing new, and as rejects always come a few days after the admits, I thought my aspirations at UCD was over.

Then after an hour of brooding, I suddenly got a hunch that I should check my spam, and voila, there was a message from the UCD CS dept. I opened the mail and realized this was an admit letter. I was stunned. I didn’t really believe it until JB read it for me and confirmed that it was indeed an admit to the Phd. I was relieved more than anything else. I knew that I, at least,, had a choice to decide what I wanted to do for my career when it is time. I spent a couple of hours on the phone letting people close to me know about it and then went to bed and got up a different man, with no pressure on me.

I enjoyed the rest of the quarter without too many qualms even if some minor glitches came in the way as I knew I had the big fish. And so, now that I had that choice between working in India and pursuing my Phd in UC Davis and pursuing my masters in either UC Irvine or Oregon state university, I decided in favor of UC Davis and so am back here and quite happy.

I also squeezed in a trip to Berkeley towards the end of the quarter, for a day mainly to meet my cousin who studies at UC Berkeley and collect some stuff my mom had given for me through him, as he had come from India only a couple of weeks ago. Varun accompanied me for that, and we took a shuttle which runs between UCD and UCB early in the morning. In an hour, we entered Berkeley and saw it was a wonderful scenic place.

We got down and decided to explore the town first. We went into a bookstore, which had the largest collection of old books I have ever seen or imagined. I doubt if a museum would have such a collection. There were many rare and coveted ones, some quite controversial and therefore unpredictable. We spoke to the owner, an old man of 90 years and he told us that he had spent all his life collecting these and he even knew what books he had and which shelves it was on. Remarkable, considering that there were at least a 100000 books there. We went around the shelves and some were so old that in a few years from now the paper may start disintegrating. The whole smell of the place and the history associated with it really impressed avid book enthusiasts like me and Varun.

We then walked further in the town to get to a street, which was like mini- India. There were at least 20 restaurants, 5 saree and Indian clothing shops, lots of Indian supermarkets etc. We felt so much at home. So nostalgic.

It had been months since we had proper Indian food, and so with no worry about the prices, we ate thrice that day. The chole bature in the morning, the biriyani in the afternoon and the chaat in the evening may well be my happiest meals in my life considering how much I had missed such food and I got an opportunity to have it unexpectedly. I licked my plate clean each time, not even leaving any work for the dishwashers.

Then we walked further and further and explored the whole town. We must have walked about 10 miles there and went to parts of the town to which my cousin later disclosed he hasn’t been to in his 6 months of dwelling there. We also did some shopping at a place to fulfil the second of the two places I had aimed to visit while coming to the US (I had visited the first with JD and D-dub in Sacramento). After all this and many a buck spent, I met my cousin and took the evening shuttle back to Davis.

Soon, it was the end of the quarter and we were done with our exams. I was rather disappointed at how the course on visualization I had taken, turned out for me, but I was at a stage where I was starting to get homesick and the fact that I was going back home in a few days cheered me up loads and kept me going. Soon it was time to pack and we had to vacate our apartment a couple of days before our flight because the GSP people insisted and so the five of us spent about 15 hours each over a course of two days to clean the whole apartment, including the carpets and walls and shelves and toilets and get it ready for presentation. Though we did a commendable job, it wasn’t good enough for a certain suddenly hostile GSP staff.

So slightly upset, we said goodbye to #116, our wonderful home for the past 7 months which has given us many memories to cherish and went with our luggage to Dwarak’s place, where we were going to be put up till we left for our flight. We had a lot of fun there, especially playing FIFA 09 on his Xbox. Thanks for being a great host, D-dub.

Cherishing those memories, we left for the San Francisco airport on the morning of the 26^rd of March, bidding farewell to Dwarak and boarded our flight.

At the Hong Kong airport, on the transit, we had to wait in queue for boarding the next flight and we realized that people were pushing past us to get to the door first while we were socially giving way like a person in Davis would. We realized we were back in the big bad world of again and we needed to get back to our selfish selves to survive in this competitive Asian world. And so with no further delay, we blended into the crowd pushing other out of our way. It was a good feeling to feel right doing that in some ways. It took us some time, after a couple of embarrassing situations to realize we shouldn’t be commenting about our co-passengers in tamil as it is quite probable that they may understand the language. It was going to take some time getting used to some things in India again. But I was looking forward to it.

We arrived at the Chennai airport with no glitches and after checking out my luggage, bid farewell to the others for now and was delighted to see my parents after a very long time. We had a lot to talk about. And a lot to not talk about too :D . Only then I realized how much I had been missing them. All this time while I had been in Davis, I had I never felt homesick which I guess is due to my good fortune that I had such good friends there. I thank you all, who have influenced my life, in any way, as I like how it has turned out till now.

Epilogue:

It was a great feeling to be back in India but not so great a feeling to be back in SRM as far as academics were concerned. It sucked to be back in the system where you cannot question anything and take things at face value and memorize stuff instead of understanding it conceptually to get marks in “exams”. I had to unlearn the system of learning I experienced in Davis and get back to the degradatory folds of the SRM education system. Worse, I had to put up with the politics and all the other crap that was dished out to us. But now that I have come past all that, and passed out successfully after graduation, I can say I have no regrets and I can look forward to what’s coming.

P.S: this started as a blog post which I thought I could complete in a couple of thousand words and publish at once, but as it went on I realized I had so much to say. So I decided to type it all as I remember it, omitting no non-sensitive important detail, with no worries about the size. I am quite shocked to see that THIS is the 31645^th word that I am typing and the 19^th blog post that I am posting . And I shall end it here!!!

THE END!!!

THAT'S ALL FOLKS!!!

CHAPTER 18- AT THE RUSSELL PETERS SHOW

2009-12-29T12:49:00.006+05:30

CHAPTER 18- AT THE RUSSELL PETERS SHOW

The other time I went to Sacramento was something I will remember all my life, as will the others who were with me. It was the Russell Peters show. Russell is quite an icon among today’s youth, especially Indian youth and it was no exception with me and the others. To get an opportunity to see him live in action would be a dream come true. He is quite easily the most popular stand-up comedian today. It helps that his main target audience are Indians and Chinese and so being popular among Indians and Chinese is like being popular among more than half the world.

You need to be broad minded to take his jokes in the right sense. Some people consider him racist, but the other way of looking at it is he is talks about what people brand “racism” as such a normal thing in life that it doesn’t become taboo anymore. Agreed…he does go overboard sometimes, but his general philosophies are so outrageously simple that you sometimes wonder if everyone in the world was like him, there would be no practices like racism. I have totally loved most of his jokes and his points of view and tolerated the very few I found offensive but I would like to assert that I hated the stuff he was babbling about physically-challenged people in his latest show “Red brown and white”. He went totally overboard there. Anyway… I wanted to make that point somehow, hence the deviation.

We were all really excited that he was coming to Sacramento for a show and got tickets at once. We all felt it would be a great experience if we could meet him and MS took the initiative of mailing Russell’s manager on the website that we were a bunch of loyal Russell fans, who had come all the way from India to get an opportunity to meet him and if it were possible to say a hi to him before the show. He got an instant reply, asking him for our details and asking us to come half an hour in advance to meet Russell. We were really surprised at how easy that was.

So we were really excited when it was D-day. It was almost all of the Blue flamez this time. Almost. Except AZ, who couldn’t make it (because he had to save to buy shoes? :D). [This gives me the opportunity to make an important point. All the 9 of us “Blue flamez” have never been at the same place at the same time. Ever. Due to one reason or the other, someone does not make it. Guys… pity we couldn’t do anything about it in India too, so it’s going to remain this way for quite some time I guess].

So it was JB, JD, MS, Varun, Dwarak, Mahesh, Sahithi and I who made it there finally. We arrived well on time and entered the place. It was actually a comedy club. And a very historic one where famous comedians like Chris Rock had made their first few shows. It was more of a restaurant-club place, where there were tables all around what looked to be a small stage. It wouldn’t accommodate more than 200 people at a time. The smaller the audience, the greater the probability of each one of us to be royally raped by Russell’s jokes on us. So we were even more excited.

Then Russell walked in coolly, dressed in casuals, his walk evident of his self-confidence. He went backstage and soon we were called by a few volunteers backstage. That was the moment we were waiting for. We walked into the room where he was perched on a table and on seeing the 8 of us enter the room, he smiled sarcastically and said “Wow… I see a bunch of malnutritioned people. You must be from…. India”. Hmm… I looked around and noticed MS especially and Varun didn’t exactly look malnutritioned but didn’t make the point. We talked with him for a minute or two and told him we are huge fans and have watched most of his shows. He was as friendly as a person who had known us all our lives. He then signed autographs for us with our names on it, and as he wrote each name, he found some way to make fun of it. I introduced myself as AJ (syllable), as I would to Americans who would find it easier to pronounce and he asked me “you must have an Indian name. Is it Ajay by any chance? :D “. He split up Jagadish's name as Jug-dish and said he was quite a dish. He showed mock surprise that a boy’s name started with Jeya when JB introduced himself. After all this, we took a priceless picture with him, arm in arm. I was totally overwhelmed to be standing with Russell Peter’s hands over my shoulder. Finally, it was time for the show to begin and we left to sit at our tables but I couldn’t resist telling him “We had a fun-tastic time” with a typical Indian accent (will make sense to those who have watched his “Red brown and white” show) and he seemed quite overwhelmed for the first time and smiled.

The show began and what a show it was too. I went with very high expectations. That it was going to be really funny. But I was wrong. It was much more than that. It was totally hilarious. Two hours of continuous laughter. There wasn’t a dull moment. My throat and mouth was hoarse after having laughed that much at a stretch. I thought all stand up comedians always have a theme and a line of proceeding and they would deviate and improvise to make it look instantaneous. I expected it to be a show where he would crack some of his popular jokes like “Somebody gonna get a hurt real bad” and the stuff about how funny Indian names were etc, and had even refreshed my memory with the popular ones by watching this videos before the show so that I would be able to catch the joke in advance, but I was off cue. It was totally totally instantaneous. Not one joke was from his previous shows.

He started off pretty lamely by coming on stage and looking around and saying “Oh man. I just dunno where to start. I seem to have exhausted all my jokes in my previous shows. I have no clue what I am going to be speaking in the next couple of hours. So if I am without any ideas for most of the show, do excuse me”. After a minute of silent babbling he started off with “Hmm…why don’t I start off with that Indian guy sitting there with a turban?”, pointing to a sardar in the audience. From there he went table to table in random order and made sure everyone present that night was embarrassed in some way or the other. There is no way that the jokes could have been made up before the show as it was all improvised reactionary humor. And it was so good that there was never a dull moment.

His imitations of the Indian accent got the biggest applause though, as he sounded so funny doing it. He embarrassed a lot of people that night including a waitress in a low top who was serving a guy at the table something saying “Hey you….guy over there to whom the well-endowed blonde waitress is bending to give you a good view…tip her generously else she might not accompany you home tonight”. I didn’t know who turned redder…the guy at the table or the waitress. There were many such jokes through the night which kept the audience hooked. It is so amazing how this guy could talk instantaneous nonsense for two hours and it still seemed hilarious.

We wanted the show to go on forever but alas… all things come to an end…and so did this after a couple of hours of entertainment. We waved him goodbye and thanked him for having made our day and a lot more days ahead and took a taxi back to Davis.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

CHAPTER 17- WWE AND NBA LIVE IN SACRAMENTO

2009-12-27T07:32:00.006+05:30

CHAPTER 17- WWE AND NBA LIVE IN SACRAMENTO

I also went to Sacramento a couple of times again that quarter, to watch some sporting and entertainment events. First was the WWE RAW event at the Arco arena. I haven’t really been a big WWE follower and I had always found the whole setup quite silly. But I was curious about it nonetheless. I was interested in seeing the event live, to understand why a lot of people were total WWE fanatics. Also we would all have a lot of fun.

A visibly excited MS and AZ, Dwarak, Jakki, JB and I set out that evening and got into the arena and found the atmosphere electric. There were about 10000 people there and each one was screaming on top of his/her voice. I also got into the mood and started screaming random stuff, though I didn’t even know all the wrestlers names and their ‘history’. Most of the superstars were there including Cena, Edge, Orton, Jericho, Kane, Mysterio.

To see them wrestle looked totally artificial, I must say. Some wrestlers started falling and reacting even before their opponent's punch landed on them. I noticed one such anomaly when Jericho hit Cena and chuckled, only to be greeted by a dirty stare from a couple of bouncer-like guys, who could’ve thrown me all the way into the ring from the stands, with one hand. They were Cena fans and probably thought I had chuckled to express my happiness seeing Cena get beaten. I decided to keep my thoughts to myself after that if I wanted to return home in one piece.

In another match, the self-proclaimed world’s strongest man, Mark Henry (he was huuuuge…must have been some 2000 kgs and about 7 feet tall) was beating up Mysterio and a pint size kid (he was one third my height) of about 10 sitting beside me, stood up on his seat and screamed “Henry…you bas****…you leave him alone or I ll come and throw you out of the ring”. I didn’t know how to react. Henry could’ve pushed him two rows back with his little finger. But from his voice, I could see he meant every word of it. That’s how passion transcends barriers like age and size. Though it was a good enjoyable one time experience, now that the curiosity is fulfilled, I wouldn’t pay to watch another WWE event again.

Another time, I went for an NBA match at the Arco arena. I badly wanted to watch the Lakers play in Sacramento as I am a lakers supporter but they weren’t to come until after I left for India. So I decided to watch the team where one of my favorite players, Lebron James plays- Cleveland Cavaliers. The cavaliers were to come to Sacramento to play against the Sacramento Kings, who are nowadays called only the Kings nowadays as they are an potential embarrassment to the capital city if they carry its name. They were last in the western conference, and by a large margin. The cavaliers were comfortably on top of the eastern conference table and if they got a win here, they would be through to the playoffs. It was also an important game for Lebron personally because he had been in the form of his life lately and had got 3 triple-doubles back to back. Were he to get one more, he would be the first player in the NBA ever to do that.

I had to go solo, as the others weren’t really interested in basketball. Without a second thought, I bravely took the yolobus and changed twice to get there to the Arco arena, having just directions from Google maps and with no idea how I was going to get back after the match as it would be late. It didn’t matter at that time. All that mattered was seeing Lebron in action.

So, asking a lot of people on the way for directions and advice, I finally got to the arco arena and took my seat. It was a really exciting atmosphere, with a full house of about 15000 people. I talked to a few people before the match and everyone was just wondering by how many points the Kings would get thrashed and not about the result.

It was one hell of a game though. It started on totally unexpected lines, with the kings getting a 15 point lead at the end of the first quarter. At halftime, they managed to increase the lead further to about 25 points. Everyone was stunned, from the players of both teams, to every person in the crowd. The Kings were growing in confidence and the crowd was cheering louder too sensing something special here. After all it had been 7 games since the Kings had won a match and to win against the best team of the eastern conference with the best player in the world, it would be special indeed.

I was discussing the game with the girl beside me and said it looked like it’s going to be a comfortable win for the Kings, she looked at me with a twinkle in the eye and asked me if that was the first time to a kings game. I told her it was so and she said that explains why I do not know about the Kings. She told me “Mark my words. The kings can really perform miracles no other team can. Like losing from this position”. I was like “No way. 25 points is too much of a lead to make up”.

The game got underway again and the kings left off where they started. They were playing like they were possessed, banking on the now-excited crowd's backing and also the DJ’s music. Yes that’s one thing I noticed which was really unique about the NBA. They have a DJ and play with the music on. That also works to the advantage of the home team, as the DJ plays adrenaline pumping music when the home team has the ball and droning music when the away team does. I guess the sounds you hear affect your tempo and rhythm. So it’s better for the away players to wear earplugs while travelling.

Towards the end of the fourth quarter, the cavaliers went on a 12-2 run, thanks to a few three pointers by Lebron. So with the momentum with the cavaliers but a 15 point lead with the kings, the 3^rd quarter ended. I still thought it was way too much to make up in the second quarter, unless the kings play real real badly and go on something like a 0-15 streak.

And that’s exactly what happened. Suddenly, where there were ferocious warriors battling for the kings, there seemed to be clueless amateurs ball watching as Lebron and co started steamrolling their way to the basket. With 30 seconds to go, Lebron hit a 3 pointer to make his tally go to 40 and draw the cavaliers level. The kings messed up their final shot at the basket, with a bad pass which was intercepted and it was end of time. The score was tied 102-102.

I was shocked at how the kings had thrown it away and got a “see…I told you” look from the girl beside me. In the overtime, as expected, it was the cavaliers all the way and they won the game with a 10 point lead. To have been 25 up at halftime and lose a game by ten points, I have to say no other team could do that. Hail the kings for the miracles they can perform. Lebron ended with 56 points and some of the best three pointers and dribbles and tricks and dunks and alley-oops I have ever witnessed. I was lucky to have been there.

I looked down at my watch and it was 10 pm. I was totally panicked as the last yolobus to Davis would be at 1030 in downtown. I ran out of the stadium, pushing the already dejected Kings fans, hearing their trailing curses, but not registering in my state of panic. Thankfully, I got a cab as soon as I went outside and asked him to go as fast as he could to downtown. He told me we just might make it in time, if the traffic wasn’t too heavy. Luckily it wasn’t and we reached at 1020. I gave the driver a generous tip and got down relieved and waited at the deserted bus stop.

I remembered the last time I was in Sacramento and realized what a foolhardy thing it was to have come all the way here on my own relying only on public transport. I thanked my stars when the bus came and I got onto it and I was finally in known territory. I came home happy with my day’s adventure but knowing I shouldn’t act so brave and take such risks.

CHAPTER 16- LAKE TAHOE- SKIING AND SOME SCENERY GAZING

2009-12-24T01:57:00.013+05:30

CHAPTER 16- LAKE TAHOE- SKIING AND SOME SCENERY GAZING

It was in the middle of the quarter that we decided we ought to the one other place we had been wanting to go every since we came to Davis- Lake Tahoe. It was a frozen lake just 80 miles north of Davis, which was very scenic and had ski resorts and the best time to see it was December to February and so we decided it was now or never. The 5 of us who were interested in going (JB, Dwarak, Varun, Jakki and I) rented a car and started very early in the morning, heavily dressed for the cold. I was really excited as it was the first time I was going to see and feel and even ski in snow.

We had driven for about an hour and there was still no sight of snow. We could feel the wind chilling a bit but considering we had another 30 miles only to our destination, which was to be snow covered mountains and a frozen lake, it was bizarre that we hadn’t caught sight of any snow. After double-checking if we were on the right track, we continued on and noticed that the wind had chilled suddenly and another two minutes of driving led us to our first sight of snow. It was beautiful to see white flakes on the black tar on the road ahead of us.

Another two minutes of driving…and voila…we couldn’t see any color other than white all around us. All the greenery and earth had been covered with snow. It was a majestic sight to look around you and see only white. Soon the road began climbing and we realized we were on the snow capped mountains now. After sometime we could see the ground below, all covered in beautiful white.

We reached our first destination, the ski resort in a few minutes from then, and got down from the car and wore every layer of clothing we had brought with us. We needed it. I stepped into the snow for the first time in my life and it was initially a weird feeling. It was about 5 inches deep and it was pretty difficult to walk initially. It was similar to walking on sand on a beach, only this was a good 3 inches thicker. We went into the resort and collected our gear. It was a huge struggle to wear the snow boots. They were humungously heavy. Each boot must have weighed at least 5 kgs(whatever that is in lbs- I am still used to the SI system). It was such a struggle to walk with that. We were handicapped the whole way from the gear closet to the open, as our movement was restricted by these boots and we were also carrying other stuff like the skiing rods. After losing balance countless times and bumping into loads of people, we finally got out into the open and the sight dazzled us. Literally. Everything in front of us was vulgarly white. There was so much white light reflected by the snow all around us that we had to close our eyes and open them gradually to get accustomed to it. It was like waking up from sleep and the first thing you look at is the sun. No wonder serious skiers wear goggles.

