sunshine

Des-Pair

2012-01-23T23:20:00.003-05:00

The pair had remained together for almost four years now. Then, in a series of commonplace events, they were separated. Not once, but twice in a span of twenty four hours. Unfortunately, the second time, there was no opportunity for reunion.

The first evening, they were dining at a restaurant. It was not until she reached for the car door, fastened the seatbelt, and drove off that she realized one of her gloves was missing. Black and leathered, she loved it for years because of the way it fit snugly. The woolen ones usually did not endure rain or snow, but this one did, and she held on to it for years. She told him the moment she realized the right one was missing. He had instantly swerved the car and driven back to the restaurant they had dined at not even an hour ago. She was grateful, although she kept it to herself. Once there, she went inside looking for it, and the server told her that he had found nothing. They looked in the parking lot and the nearby streets as well. He even went out of the way looking for it in the freezing wintry night. But her black glove seemed to have disappeared in the darkness. Disheartened and cold, she drove back. It was while locking the car door that he had the insight to look inside the car. It was particularly dark, and she was thrilled when he had emerged from her side of the car holding her right glove. She had dropped it in the car and never found it.

The next evening, he had taken her around New York City, showing her places he liked. She had never really cared for the city, but she liked what she saw on that cold wintry evening. The city was shrouded in white after the snowstorm, and she was surprised to see that people moved on with their life despite the chilly winds and the freezing weather. The city definitely had a personality, people dressed fashionably, and during the few hours they walked, she was amazed to see hundreds of varieties of black winter coats, jackets, and boots. They walked in the snow, enjoyed some great food, warmed up to some aromatic coffee at one of the local coffee joints, and it was soon time to say goodbye even before she was ready to leave. The subway was somewhat crowded, and she saw the train enter the station at a distance. In a hurry, she subconsciously ungloved her right hand to pull out the ticket from her handbag in haste. It was not until the train started that she realized her right hand was bare. They were about to say goodbye, but she had looked at him helplessly, and the next moment, they had gotten off the train at the next station. It was not possible to get into the other side of the platform that easily, so they climbed back the stairs, got outside the freezing streets, waited for the traffic signal, crossed the road amongst the slush of water and ice puddles, found another subway outlet, and had made their way to the station, this time in an opposite direction. The train arrived, they boarded it, got off the next station, got outside, crossed the streets, and after about twenty minutes of taking trains and crossing streets, they were back at the point where she thought she lost her glove. Only, there was no glove to be found this time. They looked everywhere, on the platform, near the ticket swiping machine, even in the trash cans. He asked the lady at the ticket counter if someone had dropped off a missing glove. Only there was no finding it this time. She was feeling guilty for getting him late, and thankful for all the effort he had taken. She got fresh tickets and boarded the next train, holding on to her lone glove now.

The incident evoked her philosophical thoughts on her journey back home. Losing something that belonged to you was always saddening, no matter how inexpensive it was. However, the pain was somewhat worse when you lost something you had in pairs. A lot of memories get embedded in the process of possessing things, and of course there is this guilt associated with losing things, voices in your head blaming you for being careless, voices of your parents, teachers, and elders reprimanding you every time you lost a pen or a penny. But more than the guilt of being careless, it was the sadness evoked out of seeing a pair separated. She held on to the other glove, which was now useless to her. She would soon replace it with a new pair, and knowing her, she would not have the heart to throw the old one away. It would probably sit in her cupboard for the next few years, not having a use. She often misplaced her eye liners and eye pencils, but she never felt guilty about them. However, every time she misplaced an earring, she felt horrible about it. It was the pain that came with the separation of a pair. She wondered where her other pair was now, perhaps brazening the ice and being stomped over by people somewhere on the streets.

Sometimes, it is easier to get over the loss of something just by being single, compared to the pain and distress of losing something as a pair. No matter how well you move on to do great things in life on your own, make new bonds, see new places, and attain new heights, your other half always takes with them a little bit of you, of your memories, and of your life, leaving you a little empty inside, and forever reminding you that life would perhaps been a little different, maybe in a good way or in a bad way, if fate had not connived in a series of events to separate you. Your losses as a pair always outweigh your individual losses. Looking back, she could have perhaps been more careful with her glove. She could perhaps have not removed it. She could perhaps have not cared about missing the train, taking her own sweet time to ensure she was holding on to everything she possessed. In retrospective theory, you can replay the events as many ways as you want to. In practice, you just move on with your losses, your pains, and nothing more but a handful of perspectives.

sunshine

Not eve(red)dy

2012-01-03T19:00:00.000-05:00

Driving after a while becomes second nature. You do it subconsciously, just like walking to the department every morning, multitasking while talking on the phone, or giving directions to your home. When you are new to driving, you are always alert, looking for the faint signs, every change in traffic light even from a distance, of pedestrians crossing, or changing speed limits, or slowing down signs, even birds flying or cars passing you. With time, you learn to relax while driving, your seat starts to recline more, you begin to brake and accelerate without remembering it, and you sometimes drive to the nearby grocery store, not even remembering what you saw on the road. You brake to a red light instinctively, slow down sub-consciously, without even aware of doing it. Perhaps that is when one needs to be worried.

