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..