Once our eyes got accustomed to the light, we looked around to see lots of snow covered hills of all heights and of all steepness around us. There were at least 500 people skiing in that resort at that time. We wore the skis on our boots and we realized we were even more paralyzed that before. It was impossible to lift our legs and walk. And it was impossible to move uphill with the skis which dug into the snow. And we were too scared to go downhill, as we didn’t know how to control it. And so we stayed put, watching other people, including kids as young as 6-7 years ski down the steepest slopes. We felt retarded.

Finally the ski instructor came down to us and our crash course in skiing started. There is so much technique involved in skiing, some quite difficult to master. Your legs need to be bent at the right angle to have proper control when you ski downhill. And your feet should be relaxed. When you want to stop, you have to do what is called the pizza formation with your legs, where you join the thumbs of both your toes and maintain a 30 degree angle. Not more, not less. You do one of these things wrong, and you ll end up falling, as we realized the hard way. When you want to turn right while skiing, you need to wiggle the toes of your right foot and for turning left, your left foot. There was so much concentration necessary.

The initial lessons were quite easy but when we went to do the real thing, we realized how hard it was. Concentration and relaxation is preceded by instinct when you are racing downhill and so you often end up doing one thing wrong and that is enough to make you do a somersault and fall a few yards away, head down and feet up. The worst thing was not the fall. It was the recovery from it. It was really hard to get back up on your feet, with such heavy boots and skis which give you no control. And once you get back up, if you don’t get your feet into the pizza formation, you are likely to plummet downhill again and fall.

I must have fallen at least a hundred times (no juxaggeration) and it is a wonder that I had no bones broken. Each fall propelled me to try more and fall again, after attaining a greater velocity. The longest I managed to stay on my feet was for about 20 seconds down a 60 degree inclined hill and I remember that achievement not for the good amount of time I managed to maintain balance but for the fall I had at a 40 kmph speed I must have attained. I tried to steer right, for which I had to wiggle the toes of my right foot alone and being the symmetry freak (guys who know me will understand this), I couldnt get myself to do that and so I wiggled the toes of both my feet simultaneously and as they say, the rest is history. I must have been at least 5 seconds in the air (which is a long time) and landed at least 20 metres from the point I started flying. Ouch. It sure hurt! It is funny how snow flakes, which are on its own so soft, combine to form a lump of snow which is as hard as stone (and seems harder as your body is numb in the cold). It is analogous to how, in a situation where one individual may be ineffective in performing a task, a team of individuals can accomplish the same task. In that way, the snow teamed up to give amateur skiers like me a ‘hard’ time. Pun intended.

But finally after 4-5 hrs of skiing, I think I got the hang of it and I could keep myself on my feet over a whole downhill path. Dwarak got really good at it though, almost looked like a pro towards the end. Varun didn’t really take to the snow as he would to a guitar and hence was branded ‘grandma’ by the ski instructor (:P). Knowing that our bodies would be aching all over but not even able to feel it because of the numbness due to the cold, we called it a day and returned our gear and warmed ourselves. Only then we started feeling the pain from all the bones which had taken a beating. It was like coming back from a dentist after a tooth extraction and feeling the pain after the anesthetic wears off.

We then drove to the lake, which was about 20 miles from there. I got down from the car and I was greeted by what was the most beautiful sight I have ever taken into my eyes. This was what would be justifiable usage of the often overused expression ‘picture-perfect’. Imagine this scenery. You are standing on snow. Right in front of you is a vast expanse of a frozen lake, where the ice forms a single sheet which reflects light at you like a mirror. In front of the lake which seems to stretch forever are mountains. Snow capped ones, where the snow on their peaks makes them look like a vanilla cream garnished dessert. Behind them, you can see the sky, in its purest blue. And behind that, the sun peaking out of the mountains completes the picture. It was breathtakingly beautiful. You could stare at that one scenery all day. It was so hypnotizing.

We played around on the banks making a snowman and taking pictures and then decided it was time to leave.

Rather reluctantly, we went to our car and drove back home. It had been one hell of a day. The aftermath was also hell, but in a different way. The next three days, we couldn’t move a muscle as an effect of all the beating our bones had taken while skiing. But it was worth every bit of that pain.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

CHAPTER 15- ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING IN WINTER

2009-12-22T15:17:00.002+05:30

CHAPTER 15- ACADEMICALLY SPEAKING IN WINTER

The quarter started and it started on a bad note academically, as I was not able to enroll in two courses I had asked for, due to the preference to local UCD students. I had to change my plans and had to reshuffle courses but I was happy with what I got finally. I took up Algorithm analysis under Martel, Probability under Matloff and Visualization under Nelson Max.

I really enjoyed algorithm analysis a lot and did well in that course and learned so much with a wonderful prof like Martel. We would sit down with our algo books on the mornings of the days we would have to turn in the assignments and still finish it on time (though we had to use the cyber-shot once to finish off an assignment… don’t expect me to elaborate on this again). I had a lot of company for this course with JD, MS, Varun and JB taking it, apart from my other apartment mate Allen (to whom I am indebted to for reasons obvious to those concerned) from Hong Kong, who had moved in to replace our former roommate, who had to vacate due to incompatibility issues. The five of us used to discuss across the table and completed the first assignment a week in advance of the turn in date; we discussed the second one on the previous day of turning in; the third one we discussed on the morning we had to turn it in; the fourth one- don’t even ask. So it was like any other course where a motivation-duration graph would be hyperbolic in nature.

I also had a lot of fun in the course watching Jag doze off during the class (which was early in the morning…9 am…which is early for winter) with Martel lecturing and snoring a couple of times right at the moment Martel pauses for breath, such that the snore penetrates all through the class and all the attention including Martel’s is focuses on the bench the sound came from and eyeing an embarrassed JB with disdain with JD sleeping beside him happily oblivious to all this. On JB’s advice, Jag decided to be physically absent to the class from then on, thereby sleeping happily at home, instead of physically turning up and mentally being in ZZZland. Though he attended not even one class mentally, Jug got the best grade among all of us. Good for you, mate!

Probability was a course I was forced into taking because of not getting a course I wanted, but it turned out to be a really interesting course where I would learn to apply math in a lot of places in CS and it was taught by the rather dry but immensely knowledgeable Prof. Matloff. I found the course pretty easy as it was theoretical math for most part but lost interest in it towards the end and messed up the final, in what would have otherwise been a perfect course. I had Varun for company on this one and I teamed up with him and an insanely bright guy, Spencer for doing the assignments, which we really did wonderfully. I might have got a perfect grade had I finished the course well but then, I am not complaining.

Visualization was one course I had been looking forward to for a long time. Especially because it was under Dr. Nelson Max, one of the most respected names in the field of graphics thanks to the 40 years he has spent in being one of the pioneers developing the field to make it become what it is now. The papers he has published, and their importance and number of citations easily answer to how successful he has been as a researcher. But it does not testify as to how successful he was as a teacher. I had to find this out the hard way. I will simply state that his style of teaching did not really suit my way of understanding and hence didn’t really enjoy his classes. The field of visualization itself wasn’t too interesting to me. It all seemed too abstract and random to be able to represent data any way we wanted by forming our own representation so that we would understand it in the future. A lot of its aspects seemed beyond me. I do not know if I started disliking the subject because of the teacher or disliking the teacher because of the subject. Either way, I did not enjoy those classes too much and that got reflected in my final grade. This was one course I regret having taken up at UCD. But anyway, having learned it the hard way, I won’t repeat the mistake again and I now know what to stay off now that I am back for grad school. It’s good that I learned it now rather than during grad school when I’ve got more to lose.

I also audited a couple of classes for fun. It is the unique flexibility of the system that allows us to just walk into any random class and sit there and participate in the lecture, not giving the exams or writing the assignments. This system allowed me to audit a course on special relativity initially. I went for the first class, and on talking to some students in that class who were all physics majors, I found that they were of the opinion that I was wasting my time auditing that class as I wouldn’t understand a thing as it required a lot of prerequisites that they had done in their three years as physics majors, in which I had no background. Quite dejected, I thought I’ll sit in that one class as I made the effort to come all the way. Once the class started, I was as surprised as the others to discover that I was among 3 people in the class of 20, who were able to follow the discussion and raise a few points about what we were discussing. I guess the amount of general reading up on stuff like relativity was responsible for that. Quite jubilant, I went out of that class with a grin. But I couldn’t attend that class too often as it was an 8 am class and it was worse than being strung up by thumbs to get up at 6 am in winter to make it to a class, which was not even going to give me a grade.

I also audited John Owens’ graduate course on Graphics architecture regularly and I discovered there was so much to explore in the realm of hardware in graphics, which I had looked at from the software point of view. He was a really good teacher and his classes were really merry and interesting. Varun was also totally into the class and so we kept coaxing the other to attend it even if he was in the mood to give it a skip. Hence we ended up attending most of the classes and learning a lot.

All of us SRM ppl hung out a lot more this quarter. Last time we were all in small closed groups but this time we all met up a lot more. We had a couple of get-togethers where we all met up and had a lot of fun. There was a lot more partying this quarter for me and a couple of sleepovers at Mahi and Deepak’s apartment, which was a lot of fun. Whenever I think of Mahi, the first thing I get reminded of is what he did in the gardens of the Capitol building, the office of the governor of California, the terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sorry folks… can’t elaborate further. MS’s b’day also came around that time and we celebrated it with a good cake but the most memorable thing about that b’day was the b’day bumps he got. (any comments, MS?)

It was around this time that the budding rapper in da house, JD and the music composer, D-dub (provided he has his mac) started taking their rap seriously. They decided to compose a rap song in memory of the Blue flamez and it was amazing fun to see them at work. It was always amazing to see Dwarak shout at someone and JD got a lot of that during their composing sessions, when Dwarak wasn’t too happy with something. Dwarak came up with lots of amazing tunes but it took JD too long to give him the lyrics and so it never took off. AZ was a real natural though at writing instantaneous but really impressive lyrics but he wasn’t a natural singer. JD and D-Dub have continued their work a little after coming to Chennai though and it seemed to be shaping up quite decently. I must say I thought they would’ve come out with the final rap by now but alas no results yet! Guys- if you‘re reading this, we’re still waiting eagerly for it. So get your eyes off this monitor and go make some music.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

CHAPTER 14- NEW YEAR AT SACRAMENTO AND IM SOCCER

2009-12-21T11:14:00.005+05:30

CHAPTER 14- NEW YEAR AT SACRAMENTO AND IM SOCCER

New Year was round the corner and we decided we shouldn’t stay put in Davis for that; else it would be as lame as Christmas was. After some discussion, we scrapped plans of going to San Francisco because we had to cut our expenditure as much as possible because of the stupendous amount we had spent in the last few days. So we decided to go to Sacramento instead. After all, it’s the capital of the state of California; there’s got to be some celebration. After some looking up on the net, we found out that there were celebrations with fireworks in Old Sacramento near the bridge.

AZ was also back from Seattle, so the 6 of us (Varun, MS, Jaggy, JB, Dwarak and I) sent off to Sacramento on the Yolobus in the evening of the 31^st. There were a lot of people there, and there were lots of things to see. The whole area had a festive atmosphere about it. Many stalls had been put up, and there were performances by flame throwers, belly-dancers, musicians who were playing everything from blues to rock and it kept us busy for hours. It was soon close to midnight and there were fireworks at 11 pm, which were really grand. It lasted for about ten minutes and it reminded us of diwali, only without the noise associated with it. The sky was lit by the merry fireworks.

We learned that there was a ball drop at midnight in downtown Sac, a mile or so from here and so we set out to watch that. The streets were crowded. Really crowded. It reminded me of Ranganathan street in Chennai. It was a mixture of all types of people, of all color and all sections of the society. People were shoving the person next to them without any botheration. There were also a lot of racist taunts being thrown freely. I guess it’s the crowd syndrome. When you are in a crowd, you are not conscious of your actions because you know a whole bunch of people are going to be held responsible for your individual actions too. So you can be a lot freer since the attention is not on the individual. The same bunch of people who were there that night, taunting and shoving people, might be dignified business magnates or goody-two-shoes students in the day, but that night they were each just a nobody but as a group a part of a crowd. And so they let themselves loose. We witnessed a girl being molested by a gang of people in the crowd, without anyone being able to do anything about it and quite a few scuffles between gangs of people. We wondered what we had gotten ourselves into and worried if we would get to see the New Year at all.

Thankfully we got through pretty safe and managed to squeeze into a place where we could see the ball drop a few metres away. 10..9....5...3..2..1.. and there were choruses of happy new year all around us. We were wished by numerous people thrice as big and strong as us and shook our hands, and we nervously shook them and greeted them back. We managed to ease out of the crowd and get to a free street and thanked our stars for coming out in one piece. We called a cab as it was too late for the yolobus to ply to Davis and we waited for an hour nervously on the now-deserted street, eyeing suspiciously every shady looking guy walking in our direction. The cab came at last and we got home at about 2 am.

The next morning, we got to know from the news update that about 5 people had been killed in independent incidents by drunk or lunatic people, in the mood to do something a bit too exciting in the New Year. We were relieved we weren’t one of those five poor souls at the wrong place at the wrong time.

[From this point, my style of blogging is going to change. I am not necessarily going in chronological order. When I bring up a subject, I am going to breeze through the winter quarter with everything related to that subject. I had to do this to make it crisp and end this ever-continuing story… We have come to the 14th part and just half of the trip is over. I promised to end it in 20, and so I will]

The winter quarter was about to start in a couple of days, and we decided it was time we had more fun this time as this may be the last one in Davis. We decided to use the Activities and Recreation Centre (ARC) more often to play one of the loads of sports it has facilities for. The ARC is one of the highlights of UCD, housing an indoor soccer stadium, about 20 badminton courts, about 10 squash courts, a basketball stadium, a rock climbing zone, a few tennis courts, some baseball pitches, a running track among others. I was quite surprised why we hadn’t used it much last quarter and I realized we were too busy chatting or lounging around at home that we didn’t have the time to come here. For the first half of the quarter, I was a regular there, playing soccer with the whole gang or badminton most often with Varun and sometimes one of the girls, and squash a few times. We played soccer at the Hutchinson stadium in the evening and made some friends with some other UCD soccer enthusiasts.

We also decided it would be a lot of fun if we signed up for the intramural soccer tournament, where we would compete against other teams professionally in the soccer stadium. We were pretty upbeat, as we felt Americans can’t even play football (yeah they can play soccer but hey that’s a different name) and so we may have a good chance of going all the way. Little did we know what we were in for. So we registered our team “Blue flamez”, with AZ as our captain, me, JB, JD, MS, Varun, Dwarak, Deepak, Hyun (our Korean roomie) and a couple of his friends Yun San and Leister.

In the trials, we discovered Deepak’s talent as a goalie and amazing willingness and enthusiasm to work hard to improve as a keeper, which is the most important for a player and so he became our star goalie, though Dwarak seemed as good if not better than him at it. At the end of the day, it’s the passion for the game and how much each one enjoys it that counts. Mahesh was a semi-pro as he had played a lot of competitive soccer at the school level in Kerala. With these soccer training sessions, Mahi and Goalie (Deepak) started hang out with us more often.

So that left our team of 12, with just three professional players- AZ, who had been playing all his life and was a great overall player; Mahi, who had played at competitive levels and was very good with the ball; Leister, who had played the IMs before and was a consistent player with great tackling abilities with great energy levels and the rest, amateurs- Yun San, who was quite talented with the ball but quite raw; Hyun, who didn’t have much skill with the ball but had amazing strength and stamina thanks to the 3 years he spent in the Korean army; me, whose mind was as good as a pro’s due to the amount of football I watch and quickness on my feet coupled with good anticipation but with not much on-field experience and also with atrociously poor stamina levels which renders all good qualities of a footballer useless by not letting him play much; JB, with great footballing knowledge and great judgment and anticipation but again no experience on the field; Dwarak, with great power in his legs which were capable of unleashing ferocious shots but had chicken legs and he got injured as often as Owen Hargreaves does after his move to Man Utd; JD, who had amazing pace and will-power but lacked composure and tried a trick too many when he had the ball; MS who was strong and graceful but lacked the speed and acceleration needed in football due to his rather…er…footballish shape (:D); Varun, who wasnt the swiftest and most nimble-footed at soccer but was a fierce competitor nonetheless and Deepak, who hadn’t watched or played much football and wasn’t even aware of some of its intricate rules but his amazing enthusiasm to learn and improve neutralized his shortcomings. That wasn’t a title winning team by any stretch of the imagination, but we felt we could improve if we all peak at the right time and practiced often and hope the Americans are as bad at soccer as we thought they were.

JB, AZ and I spent a lot of time during the quarter, discussing about the formations we should employ and who should play where and what kind of game we should play. We took it pretty seriously right through the quarter and the enthusiasm didn’t dwindle amidst our heavy academic workloads. We let out all our frustrations in other aspects of UCD life on the soccer. But the results of the matches weren’t really as rosy as we expected.

We found that lots of Asians, Africans, Europeans and worst of all, many South Americans including Brazilians and Argentines, played for each team in the league. Many of these players could play for any professional Indian club; that’s how good they were. Even the Americans who played were really good in some aspect or the other. Teams which didn’t have passing or understanding had strong guys who played physical games (Russians were the most notorious) and could unleash powerful shots from far. Teams which had nimble players with quick feet and skill (mostly Brazilians) passed and wriggled their way into the goal with the ball.

We went with the frame of mind that we’ll do well as the opponents will be Americans who can’t play much and we were punished for that by a royal thrashing from the first team we encountered, whose passing blinded us and we all were in the same end of the pitch at a particular time. We had no coordination going and we couldn’t really get one strategy working for us and we were humiliated that match.

But then we regrouped after that and never underestimated our opponents from then on and we played much better and even enjoyed successes in the way but most importantly had a lot of fun. We would look forward to Wednesday’s game and for Friday’s training sessions all week and also the dinner at Sam’s with a free drink the girl who ran the place gave us for visiting every week, after the session. I also invested in a lot of gear including knee braces, shin pads, ankle guards, tube socks, bandages for the one too many injuries I had but the fun we had was worth the money and blood spent.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

CHAPTER 13- SIX FLAGS AND AN ADDITION TO OUR GANG

2009-12-20T11:08:00.006+05:30

Well... sorry for taking forever to publish. Got too busy, thanks to the rigorousness of the UC Davis quarter. :( I am going to post the remaining parts of the blog within the next week, so that I can start chronicling and posting my experiences this time, in a new series of posts...

CHAPTER 13- SIX FLAGS AND AN ADDITION TO OUR GANG

Physically and mentally charged, we spent the rest of the holidays mostly in Davis. Christmas was rather quiet, taking into account what we expected, but then there were hardly any people in Davis as UCD was not functioning and Davis minus UCD seemed to leave only a few like us here. As the holidays were coming to an end, we decided we should go somewhere else and we decided we should pay Six Flags a visit.

Six flags is a theme park, with some of the most high-thrill roller-coasters in the world. Dwarak (hence referred to by his popular nickname D-dub) was also interested in coming and we rented a muscular SUV this time and the five of us, D-dub, MS, JD, JB and I started in the morning. We reached in an hour and there was no problem finding the place as we could see its really tall roller-coasters from miles away. We had done our homework and learned there were 4 high thrill rides and we decided we should do all the 4 first before going on the medium thrill ones. We realized how much of a flop our plan would be only after going there.

We went on the Medusa first, the longest rollercoaster there lasting close to 4 minutes and one of the longest in the world too. And it was really fast too, with so many twists and turns and 360s and inversions that at the end of it, I didn’t realize when I was travelling straight and when I was upside-down. At the end of the ride, I was as physically exhausted as a runner would be at the end of a marathon. And that was just one ride. We had three more equally if not more exhilarating rides according to our plan before we took a break. We knew it would not be possible.