Although driving has transformed from an uncomfortable to a comfortable and now to a relaxing task for me, I have never taken it lightly. I still indicate while changing lanes, slow down while taking a U-turn, or look for cars in the blind sight while changing lanes. It so happened that my friend pinged me one night when I was about to go to bed. It was almost midnight, and he asked if he could get a ride back home. He had missed the last bus. Although sleepy, I left to pick him up and drop him home. I knew the roads, hence did not take my GPS. I took the right turns, picked him up, chatted with him while driving, and dropped him home. And on my way back, I did the most horrible thing I have done in my driving history. I jumped a red light.

I knew it instantly I did it. I was tired, sleepy, and I still wonder how I did it. I have never jumped a red light, and never hope to do it again. The consequences could be disastrous if it was not for a cold wintry December night when the streets were deserted. I had never experienced this, but the moment I realized I had jumped the red light, my first instinct was to brake and drive back to the signal in reverse motion. Horrible and fatal mistake. Never try to go back if you have accidentally jumped a red light.

I came home feeling sick and dizzy. Every time I replayed the situation in my head, I felt nauseous. I could have been hit sideways by an oncoming vehicle. I could have had other people in my car. I could have been dead. Not only had I endangered myself, I had also endangered oncoming traffic. I have never considered myself as a traffic hazard, and although it was a lucky escape, I felt horrible.

Driving is as much a privilege as a responsibility. Whenever I hear horror stories about cars hitting and slamming into each other, or pass by cars in an accident with the blinking blue light of the police and the ambulance, I always thank myself that I was not one of them. I could have been one of them, with or without my fault. Jumping a red light was scary, and I hope it never happens again.

sunshine

Staying Hungry, Staying Wise

2012-01-02T22:59:00.000-05:00

New year is the time when the world goes high on making resolutions. I read somewhere that “A new year’s resolution lasts as long as the first week of January”. Truer words were never spoken. While Facebook is replete with updates from people who resolve to lose weight, be tolerant to fellow-desis from the Bay Area, spend less time Facebooking (ironically announcing it on Facebook), strive to find a higher truth (whatever that means), cut down on spending in shopping, or waste less time listening to Kolaveri di, I wonder how many of these resolutions actually attain fruition. This gives an interesting glimpse into human behavior, where some invisible force throughout the world not only makes us guilty for our actions (or the lack of it), but also makes us announce publicly a list of all the things we will probably never do.

I do not make new year resolutions. I make resolutions, not just during the new year though. Last summer, I made a resolution to cut down on eating outside. I had to make a sudden trip to India because my father was ill, and I had to save for the trip. Not eating out was my only serious resolution, and it was hard. It was hard not because I am a big fan of eating out, but because these days, eating out is a major form of socialization. We have all the time to stalk people and stay abreast of gossip, but we do not have the time to invest into cutting, chopping, and cooking. I did not stop eating out altogether, I just reduced it to once a week, then once in two weeks, until I reached a stage where I rarely wanted to eat out. I started with saying no to outside meets, but yes to potlucks at home. I continued it with making less frequent visits to Chipotle and Starbucks (I used to frequent them every alternate day). I started skipping get-togethers, and with each dinner meet missed, the peer pressure of making it to the next one got worse. I would order a glass of water at the coffee shop if that was my only option. It was about saving money. It was about taking a little step toward a healthy lifestyle. But most importantly, it was taking a major step toward self-disciplining yourself, and sticking to that. I feel I cared more about money when I did not earn it. I started to hang out with people in smaller groups. I would call them up, asking if I can come over for dinner, and always bring a dish or two to share. Every time I went out, I made sure I had some yoghurt or bananas with me. I started rewarding myself by buying things I am passionate about (for example, office supplies and photography gear). I have eaten out once at Chipotle, and have been to Starbucks once since summer. That is more than six months. We went for a little trip on new year, and I had packed some bananas and yoghurt in case we got hungry after the hike. I mentally congratulated myself when I could convince my friend to not eat out, and we came home to enjoy two courses of chicken curry, shrimp curry, and some lentils, all prepared at home. This morning, I put some time into chopping vegetables and making an omelet and some coffee for my friend, rather than head to ihop.

