MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 3

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

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

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

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!!!

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!!!

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!!!

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.