We walked dazedly to the next ride. This was the Kong. It was a short-ride and its course was not half as scary as the Medusa. But it was easily the scariest rollercoaster I have ever been on. Purely because of psychological reasons. There was no cart and no track on this one, customary on all roller-coasters. There were individual chairs hanging out from a platform suspended in the air, with a thin wire. We were strapped onto these seats, which looked like wooden armchairs. Then the ride started and the platform on which our seats and consequently our lives were suspended, started moving. As it picked up speed and height, I realized how scary this was going to be the moment I looked down. I could see my legs dangling in mid-air a hundred metres above the ground, with nothing to break the fall if I were to slip out of my seat. On a normal ride, you wouldn’t get such a view of your dangling legs as there would be a floor to the cart you are sitting in. Also there would be plenty of people sitting by you, and if you were to crash and die, it might be a little comforting that you will have some company when you find your way to heaven/hell (personally I do not believe in the concept of heaven/hell, but it’s a useful concept to use in figure of speech…anyway that the topic for another blog post). It got scarier by the moment when my loosely hanging chair started twisting all 360 degrees at an enormous velocity and a great height above the ground. I closed my eyes shut and was actually thankful when the ride came to an end. I wouldn’t want to get on this again, if I can help it.

We were totally exhausted after this ride. We climbed down and couldn’t get ourselves to speak to each other for the next 5 minutes. Once we recovered, we decided that’s all we could do at a stretch and to give it a break and come back later for the other high thrill rides. We had some food and did a lot of the medium thrill rides which seemed totally lame to us after having gone on the Medusa and the Kong. So we never even gave the low thrill rides a second glance.

There were also penguins in the water section of the park. It was really nice to see hundreds of penguins all around us as we walked in the underground passage, where the penguins were housed in large glass enclosures around us. They looked really adorable and I added them to my long list of potential pets.

We then visited the underground aquarium where they had some ferocious sharks.

We then took some pics with Looney toons characters and then played around in the artificial snowland.

We then went to the animals section of the park and took some pics.

Finally when we had recovered enough, we went on the other high thrill ride, Vertical Velocity V2. This was supposed to be among the fastest rollercoasters in the world. It goes from 0-70 mph in 3 seconds, which is one hell of an acceleration when you start a ride. We found it really thrilling but not scary after having been on the Kong but disembarked from this one, totally exhausted. We knew we couldn’t do any more, even if there were any. Fortunately we had been on all the high thrill rides Six flags had to offer so we were satisfied, and so we wound up the day. We drove back and only then realized how much of a beating our bodies had taken. We were on the bed for the whole of the next day.

The end of the break was nearing and this was when there was one more addition to our gang. That was Varun. I had been in touch with this chap, for the last 6 months as he had been getting my opinion on various things once he had decided to come to UC Davis on the Global study program from SRM. He came from a mythical SRM campus at Ramapuram, whose existence most people aren’t aware of. (I still have my doubts, so Varun if you are reading this… is there an SRM University campus in Ramapuram or are you talking abt Easwari … expecting your comments :P). This chap had one scary profile attached to him (a 9.5+ GPA, a 1540+ GRE score etc and consequently admits at a couple of colleges by the time most of us hadn’t even started to apply to universities). His reputation preceded him and most of the others knew his heavy reputation before they knew him. He was also supposed to be one really good guitar player, making him a bit of an all-rounder. I had got to know him pretty well without having met up even once and he was one helluva computer graphics freak like I was, with the only difference that he had already learned most of the stuff I was learning.

I went over to meet him when he arrived in Davis and helped him check into his apartment. To show him around Davis, we took a walk from the apartment and which turned into a marathon as we walked at least 10 miles around Davis, braving the drizzling rain. I discovered that he was one amazing character, who always very instinctive and wouldn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade (As his new roommate and coincidentally our former roommate who moved out due to differences with us, found out). It was good to have such a person around.

He was a totally ironic person, who might act often unconfident, but is one of the most self-confident guys I have ever come across; act confident and that too with confidence even when not confident about something; act indifferent about something that may be very important to him on the inside; act sadistic to something though he may like it dearly; act unconcerned about a person he is very concerned about. He was one of the most complex people I have come across, but nonetheless a great friend who would unconditionally help out the people he cares for. (Note to Varun: The deviation in the last few sentences were just cos u asked me to blog about what I think of you, especially the criticism J). So he gelled in well with all of us. We also found out that he was also one amazing player of the guitar, when he played complex stuff like Hotel California, Sweet child of mine etc with amazing ease.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 12

2009-10-11T05:01:00.023+05:30

Sorry about the delay in posting.... Getting too busy here to even spend sometime posting this... I ll try to do it every Saturday from now...

CHAPTER 12- SEAWORLD AND THE JOURNEY BACK TO DAVIS

The next morning, we woke up well on time with no antics on our part and got ready half an hour before the planned 9 am start. We were to go to Sea-world, and we were transformed into those adventure seeking active tourists again after a couple of nights of relaxation in San Diego. We went for a couple of water rides first and then checked out the underground aquarium and the penguin display where there were so many amazing cute looking penguins.

We then went for the main attraction of the place. The Shamu show! Shamu was a killer whale, who would perform stunts for the audience. We went to the huge stadium, which semicircular, with a water-pool in the middle and about 200 rows of seats. It could house a thousand people easily. We went to sit in the around the fortieth row, when someone told us we should consider going a little further back if we didn’t want to get wet. Our eyes twinkled and we did get up and leave those seats to go to the second row to sit on the least-coveted seats with our grins reading “Bring it on!”. It was surprising that there were not more than a handful of adventurous people in the first few rows , so we got to sit comfortably. The gallery filled up and the trainers came out and announced that the people in the first few rows should be really prepared to get wetter that they might have ever been in their lives. That turned us on more and we stay put. People around us were buying raincoats and ponchos to protect them from the torrents, but we stay put braving anything that was to come our way.

Then Shamu came out. He was huuuuuge but looked so adorable. About 30 humans could fit inside his mouth comfortably and to see him close up from our seats was awesome. He came near us and waved to the audience. Imagine a killer whale waving to you. And one which looked so adorable, with his black color with white patches and what I could have sworn was a grin on his face. Even the most cold hearted soul would be moved by its awesome sight. The trainers hugged him and I felt I could give anything to be in their position. Getting a hug from a killer whale. Fancy that.

Then one of the trainers got on his back and he went around the pool, with such amazing speed that left us gaping. It looked so majestic to see a whale swim up close. He jumped in the middle of the pool to such a height that the people at the hundredth row might have seen him in their horizontal line of sight. It looked so awesome to watch him do that. Each time, he landed, due to a certain Archimedes principle, water splashed on us and we were soon dripping wet. It was pretty cold that day and so we had no way of knowing whether the goose pimples we got were attributed to the cold or that splendorous show we were witnessing.

And then the trainers announced on the mike that it was time for us all to get wet. We looked at each other, thinking if the mess we were in currently was not wet then what would be. We soon found the answer to that. Shamu came near us and put his fin into the water and threw what would have been a thousand litres of water, with such an amazing force that when it hit us square in the face when we were least expecting it, it stung us and threw us backwards into our seats. We looked back to notice water pouring into people sitting as long as a hundred rows back. You would have to be on the last row and equipped with a poncho to stay dry. I have experienced drizzles, showers, downpours and even torrents of water but this was something way beyond all that. It felt like a pump from a fire engine was hosing us, albeit in short spurts. We negotiated the spurts which followed better, by getting into a shell as the water splashed, as we didn’t underestimate its force anymore. At the end of the show, we had learned what the definition of getting wet was, the hard way. It is not poetically that I am describing that we got wetter that one could while taking a bath; believe me I experienced it.

We were drenched to the skin and shivering in the cold breeze the rest of the afternoon, but we didn’t complain because the spectacle we had witnessed was worth a little discomfort. We then went for the dolphin show, which was also really grand. We sat further back this time though, not wanting to get any wetter than we already were. There were about 10 dolphins in the pool and we watched with awe as they jumped through hoops and touched flags placed as high as 50 metres in the air. To think these little things, not more than 6 feet in length could jump to 20 times their height was stunning. And they looked really cute too.

At the end of the show, we went to the dolphin feeding centre where each of us were allowed to go up to the pool and a dolphin would come to us and greet us by shaking our hand with its amazingly soft fin and then jump for us a few times and even get on its back and wave at us. It was soo soo adorable to watch them do all that. I was transfixed when I noticed it was opening its mouth wide and I threw the, rather disgustingly stinking, fish in my hand into its mouth on the instructions of a representative. It jumped up and caught the fish and feasted upon it and jumped up a couple of times as if thanking me for the food and swam away backwards while waving its fin at me as if bidding farewell. I was so moved by its adorable actions that I could have cried right there. I added a dolphin to the now fast-growing wish-list of the animals I wished to have as pets. Let me see- a polar bear, a panda, a killer whale and now a dolphin among many others.

We then went to watch the sea lion and walrus show, which was a themed comical skit with the animals running around a stage ship with people and balancing balls etc. The show was quite hilarious and we enjoyed every minute of it.

By the time the show ended it was dark already and after getting a couple more souvenirs, we drove back to the hotel and had dinner and went to bed thoroughly satisfied with the day and our trip in whole, which was just about over.

We got up the next morning and break-fasted and realized we were really far from home. About 600 miles. We had one long drive back and we started at about 10 am. We went to the San diego beaches on the way and spent some time playing soccer and I got a chance to ride a jet ski there. It was really amazing. To go at 40 mph in water, and wherever you look around you see no land, it is quite scary. Each time the ski hit the surface of the water while going at 30+ mph, there was an amazing jerk. It was an awesome experience.

We had an uneventful journey back, thanks to MS’s safe driving but we were really slowed down by the trademark traffic out of LA, which went all the way to San Francisco. Guess southerners were going north for Christmas. It seemed like being back in India, with cars in all directions. For about 4 hours we were inching (by US freeway terms it is inching) on at 40 mph.Also near the bay area, there was a great amount of fog and we the visibility was not more than a few metres. It is a scary feeling to know that you are travelling more than 20 metres each second and you cannot see more than the next ten metres. You just had to pray there wasn’t some stranded vehicle or a broken road just ahead of us, as there would be no reaction time to do anything even as soon as we see it. We stopped in resting places, off the freeway, 3-4 times so that we wouldn’t tire. We some some frosted ice and snow too at one of the resting places- the onset of winter was quite clear.

I have to mention the organization of US roadways is really brilliant. The Interstate freeway connects states and the roads are 8 lane. Whenever some city comes up along the way, or there is a bunch of shops off the road, an exit comes up which takes all the traffic away from the freeway and then branches off to different points so that the freeway cruisers are not affected by cars turning left or right from the freeway itself to go to their destinations. Admiring the effectiveness of the system, we travelled for close to 16 hours on the road and reached Davis at about 1 am. We took turns to sleep in the car and the person who was awake would be MS’s cartographer and companion. It was a brave effort by the equally tired MS to keep his concentration and drive safely.

Once we reached home, we hit the bed right away and it was the worst feeling to get up as early as 8 am next morning to return the rented car, but if we didn’t do it, we would have to pay another day’s rent and I volunteered to accompany MS to Enterprise to do that. Once we came back, I went to bed again and the best part of the next 3 days was spent sleeping, resting our physically and mentally exhausted selves. AZ left for Seattle to visit his sis and it was the four of us again for some time.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 11

2009-09-28T14:02:00.005+05:30

CHAPTER 11- SAN DIEGO BEACH ADVENTURE AND ZOO

We slept for 12 hrs that night and got up the next morning and had a late breakfast and headed to San Diego on the car. It was only a couple of hours drive but it was one helluva drive, as it was totally along the coast. We could smell the sea and feel the moisture when we opened our windows and could almost hear the thumping of the waves on the rocks and the beach amidst the quiet roar (a quiet roar is oxymoronic while describing anything except good cars, which is a complement to them) of our Chrysler 300 engine.

We found our hotel, Holiday Inn and checked in and it was awsome hotel, right by the harbor. We could see the sea right from our room window and it was one hell of a sight. We felt relaxed mentally. We decided the best way to sight see San Diego was to laze around, as it was a city meant for that. We had some places on our list to go to and we would go with the plan but at a relaxed pace, unlike LA.

We lounged around for a couple of hrs in the afternoon and then started for the nearest beach at about 6 pm. It was getting dark by the time we got to that area. As we drove towards the beach, the lights from the shops seemed dimmer and dimmer, and the roads got narrower and narrower, and the people seemed shadier and shadier. We hesitated a bit to go further but then we thought… what the hell…lets see what this side of the US is all about. We parked the car at what seemed to be a car park, only that it seemed more like all the cars there seemed out of some dump yard. We headed towards the beach, noticing that all the shops were shady salons and bars where almost everyone seemed to have a ruffled look and sneer on their faces and the sneer seemed pronounced when they took in the sight of 5 nervous Indian tourists walking their streets. We could see a few shabbily dressed whores on the street winking at passers-by. We could see some people, just lounging on the road, who looked to be drug sellers, talking in low voices to people.

We went past all these people to get a sight of the beach. It was dark at that time but we could make out enough to see that it was quite deserted. Or was it? There was a gang of about 10 well-built people we could see, who would fit the definition of the gangsta typically described in Hollywood movies. And they had with them…..on a leash….a dog. We were first perplexed by this. Anyone, who just saw 10 of the scariest looking men, taking a dog on a stroll by the beach would be perplexed. After sometime we realized, they were waiting for someone. We put two and two together and concluded there was going to be a ferocious dog fight here between two gangs that night. The gang whose dog kills the other dog is granted some favor by the other gang.

Some of us were (including me) excited by this and thought it would be a good spectacle to watch, especially considering there was a good chance someone may take a gun out of his jacket and just shoot us dead for nothing. But then sense prevailed and we decided to scram from there. We just turned around and walked towards the car, when a giant of a guy stopped us. We thought the game was up and he was gonna set his gang upon us or rob us or worse, but then he asked us if we wanted some weed. We refused his offer and walked away, as he mouthed some expletives at us. We breathed a sigh of relief to find our car intact and just drove out of that area as quickly as we could. We could relax only after we went to the more secure parts of the city.

Disappointed at not having been able to set foot on the beach but more than content with our adventure that night, we had dinner and went to our rooms. This side of the US is not seen unless you go to the right places and we were really happy to have experienced that. Now AZ’s birthday was also that night and so to give him a “surprise”, JD ‘n I kept him out of the room trying to distract him by playing soccer with the ball we had brought, in the lawns of the hotel and forcing a couple of toilet breaks, just to ensure he wouldn’t go to the room where MS and JB would smuggle a b’day cake after buying it and hide it so that we could surprise him at midnight. It looked really retarded for JD and me to play our parts, dragging AZ along with us to satisfy our sudden “desire” to play football in the night outside. He would’ve guessed something was up for sure, nonetheless we did our part. We “surprised” him at midnight, though we all knew he was wide awake and knew what was going on. Still… we were all sports. So we had a nice little celebration, feasting on a delicious cake and some b’day bumps. We had some badushah (curse you JB :x for having disclosed the meaning of the codeword on your blog) too for the sweetness ;) . So we all went to sleep quite late.

The next morning, we got up very late (at about 9 am), considering what we had planned for the day. Well, we actually woke up early but then our laziness didn’t make us get up. My alarm rang at 7 am and I woke up and silenced it. I turned towards JB, who was sleeping next to me and I could see him shut his eyes quickly as I looked at him. I then closed my eyes thinking a couple more minutes of sleep won’t make a difference. I lay awake for the next 5 minutes and though it was high time we all woke up, but didn’t want to take the initiative. I opened my eyes and lay on the bed when I sensed JB also open his and look towards me. I quickly closed my eyes and pretended to be sleeping. Had two of us seen each other awake, we would be weighted by logic and would take the initiative to get up, which means I couldn’t lounge longer on the bed. So I didn’t want to be among the first ones to take the initiative to get up and wake the others. I later discovered that was exactly on JB’s mind too. And AZ’s too. And probably the other two too. So we basically had been all awake on the bed, pretending to the others to be asleep so that we could laze around on the bed longer. A couple of hours passed like this and finally at about 9 am, JB, AZ and I (un)fortunately opened our eyes at the same time and there was no excuse this time. So we got up in a jiffy and woke the other two.

We knew we were running really late, as we had planned to step out of the hotel at 8 am max. After all, we needed one whole day to visit the largest zoo in the world and the national park and take its numerous safaris. As we had just one bathroom, it took us about 11 am to step out of the hotel and so we had to modify our plans as the national park was 20 miles from the zoo in the other direction. So we had to choose between them. That was a tricky choice but we finally choose to see the zoo because it was really famous and had some animals no other zoo in the world would have and it was closer by about 15 miles to the hotel and we knew the way.

In the now pouring rain, we reached the zoo in half an hour and decided there was no point in waiting for the rain to stop and so walked into the zoo in the rain. It was pretty deserted because of the weather. We looked at the map of the zoo, and it was huuuge. We decided to take the motorized tour of the zoo and it took an hour for the van to go all around the zoo, that’s how massive it was. By the time we got down from the van, we had an idea of the layout of the zoo. So, with zoo maps in hand, braving the rain, we went to visit the animals we had picked out. We must have walked about 10 miles in the zoo in the next 3-4 hours, during which we covered about 50 percent of the zoo.

The stand-out animals, which might not be seen anywhere else were the panda and the polar bear. Yeah that’s right. A real polar bear. The name polar bear itself suggests that it lives only in the poles. But hey… this zoo had one. It was housed in a huge 1 acre glass enclosure, in which the polar habitat had been simulated with caves ad polar vegetation and optimum temperatures. It was really exciting to see an animal, which only the explorers who explored the poles would generally see, right in front of us. It looked so majestic- so large and ferocious but it looked friendly too. I guess it was the white color of its fur that gave a friendly harmless look. Our mind always associates mild colors like white to be non-violent and peaceful unlike brown or black which are associated with violence. It seemed to me that if there were no glass enclosure, it would run to me and hug me. A bear-hug it would be too. Good thing I couldn’t try it… cos it might have had other ideas….

We then went to the part of the zoo when another attraction was housed. That was the panda. It was sooo cute. Cute is a term often overused and misused by most girls, but this is one time I would totally agree with any girl who might have called this cute. It was black with white patches in its body. There has never been a time after that where I felt it would be amazing to have one as a pet. Alas… they are protected animals and I was lucky to have had the opportunity to see one at least.

Due to the lousy weather, it grew dark as early as 5 pm and the zoo was closing down. We did some souvenir shopping, where I got a stuffed panda, which was so soft and fluffy that I even toyed with the idea of hugging it in bed(:D), much to the disgust of AZ, who was barbarous to the poor thing all the time (:x).

We went back to the hotel and made some rice, with the rice cooker we had brought from Davis (lol…look how planned we were), because we realized we had spending a lot and we could save up on this at least and so we had some curd rice. I then hit the hay, with regret on my mind for the first time in that trip, because after having come this far, we couldn’t get to see the wildlife sanctuary, due to purely our laziness and stubbornness in not getting up that morning. That is the only thing which I would want to change if given the opportunity in the otherwise perfect trip. But I guess that was one of those times our physical fatigue won over our mental willingness to make the maximum of the trip.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 10

2009-09-20T02:09:00.037+05:30

SPOILER ALERT: If you ever plan to visit Universal studios in the near future, you would be advised to skip reading this post because I have described a few of its rides. It would spoil the suspense if you knew about the rides before you embarked on them.

CHAPTER 10: UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

We were really tired after the last two grueling days, where we would’ve walked at least 15 miles in total, but then we were really excited to go to the parts of LA that everyone knows about- Hollywood. We breakfasted in the hotel and drove into LA in its heavy morning rush hour traffic, further compounded by the rain pouring down.

We got to Universal studios in an hour and entered inside. The weather was pretty gloomy and that cheerfulness of Disneyland wasn’t quite there in Universal studious but there was plenty to look forward to.