I am not going to start telling you the advantages of not eating out. It works great for me, but that might not be your calling. It works for me because I save money, plan my food supplies better, restrict my socializing (if socializing is equivalent to eating outside), feel less guilty about eating unhealthy, and afford the best quality stuff (the best quality of organic food is still cheaper than eating outside). Most importantly, I feel I have a say in deciding my life, about which get-togethers I want to go to, and which I want to avoid. I like the power of being able to say no. I spend more time cooking for friends at home, and hang out with people who spend time cooking for me. When I was in Calcutta, I ate at home every day. I might not know what food in Oh Calcutta or Mainland China tastes like, but I sure know how good it feels when my mother, grandmother, father, and even my neighbor aunt put in the time and effort to cook something I enjoy.

Since this was not a new year resolution, it did not die by the end of the first week of January. I still have to work on disciplining myself in sleeping earlier, working out everyday, reading and writing more regularly, or keeping myself motivated through the rest of my doctoral study. However, minimizing eating out is a resolution I am going to observe for life. I am going to eat out only when either the food or the company is compelling enough for me, or when I know I am going to die for the lack of food.

sunshine

Goodbye Woes

2011-12-27T00:17:00.001-05:00

Saying goodbye to old friends was never easy. After having shared an exceptionally great (almost) three years with my camera, I bought an upgraded model this Christmas. For the longest time, I was undecided about whether I should do it or not. You see, I realized the fun of photography after I purchased my first D SLR in 2009. I started going places, and my camera always went with me. Be it road trips, parties, outdoor events, or hikes, my camera always accompanied me. I sometimes used it to get through boring events when I would shy away from conversations in the name of taking pictures. I was so proud of it, and so proud of all the pictures I took using it. But sometimes, knowing more is harmful. As I started to read up more about photography, I realized that my camera can only take me so far. I realized I had (almost) learned everything that I could learn using this camera. It was perhaps the right time to graduate to the next level.

I felt my new camera would make me ecstatic, especially after all the money I spent on it. I am not so sure about it. I like it alright, but I feel guilty as hell. I feel guilty that I decided to part with my old camera. The previous two cameras I had (which were not D SLRs by the way), I gave it away to my father. So I never really felt bad about them, knowing they are still in the family. Now, I no longer require my old D SLR camera. I should sell it, and I tried spreading the word. But something in me felt so sad and guilty when I did that. Perhaps this was attachment, and the result of spending every significant moment of my life for the past three years with my camera. I have lost count of the number of pictures I have taken, of the numerous occasions I have witnessed with my camera. I have often ventured out on my own, for hikes or for long drives, just with my camera. I realized that I could close my eyes and use my camera, I am so used to it by now. Somewhere down the line, a typical human emotion like fondness, usually reserved for animate beings, got transferred into an inanimate object. An inanimate object I learned to call my own, and shared three years of my life with.

I have given myself some time. If by the end of it I still have a sad feeling about it, I will perhaps hold on to my camera. Not a very wise decision perhaps, but a little bit of irrational emotion, especially an emotion like attachment, never hurt anyone.

sunshine

Post-Mortem of a Post

2011-12-13T02:34:00.003-05:00

I am interested to know, what exactly goes behind the success of a post, from a strictly academic point of view of course. Measuring the “success” of a post is not that relative or abstract when there are defined indicators. For example, the number of comments, the number of tweets, or the number of “Likes” on Facebook are some indicators that define the success of the post, not to mention the content of the comments. I am interested to know, because last week, I wrote a post for Amreekan Desi, that had a phenomenal outcome and made history for me. As of today, 9 days into publishing it, it stands at 625 Facebook Likes. This is huge, quite unlike anything any of my writings have ever garnered. I am not complaining, why should I? I am ecstatic. However, I am curious about what made this post a hit. I have a few theories, but I do not know if they work.

Content Theory

I would think the content resonated with most people who read it. Barring a few who did not like my post, most agreed that they identified themselves in a similar situation. I am somewhat hesitant with this theory, because in the past, I have written many posts that people identified with. None of those got as much attention as this one did. In fact, this is not even one of my better written posts. I have written much better posts in the past. I have even written about similar content, of the whole alienation experience when you live in a different country. So is it content after all?

Platform Theory

Amreekan Desi (AD) is undoubtedly a well-written, popular and a widely acclaimed blog. With thousands of readers, I am sure this post was bound to get some attention. So is it the fact that it was presented to a wider audience? I do not know.

