MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 5

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

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

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.