We first went to the horror house, which we realized we would find silly if we don’t act scared and get into it, which is the mistake we did in Disneyland and so found it lame. Sometimes, when you convince your mind something is going to be a particular way, then however it actually is, your mind would look at it from angles to make it appear the way you convinced yourself it would look. And this strategy worked, and we enjoyed it a lot as we found quite a few things scary. Mummies, and ghouls, and ghosts, and banshees, and Frankensteins and so many other creatures tried to scare us all and the way the five of us ran from them and pushed and jumped into each other, reminded me of Scooby doo and his pals.

Then we went to the Jurassic park ride. It was a rollercoaster through Jurassic with many dinosaurs popping up at the sides. They were quite realistic and their roars were quite scary. But nothing could have prepared us for the final part where the cart went to a height and we were going to plummet into water and as we were going down with full speed, a tyrannosaurus appeared out of the water and opened its mouth wide and we just went scraping the dinosaur. That was pretty thrilling.

Then we went to the Mummy ride, which was a 4D ride in some ways. It was again a rollercoaster ride, where we travelled through many a dark cave and seeing mummies and sphinxes popping up. Finally the cart stopped abruptly at one point and when our eyes got adjusted to the darkness, we saw that we were confronted by a cave wall in front. Then suddenly the wall opened and we could see a lot of rats scram out (a la Mummy movie). Just at the point where they should’ve been under our carts, we could suddenly get a ticklish feeling on our feet as if rats were really going past us. It was an eerie feeling, and being the reptile-phobic person that I am, I almost squealed and tried to force their legs upwards. Then suddenly the wall closed and our cart went backwards full speed, retracing the path it had taken to get there. That was really unique, as it was the first rollercoaster that I had been on which went backwards. After a lot of screaming, we got out of the cart dizzy.

Then we went to the ride, which when I think about still gives me the goose bumps. Those 5 minutes on that ride would undoubtedly be the best 5 minutes in my life. That was the Simpsons ride! I wasn’t looking to the ride as much because I was not exactly the biggest Simpsons fan around. That would be JB. He was a huge Simpsons freak, who has been following the series for over 10 years (I guess he started watching it when he was about 10 before which he used to watch only BAYWATCH as a kid… what an innocent kid!!!). He was as thrilled at seeing the ride as I would be if I were at Old Trafford watching Manchester United play. So we went in and sat on a small cart, which accommodated 8 people in two rows. Suddenly everything around us became dark and what happened after that cannot be described by words. You have to be there to know the feeling. I’ll try to put it into words though. Suddenly the world around us transformed into Krustyland. We could see tracks on which our cart stood and there were so many Simpsons characters around us in 3D. I was sure if I jumped out of the cart I could touch them but when I peeped out of the cart, I could see that the tracks our cart was on was high above the ground. I sat back into my seat securely, not knowing how long I would be plummeting if I fell. Suddenly the cart started moving, and it took us through Krustyland, where many characters like Bart, Homer, Apu interacted with us at different junctures. Suddenly Krusty came to the track ahead of us and blew up a part of it and our cart plummeted to the ground for a few seconds before another track caught us and we continued. It was so realistic that I really felt like a character in Krustyland. Our cart stopped and it became dark again and only when the lights were switched on, I realized we were actually on a ride in Universal studios.

I studied the surroundings and the cart and realization dawned upon us that we had actually been sitting on a stable cart which could just rotate 360 degrees. The walls, floor, ceiling were actually massive screens on which images of Krustyland would be projected. Tracks would be projected to the floor to make it appear to us as if our cart was on the track and the whole picture was moving backward to make it appear as if we are moving forward. When we plummeted down, our cart would have rotated 90 degrees towards the floor. The whole thing was so well coordinated that we totally fell for it. I knew about tears of joy and tears of sorrow but at that moment what tears of disbelief meant when it formed in my eyes. I was goose-pimpled from head to toe. It was such cutting-edge virtual reality that the name virtual reality is demeaning to describe it- it was REAL.

It took us a few minutes to recover from the shock of having experienced such a wonderful ride. We then went outside and posed for pictures with the whole Simpsons family. JB was almost in tears at the end of all this. I was quite overwhelmed too, not being a big follower of the show, so I don’t blame him.

Then we grabbed some lunch and went to the terminator 4D show. It was a reenactment of terminator scenes, with an Arnold-lookalike riding a huge bike and carrying guns and blowing up the bad guys et al. It was rather disappointing. Then we went to the Shrek 4D show, which was really cool. We were given 3D glasses and we followed the 3D Shrek and his comrades on their adventures on screen, only that when it rained on the screen, water fell on us etc. That’s why it was called 4D.

We also went for a guided tour of Universal studios where we were taken through lots of sets used in real Hollywood films. We were shown a real film simulation of car explosions, of artificial floods etc. It was a great experience.

Sets from the movie "Psycho"

A car used in the movie "Animal House" "Psycho" moving with his dagger

SETS FROM "THE FAST AND FURIOUS"

SIMULATION OF AN EXPLOSION IN THE MOVIE

SETS FROM "JAWS"

SIMULATION OF A RAIN AND A FLOOD

A BOEING CRASH SET

After that, JD and I got our caricatures made by a couple of artists there. It came out pretty well, though it wasn’t as exaggerated as a caricature should be. It was more of a portrait, but then I am not complaining as it was something to remember the place by. At about 4 o clock, we left Universal studios thoroughly satisfied. We had more places to visit that night.

We then drove along the streets of the part of LA that the whole world knows about- Beverly Hills and Hollywood. We drove to Sunset blvd, the LA traffic nicely negotiated by MS who had was driving with as much ease as a guy who would have been driving there for years and parked our car in the car park of a big shopping mall. We had to note down every detail of where we had parked it, lest we can’t locate where we put it amidst the thousands of cars parked there. We walked out of the mall, which was easily the largest I had been to, and it was one of the average sized malls there apparently. We walked onto the streets and it was drizzling.

We walked on the street for sometime before reaching sunset blvd, where we walked on the famous starred path, where the name of a celebrity was engraved on each star-shaped stone on the pavement. We saw the names of most of the famous Hollywood actors, actresses, producers, directors, and any other famous person in their tinsel town.

LMAO!!!!!!!!!! Of all the celebs!!!

There was also another thing we realized- how different and unrepresentative Davis was to the US cities. In Davis, pedestrians are given first priority and even if a car is speeding at 80 mph, if they see a pedestrian standing on a crossroad, they’ll brake to a halt and ask the pedestrian to cross. Only when the pedestrian is safely across the road, will the car take off. I guess the people who are in minority are often considered maybe even respected in any society and that was the case here as a guy in a car wouldn’t see and thereby have to stop for more than a few pedestrians every day, most of who would be Indian students like us, with a negative income (L), who couldn’t afford a car. It wasn’t like in India where most of the people are pedestrians and if cars stopped to let them cross, there would be no moving traffic at all at any crossroad. Having been this “elite” class of pedestrians the past 4 months in Davis, we were used to the respect and expecting that in LA too, we just tried to cross a road even when a car was speeding towards us in the distance expecting him to give us the respect and apply his brakes. But alas… he might have accelerated harder even but he never slowed down, and so we jumped back to the safety of the pavement as he sped past us at 60 mph, adding insult to injury by honking, thereby getting us dirty looks from our fellow pedestrians. We realized not to take things for granted from then on, as this was alien territory for us.

We then found the famous Hollywood wax museum and went in. There were many amazing wax statues of so many of our favorite Hollywood stars. After lots of pictures, including one with Marilyn Monroe in her most famous pose, revealing the mystery as to where the wind which blew her skirts came from (J), one with Hugh Hefner paying tribute to him for what he was, and many more with our favorites, we came out of there.

PROPOSING TO ANGELINA JEDI KARTHIK

It was already about 9 pm and we realized we had hardly had any food the whole day and being really far from our hotel, not knowing if we could find our way back through the complicated streets of LA, we started from there after getting some souvenirs, giving other places like Ripley’s believe it or not and Guinness records studios a skip. We found our car and made a couple of wrong turns on the streets and found ourselves lost a couple of times. It is not like India where you could stop our car on the main road and get down and ask some pedestrians how to go. There are basically 3 problems with that. One: you cannot simply pull over on the side of the main road as cars would be using all the lanes and if we pull over, someone is bound to ram into us at 60 mph, especially considering how rash LA drivers were. Two: even if you manage to pull over and get down and go to the pavement, you cannot ask pedestrians for the simple reason that there won’t be any. All the people who venture out have cars. You could drive for hours and you wouldn’t come across more than a handful of pedestrians if you were lucky. After all cars are dirt cheap there, why wouldn’t everyone have a car. A second hand good-condition Toyota corolla could be bought for about 5k $. Add to that the cheap gasoline rates. And the US transport system encourages you to have a car, because without one you simply can’t get anywhere as there aren’t too many buses or trains connecting places. Well…anyway… Third: even if you do miraculously manage to find a pedestrian, he would in all probability be an Indian tourist and he would be as lost as you. Even if it were someone who had lived in the city for long, he would run at the sight of a car pulling up by his side or he may even take a gun out of his jacket and gun you down, fearing attack as such sights are quite common in some parts of a rough city like LA. So logic told us not to pull up even if meant we had to drive for hours finding our way. Fortunately, thanks to the GPS we had, and the maps we had printed out and our cartography skills, we found our way after sometime and got back to the hotel and had dinner there and went to bed thoroughly satisfied with our trip of LA, knowing we would have to go the next day to San Diego. We were tired, really tired after 4 days of 6 hrs sleep a night and continuous touring. We decided to make the second leg of the trip a relaxed one.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 9

2009-09-12T05:53:00.036+05:30

NOTE: Sorry for posting this later than promised. Was just a little busy settling down in Davis... And also waiting for comments on my prev post from a couple of ppl, though it never came :(

SPOILER ALERT: If you ever plan to visit Disneyland in the near future, you would be advised to skip reading this post because I have described a few of its rides. It would spoil the suspense if you knew about the rides before you embarked on them.

CHAPTER 9- DISNEYLAND PART 2

Other than this, we went for some other memorable rides as well. The Splash Mountain was a really cool roller-coaster ride through an "artificial" mountain. I put artificial in quotes because it felt so realistic. There was this rather innovative concept of installing cameras at a couple of the most exciting points of the ride, which would photograph your expression as you went past it without inhibitions. The pictures would be displayed on monitors as you exit the ride and you can go up to the counter and buy the photograph for 10 $. Being the unembarrassed uninhibited innovative Indians that we were, we went up to the monitors with our digicams and clicked a photo of the photo. That earned us a few looks, some of amusement and some of disgust, but hey we didn’t give a damn as long as it saved us many a buck. We did this at every ride. :D .

Then, we went to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride, which was a boat ride, though some pirate villages with realistic characters like Jack Sparrow appearing every now and then.

We then went through the horror house, which was a lot of dark passages of "scary" ghosts and creatures, which was pretty lame. We found it quite kiddish and tried to scare a couple of the ghosts away. :D . The people around us, both young and old, surprisingly seemed pretty scared and excited though.

We then went for the jungle adventure ride, which was a boat ride through a jungle which had animals on the shores. JB met his match on that ride- a girl called Ashley who was the instructor of the ride whose PJs exasperated even JB, the Master of Mokkai (MoM). Then we went to a castle, which was built such that it was shaped like all the wonders of the world. It was a brilliant sight.

But the most majestic sight was the Disney castle, which was draped with decorations of hanging blue and red lights. It was quite a sight to take in.

We then had dinner there and went to the banks of the artificial lake, where a spectacle was awaiting us. That was "FANTASIMIC". Literally. The show is held on the nights of every weekend and that day being a Saturday, we got to witness the spectacle. It is a show where Mickey, as the protagonist, uses his imagination to conjure up objects that he desires. Laser light is beamed on shape changing fountains in the water to give is a feel of the objects. It was so realistic and so majestic. The show lasted a whole twenty minutes. It seems they spend close to 30k $ for that 20 minutes of entertainment each evening. Sheesh…. that’s more than what we would spend in an entire year of graduate study in the US. The wonderful calming music added to the brilliance of the show. To think it was just lights and water being adapted to form such realistic images was mind-blowing. We were so awed by it that it took us a minute to realize we had to tape this on our cams and start clicking. At the end of the show, we swore to come back again for it the next night and witness the spectacle again.

Disneyland is in a way like drug addiction (or how people say it is at least. I’ve no first-hand experience ppl). You want to come back to it every day. Ok bad comparison but hey it is addictive and never leaves you satisfied for sure. It was about 10 pm by the time the show ended.

We had walked at least 5 miles inside the place in those 4 hours and it was only then that we noted the tiredness felt by our legs. We trudged back reluctantly to board the train which would take us back to the car as the exhibits were closing behind us. But we were satisfied by how it had gone till then and couldn’t wait for the next day when we would be coming back to the place.

We drove back to the hotel and went back to our rooms, which is when we noticed that the suite we booked was the kids suite (That was the cheapest deal that we got). Everything, from the beds to the furniture was kid-sized. We felt like a giant dwelling in Liliputian land but then we had been transformed into kids after that night at Disneyland, so we were happy to be treated as kids by the hotel room too. We dived into our beds and didn’t know anything until 8 am the next morning when we woke up, looking ahead to the day.

We woke up and got dressed and stepped out of the house within an hour, which is an amazing achievement by five generally-nocturnal 20 year olds. Such was our enthusiasm to go back to Disneyland. We parked our car there and went into the California adventure park as per our plan. This is an annexure to Disneyland, but meant more for adults as it contained some amazing rides. We went inside and were greeted by the sight of big roller-coasters. We went for a couple of water rides initially, which felt nice in the warm southern Californian sun.

Then went into the Hollywood part of the adventure park, where there was a replica of the intersection of Sunset Blvd and Hollywood Blvd.

Then we went into Monsters 3D, which was a ride which took us through some caves, where Monsters Inc characters kept popping up. The hall of moving doors in that ride was pretty amazing.

Then we went into Muppetvision 4D, which was a show where we were given 3D glasses and we could view Sesame street characters a screen on stage in 3D, thanks to our glasses and say, whenever the characters sprayed water, real water would spray on us too from somewhere, thereby adding the 4th dimension to the show, making it totally realistic. It was the first such 4D show I had gone to in my life, and so I found it really exciting.

Then we went to Hollywood hotel. It was a massively tall building, which gave everyone the creeps. We were taken to an elevator and strapped to chairs there and we could guess what was coming up, but that didn’t prepare us for what lay ahead. The elevator climbed all the way to the top of the 100 odd metre tall building and suddenly stopped there. The door opened for us to see how high up we were. Suddenly, it plummeted down in freefall with every one of us screaming on top of our voice. Then the elevator was caught as it came down and it went up again all the way to the top and plummeted down again. This went on for the next couple of minutes in irregular patterns, which made it an exciting ride.

We climbed out of that gingerly and had some lunch. We noticed a restaurant "Ariel's grotto", which was supposed to be an underwater restaurant, where tables were in the middle of glass-enclosed water chambers from all directions where mermaids keep floating. We didn’t go there as it looked too expensive a place.

After food and some cotton candy (LOL...we were quite a sight with our hands and face all pink in its aftermath), we went to the most adrenaline-pumping rollercoaster ride.

It was a 3 minute rollercoaster, which contained a lot of freefalling, vertical climbing, extreme twists and curves, a couple of 360s and that too back to back. In all it was a really exciting ride as it was a very high speed one too. We were screaming on top of our voices the whole time. We were quite exhausted when we came out. But then, we didn’t feel queasy at all like we would after a ride at Kishkinta or MGM theme parks in India. And it was less of a thrill, because we had faith in its makers that they would’ve done everything possible to ensure it’s a safe ride. Unlike a ride in MGM where you may be wondering if you’re going to fly off the cart due to a loose seat belt or if the track itself would break making the cart crash headlong into the ground. Only after this ride, I realized what a rollercoaster ride was. Exciting, adrenaline-pumping but at the same time does not cause you unease physically and mentally.

We then went out of the California adventure park back into Disneyland. We first went into bug-land, where everything was made to make us feel we were as small as bugs. We looked up to see massive trees and on closer inspection, we found they were actually small plants, with the difference that it looked as huge to us as it would to a bug. It was a really nice concept.

Then we went into the Toy story ride, where while waiting in the queue JB gave up his claim of being the best mokkai (loosely translated in English as PJ cracker) in the world after watching Mr. Potato Head (an artificial character standing outside the ride entertaining people standing in the queue with his PJs) crack a few "jokes". Believe me, they were just of another level. An example- "Say D.... (pause) Say D...(pause) Say D... (pause) Now what do we have here? (pause) 3D. ". This was one of the many PJs he cracked which had people frantically hit their heads with their hands and pray that the queue moved on quicker so that they don’t have to stand this weirdo anymore. It was too much for poor JB to learn that there were two people we encountered in the last couple of days, who were better than him in cracking such jokes, Ashley and Potato head, and he was truly dejected after that :( .

Finally it was dark by the time we were done with all this. We learned that a special Pixar parade was going to take place in sometime where all Pixar characters, would parade on the corridors. We were really excited by this as it contained many of our favorite movie cartoon characters. We sat on the corridor, and witnessed an exciting parade, where characters from Finding Nemo, Toy story, Monsters inc and many more evergreen Pixar films came by and waved at us.

We also witnessed the Disney parade, where Disney characters like Mickey, Goofy, Donald etc walked the ramps.

Then we went to witness the "Fantasmic" show again, as we had planned the previous day. We were again awed by it. I guess one would be awed by it even if one watches it every day, such was the atmosphere. Then we went again to the "Indiana Jones" show, as we thought it was worth another visit.

With our hearts filled with contentment, we went back to the car park and went back to the hotel. On the way back, we stopped at an Indian restaurant that we saw and had food there. Though it was a touch expensive, we felt we deserved it and had good Indian food after months. We hit the hay as soon as we went back to our rooms, as we had another big day ahead of us the next day.

TO BE CONTINUED...

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 8

2009-09-03T17:54:00.009+05:30

NOTE: For continuity, read chapters 1-7 before starting on this.

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CHAPTER 8- THE DRIVE AND DISNEYLAND PART 1

The day exams ended, we packed and wanted to sleep early so that we could get up early the next morning and start at 4 am as planned. But we were not confident if we would get up at 4 am if we went to sleep and so we decided to have an all-nighter. We fine-tuned our plans and ironed out the flaws and took more printouts and made more notes and got ready for the trip. It was terribly tiring just planning for the trip, as it was a daring one as we were in a totally alien land and we were going to take a car for rent and travel 1000 odd miles, without any experience of driving in the US and knowing only theoretically how to get there, through the internet and so we had to have all our plans perfect. In hindsight, I am sometimes amazed at how quickly and confidently we decided to embark on the trip but at that time, all that fuelled us was our enthusiasm to see the real California.

And so we set out on our journey at 4 am sharp as planned. MS took the wheel and I got to say he drove pretty smoothly. Kudos to you man! One of us acted as the cartographer, sitting beside him, with the various printouts and maps that we had printed out and giving him instructions on which turn to take, when one came. The GPS that we had borrowed also came in very handy, as it kept telling us where to go (in a lady’s voice who we addressed as “akka”) but it wasn’t that accurate, and so we had to double check with our maps each time it predicted a route.

LA was about 500 miles from Davis and it was a straight highway, so the drive was pretty smooth. The car was pretty comfortable and spacious (it was a luxury car after all) and we all enjoyed the drive, as every sight that our eyes drank in was new to us. We passed through the bay area and caught up with the coast there and drove further and further south. We stopped for breakfast at a McDonalds on the way and also stopped by for lunch at someplace. We didn’t feel the strain of our long journey as we kept chattering in the car (its amazing how we always find something to talk about) and entertaining each other. MS also was totally at ease driving the car, and really started enjoying it too. We were on “cruise” for an hour in the middle at 80 mph. We also experienced showers in the middle of the journey as we were passing some hilly areas and that was pretty exciting too. I guess everything was exciting at that time as it was all new to us.