Theory of Critical Mass

It could be possible that there is a critical mass of readers and more importantly, sharers for every post. I do not know what that critical mass is, but when it crosses that critical mass, it spreads like wildfire perhaps? When 2-3 people read something and share, chances are more that it would be a dying flame lost even before it has spread a significant number of times. However, when 200-300 people are sharing the same thing, the chances of it being lost or dying becomes significantly lower. Perhaps it is not content or platform alone, but a phenomenon of crossing that critical mass? I don’t really know.

Help me think of other factors that could lead to the success of a post. I know there are measurement biases and confounding factors involved here (for example, having or not having friends who network widely, and who spread the word). Still, there has to be something underlying, maybe singly, or maybe a combination of factors, that determine the popularity of a post. I have written travelogues with much time and effort that have done reasonably well in the past. However, on a bored Monday morning, in between listening to class lecture and introspecting about the value of taking that class, I had ended up writing a short post on why Portugal is an amazing country to visit. That post had become an instant hit, got widely circulated, showed up on travel websites of Portugal, was instantly loved by the Portuguese community, and currently stands at close to 400 “likes” on Facebook. No one really knows what worked right with that post, and when I tried emulating that formula again, things did not work. A hastily scribbled account of a country had produced an effect that carefully crafted travelogues that failed to create. In any case, given that the shelf life of a post is not much, maybe days, maybe weeks, I am currently basking in the glory of finally having written something that has gained the readership I have always dreamed of. Trust me, modesty and everything aside, it is an awesome feeling.

sunshine

Season of Publishing

2011-12-03T16:44:00.005-05:00

It has been more than 6 years since blogging happened to me. Even after all these years, someone appreciating my writing, saying a few nice words, liking or sharing a post on Facebook, or getting me published always thrills me. Hence this post.

I have always taken my writing seriously. That is one of the few things I enjoy doing. In my professional life, I do one of the two- I either run statistical analysis, or write. Someone told me the other day, “You don’t feel stats, you just do it. But you feel writing.”, I was taken aback by the honesty in what my friend had said. True, I do stat because I need to earn my living, I need to finish my Ph.D. on time, get published, find a job, and accomplish. That doesn’t mean stat thrills me. Writing does.

I have often ranted about my alienating experiences in the US, and more so, in India. Recently, I wrote an article about the same, that was published by Amreekan Desi. Hence wanted to share the news. This article was somewhat influenced by my thoughts expressed here and here. Hope you enjoy reading it.

Thank you Amreekan Desi for the honor.

sunshine

In My Good Books

2011-12-02T22:19:00.000-05:00

The library materials were clearly overdue, but I had no clue why they showed me an amount that I did not owe. Was not it about a dollar late fee per day? I think I had not noticed the date of return for two days, before I renewed it. I usually do not delay returning stuff, but confusingly enough, I had received no automated email that prompts me to renew the items. To add to it, it was Thanksgiving holiday, and the librarian, probably an undergraduate who was filling in at the last hour, had no clue why they were showing a late fee of $14 for a delay of 2 days. She was not of much help on the phone, but asked me to call back the next business day, which was a 4 days away. No big deal, just that I had to remember doing that think in between the one hour break between classes on Monday. I wrote it down in my calendar. I hope they were not charging me for those 4 days between Thanksgiving break and Monday.

Monday morning, I went and explained the situation. The librarian looked up my records and found the $14 arrears. I explained my situation. I explained the mistake in calculation. I was ready to pay upfront, but I had no idea why it was showing me that extra amount. He had no clue either. It just compounded the confusion. He asked his manager to help out. This meant another round of explanations on my part, about how I had delayed renewal by two days, about how I never received that renewal email, and so on. Mercy !!

I started explaining to the manager, and must have blabbered for a full minute when he pulled up my account, did something, and smiled at me. He told me he had cancelled the late charge. Clearly there were a series of confusing events, of missed emails and incorrect account balances. He figured it wasn’t worth all our valuable time. No explanations, no paperwork, nothing !

Little things people do around me make my day. I walked out of the library, happy, smiling, and debt-free.

sunshine

Why Rockstar Rocks

2011-11-21T02:19:00.000-05:00

We sometimes find ourselves wondering how a particular movie could do well when it had nothing really to show or say. On the other hand, some movies are made so well, yet are not appreciated by the larger audience. I have a theory about the disparity between the personal appreciation and mass appreciation of movies. We often find ourselves attracted to a form of art we connect to at a certain level. Movies are no exception. For example, I absolutely loved Rockstar despite the poor reviews it got. I connected to it at a certain level, which perhaps others did not. I loved the movie despite its obvious shortcomings, breaks in the linearity, many logical flaws and unanswered questions it evoked, the bad acting by Heer, and the non-uniform pace of the movie. No one knows why JJ visited Kashmir and still had to wait for a trip to Prague to meet Heer’s husband. No one knows what seeing a psychiatrist had to do with bone marrow aplasia. There are several such unanswered questions, unanswered to the logical mind. Yet the movie resonates at a certain level, probably echoing the artistic self. This is a dark movie, and some people do not appreciate darkness. I do not watch a movie expecting it to be realistic. Yet it is a work of art, and while we sometimes connect to art, we sometimes do not. It doesn’t matter who the female protagonist was, she might as well have been a tree trunk. For the movie is about JJ, his pain, his passions, his darkness of personality, and his saga of unrequited love. Have you ever read Wuthering Heights? JJ so reminded me of Heathchiff. The novel does not make sense at the logical level, and I have always thought Heathcliff’s obsession for Catherine was paranormal. Yet the novel is an epic, probably because it has appealed to generations at a certain level. The same goes for Rockstar. It was not so much a realistic tale for me as it was a work of art. The visuals, the cinematography, the music, the locales, and Ranbir Kapoor are the best things in the movie in no particular order. I loved seeing Prague on screen. I absolutely loved the character JJ, his passion, and Ranbir’s superb acting. Other than Ranbir, I think only Saif Ali Khan (who is a veteran in the field) could have done justice to the role (according to me). The character of JJ got me riveted. Who knows how things would turn out if this was a typical love story, where JJ meets Heer, they fall in love at first sight, he finds a job, they get married, have triplets, and so on? Ever wondered what happens to those love stories that do not fall in the socially normative spectrum? How do they find closure? Do they move on and find love with different people, or do they live in hopes that unrequited love will find closure someday? No one knows.

For every review that did not speak highly of the movie or Ranbir’s acting skills, I claim that I loved the movie. True, it is not the best made movie, and there are obvious flaws, but if you can watch the movie for what it is, rather than what it is not, you will perhaps enjoy the experience as much as I did.

sunshine

Strategies for Successful Coding

2011-11-18T16:52:00.002-05:00

I was never exposed to the world of coding before I started graduate school. I thought it was mostly for computer programmers, but apparently, statisticians do it a lot. Earlier this semester, I started learning Stata, and I must confess, I went slightly crazy learning it. I spent hours staring at the data and none of the codes I wrote for cleaning and analyzing data made sense to me. The weekly assignments were due every Monday 9 am, and I have never been more traumatized at the prospect of spending 14-15 hours every weekend coding. I am perhaps one of those outlier cases with an extremely slow learning curve, and some things just don’t make sense to me unless I draw diagrams and flowcharts. However, I am beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel, and you will never know how much joy a simple 20 line code running successfully brings you, unless you have spent 4 hours writing that code and staring at the data wondering why it would not run. In the process, I picked up some strategies that have worked for me, and I might be rehashing things that already seem obvious to you, but I will share my wisdom nevertheless.

1. Organize

Try to be extremely meticulous and careful about organizing data. Make folders and subfolders, but do not overdo it to the point that it increases work for you. Unlike Indian parents who take credit for naming their babies something that will take years for them to master enunciating or spelling, keep simple names and avoid using “underscores” if you can. If naming a file M9ScoreSummary suffices, do not try naming it Mathematics_Grade9_Score_Summary. You will waste time typing a long name every time, and will significantly increase your chances of making mistakes. Keep a separate notebook as a key for identifying actual names, lest you forget it at some point. The more time and effort you put in organizing your initial data, the better off you are in terms of not splitting hairs. Most importantly, don’t leave it to your brain for remembering things. Write them down.

2. Engage

Imagine spending a good whole week learning to code, getting codes running, and then going away for a month long trip to Timbuktu. Chances are that nothing would make sense to you when you are back. You spent all this time and effort boosting your learning curve, and now it is all gone. The more you do it, the better you get at it. So while in the initial stages of learning, spend some hours every day doing that. Remember as a child how your mommy insisted you spent at least two hours solving math problems every day, and that too first thing in the morning if it was a weekend? Not that all of you went on to become math majors or math professors. However, since the learning is so application oriented, and requires you to develop skills observing, getting dexterous, analyzing, and learning the logic, you should spend every day practicing it during the learning phase.