After a long journey, we finally reached Los Angeles at about 3 pm. From here, things started to get a bit slow, because of the notorious LA traffic.

We had to pass through LA to get to Anaheim, where our hotel was located. We also had to pay universal studios a visit to collect our tickets, which we had ordered online, at the counter. It was exciting going into those Hollywood parts and seeing quite a few really loooong limos passing by us. Who know who was in there? We might’ve been a few metres away from a Brangelina or a Scarlett Johanasson or a Will Smith. Damn those tinted windows that those cars had, else we could’ve looked in. :x

We collected the tickets and then drove away rather ruefully, as we had to wait a couple of days to come back here according to our plans. We then drove for another good hour to get past LA in its heavy evening traffic and went past quite a few interesting buildings such as the one in this pic ;) . (We even toyed with the idea of going in to see if they let us see them in aah...action...But alas we were short of time)

We finally reached Anaheim at about 5 pm. We found our hotel quickly, thanks to our maps and checked in and took an hour’s rest. Then it was time to go to....Disneyland, which was just a mile away from the hotel.

We arrived at Disneyland at about 7 pm, and after putting the car in the car park, we had to take a toy train to go into the place. It was a good 10 minute ride, with each passing minute increasing our excitement of what lay ahead.

That was when I contemplated where I was. I was in the US, in California, in DISNEYLAND, at a place where I had not even dreamt of visiting in the near future, at a place which has delighted millions with its colorful entertainment, at the place which acts as a living memory to the many fictitious characters who have made many a kid's and quite a few adults’ life more cheerful with their amazing entertainment- Mickey, Donald, Goofy...and the list goes on... I got goose bumps thinking about all this and a glance in the others directions told me they were also getting a similar feeling.

Once we got down the train and entered this wonderful world, we were babbling out of excitement. With huge expectations, we entered the gates to be beheld by a sight which took us aback even after all this anticipation. We were stunned by the amazingly cheerfully lit streets and cartoonish buildings and the characters standing at every corner of the streets and the huge crowd of cheerful equally-amazed people basking the streets was a sight which could not be described. The fervor of the night added to this experience. Also, as Christmas was round the corner, the whole place was doubly decorated with Christmas trees and the like. Nothing could’ve prepared us for this majestic sight. Now, I never for my life have imagined I would state the sentence I am going to in my next line, but then I guess this is the only way to describe it. "The majestic sight I faced was similar to the image of Lord Venkateshwara in Tirupathi". (for more on this refer to my older blog post "FROM AN AGNOSTIC TO A HAPPILY CONFUSED PERSON"). You have to be there to see it. Anyways... back to the subject... We stood in wonderment, taking in the whole scene with awe. For a minute or two, we couldn’t say anything; neither did we know what to do or where to go. All that mattered was that present moment and we wanted it to prolong it forever. Finally, we broke the ice and someone uttered "It’s beautiful", stating the obvious but getting us out of that reverie.

We then walked aimlessly the first few minutes along the streets, just along the way people flowed. Each street were filled with as many people as there would be on Ranganathan street in Chennai or on Commercial street in Bangalore or in Palika bazaar in Delhi, but this was one place we wanted to be with the crowd. There were lots and lots of excited kids and looking at them made us feel like one again and that increased our excitement level by another notch, if that was ever possible. I felt my pulse and I was positive I would count over 200 a minute just due to the excitement. There were an equal number of adults too, all as excited as the kids. I could not see one glum soul in that place. I guess, if ever someone could sulk in that place for more than a few seconds, he/she would have to be one of the most cold-hearted people.

After sometime, we recovered and looked at a map of the place and decided what rides to do in the night and what during the next day. We chose a few rides which would be a good experience in the dark and went ahead. There were just so many rides that we would have to spend a whole 3 days covering every one of them. So we had to choose wisely about which ones to take and which to give a miss. Our choices were pretty good, I guess, as most of the rides we went on were pretty exciting ones. Though we went on at least 10 equally exciting rides in those couple of hours that night, there were a couple which still give me the goose bumps out of excitement.

The best ride in the whole place was the "Indiana Jones" one. It was pretty popular, I guess, as we had to stand in a queue for half an hour to get on the ride. As we passed along the queue, we went through artificially made caves, whose every aspect looked so realistic. We finally got on the wooden cart on rails, which seated about 10 people and the ride started. It was a rollercoaster kind of ride, which took us through the massive caves, with stalactites and stalagmites whizzing past us, with cave-dwelling creatures like rats on the floor, gaps on the floor of the caves, propelling us downwards every now and then. All this was really exciting and we thought the ride over and was worth every bit of the wait. But only then, we got to know the best part was yet to come. Our cart stopped in a dark cave for about ten seconds and Indiana Jones himself came in front of us and screamed "A boulder is gonna fall on you. Duck!". I looked up to see a HUGE boulder of at least a 5 metre radius falling freely right towards our cart. It kept getting closer and closer and it was only a few feet above us, when I realized how realistic it is and I in fact felt it WAS real. Had I lifted my hand, I swear I could’ve touched it. It was that close. I thought there was some technical flaw as the boulder should’ve never come this close and it was going to fall right on our head. I looked at the others and everyone seemed equally panicked. Suddenly, the track our cart was perched on gave way, and we underwent freefall for a couple of seconds as another track caught us down below and we looked up to see the boulder stuck in the hole we had fallen through. We sighed with relief for a moment and only then it dawned upon us that we were actually in a safe ride in Disneyland and not really adventuring in caves a la Indiana Jones. That’s how realistic it was. We came out stunned and swearing to come back to this ride again the next day.

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P.S: I had such a wonderful time just recollecting my memories of LA and Disneyland that I want to go on describing the whole thing, but I guess I'll have to cut off here because of the sheer length of the post may turn people away from reading it. So..

TO BE CONTINUED... NEXT POST MONDAY, 6th SEP (Following the Pacific Standard Time from now, as I ll be in California while posting the next one)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 7

2009-08-30T22:25:00.006+05:30

NOTE: Please read chapters 1-6 before starting on this.

CHAPTER 7- AN INDUCTION INTO THE BLUE FLAMEZ AND THE END OF THE QUARTER

It was also somewhere in the middle of the quarter when a new member was incorporated into the Blue Flamez. This was a bloke called Dwarak. Dwarak had been JD's classmate in 11th and 12th grade in school and JD had mentioned to me that there was this guy who had been in his schoolmate, who he had learned was doing his undergrad in UC Davis. Before going I had often pestered JD to get back in touch with this guy, so that we could learn something about Davis which would help us settle in better, but JD was too hesitant to do that as he had no contact with him all these years and didn't know what kind of a guy he would be. (Dwarak- JD didnt tell u this did he?... if u re reading this... u ll find this interesting).

Only after we were well-settled in Davis, Dwarak got to know through someone that JD was here and he initiated contact and he came down to our place one evening (in fact JD was initially actually apprehensive about this..LOL). He was a cool chap, and we all gelled well instantly. It was evident that he was quite bored of living there without too much Indian company. It is true that you can befriend most Americans easily 'n stuff but for an Indian, such inter-cultural friendships are never the same as two Indians bonding, because of the inherent difference in wavelengths. Our idea of having fun (mostly pulling each other’s legs and teasing each other), the amount of privacy we give each other (practically none as we constantly poke our noses into our friends affairs whether they like it or not) etc are different from the way Americans gel with each other. So when he saw five Indians similar to him, I was not surprised about how delighted he was.

Now, though we gelled well instantly perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a little odd that we (JD, Dwarak 'n I) hung out at the place we did (that was one of the two places I planned to go in the US before I had to come back to India) on our second day of acquaintance. Lol… funny thinking about it in hindsight. (sorry folks....cant expand on it further due to sensitivity issues...).

We also went to the Imax in Sacramento to watch Dark Knight and I can undoubtedly say that it was my best experience in a theatre. I had never been to an Imax in my life and what better to watch there than “The Dark night”. The screen was MAAAASSSSIVE. The sound effects were mind-blowing. Literally. In the scene where Batman is on top of a skyscraper in Hong Kong and looks down into the night, I got goose bumps on seeing the realism. The 3D effect was so realistic that I actually felt like I was a hundred storeys above the ground. The scenes are made especially for imax audiences by shooting the same scene from different cameras at different angles and putting them together to form a 3D effect. It was phenomenally done. The scene where Batman chases the Joker on his bat-mobile and later his bike gave me the shivers. It was like really being on the streets watching it. JD and I had our eyes glued to the screen with disbelief and we actually jumped out of our seats in one scene where the Joker breaks a window pane by throwing something, we looked at each other agreeing on how amazingly realistic and spine-chilling it was and then we turn to Dwarak and there he is slouching on his comfortable seat, asleep, almost snoring. We didn’t know how to react. We were just watching the most inspiring thing on screen and here was a guy not bothered about what was going on. Shaking our head in disbelief, we focused back on the movie. It may be true that he had watched movies on the imax before unlike us, but hey who can sleep through a movie like The dark Knight and that too in an imax theare. Bah. Anyway… Soon, Dwarak alias Val (lol...my hand itches to narrate an incident that was to happen in mid February involving JD 'n our dear Val but again sensitivity issues, so just a reference) hung out with us five most of the time after that.

It was almost the end of the quarter and exams were fast approaching. I was looking forward to these exams as they were open-book, which was a concept I loved and thought I would revel in. My main problem through my whole life has been remembering stuff, necessary to answer questions in exams. I have always felt unmotivated to remember stuff which can be looked up in books and thus got a mental block to memorize such stuff, but exams in India test just that- your ability to remember stuff. Even in places where you have to use your brain to figure out stuff, there is some basic fundamentals that you should memorize and not just understand. My problem was that though I was really good at understanding stuff and applying them, I wouldn’t remember the basic stuff needed to apply in exams. But here, exams being open-book, I could take my books and notes and so I wouldn’t have to bother memorizing and I just had to know what’s where to refer them and apply them to answer questions. And as expected, I loved giving those exams and did well in them, thereby raising my subject grades.

The last couple of weeks of the quarter at home were spent in planning where we'd be travelling in the 20 day winter break. All five of us were enthusiastic travelers and didn’t want to go back to India without seeing the main attractions of California after having been there for 7 months. And no trip to California would be complete without visiting Southern Cal which is where all the fun- the beaches, the glamour etc- is. So we took a resolution to go south for a few days. After a lot of research (each of us must’ve spent at least 10 hrs each the last two weeks of the quarter I guess), we laid out a draft and discussed among ourselves and made a plan. We decided to rent a car for a few days and drive down. MS volunteered to drive and we had confidence in his driving as he has driven lots in India and driving in the US was a piece of cake when compared to India. There were no slow-moving vehicles to look out for; there were not many pedestrians who would dive across to cross the road; there was no need to change gears in the car as it was all automatic; there were no bumpy roads. To sum up, it was very predictable, which makes driving very convenient. Though I had an Indian license, I wasn’t confident enough to drive as I hadn’t driven as much as MS had in India, and so he bore the responsibility of chauffeuring us.

Once we were confident we had the means to get there, the rest of the pieces fell in place. We listed out the places we should visit- and three cities came into the reckoning- Los Angeles, San Diego and Las Vegas. LA was a place we were going to go to for sure, as it was the entertainment capital of the world and when someone thinks of California, LA is the first thing that comes into mind, with Hollywood, Universal studios, Disneyland all in LA. So with LA fixed, we had a tossup between SD and LV, as they were in different directions- we had to head east from LA to get to LV and head south to SD. After a lot of deliberation, we decided to go to SD, as LV wouldn’t be a great place to visit for 3 of us (JD, JB and me) as we were under 21 yrs old and so entry would be restricted into casinos and other aah....attractions of LV. So we took a decision to go to SD, as it was a wonderful place of nature, with its amazing beaches, huge wildlife park, SeaWorld etc.

We checked the prices of tickets online at each of these places and finally got a California adventure pass online, with which we could visit most of the places on our list at the cheapest deal. Then, we checked out how to get to each of those places, using Google maps, took loads of printouts, wrote down loads of directions and addresses and planned our whole itinerary. We made reservations at hotels where we could get the best deal- Best Western in Anaheim (near LA, right beside Disneyland where we decided to stay to visit LA) and Holiday Inn at San Diego. We booked a luxury car (Chrysler 300) at Enterprise in Davis. Car rental was so cheap and fuel prices were dirt cheap too. It all worked out quite affordable for all of us as we were 5 and all the bills got split by 5 thereby making it cheap. We even took some rice and our cooker so that we could have free food once or twice during out 8 day trip. :D That’s how well-planned we were.

(TO BE CONTINUED... NEXT POST THURSDAY, 3rd SEP) [I am totally looking forward to writing the next few posts as it is about the best 6-7 days of my life]

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 6

2009-08-26T22:45:00.016+05:30

NOTE: For continuity, read chapters 1-5 before embarking on 6.

CHAPTER 6- A TYPICAL DAY IN DAVIS LIFE

This is how a typical day went by in my life. I had a couple of classes everyday on an average- one in the morning and one afternoon (identical to JD as we took similar classes but a little different from MS's where he often had late classes- so he didn’t need to get up that early and I was so envious of him for that). For a class at 10, I used to get up at 9.15 and rush to get ready to go to college. It was especially difficult as the three of us (MS, JD 'n I) shared a bedroom and a bathroom, for which we had to wait for turns to use. One of us often ended up not being able to take a bath because of the lack of time.

Every morning, we took a resolution to get up an hour and half before class in the morning from the next day so that we could get ready at leisure, but we never honored that till the end. Often I ended up getting up early, but then I would look up (rather look down as I was on the top bunker of the bunker bed) from my bed to find JD and MS (he didn’t need to get up early that often as he didn’t have a class until late afternoon) sound asleep. My conscience would tell me not to bother about that and get up and wake them (at least try to) and start getting ready, but the evil side of my head (the part which incidentally gets up late in the morning) would tell me that I, in no way, deserve less sleep than the others and while they’re sleeping soundly, why should I alone take the initiative of getting up. As always, the evil part would win over the good part and I would go back to sleep, with an itching conscience, ignoring the multiple alarms on my iPod and the vibrating alarm on my mobile, which when combined would be alerting me every five minutes and also ignoring JD's alarm on his mobile, which was so loud that one would have to question the appropriateness of having a small quantity called decibel to be the SI unit of sound. Poor MS was quite sensitive to alarms though, and he would get up, unsurprisingly quite irritatedly, each time one of our alarms rang. As he had the bottom bunk of the bunked bed, he would also feel the vibrations of my vibrating alarm on my mobile and would wake up for that too. Sorry mate.... :D.

Later, with only 40 minutes to go for the class, my good conscience would finally prevail over the evil part, and I would get up on my bed and exclaim "Oh F***" after looking at my watch, to which MS 'n JD would get up too and we’ll all start getting ready, swearing all the time and resolving to get up early from the next morn, knowing secretly that we weren’t going to do it for sure. This became such a daily routine that, my "Oh F***" became JD's and MS's last alarm. I’ve heard of people praying or chanting mantras just as they get up from bed, but my routine was quite unique.

It would be a running race into the bathroom, as the first one in got a chance to take a slightly more leisurely bath, and I often won that battle as my recovery time from sleep was quicker than JD's, who had this ...ah...custom of sleeping on the floor just outside the bathroom for about 10 minutes before he really got up properly. We would then put on some clothes in a hurry and skip breakfast (didn’t fancy eating bread and cereal everyday anyway) and run to the bus-stop, which was fortunately right outside the apartment to catch the Unitrans bus to college. We would often end up just missing the bus while waiting for the pedestrian signal to change to green to cross the road, to get to the bus stop. The cruelest sight was to watch your bus go by, just a few metres away while you’re stranded on the opposite side of the road waiting for an insane signal to turn green. After a few such times, we didn’t give a damn about signals and just ran across the road, waving our hands at cars going past by at 50 mph to stop, the typical Indian way. :D

We would have to run to class from the bus stop at MU to make it on time, and we would often grab a hot chocolate on the way, as that was the only thing that would keep us awake the whole class. It wasn’t so much a problem in the graphics class to keep awake unlike the scientific data management one, but still we became addicted to that chocolate in the morning that it became impossible to concentrate in any class without sipping on that. After the first class, we would hang out at the Silo, for a couple of hours and have lunch at Carl's Jr/Pizza hut. JD would have his at Crepes every day, to the astonishment of even the shop owner who was not used to having customers eating there regularly.

We would then go for the afternoon classes and sleep through it as it was often scientific data management and sometimes programming languages, which had started to get boring as the quarter went on as we stopped delving into system study by studying programming languages in general but started studying specific programming languages like LISP and Prolog, from the point of view of a person who is going to use the language for programming rather than a compiler designer who would look at the general aspects of the language which would help him develop a compiler, which is the angle I love.

We would come home in the evening at about 5 pm in the evening. And till I slept very late into the night or rather early next morning, do not ask what I did during that time, because I cannot think of what I did. I seemed to have no time at all on my hands, either to do the assignments, or play sports or even follow sports I love which is a shocking thing for me as I have always been an ardent sports fan.

Thinking hard, I guess this is how we passed time. We cooked dinner for 2 hours, ate for an hour (that’s just my usual eating time anywhere, and luckily I had JD there for company as he was a slower eater than me, which is quite an accomplishment for anyone), cleaned for half an hr, then spent the rest of the time chitchatting with each other, pulling each other’s legs, playing pranks on each other. We spent a lot of time making badusha, with AZ involved (can’t expand further on it again… :D).

BADUSHA- A LIVE DEMONSTRATION

Of course all this in the time I did not spend praying. [no comments on this please] :D

Initially I had got the impression that all my homies would be mature, serious no-nonsense people, with the exception of only JD who has always been quite a clown. I especially thought JB was a totally nerdy chap who would be studying all the time and AZ would be the kind of chap who would be quite serious when he studies and ditto for MS. I found how wrong I was soon after we started living together. All 5 of us were as freaky and immature and childish as the other, always wanting to have fun and never serious. The others had a similar impression of the rest including me and were as surprised as me when our true selves were disclosed. So, as we all found each other to be equally crazy, we all got on well and wasted a lot of time together too.

DURING SOME OF OUR CRAZY MOODS

We also spent a lot of time talking cracking random PJs (popularly called mokkai). JB was and is GOD at that and he was inspiration for us. A couple of his trademarks- you ask him "what’s up" and he’ll reply "ceiling", much to your amazement initially and to your exasperation later; you tell him in exasperation "be serious", he’ll nonchalantly reply "no i am harry", (hope u got it); you ask him "are you ready?" and he’ll reply "no i am not reddy. i am jb" which later turned into “No, only Sahithi is :D”. MS and I became his disciples soon, admiring his craft and spent a lot of time cracking such PJs and though JD and AZ were initially resistant to it, they ended up cracking some amazing ones. And thus, JB converted us all into ...ah...weirdoes... And proud ones at that too. Thank you JB! Apart from spending time in such pursuits, being a Man Utd fan, I spent quite some time arguing football with a Chelshit fan, JB and an ardent Arsenal fan, AZ.

Considering all this, no wonder I was short of time for assignments. I did well on the graphics ones, as it is my subject of interest. I did surprisingly well on the scientific management one, as it wasn’t time consuming. But I did poorly on the programming languages assignments, as we had to spent sooo much time on each of them, which is what we lacked. We often ended up having to do half of the assignment, on the last evening before the midnight deadline. And we had to wrap up with whatever we were done with at 1130 pm and rushed to document it and login to our accounts and submit it. We never submitted an assignment before 1155 pm (5 minutes before the server closed) and we submitted one as late as 11:59:55. Now that’s what I call perfect timing. AZ and JB who didn’t have such deadlines in the subject they took, often came to our room just to see us frantically hurry hyper-actively to turn in the assignment on time. That was unsurprisingly, a good hour's entertainment for them.