3. Attention to detail

There is a lot that can go wrong over a missed semicolon, an extra underscore, or simple typing an N for an M (the same reason why the more succinct your data naming system is, the better). Don’t run a code blindly unless you have a clear reasoning of why you are doing it. Don’t use the “cd” command unless you know it is meant to change directories, else you will keep looking for your file in a random folder all day long. Remember the “i” command overwrites your original file, so always make sure to save it as something different, like “i_different” if you do not want to mess with your original dataset. Pay attention to coloring details, it once took me six hours to figure out that my data will not run because all my numbers were coded red (string variables) and not black (numeric variables). Learning a coding language is no different compared to learning a language. It is very intuitive and logical. There is a reason your teachers taught you to begin every sentence with a capital (upper case) letter, end every sentence with a full stop, and use punctuations. Every bit of code you feed into Stata has some meaning to it. Stata is not crazy (although I have often alleged it to be), and it will not spew output if you screw up even a single alphabet. What more, even if it spews output, there is no guarantee that it is the correct one. So use your brain, and pay attention to minute details.

4. Seek help

Learn to look for help whenever you are stuck. It is great to cogitate and analyze issues in your head, but staring at numbers can get so overwhelming that by the time you have figured out a solution, you will be too tired to do anything with the solution. Sometimes you overlook a single missing command that makes all the difference, and a fresh pair of eyes looking at the data spots it right away. Google is a wonderful resource, and so are colleagues and professors.

5. Work hard, and work smart.

Learn to use various tools that make your life easy. Why wash clothes by hand when you can access a washing machine? Don’t write a thousand lines of code if you can get away with a hundred. Learn to use loops, macros, egen commands, foreach commands, and the various other tools that make your life easy. I resisted it for the longest time because it did not seem intuitive first, and looked scary. My codes did not run when I used the tools, the data messed up, and I gave up. Eventually I sat with my professor for three hours and figured it out (somewhat). Those three hours you put into learning it is going to save you 300 hours of future work and 3,000 lines of writing codes. I see it as a difference between calculating mathematical solutions by hand and then learning to use a calculator. First, you learn the entire process of doing calculations by hand. Then you have the added responsibility to learning how to operate a calculator. You realize it is not worth your time (especially if you have deadlines) and continue to calculate things by hand. Here is my advice. Be thorough about how to calculate without a calculator. Then invest some more time getting used to a calculator. This way even if you make mistakes, you would have developed the intuition to go back and see what went wrong. If you only knew how to use a calculator, you would never be able to function without one, or detect coding errors if you ran into one.

My biggest learning and advice from my experience is, learn to play around with data. There is no learning greater than the one that comes from playing around with systems, making mistakes, going back to fix them, and self-training yourself using structured resources (like professors, forums, and books) and a little bit of external guidance every now and then. Remember, learning to code is not research. It is just a tool you learn to help you do research. You are still dependent on your brain and your analyzing ability at the end of the day.

Happy coding.

sunshine

My Thanksgiving List

2011-11-18T04:18:00.002-05:00

Normally, I do not associate myself with Thanksgiving and Halloween as well as I do with Christmas. It could be the result of childhood associations, or the lack of it. It could be the cracks in my cross-cultural blending. However, one does not need to celebrate Thanksgiving in order to be thankful in life. Early Friday morning when my codes are running smoothly after laboring over fixing glitches for hours, I thought this should be reason enough to be thankful. My list below in no way captures things in entirety, it just helps me get some perspective in life as I plan to spend a five-day long Thanksgiving vacation writing papers, running codes, and preparing for the impending final exams.

1. I am thankful for the rich educational experience I have had. I am thankful I get to spend most of my time in academic pursuits. I am thankful for the cross-cultural and cross-national educational experience I have had in two different countries under very different educational settings.

2. I am thankful for an understanding family, who might not always agree with my views, but leave me alone most of the time.

3. I am thankful for my health. I know things will start going downhill someday, and it scares me to death to see people my age suffering from cardiac problems and cancer. Illness is definitely something that gives you perspective in life.

4. I am thankful to the world of creativity. Everything we do in life is in some way our effort to pursue creativity. Be it photography, be it writing, be it having children, or doing a PhD, all of us find some corner of creativity in this world for us.

5. I am thankful for the number of travel experiences I have had, both national and international. I have always wanted to see what the world looks like in places I have never been to, and with time and patience, I have been inching forward little by little.

6. I am thankful for the little nook and corner I call my space, my home. I realize not everyone is fortunate to have a home, and although I love traveling, nothing makes me happier when I am home.

7. I am thankful to God for being gainfully employed. I am thankful to God for my first job as a teacher. I loved that job, and I would not be doing what I am doing today if I had not had that job.

8. I am thankful that someone introduced me to the world of books, writing, and movies. My world would not be the same without them.

9. I am thankful that I am introverted, and do not mind spending time alone. I have known how scary the thought of being alone is for some people.

10. I am thankful for my belief in the resilience of humankind. I am thankful for this wonderful present that life is. It is great to live life with the knowledge that death is inevitable, that it is all going to end someday, and it is but the little time we have that we use in pursuing our beliefs, whatever they are.

sunshine

No Strings Attached

2011-11-14T02:13:00.000-05:00

On a cold Sunday evening, starting from the evening until well past midnight, it has taken me more than 7 hours to figure out why a simple code would not run. I checked the data, I looked up Google, I emailed the professor, I posted a new thread of message in the class discussion forum. However, nothing worked. I could not generate a simple bar graph using two variables in stata. I took breaks, I paced up and down my home, I sometimes sipped some water. The assignment was due the following day, and the professor had promised it shouldn’t take that long. Then why was the code not working?

After seven plus hours of thinking, contemplating, frowning, agonizing, staring at the data, seeking for help, excogitating, and cerebrating, I finally spotted the problem. Every numeric information I had in my dataset, stata for some inexplicable reason thought was a string data. Now why would stata think an achievement score percentile would be string data, I have no idea. Some serious googling indicated that string data was coded red, and numeric data was coded black. With the sinking feeling, I went back to my dataset and checked. There was blood everywhere.

All it took me was a simple command, “destring, replace”. Within seconds, stata had converted most variables from red to black. There are a few that still look red, but I am past caring.

I cried the moment stata converted everything from red to black. I don’t know if the tears were for happiness, relief, or tension release.

I cried, because it took me seven plus hours on a Sunday evening to figure out that every numeric data was being read as string data. And all it took to fix it was a simple command. Whether I am stupid, naïve, or lack sharpness to survive graduate school, I will never know. This could be one of your unfortunate evenings if you were in graduate school. If you are interested in graduate school, please ensure that you have virtues like patience, hard work, and persistence in your toolkit.

Finally, my data looks as if there are no strings attached.

sunshine

I Proposed … They Accepted

2011-11-03T01:25:00.001-04:00

Last year this time, I was 2 months into my PhD program. I was fretting about my preliminary exam due in the next 3 months. I was struggling with learning to critique papers and write literature reviews.

The same time this year, I finished my qualifiers. Then I proposed, and they accepted. Not once, or twice, but thrice. This summer, I sent out 3 proposals for 2 national conferences. Academic daddy had made it clear that if I wanted to attend these conferences, I had to make sure that I had a research agenda, wrote a good proposal, and it got accepted. Fair deal. I was extra keen on getting accepted, since one of the conference venues was international. Hence, I sent out 2 proposals. Just to make sure I ended up going somewhere at least, I sent the last one to another conference.

One by one, all three of them got accepted in the last 4 days. First, it was the joy of delivering twins, and yesterday, I got the news they were actually triplets. When I checked the website for reviews, what I saw was a miracle. For one of my proposals, both my peer reviewers had rejected it based on certain methodological flaws. However, the editors still went ahead and accepted it because the topic was important enough, and flaws could be fixed. My last one made it despite a 100% rate of rejection.

Needless to say, I have been on cloud 9. As a student 14 months into the program, I had not even hoped for a single acceptance. However, I no longer attribute it to the lack of confidence or experience. When you are so new to the program, sometimes you do not know how important your findings are. I analyzed my data, looked at my findings with nonchalance and thought to myself, “Whatever”. My adviser looked at it and got really excited about the findings. That day, I realized that although I was learning to analyze data, I had still not developed the eye to chaff good data from bad data. I looked at diamonds and thought they were just stones.

Today, I write this post as a tribute to my academic daddy once again. I have not had many academic role models in my life, but one fine day, I just got lucky. Like my data, one fine day, I found a gem of an adviser and didn’t realize it until I started to see the results of his advising. He has pushed me to the best of my abilities, and there were times when I was stressed, unhappy, and disillusioned. However, this has been a part of the rigorous training. And this reminds me of a quote from Newton,

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

For once, I do not feel the stress of the possibility of not finding a job. I will exult in the current achievements, get those suckers out for publication (my papers I mean), and try finishing the PhD aee ess aee pee now.

sunshine

Happy Diwali, Bollywood?