TEARING OUR HAIR OFF AND THEN FINALLY LAUGHING AT OURSELVES AFTER TURNING IN A HALF COMPLETED ASSIGNMENT

Apart from all this, we used to spend some time on the net randomly browsing and downloading and streaming stuff and I spent quite some time filling the new 250 GB hard disk I had bought (Blue flamez-no comments please). I also spent an hour everyday chatting with my, anxious perhaps even over-zealous, folks in India. We also spent a good hour’s time everyday just polambifying (grumbling) about how difficult life is (lol... thinking about it now...we didn’t find anything difficult... we just were grumbling without reason just to pass time...but after 3 yrs in SRM which pampers you, life was indeed more difficult but hey that’s a part of the deal). After all this, it is not so surprising that we went to bed only at 3-4 am and so we struggled to get up next morning till my customary "Oh F****". This was the vicious circle we were in.

(TO BE CONTINUED... NEXT POST SUNDAY, 30th AUG)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 5

2009-08-22T22:22:00.003+05:30

NOTE: For continuity, read chapters 1-4 before jumping to 5. This serious narrative tone and the boring picture-less narrative style again continues as this is also mostly abt academics.

CHAPTER 5- RUNNING THROUGH THE QUARTER...THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY PARTS

Scientific data management classes became more and more monotonous by the passing day, but being a small class, it was easy to attract the professor’s attention by answering questions and shooting a few of my own. Thus the prof got to know me pretty well in the good way. That was the sole reason for me to refrain from bunking those classes. It was also worth attending those classes to listen to a couple of nerds in that class conversing. It was simply hilarious to listen to them discuss about trivial things with all the seriousness in the world. I’ll give you a couple of examples. This one time, they were talking about digging the earth, one guy said "What will happen if we dig a hole though the earth from one end to another". The other guy said "that’s a good idea... we should do that and find out whether the magma will flow into space through the holes". The first guy says again "we can pump the magma out and then we can jump into one end and we can quickly commute to the other end". The second guy replies "But one thing to consider- do we jump in head first or legs first? I guess it’s important to determine which is safer before jumping. We don’t wanna be flying out of the other end with our legs up". And all this with a poker straight face. I tell you it was no joke that they were discussing. They were dead serious. Another time they were discussing about how it would be if there were no guns nowadays. How Sadaam Hussein and Osama would be fighting with the US forces with swords and shields and they laughed their asses off as if it was the funniest thing said. I laughed my ass off too, but at them. However they were very sharp in class with the coursework. But to listen to them talk among themselves was enough motivation for me to turn up for that class.

Programming languages was a class I was starting to enjoy, as the first few weeks were about how programming languages should be designed so that they can be compiled easily, similar to how compilers should be designed to process programming languages, which is what we studied in the compiler design course I had taken. I showed my enthu for the subject by being very active in class and I developed quite a reputation for myself in that class among other students (from what a couple of people told me later) and with the professor as well. Later on, as the course got monotonous, when I was too bored to listen to the class, I would be busy watching the girl next to me draw cartoons on her notebook, or looking at a bunch of guys multi-playing some game on their iphones or just looking at one guy sitting in the first bench under the prof’s nose and snoring so loudly that the prof had to pause often in the lecture. But the thing I will remember that class most for is the friends I made during that course. This bunch was the core bunch of people at UC Davis that I’ve kept in touch with even now.

Graphics was as enjoyable as usual. There was never a dull moment in that class, for Ken taught it very well and also because the class was very competitive, good mind-boggling questions kept coming up every now and then. I initially had this impression, often spread in India that the people in the US are pretty dumb and even an average student from India goes there and ends up the best among the Americans easily. Even Obama backed this in a press conference recently. I realized how much of a distortion that was. I am not sure if I felt it because my experience stems from one of the top schools, most difficult to get into but I would say it would take some work for an Indian to go there and do well academically. It is probably because of a lot of factors like having to get used to the system of education, which they already have because of which they have an edge. I will elaborate on this a little later. But this said, intellect-wise, the average American I saw was in no way inferior to an average Indian by means of intellect. Maybe the sample set I had was above average, but that’s how I saw it.

I was doing well in all the classes understanding the theory, I was doing well in assignments and quizzes, but there was one place where I faced problems especially in programming languages and that were the assignments. The first assignment was to make our own compiler for converting E programming language (hadn’t heard of it before that class) into C code. I had taken a whole course on compiler design in SRM, but the way we were taught never induced us to think about making one on our own. Now after 4 hrs of unrelated lecture, we had to learn what was necessary on our own and build a compiler. This was a difficult task for someone who had been rotting the last 3 years in SRM's curriculum. First I had to unlearn what half-cooked stuff we had learned here and relearn the stuff from the right angle. It was an uphill task all through, so I was a step behind the class all the time, as far as the assignments were concerned. It was however made up by my performance in the first mid-term, where I was in the top 3 of the class of 50, which was a commendable achievement for a person taking an exam for the first time in the US system. I reveled at it mainly because it was an open book test and remembering stuff was the problem I’ve always had in exams in India. That was out of the window, now that I could bring my own notes and refer when I wanted to. So all I had to do was to think on the spot and refer the right notes and write the answer. I really enjoyed the exam and did as well as expected.

Scientific data management assignments were very theory-based and being Indian automatically implies being good at theory, so I unsurprisingly did well in those. Also my performance in the midterm was well above the class mean. So I was happy with how I was doing there. As far as graphics was concerned, the assignments were difficult (from drawing cartoon characters using chaikin’s curve algorithm where I drew Apu to modeling Bainer hall...(umm...bathroom tiles as AZ described it :D) but graphics being my area of interest, I found it interesting. So I did fairly well in them and Ken's liberal grading helped me keep up with a very competitive class. There was no mid-term for the class. Just the final at the end, which I was confident that I’ll do well in, as Ken's exams are math-based and Indians in general are very good at math apart from theory in general.

A couple of weeks after the quarter started, and after Ken got to know us, we (me and JD) started approaching him to see if there was something we could do to get into his lab. We finally got to meet him in his office and we explained (rather I explained....not giving poor JD a chance to speak much as I often used to do, which I realized later after being told by him...Sorry about that mate... I changed that later however) how interested we were in graphics (I probably used my trademark "we’ve come here for a couple of quarters" catchphrase...eh JD?). He listened to us and immediately asked us if we wanted to see his lab. We couldn’t believe our ears. We enthusiastically nodded and he took us to the academic surge building after locking his office and took us on a half an hour tour of the IDAV labs, and introduced us to a few of his Phd students. He explained all the research that was going on patiently. Coming to think of it, I was rather overcome by the occasion and was wondering what I did to deserve this. I am talking to one of the great research minds and a highly respected person in the field of scientific visualization, and he is explaining all that he is doing, taking me on a tour of his lab, taking time off his busy schedule just for me. I felt insignificant, thinking about his achievements and contrasting it to nothing major I had. But his friendly manner and treatment of me as a person on par with him made me feel good again. He then finally introduced us to one of his postdocs, Eduard and told us we can start working with him on acoustic visualization. Eduard was a nice intelligent looking chap, whose English however wasn’t that strong as he had just come from Germany and his accent was difficult to understand and his speech was way too soft to hear without an amplifier. So it took some effort to understand what he said. We started working on some stuff Eduard gave us on acoustic visualization. Ken had got us proximity scanner cards for entry to the IDAV labs and also given us the keys to the academic surge building. We felt important and made plans about how we would spend all our free time in the labs. But alas!!! We never really had much of that after that point in the quarter. So we couldn’t really work on it as much as we wanted, without compromising on course grades.

(TO BE CONTINUED... NEXT POST WEDNESDAY, 26nd AUG)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 4

2009-08-14T14:41:00.011+05:30

NOTE: For continuity, read chapters 1-3 before jumping to 4. This post has a kind of serious narrative tone about it because it is about academics.

CHAPTER 4- Beginning of classes and Project woes

All the good fun things have to come to an end. That’s a universal law in life and though we want it to be defied each time but it never is. It was Sep 22nd already and was time for the start of the fall quarter. We were really looking forward to it actually, as we wanted to get a real taste of the American education system that’s so favorably talked about but we knew we couldn’t have that much fun as the first few days when we were jobless.

The first day was orientation, where the all GSP (Global study program) students assembled and we were briefed about the system and about UCD. We were issued our ID cards and from then, we were as much a student of the University of California as any of its other undergrads and that gave us a sense of pride and belonging.
I had got the courses I wanted- Programming languages (which I like because of its similarity to compiler design which I love), Scientific data management (which I was forced to take as I had to satisfy some core subject equivalents in SRM), and finally Computer Graphics (which has been and which will be my area of interest).

Computer Graphics was my first class ever at UCD, and JD (who was also in that class) and I went really early to scheduled classroom to find that the classroom had shifted to another room. We went to the other room and found we were unsurprisingly the first there. Gradually people started dripping in and then streaming in and then flowing in as it was just time for the class to begin. It was a minute late from the scheduled time that an elderly amiable-looking man with a French beard came into the room with a smile and I recognized him to be Dr. Ken Joy who was the one of the most senior professors at UCD and a pioneer in the field of visualization and the director of the IDAV research at UCD. It was a great feeling to see him- a man who had directly contributed to the research that our professors teach us about in India- in flesh.

What brought me out of this reverie was his opening sentence that I will never forget "Aah this is the graphics class I am looking for indeed. I initially went to the originally scheduled room, and I found the class filled with girls. Girls! Now that’s the last thing a computer science professor, lest a graphics professor would expect to find in his class. So I realized I must be in the wrong room, and only then I noticed the announcement for the change in the room. Now this looks like a graphics classroom, as I see no girls." We all laughed at this wonderful ice-breaker and I was taken aback by his good nature and humor. Indeed I looked around the class, and I found no girl (Well there was actually a girl(who we nicknamed Rhino- no real offense meant, but on first sight she did look like one, so Ken can be forgiven for not noticing her...anyway she dropped out after a few classes) there at all in a class of 40. I cursed my luck as hitting on blonde was one of my goals for the trip, but was really excited to have Ken as my prof.

The class turned out to be wonderful, as he delved deeper into the mathematics on which graphics is based. JD and I came out of that class, really sad that it was over already. We talked to him at the end of class and introduced ourselves, as we wanted him to get to know us and look out for us as we wanted to work under him in his research lab in the future.

From there, it was time to go to the Programming Languages class. After Ken's wonderful class, my expectations were high. Probably too high. It is always a problem if you taste the sweetest thing first, your expectation becomes too high and you find nothing as sweet. This is kind of what happened to me. Prof. Su's lecture was pretty good I must say, but that friendliness and humor factor was never there. You never felt at ease in his class. Especially the first class, he seemed to be a more of a teacher than a professor. You’ll understand the distinction between the two if you’ve studied in India. He explained trivial stuff like "You shouldn’t cheat on exams and assignments. Else you’ll be punished- sent to the SJA or some such council for which I don’t even know the expansion (uh huh... Blue flamez…no comments on it please :D). You should be honest. You should do your homework. Else you’ll lose your grade." As if it takes a genius to figure it out. These are things no decent student who wouldn’t think of cheating would want to be told about, but then has to listen to always. Except for the stiffness in his tone, and his attitude, there was nothing I had against Prof. Su, as his teaching was really sound. And his research was really exciting. I came out of that class having realized I’ve to lower my expectations of professors here which had shot up after Ken's class.

The next day, all three of us (MS, JD and I) had Scientific Data Management. This was one course I wasn't looking forward to, as database management has never been my field of interest. I always found it void of logic and thinking and felt it was a dry subject where you keep following known practices. Dr. Bertram Ludaescher handled that course with Dr. Shaun Bowers (Sobers as MS was to call him later…:) ) to take care of the genomics angle as the data we were going to learn to manage was genetic data. Bertram's German accent was very noticeable and it was a little difficult to catch what he was saying at first. The class was as dry as expected, but then the professors seemed friendly and good-natured. Besides it was a class of only about 15 people and quite a few were from other departments. The course taught people how to manage data in their respective fields using computers. So it was an exciting class for its diversity. But it was a class I never looked forward too much to.

This class was also the only one where we had to do a final project, and the professors to make teams of 3 or less and think of ideas. I initially befriended someone, and was going to do the project with her and JD and MS, but then had to give that up as we thought it was better for everyone that just we roomies work on it as we can adapt our schedule to find time to work on it as a team and also because we weren’t going to concentrate much on it because we were going to start working in Ken's lab hopefully (:D). So I had to break off with her and unsurprisingly, she wasn’t really happy about it. We named that the "break up incident".

Then the three of us sought JB's help with choosing a project, and resourceful as he is, he gave us ideas which if implemented would win us Nobel prizes. I’ve often wondered how JB comes up with such amazing wonderful ideas that no one person can think of but am even more surprised why he himself doesn’t work on them with the same vigor to implement them, which he is totally capable of. He is one of the most remarkable minds I’ve known, and if he keeps his focus and drive from thinking of an idea to implementing it, I am sure he’ll be a Nobel laureate. Anyway… we finally zeroed upon an idea that we felt we could implement. It was about retrieving some data from the DDBJ database (a genome database) and extracting necessary information and analyzing what the user wants and displaying it to him. We were happy with our proposal and when we submitted it, our profs were happy with it too. Thus our first week came to an end with a couple more amazing graphics classes and a pretty good programming language class.

(TO BE CONTINUED... NEXT POST SATURDAY, 22nd AUG)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 3

2009-08-14T12:40:00.018+05:30

Note: For continuity, read the first two parts of the series. This post isn't that comical (except the initial part) because most of it is about my solo adventures. And where there's no JD...there's no comedy :(

CHAPTER 3- A messy bubbly incident, the JD catalyst theory and my visit to the bay area

The days passed and we started getting into the Californian lifestyle and really started enjoying it. We spent most of the time on the internet streaming stuff because we hadn’t ever had the liberty of streaming videos in India with the net speeds here and this was a great revelation for us. As we were flabbergasted with the internet speeds (we got download speeds of 1 MBps), there was a person in the apartment who apparently was frustrated with the net as he found it way too slow. That was Hyun, who later told us that they get speeds 20 times as fast as this, all over South Korea. Oh boy! 20 megabytes in a second! That’s 100 MB in 5! A movie downloaded in 35 secs! Phew... I might go to Korea one day just to operate on that.

A hilarious thing that happened around that time was the toilet clogging incident and once again JD was the hero, rather the comedian and I played a part too. He mistook kitchen paper to be toilet paper (LOL) and tried to flush it down but as it was too thick, it didn’t go down the drain. But that’s not the end of the joke. After some scientific thinking, we (JD and I) came up with an idea that if we had some acidic substance, it might erode the paper away. We thought the dishwasher liquid might just serve the purpose. So we brought it and put it into the toilet and flushed. And voila… it became like a bathtub filled with foam, as the dishwasher liquid had obviously foamed when in contact with water and the toilet became a bathtub. We had succeeded in making it messier, if that was ever possible. :D

We had bought a football...ah sorry soccer ball, and were playing with it in the house (with AZ's enthu for soccer, that’s the least you can expect). AZ was our coach, and he spent his time teaching us tricks (I gotta say he was pretty good with it), and we did learn quite a bit. I gotta mention specifically about JD, because of something that followed. He used to try too many tricks at once and his legs and body couldn’t react to the speed his lightning quick mind was thinking. And so he often... let’s just say... messed (and JB…don’t comment “canteened up”) up.

Once when we were practicing power shots in the lawn, he was getting it all wrong as he just couldn’t connect with the ball properly. He tried umpteen times but couldn’t work it out. Suddenly we noticed a blonde girl walking her dog out on the lawns, watching us play. We pointed it out to JD and he looked for a moment at her and suddenly with his face steeled with determination, kicked the ball with a force Christiano Ronaldo would not be able to get on his free kick. Alas... Unfortunately I stood between him and the goal, and before I had any time to react, it hit me square on my stomach and I doubled up with pain the next few minutes. So all you need for JD to do something good is to have a girl watch him do it.

Another instance proving JD's catalyst theory was when our apartment mate brought a Japanese friend of his, to our apartment. For the record, let’s call her "Countryside". Just before she had come, we had been learning some tricks again at home from AZ. And I gotta say JD was having a really bad time, again doing too many things at a time, thereby flopping. He had just given up when she came. After a bit of chit-chat, when the talk came to soccer, JD's eyes suddenly lit up and he said "Lemme show you some tricks". We were all like "Ohhh.... hope he doesn’t make a fool of himself". Then to our amazement and Countryside's delight, he neatly lifted the ball, and did a 360 spin following it up with what was a near flip-flap and even attempting a rainbow kick. And he pulled it off pretty well. We just looked at each other and shook our heads. So now we knew what was necessary to make this guy play good soccer. Just load the stadium with girls. Preferably Chinkey (codenamed Chicklika or Chandralekha…lol) girls, as he has a thing for them.

Around this time, I decided to go to the bay area to visit two cousins I have in Santa Clara, and one in Cupertino. I hitched a ride with a couple of other girls from SRM, who were going to the bay area to visit their folks. Thanx ppl. So I spent a night and half a day at my cousin’s place, playing with her two kids. I was shocked at number of Asians in that place. Every person I saw (I mean EVERY) was either an Indian or a Chinese. I saw many people play cricket, clothes hung outside the house and many more typical signs of Indians dwelling in a place. I really felt at home there.

My cousin from Santa Clara came to pick me up from Cupertino in his new Audi A4 (cool car to have, San...) and took me to the Saravana Bhavan in the bay area. I was happy to get to eat some authentic Indian food, after a month's gap. It was quite a large restaurant, seating at least 200 people, and it was flooded with people flowing in and out. After a short wait, we got a table, and I got my first look at the menu card. I had got used to the dollar system and was no longer converting it to rupees, but the cost of the items in dollars was really vulgar. A plate of idly was 6 $ (Rs 300), a dosa was 10 $ (Rs 500), a masala dosa was 12 $ (Rs 600) and a meals was 15 $ (Rs 750). Half my appetite vanished looking at the menu, but then the aroma brought the appetite back and I had really enjoyed the food (which he paid for).

We then went to his apartment, and I met my other cousin as well. We unwinded and had a good afternoon chatting and learned so much about each other. Neither of them were the reserved homely people I was told by my parents they would be and I wasn’t the quite innocent person they had pictured as well. :) Lol it was fun getting to know we were all normal people on the same wavelength.

After a lot of debating and planning, we all went out in the evening to San Francisco to hang out in the night as SF is a great city to see with the lights on. We first went to the golden gate bridge, which was a bit of a disappointment because it wasn’t really visible as it was a heavily foggy day. Only the next 10 metres or so were visible, and so I could just mentally picture the glory of the whole bridge taken in one eyeful. We walked on the bridge a bit and then left the place.

We then drove around SF, which in itself is an exciting thing to do around the Lombard street areas, because of its Monaco grand prix like curves and slopes. We drove around downtown near the towering skyscrapers, which were a majestic sight when lit in the night. Now I experienced what the America that is showcased in movies and media was like. This is just a small part of the country, and most of the country is like Davis, with the tallest building in the city being not more than 3 storeys, or even worse with just barren land. The rich well-to-do parts are what are portrayed all the time. Watching other cars on the road was in itself an experience, and cars I had seen only in NFS-like games and on TV and magazines, were right before my eyes. Ferraris and Audis and Porsches...you name and it was there. This was in stark contrast to Cupertino where I noticed an excess of Japanese cars like Toyotas and Nissans. Every alternate car was a Toyota corolla. I guess it is no coincidence that there number of corollas and the number of Asians were proportionately high. It shows our attitude of looking for the cost of the car and the mileage it gives before choosing a car, which is why we prefer the cheap less-prestigious Toyotas. :D .

So after downtown, where there were some places we wanted to go to but couldn’t because...ah... I was...underage. Californian law totally sucks there, and this unfortunate handicap kept haunting me in the whole seven months I spent there. I am glad I have just turned 21 a couple of weeks ago. So no more babysitting for me when I go back there. And so from downtown, we went into Chinatown. There is only one way to describe it... it was China... It’s quite a large neighborhood with all shops, houses, buildings being run by Chinese. Everyone looked the same. We went to a Chinese restaurant and had some food, which I really enjoyed as it was authentic Chinese. It was pretty late by the time we were done and we drove back home to Santa Clara well past midnight.

The next day, we got up early (8 am...which is early of course) and drove to Santa Monica to the beach. I got my first feel of the Pacific Ocean then. After hanging out at beaches in Chennai, I forgot how water in oceans looks blue and so my first sight of the beach was breathtaking. The beach was like an amusement park with roller-coasters etc. I didn’t have time to ride them, but I guess it must have been a good experience to be in a roller-coaster overlooking the sea. There were a lot of people hanging out and sunbathing on the beach too, as it was just about the end of summer.

I then had a good breakfast there on a beach-side restaurant and from there, we drove to the mystery point, which is supposed to be this place where gravity behaves strangely. People cannot stand straight, they tend to lean towards a side, water moves from "lower" to "higher" level, a freely suspended ball moves "uphill". It really aroused my curiosity. It was as good as anticipated to see these "miracles", and the way the guide described it to us made it seem even more mysterious. However, it is just a simple concept where a cabin has been built on a hill after digging the hill such that "uphill" was made into "downhill". It was well made indeed I have to say.

After having a good time there, we drove back home to Santa Clara, where we unwinded a bit in the evening and then it was time to go. I again hitched a ride back with the girls in their car. Thanks San ‘n An for taking the effort to spend time showing me around the bay area. Hope to hang out much more this time.

(TO BE CONTINUED...NEXT POST TUESDAY, 18th AUG)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 2

2009-08-10T14:31:00.024+05:30

Thanks folks, for all your comments on the first part. Here is the second installment. I seem to have no other choice than jump from one incident to another, without much of a continuity between paragraphs, as I have lot to say and few words to do so. So please tolerate my style of writing.

(For continuity, read part 1 if you haven't already)

CHAPTER 2- Culinary experiences, an English lesson and the One Cent incident

We had been eating a lot of ready-to-eat stuff till then. Once MS came, he brought with him his culinary skills. Actually all of us had recipes with us and knew some basic cooking. We were just too lazy to experiment and MS brought that enthu with him and enthusiasm is always pretty infectious. We all did our part in cooking, but to sum up I was the vegetable cutter and dishwasher. JD was the main dishwasher and cleaner. JB was the vegetable cutter and cook. MS was the head cook. AZ, after he came back from Seattle, also helped with the dishes, cleaning and cutting. Rice, sambhar, and a poriyal was a pretty standard menu for us.

We often had easy-to-make food like pre-made pizzas, where all we had to is just put the pizza in the oven and in ten minutes, it would be cooked. But easy-to-make often turned out into some exercise for us, thanks to the wonderfully hypersensitive smoke detector in our apartment, which did more harm than good. Each time a crumb of pizza rested on anything other than the grill, there would be some smoke emitted from it and our wonderful smoke detector would sense it and start wailing like a banshee as if it were a forest fire. And we would have to take any object we could get hold of and try to shoo the smoke away from the smoke detector. By the time it was done, we would be too tired to eat the now-stale pizza.

Another time, I saw something in packets on the shelves of the Safeway supermarket that resembled rotis. It was called "tortillas". Thinking it was just another fancy name Westerners had made for our rotis (I once saw a place which served the fancy sounding “rice puffed cakes”, which turned out to be our…idlis), I bought a packet of that. Little did I know that they would smell so much worse than a skunk on opening the packet after getting home that we would have to chuck the whole thing and go hungry that night. After that experience, I never took my chances with Mexican food.

We explored Davis quite a bit (finding our way using maps), walking as far as a few miles some days and the effort was worth it just to see MS's expression on his face realizing he had to walk so much. ;).

We also spent some time participating in live politics of #219 :D. Was pretty interesting to be a negotiator. LOL. Then as a consequence, we spent some time honing our carpentry skills :P (Sensitive issue ppl...can't elaborate further :D)...

Then AZ came back in a few days and at last it was all the 5 of us homies together. The BLUE FLAMEZ united at last.

Once all of us went out and ate at a place called "Baker's square", where they had about 50 pies to choose from and they were the tastiest any of us have ever had and ever will have. That was an oft visited haunt for us from then on.

JD, MS and I decided to get ourselves bikes (i am referring to bicycles here- not one of those cool mo’bikes) and so we went to Walmart in the next town, Woodland by bus to get that. We got good solid bikes for 60 odd dollars and much to MS's disdain, we decided to ride the bike home a whole 10+ miles and that too without knowing the way properly. We embarrassed ourselves umpteen times doing things like trying to cross the interstate highway at a place where there weren’t even traffic lights. That was one of the few times when one of the cars honked at MS, when he tried to dart across when the car was approaching at 70 mph on the highway. According to JD's juxaggerated*(refer footnotes for definition) version, MS ran to the middle of the road with his cycle and the car screeched to a halt from 100 mph and the driver honked for a whole ten minutes. Not one; not two. But TEN minutes. :D. This is the version the SRM girls who asked us about it heard, much to our amusement and MS's chagrin. :P. So anyway, we got the bike and ourselves safely back home. And we locked it with the tube locks we had got from India, as we heard locks were expensive in the US. Only later we realized how our intention to save 10 $ backfired to make us (me) lose 60 $.

We woke up the next morning (err...afternoon actually...) and went out to find just my bike missing. On further inspection, we found that the tube lock I had locked it with had been broken open and the digits of the combination lock were lying separately. The most exasperating thing about it was that there was also a one cent coing lying near the broken lock. Now whether it was dropped by mistake or on purpose by the thief as a token of his theft, as a tip to me, after stealing something worth 6000 odd times its value, I do not know but it was like adding insult to injury. Hence we called it the "One cent incident” after that. It was evident that the thief had also tried to cut open JD's and MS's locks with a sharp tool, from the cut marks all over that we noticed but he had abandoned it midway due to some reason and left.

With the One Cent and the broken lock in my hand.

JD and MS were paranoid about bike theft after that and immediately went back to walmart and returned theirs. It’s an amazing concept that walmart lets people buy stuff and takes the product back within 60 days with a full refund, without any questions asked. The fact that this works in the American system, is something to be admired about its people. No one takes advantage and buys stuff, uses them and returns it within a couple of months once they’re done with it. I am sure a large percentage of Indians would do that if given an opportunity. As a live example, there were a couple of professors who came from SRM to UC Davis to study the system there for a month or so and they got a camera at walmart, used it to click pictures while they were there and finally returned it back to get a full refund. The people cannot be blamed as there is so much competition among ourselves and survival of the fittest is the universal principle, so we make best use of every opportunity where we are benefited selfishly. I quite possibly would do the same, when hard pressed. Anyways... I deviated. Back to our story... so MS and JD returned their bikes and got the refund.

I however lost my 60 $, though JD made a great gesture of making me insist on taking one third of his refund back, as he argued we got the cycles together and any of ours could have been stolen. Appreciate that, mate!!!

Our other apartment-mates had arrived by then. One was Hyun-Jyun, a really cool guy from South Korea. He spoke really good English and was as American as anyone cos he had his family living in the States. He was easy to get along with, minded his own business, and overall a great apartment mate. Then came along a chap from Japaaaan (that’s how he pronounces it). We could see he was pretty immature and probably had not much experience living with other people in an alien country. Communicating with him wasn’t that easy as his English wasn’t really sound, but he seemed a nice innocent chap initially. We helped him settle down, taking him shopping, having him eat with us for the first couple of days (though he couldn’t tolerate our food as he found it too spicy. Then he started eating his normal food- plain cooked vegetables and stuff. A caveman’s diet if you ask me). Only later, we realized how difficult it would be to get along with him, because of his hypersensitivity to noise. Even if we talked in our rooms, with the doors closed, he would knock on our doors (and later even barge into our room), to ask us to "reduce the volume", which was pretty irritating. Even if one of us switched on the light in the living room, he would come out of his room and ask us to switch it off as he apparently would not be able to sleep with the light seeping through the crack in his closed room door. And so unsurprisingly there were many unpleasant encounters between him and a few of us, resulting in him moving to a new apartment the next quarter.

FOOTNOTES:

*- juxaggeration- noun- exaggerating something to a superlative extent. Word stems from the root jagadish and the suffix exaggeration because of Jagadish’s tendencies to exaggerate something so much out of proportion that one realizes it isn’t true. Word is being processed by Oxford press for incorporation into their dictionary.

Example: How I just defined the word is what is juxaggeration :P

(TO BE CONTINUED...NEXT POST FRIDAY, 14th AUG)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA:Chapter 1

2009-08-06T13:43:00.025+05:30

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA.

Prologue:
This is one blog post I have been worried about the past one year in fact. When I got to know that I was going to the University of California to spend my last two semesters, that’s around when I had started this blog. I was blogging quite regularly then and I was worried about how I was going to blog about my experiences in the US after I come back. 7 months of life in a different country cannot be expressed by a few hundred words and so I decided I should update my blog every couple of weeks while at Davis so that I wouldn’t have this headache of writing it all in one session, but as you can see, procrastination has lead to what I most feared. So here I go!!! I have no idea where to start and where to end and what to mention and what not... So I’ll just go with the flow expanding on events that were memorable to me. I don’t even have daily accounts of what happened, as I have no practice of writing a diary. In fact the last time I wrote one was during my 12th std English board exam. :D Though I may have the urge to clarify the details of some events with the others who were involved, or to look at the photos I had taken in Davis, I will desist from doing so because I want this to be a description of everything as I remember it, even if it may be distorted or inaccurate or biased or having omitted some events or details. I want this to be an account of everything that comes to my mind first, without having to think hard, when I think of the trip, because what comes to you without thinking hard is what is most memorable to you and this is about MY memories of California. Most of it will be nostalgic for those of us who were involved and who know the people who were involved, but a lot of it should make sense to a third-party reader too.

So here goes….

CHAPTER 1- The journey and the birth of the Blue Flamez

It all started when... we were on our way to Davis and five of us who all knew each other pretty well had decided to stay together there. That’s Aslam aka AZ, Karthik aka MS, Jag aka JD but better known as Jakkibad or Jugs or Jakki or Jag :P, Jeya Balaji (it is a guy btw :D) aka JB and yours truly aka AJ. All of us except MS departed on the Cathy Pacific on the 7th of September, with MS insisting to come a couple of days later on Sep 11th. Maybe he had ideas of blowing up the flight... :D. I thought I would be a mess before getting on the flight as it was the first time I was going away from home and that too for such a long time to a totally alien country. Surprisingly, the anticipation of what lay ahead outweighed the sorrow of leaving and I was actually happy to get on the flight.

Aslam's parents were accompanying us as they were going to visit their daughter in Seattle and they took the wonderful gesture of escorting us to Davis and helping us settle there before they left. So AZ took a seat on the flight with his parents and so it was only me, JD and JB with consecutive seats. JD, whose messing up of simple things was to entertain us though the whole trip started his antics right there on the flight, when he filled in a simple immigration form on the flight which asked for details such as name, date of birth etc incorrectly, not once, not twice, but thrice. The airhostess was so exasperated with him, that the third time he asked for a new form, he told him she doesn’t have any more extra and he would have to explain to the immigration officer about it. That panicked expression on his face remains etched in my memory, before she told us she was joking. :P .

Also on the flight, when JB was sleeping, JD's prankster mind got the idea of placing paper bits on his half open mouth like a cigar. The stewardess had a good laugh, when she came to serve us something and she looked over at JB. Nice idea JD!!! Other than that, the flight was pretty uneventful. We watched a couple of movies and slept quite a bit.

We had a 4 hr changeover at Hong Kong, where we spent most of the time exploring the massive airport situated right on the ocean and also posing for the camera with "punny" poses such as these. Ahem ahem!!! (Our gesture is significant)

After a long flight which we didn’t find strenuous cos we had each other for company, we landed at San Francisco. After immigration and picking up our luggage etc, we were received at the airport by Aslam's sister Yasmine akka, her husband Harris and their lovely daughter, Safia. The 7 of us (4 of us plus three other girls from our college we knew who had taken the same flight- one of whom I have to step out of the way to mention was probably the most talkative gal I’ve ever come across in my life. Hope u re reading this, P'tha :P) boarded the taxi that we had pre-booked. We were all pretty excited as it was the first time in the US for all of us and we were all peeping out of the window to take in as much of San Francisco as our eyes could. All of us except… JB, who just slept through the whole journey. SLEPT!!! Inexcusable... For me it was doubly exciting, as the first city outside India that I saw was the huge San Francisco. :D. As we travelled north to Davis, we saw the skyscrapers vanish and a lot of barren land come into the picture and by the time we reached Davis, it was totally rural countryside scenery that we saw. We felt it was serene.

We got down at our apartment, Adobe at Evergreen and were received there by a guy from UCD GSP (Global study program) staff member, who helped us check into the apartment. We found the apartment really cozy. It was fully furnished, with couches, beds, desks, a fully equipped kitchen with a microwave, an oven, a dishwasher etc.

Later that evening, AZ's family came down to our apartment to help us set up. His sister and mother set up the kitchen, unpacking all the vessels, provisions etc that we had brought. That itself was some doing, as each of us had planned and brought 12 kgs of stuff for common cooking. So between the five of us it was about 50 kgs of stuff. Plus Aslam's parents had got some stuff for us too. In the meantime, his bro-in-law took us out to Target for some basic shopping, getting us stuff like toilet papers, buckets, detergents etc and also got some vegetables etc from Safeway. The next day, he helped us open bank accounts, told us about the how things work in the US. His dad gave us really good tips on how to manage an apartment by ourselves etc. I am dedicating an entire paragraph to how AZ's folks helped us to settle down, as it’s the least I can do by at least acknowledging their efforts. If not for them, life would’ve been a hell in the first few days. Thanks to them, we were as well-settled as any American in a couple of days. THANK YOU if you’re reading this!

Even after a day, we didn’t feel the jetlag at all and we were wondering what all that fuss was about. We went to check out the gym in the apartment and checking-out turned into a working-out and we came out after an hour, feeling totally drained. So we thought we’ll take a short nap. And a short nap turned out to be 20 hours for me, JB and AZ and more than 24 for JD. And that too on the couch!!! AZ's folks were wandering in and out setting up the house as we were busy slumbering.

Another instance where we had a laugh at JD's expense was on the next day. Harris was setting up the wifi modem that we had bought and he tried searched something to test the internet on Microsoft live search and it didn’t work. JD came forward and advised him to use Google instead, further adding Microsoft is lousy. Harris looked at him in the eye and said "I work for Microsoft in Seattle". JD was pretty flustered.

From the time we arrived, we were thinking of a cool name to call our gang. At that time, Yasmine akka looked at the stove in our apartment and exclaimed how lucky we were to get a gas stove which gives blue flames instead of a lousy electric stove. And we were like "Ah! That’s a cool name. So henceforth we are the BLUE FLAMEZ!!!". Thus the Blue Flamez were formed.

Now that we were well-settled, AZ's folks left for Seattle and the next day MS arrived and with him the entire batallion of girls and guys from SRM, who were going to be with us in US (:D).

(TO BE CONTINUED....ITS GONNA BE LIKE A MEGA-BLOGPOST UPDATED EVERY WEEK. PLENTY OF PARTS [EXPECTING ABOUT 20 SUCH] COMING UP...)

NEXT POST ON MONDAY, 10TH AUG

FROM AN AGNOSTIC TO A HAPPILY CONFUSED PERSON

2009-07-10T18:14:00.003+05:30

I AM BACK!!! After a hiatus of about a year, I am back again in the blogosphere. Now whether I am going to disappear after this one entry or whether I am going to renew my oft-abandoned feeble attempts at blogging, I honestly do not know. But there was something I wanted to share with the virtual world and so here I am...

This post is about how something that happened last week,which has changed my life forever. As many may know, I have been a strong agnostic, from the time I started thinking independently, leaning more and more towards aetheistic tendancies. I always have always stood for logic and logic says everything in the universe can be explained by logic itself in some way. I felt God was something Man had made to have someone to look upto while doing any task and to blame when he messes up something in life. I didnt object to the concept as it served its purpose, which was making people happy in some way. Having skills of creativity no other living being has, Man made so many wonderful tales and fables, of how he pictured a supreme being, if one existed, and thus came different Gods and religions. Aah ok I am deviating again. I could write loads about what I think (or thought) of religion and God but that was not the scope of this post. My point is I am a firm believer in logic and as the concept of a supreme being was illogical, I DIDNT believe in it.

The "dont believe" turned into a "didnt believe" after my experience in Tirupathi with my family last week. I have gone on many a pilgrimage before (probably more than any 20 year old has :D), thanks to the amazing enthu for temples by my family members. I have visited most popular temples, but there was on temple I had surprisingly given a miss, Tirupathi. One of my friends, who was an atheist converted into a believer after his first time to Tirupathi, and he once told me to go to that place to understand why. I wondered about why he said that often but scorned it feeling I would stick to my ideas and principles. So i was just a little curious about the temple and proving to myself that it was just another temple. So we had the darshan at 5 am in the morning, and as we had got some special tickets, we had to stand in an orderly queue for just about an hour or so. So I was in a normal state of mind, neither too pissed at having to wait for long hours in a queue nor too happy about having had to get up at 3 am that morning. I wasnt anticipating too much about what would lie ahead. I just considered it a routine job, which once I finish, I can go back to my hotel room and get some sleep before having to drive back to Bangalore. It wasnt my first time in a famous temple, as I have been to many before. It wasnt the first time I was seeing the inside of a temple completely covered with gold, making it majestic, as I had been to the golden temple at Amritsar and also the Hindu golden temple at Sripuram as recent as last month. I am explaining all this to support my arguement that I was in a normal state of mind, logic prevailing over emotion, and hence what happened next came as a surprise.

We entered the sanctum sanctorium of the temple and I got my first look at the idol. I never thought I would be saying this, but there is no denying to myself that I suddenly, inexplicably felt happy. Not just happy, but filled with joy in every crevice of my body. I cant really put that into words. Tears stared welling up in my eyes as we moved near the God's idol. In ten seconds, as I got a last look at the God (notice how the "idol" in the previous sentence became "God's idol" in the next and now is "God"- thats exactly how I felt during that time) while moving towards the exit, I noticed tears of joy were actually flowing down my cheeks. I questioned myself, as to why this was happening and blinked back a couple of tears and told myself to calm down and take control, but I just couldnt. It felt as if someone had taken control of my sensory organs. I thought as hard as I could to understand what I may be feeling this happy about, but there was no one thing in the brain that I was thinking about. I felt this was the only time in my life where my brain wasnt thinking of anything. It was just blank. And that blankness let happiness flow through it. I have often wondered what yogis and saints think of while meditating, and this was the time I knew it was "nothing" that they thought about. To be able to think about "nothing" is the most difficult thing in the world, for which you need amazing self-control and concentration. I have never been able to do it in my life. Till that moment at Tirupathi. And there I know how good it felt.

For the next ten minutes after I came out, I was smiling insanely, almost laughing, to myself. I knew I sported a wide grin and I told my mind to control it and act normal, but I just couldnt control it. I then got my mind to think of something materialistic to get rid of my emotions, but that feeling of happy nothingness remained and only slowly it faded. Only after this, was I able to stop smiling for nothing. Those who know me will understand how unemotional I am, at least on the outside, and how strange it is for me to have reacted this way. I have tried to attach a logic to why it happened but nothing fits in. Why get such a feeling at that particular place, at that particular time, when I didnt get such a feeling either when I graduated, or when Manchester United won the premier league, or when I got an admit in UC Davis for my Phd. It just cannot be explained and maybe thats what people call God. Now that one incident is not enough to transform me into a person who believes in God, but I shall concede for the first time in my independent life that there are things I cannot explain. I shall not start worshipping God every day, but I shall at least understand when people say they worship God. I still believe helping out the poor and underprevileged would give you more contentment than spending money on going to a temple, but I shall tolerate those who donate more money to temples than to the society, as they probably do get some piece of mind by doing that.

So now I am presently a person who is confused, albeit happily confused, about what opinion to form and what path to take, after that day at Tirupathi. It is probably one of those times where you would prefer to remain confused rather than form an opinion, and so I plan to keep it this way, until another inexplicable incident.

Candid confessions in my last hour as a teenager!!!

2008-07-28T21:57:00.005+05:30

It is 28th of July and the clock just struck 11 pm... The next one hour is not an hour, neither is it 60 minutes, it is more like 3600 seconds. I count down each of these 3600 seconds one by one as they are the last 3600 seconds of a phase of my life. These few moments are my last few as a teenager as I turn 20 finally...
20!! Twenty!! Wow... i am an adult at last as far as the definition according to English literature is concerned. From thirTEEN to nineTEEN and now finally twenty... I know i just grow older by a day from today to tomorrow but there is something psychologically significant about getting out of your teens. I am not excited because it is my birthday as i dont really believe in celebrating my birthday (what have i achieved for the world to actually celebrate my birthday???... it makes more sense to celebrate 29th july as the great J.R.D.Tata's birthday as he has influenced in the shaping up of the world in his own way... it makes more sense to celebrate 29th july as fernando alonso's birthday as he has been a two time F1 champion to date...it makes more sense to celebrate 29th july as sanjay dutt's birthday as he has entertained loads of people though cinema....but celebrate 29th july as my birthday? ridiculous!!! for now at least)
[3000 secs to go] There is a sense of regret in turning 20 as this is probably the end of the most challenging yet enjoyable phase of one's life. In your early teens, life may seem harsh as it is a transition from the innocence of childhood to the crudeness of the world. You are suddenly handed responsibilities and you are answerable to the world for your failures. You are made to understand that the next few years as a teen are the most important in your life as it basically sets up your life. There is one part of you which wants to carry on with life as normal and be happy with what you get and there is this other part which compels you to take up responsibility and set goals and work to achieve these goals. Now which of these is the angelic part and which is the satanic part is something that cannot be discerned. And this is the most inconvenient period for your hormones to start kicking in. Had man been created such that these hormonal changes take place after the teens, it could have lead to more people attaining their goals. Here you are, as a teenager who has understood the importance of the years immediately ahead of you and set goals for yourself and started working to attain them and other than the obstacles you have to face in the society, the mightiest obstacle you face is yourself- your wavering mind which would be looking for the slightest distraction to weaken your resolve. Some are strong enough just ignore this satanic part of the mind and keep up their assiduousness while some succumb to it and end up choosing a different path which is less likely to lead to being "successful" in life as the society describes it. Thus a person's teen life is a rocket launcher to his future. Of course, you do have the opportunity to steer the rocket, however it took off, but often the initial momentum provided by the launch is probably what sets the rocket to attain the height.
[Hey just 1800 seconds to go... ]Now my teen life, from that point of view has been mixed. Pre-teen, I was very studious and fiercely competitive in school and loved to be on top of my class, then my resolve wavered as I entered the dreaded teens and I became this guy with multiple personality, one part wanting to freak out and the other wanting to continue being this focused studious guy. The final avatar of Ajay in his teens turned out to be a cocktail of both these, who freaked out quite a bit sometimes (during when he was regretting not being more assiduous) and who also was quite assiduous sometimes (during when he was regretting not being more freaked out). Both these traits were like the first law of yin and yang [Yin-yang are Opposing-Yin and yang describe the polar effects of phenomena]. There was this rebellious part of me which didnt want to do what I didnt like doing (and there were a lot of things I didnt like doing academically- like studying history, biology etc [loved reading these but not studying as I felt all this can be looked up in books anytime..so whats the need of memorizing]) and there was this other sincere part which wanted to do what I was supposed to be doing. These subjects made my academic life till my 10th grade pretty dull.
Then during my last years at school, I enjoyed the most in all my 19 [ 20 in another 1200 seconds] years of life. Had an enjoyable life where I used Yin and yang's second law (Yin-yang are Mutually Rooted- the yin and the yang aspect of any one phenomenon will, when put together, form the entire phenomenon) and managed to draw a balance in life. I knew I had good potential and could compete with the best of my peers. But then as time went on, I realised I am probably in the top 10 percent of the people competitively but not the top 3-4 percent, which is where you have to be in a fiercely competitive country like India. The people in the top 4 % attain what they aim for and the people who are below this 10 percent do not expect much out of themselves. It is people like me who are in this "bracket of disappointment", who end up feeling cheated. Thoughts like "had i been luckier", "had i worked harder" do keep coming up, making you feel low. I ended up that way after 12th std when I got a decent enough top 400 AIEEE state rank which would give me entry into many NITs but none in branches I desire, when I did decently enough in the JEE to clear the individual cutoffs for maths and physics but fell short in chemistry (well short actually- so no regrets), when I did decently enough in BITSAT which would give me admission into disciplines in BITS which I did not fancy taking.
[still 300 seconds left- hey dont ask me my age now.... i will answer only after 5 mins... am probably one of the very few who re into 4th yr of coll and still in their teens...thanks to my being underage...feel inferior..Anyways] Much to the disgruntlement of many of my friends and well-wishers, I joined SRM where I got CSE which is what I wanted to take up. I have absolutely no regrets to that decision I took which some people muse over even now. I have spent my last three teen years here and this has really been a transformational period. From the shy introvert in school, to the gregarious extraversive person that I am now, it has indeed been a huge transformation. Now I am more of this rebel, who questions the norm in everything I do and proceed only if it makes sense to me. I have my own set of ideals which I follow. I have really chilled out in the college part of my teen life and really had a good time. Although my college life here has not offered me as much an intellectual education as other colleges might have, it has definitely given me an exposure which I could ve not got in most other places. I feel this place has set me up wonderfully for my transformation into adulthood.
Transformation to adulthood.... now thats not far away...in fact only some 20 seconds away... countdown...13..12..11..10..7..6..4..3..2..1.. tada i am an adult now... happy birthday to me....and wishing myself a happy and prosperous future... hey ask me my age now.....i am 20 ...TWENTY...that sounds exciting...
Well...anyways i am happy at where my life is heading presently and I am getting a good opportunity to give myself another thrust when I go to UC Davis next month (again thanks to SRM). I just hope my entry into adulthood will be a smooth one and I can attain escape velocity using this thrust...
Wow .... it was nice blogging about an event that is happenening in life presently.... I started with the intention of writing a small blogpost summarizing my [now past] teen years to be and ended up deviating completely from that and writing what random thoughts i was gettting in my mind... it is 1216 am now and this is the longest i ve spent writing a blog entry... an hour and quarter almost.... Gotta end it here before more random thoughts start entering my mind.... wishes thru ph calls and msges ve started pouring in and i gtg to attend to them... will be back with hopefully a more sane blogpost next...

The beginning of a new journey!!!

2008-07-05T14:04:00.006+05:30

This entry was long due. It is just that I wanted to make sure it was going to definitely happen before I came out in public with this. At 1620 hrs IST on July the 3rd, all uncertainty vanished and now I can blog all I want about it.
This event i was talking about was my interview at the American consulate for my US visa. Now that I succeeded in getting one, I know what is ahead in the immediate future. I had got a chance to study at the highly rated Univerisity of California, Davis for the fall and winter semesters (from Sep '08 to Mar '09), thanks to a MoU signed by UCD with my college. I had applied for that and was accepted by UCD and they sent me my I-20. The only thing that was to then decide my fate was my visa interview and I had a lot at stake too. I had not really prepared for a scenario where I would not be issued a visa. We had already fixed tenants for our house in Chennai as my mother was also going to shift to Bangalore where my dad had taken up a job last year. I was initially going to move into the hostel before this UCD option came up and now I had not even booked a room at the hostel assuming that I would not be here and it is too late to get a hostel room now. So had my visa been rejected, I would ve been on the streets literally. I would probably have moved in with some of my friends who live together but fortunately I dont have to encounter that situation. And it was not such an improbable situation actually looking back at my experience in the consulate. The whole environment was hostile and it was guilty until proven innocent as far as the consulate people interviewing us were concerned. Credit to them, the Americans at the counter were quite fair and thought twice before rejecting someone. That was not the case with an American Indian woman (note that i dont use lady here as i generally would) and an African American woman at other counters, who rejected candidates with no consideration at all. Take the case of a person I met when I was standing in the queue, who was a passout from IIT chennai who was in the top 5 % of his class with a 9+ GPA and having refused a couple of 8 lakhs p.a jobs through placements at IIT because he had secured admission for MS/Ph.D at the highly reputed Georgia tech with FULL graduate assistantship. Imagine the audacity of this American Indian woman to just reject his application after 30 seconds consideration on grounds of lack financial backing. To think he had a full scholarship and did not have to even spend any money from his pocket for his education. And he had so much at stake and was hard done by just due to the arrogance of a particular woman. Its such a pity that so many Indians [including me] have to queue up outside the hostile US embassy to just get a short term visa while they can just walk into our country at their will. We even welcome them with red carpets. Would not there be such a situation ever in my lifetime where American people would queue up outside the Indian consulate in the US to be granted entry in India. I guess thats all wishful thinking. I understand I am being hypocritical as I was one of the people who queued up just a couple of days ago but I sincerely wow that I will do whatever I can to turn India into a place people from US would want to visit.
The future which was hazy, just a couple of days ago, suddenly seems bright and clear. Now [unless i have an accident while crossing the road and my face gets deformed and I require a plastic surgery and the surgeons conjure me a face which resembles that of Osama bin laden and the flight authorities detain me from entering the US mistaking me to be Osama or maybe while I am typing this blog entry I turn into ashes due to Spontaneous human combustion...nah forget it..i can think of a thousand other more plausible reasons] I know that I am taking the September 7th Cathy pacific flight at 0245 IST and going to touch down at San Fransisco at 1315 PDT. [i fly for 18 hours and still end up spending less that 11 hours travelling...wow...i love time zones....but hey as I will be flying through the pacific at one time I will be GMT+9 hrs when I fly over Japan and in if I take a short nap and wake up, I will be GMT-8 hrs....that means I jump 17 hours in a few mins!!! hey this is too complex....i just wont wear my wristwatch during the flight and get confused thinking about the time...]. And once I land at SFO, I know that I will be taking a connecting flight to Sacramento from where Davis is only a few miles away. I know that I am going to move into the apartment arranged for us by UCD with my friends. I know that I am going to fall for a blonde there. Ok academically, I know that I am going to take up courses of my interest in UCD and get good grades, conjure up a good rapport with the professors there and do some good projects there so that I would stand a great chance of getting into either UCD itself or hopefully an even better college for my MS, which is what is my aspiration. I really hope that, one year from now, I can look back at the previous sentence and rejoice about how right I was rather than cringe at the sight of it.
I guess I owe a lot to my college [especially the men who have made it possible, Prof. Gopal, Kiruba Sir, Mr. Sathyanarayan and all the others involved... wow...i never thought i would hear myself say this] for providing me this wonderful and unique opportunity, often unheard of in most colleges in India, and I just hope I can make full use of it to do something worthwhile. As, I would be spending effectively the whole of the next two semesters here, I will not be attending many more classes at SRM. It does feel a little sad to think I wont ever be attending classes with the amazing friends with whom I ve shared my life for the past three years. It does feel sad that I wont ever be attending the classes of some of the professors here whom I have known well. Correlating both, i am sadder that I wont be able to sit together with my friends and criticize and laugh at some profs whose classes (more accurately reworded as gags) have been a constant source of entertainment. I am even sadder that I wont ever get an opportunity to bunk classes at SRM. But then if I aim to move on to something bigger, I guess these sacrifices are a part of the bargain. Let me wish myself all the best for the future..

My experiences during transition into the big bad corporate world!!!

2008-06-11T14:46:00.005+05:30

After that promising preamble, and a delve into hibernation, I am back again. I had possibly picked out the worst time to start my blog as it was the middle of my sem exams and added to that there was the ongoing placement saga. So now that my part in it is over, let me just reflect upon it.
It was May the 23th 2008. When the next day dawned, TCS was going to pay a visit to my college for hiring people. I was still undecided whether to appear for it as I was inclined to wait for a production company like mindtree to come, because it was a rule in the college that once you get placed in a company, you cant sit for any other. And looking at the numbers that TCS takes, I didnt even consider not getting a job if I appear for it, as even a possibility. I took a call to actually sit for it (and of course get placed!!!) late into the evening, because I realized the job was not a priority for me because I aspire to do an MS after my undergrads and not work. So it was better to have a job under your belt for backup and move on to more important things. I went to college the next morning having shaved the previous night, having prepared my resume, dressed in formal clothes, ready to take on the interviewer once (note that I use "once" and not "if") I get through the "formality" of a first round called the aptitude test, in which about 1000 people out of the 1500 who appeared got through last year. And I was pretty upbeat about my chances of being in the top two thirds, especially in a test like an aptitude test (upbeat is an understatement; affirmative is a better word). And with that mindset, I entered into the computer labs (it was an online test) to get the formality over with. I was through with the verbal section and was waiting for the timer to countdown to 0 so that it would move automatically to the next quants section. I watched the timer countdown 5..4..3..2..1..0 and instead of moving on to the next section, the screen stayed the same except that the timer now started ticking into negatives (-1..-2..-3...). Half-startled, half-panicky, half-amused, half-exasperated, I called one of the people conducting the test and even he was baffled and directed me to another computer and asked me to login and resume from the next section, assuring me that the first section had been saved, which was logical as they had an autosave feature on every few seconds. I moved on and did the rest of the test quite well and was sure getting about 55 questions of the 72 right. I congratulated myself for getting through and was preparing my preamble when I appear for the interview as I clicked on the submit button and voila.....the next screen was a hammerblow. It read "Sorry...You have not qualified...Better luck next time". I read it and reread it and rereread it umpteen times to see if the message was coded and I had to decipher it but it read the same how many ever times I read it. Each time I read it, it seemed as if the sledgehammer was getting heavier. In a trance I walked out and met a few friends who refused to believe I had actually not got through and thought i was pulling their leg. With each passing moment, it was like being strung up by thumbs. And when I met a few friends who had made it, I felt a pang of disappointment rather than delight for them. And this made me feel more miserable that I was acting so immature. So with a heavy heart and a heavy bag too (had formal clothes, tie, resume, certificates etc) for the interview which was never going to come, I made my way back home. People suggest the computer mishap might ve been what went wrong, some say there were dummy questions for some sets, some say say there was an upper cutoff but those are just excuses. Bottomline was I was not among the top 550 in 1500 people in my college!!!
The next one week was a painful one, where each passing moment was not exactly gleeful (more because I could not measure up to the competition than because I was still unemployed) and it was further compounded by the barrage of sem exams (3 in 4 days). And then it was June 3rd at last, the day I would get the second bit at the cherry (or a bite in the second cherry) when Cognizant was to come next to college for placements. This time, I went with a more balanced frame of mind with the primary aim of getting through the aps before I thought about the interview. There was no difference in my "preparation" though (which was none at all actually as I feel aptitude tests are supposed to be an indication of how you actually are and that is determined by what you have learned all your life and not by how much last minute preps you put in by going through previous years' company papers etc which apparently keep getting repeated). I went with the frame of mind that the TCS disaster was a one off day where luck was not on my side and lightning does not strike twice. As they say, failure is the stepping stone to success but I just had to hope that only one stone was necessary. This aps was on good old paper and I did pretty well (as well as TCS, which was the hitch) and was upbeat about my chances once I submitted my paper. The results were announced in about an hour and fortunately I had got through. The next day, I went for the interview which only in the evening after a 6 hour long wait. It was a great experience and went on for a mammoth 30 mins. I felt I did as well as anyone could ve possibly done as the interviewer took the bait I deliberately laid out when I told her programming was my passion and so all my technical questions were directed towards programming which I manged to ace. After another 3 hour wait the results were read out in the auditorium at 8 pm and as each name was called out, it seemed like a final countdown. I was quite confident but still it was one of those times I was nervous because I was not nervous. When at last the auditorium resonated with my name, it seemed to linger in the air for eternity and seemed to echo from all directions and when I grasped it at last, it was a feeling of relief flooding through more than anything else. I couldn't have stood another failure as it would ve created self-doubt more than anything else. However the relief transformed into sorrow once again the names of many of friends who had done the interview well, were not called out. I had experienced what it felt to get rejected and it was one experience that I would not forget so easily. The auditorium was one of the most sombre places to be in when there are 300 depressingly sad faces among 550 people. It was embarrassing to sit there as one among the 236 employed people to witness the welcome speech as the others trudged out. I would ve given anything not to be present there. There was a mini-celebration of sorts with 235 delighted people throwing around a cake brought by our new employers but I just sat there in my seat with feelings of amusement of watching everyone get so excited and relief of getting through but happiness?...Not really as the disappointed faces swam before me. I felt like a dementor had kissed me. But then that is how life goes. Whoever you are and however you are, you need something which is not in your hands (popularly called "luck") to be on your side. So all I can do is to hope that there are not many stepping stones between success and failure for these people who re not placed as yet.
It was only as the next day dawned that I felt some happiness for myself. It was heightened by the fact that it was second time lucky for me. In life, when you succeed a task in which you ve experienced failure, it is indeed doubly delightful. But it is always better not to have an opportunity to experience double delight but keep experiencing single delight with success on the first attempt, as the period preceding the double delight is not the most delightful.

My first sincere attempt at blogging

2008-05-14T13:34:00.007+05:30

At last here I come into the blogosphere... Are you scratching your head and tickling your gray cells as to where you might ve seen that one-liner... It is most probable that you would ve started to journey with me, when I undertook my several attempts at blogging in the past, only to find that the journey ended as abruptly as it started. The first time, being the perfectionist that I am, I spent an hour thinking about what name my blog should have as I felt it should be a reflection of a person's thoughts and attitude and came up with way too many options which made me ditch the attempt. After a month, I cooked up some weird name and was about to click on the create blog button, when I contemplated whether I would be active enough to keep posting regularly and the immediate answer was pessimistic. So I abandoned that attempt too. Then, for the third time, after intense pressure by loads of friends, who were blog-addicts and wanted to make me one too, I finally created blog and wrote the preamble (like i am writing now) and even posted an entry once. Then I got my hands on Fifa 08 and i was immediately addicted to it and so felt like blogging was a waste of time when I could spend it in playing fifa.

Now here I am at last with what will (hopefully) be my first sincere attempt at what is a pasttime-turned-addiction for many people, called blogging. In fact, it seems embarrassing and even taboo in today's world not to have a blog. Now why do people blog? There are two kinds of non-profit blogs in the world: one by means of which a person shares his thoughts with other people. These blogs are attractive and written keeping in mind the target audience, with the aim that the people reading the blog are delighted by it. In these blogs, the posts deal with a variety of subjects, that appeal to most people and which people can associate themselves with. And there is the other kind of blog, where the blogger writes for the happiness he gets in venting his feelings and expressing himself to no one in particular. He can blog his thoughts at will, however profound or uninteresting or controversial they may be without any fear of the society or other factors. The purpose of such a blog is only to please one's alter-ego. This blog is of the latter type which is written to vent my thoughts so that I would end up happier. The posts are not written keeping in mind that an audience would be reading it. A sincere blog should be a reflection of one's thoughts rather than a showpiece where one writes (about) stuff people want to read. And if my views end up drawing an audience unintentionally, it would be a bonus. I christened this blog pensieve because it gives me a medium to empty my thoughts when I am full of them and reflect upon these thoughts at leisure, analogous to the pensieve Dumbledore uses in the Harry Potter series.

I am a critic by nature and love to profoundly analyze things around me, however minuscule they may seem. And a critic who keeps his thoughts to himself is an oxymoron in itself. And what better way to share one's views than the blogosphere. So with the sense of duty of sharing my views flowing out of me, embark with me on this all new journey (in fact I hope to make it an odyssey) which I vow would not end abruptly like last time... Enough of this preamble... Fasten your seatbelts. Wheeeeeee!!!!! Here we go!!!!!