2011-10-28T03:03:00.001-04:00

I always thought that Bollywood would have a healthy collection of songs suitable for any Indian festival, but I am not so convinced anymore. The lack of an optimal number of songs dedicated to the festival Diwali (optimal number n being greater than five) only reconfirms my theory that ours is a sex-driven race, just like any other species in the animal kingdom. Have you ever thought why there are hundreds of songs for Holi, Sagai, Sangeet, Shaadi, Karwa Chauth, God Bharai, or even Nag Panchami (characterized by the sinuous dance moves of a reptile-turned-heroine-turned-reptile cursed by some black robe wearing evil man) but only three songs for Diwali? I would argue that in a testosterone and estrogen-driven society where macro-level phenomenon like preening, grooming, mate hunting, courtship, marriage, and procreation exist in any random order, there is no respectable place for a festival which lacks the insinuations of the primal needs of man, namely rain, color, hormones, or the need to touch, want, and hug. Come to think of it, there are hundreds of songs not just for festivals, but for seasons, be it the cot-displacing brrrring of the winter when the khatiya is begged to be sarkaoed because of jaada, the jeth ki garmi waali dopahar (where the heroine instructs the hero - aake god mein utha thaam le baiyan), or the obvious tip tip barsa spawning season. After all, what could be so inviting about a festival characterized by crackers, ear-deafening sounds, the smell of gunpowder, and a bunch of cranky policymakers unhappy about noise pollution? Images of a heavily endowed woman in a flimsy white sari drenched in the rain running around while a male chases her with Holi colors rings a few familiar bells. However, imagine a woman gyrating her hips with a bunch of sparklers and crackers in her hand, hurling fire crackers at unsuspecting males every now and then and singing “Wanna be your chammak challo”? I fail to imagine the latent sexual overtones in this setting. No wonder Bollywood has never really considered dedicating entire songs to the pursuit of the celebration of light and sound, two very important concepts in an extremely dry subject called physics. Sure there are songs with occasional shots of the chick and the lad entwined, playing around with a bunch of sparklers (remember the song Mujhse Mohabbat Ka from Hum Hai Rahi Pyar Ke?), but a random youtube search for Diwali songs yields three results, one from the movie Home Delivery which is not really a “pataakha” item song in any respect, an old song from the time of Akbar where Mukesh’s adenoidal voice (although very melodious) of “Ek who bhi Diwali thi, ek yeh bhi Diwali hai, Ujda hua gulshan hai, rota hua maali hai” sets off a chain reaction of melancholy potent enough to extinguish any number of sparklers and crackers in the world (let’s face it), and another song from the year 1946, where the heroine’s sad state of mind reminded me of the day I had cried buckets at the scary thought of turning 30 because I was convinced that I was approaching senility and half-life decay at an alarming rate. Surely the Ramsay Brothers show more tactile actions (also known as touchy touchy) and hanky (s)panky (amongst ghosts and haunted spirits of course) than these songs do. Sure, there is one song in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham where SRK makes the grand Bhagwan Ram like entry, but then again, every song in that movie reeks of showoff, celebration, and affluence. No fault of Bollywood, which is just a reflection of the evolution of human race (or the lack of it), which brings me back to my irrefutable theory that everything in life ultimately boils down to preening, courtship, mating, and procreation. And anything that does not involve diaphanous clothing, the consequences of global warming (bouts of hot, wet, and cold weather, pun unintended), an umbrella, a few bees buzzing over a rose, a cot (khatiya), or even a reptile-dance number to save the mate from the curse of the evil man will never make it to the Hindi silver screen.

A very happy Diwali everyone, never mind the disappointment Bollywood has brought us.

[P.S.: I thank my friend S who made me notice the scarceness of Diwali songs in Bollywood, something that I had entirely overlooked for reasons not quite clear to me].

sunshine

The Titanic is sinking … and she stays onboard

2011-10-26T02:10:00.001-04:00

She had walked from the department to the bus stop that afternoon, feeling the weight of the world weighing down on her shoulders. It was a cold, rainy afternoon in fall, and it seemed nature was crying at her predicament. She reached the bus stop just in time to see the bus leave right in front of her. The frustration of missing a bus becomes manifold when you actually watch it leave right in front of you, knowing that you do not have enough time to run and cross the road. This was perhaps very symbolic for her that afternoon, looking at the bus full of opportunities abandon her. Although she was suitably qualified for what she was aspiring to be, she did not have that powerful piece of document that declared her eligible for the job. It was the same document of citizenship or permanent legal residence that people in the past have killed, manipulated, and married for. Neither her parents had the foresight to visit the US and give her birth there, nor she had the foresight to get hitched to someone local. As a result, despite what she would have liked to think of as spectacular and scintillating academic potential, she was disqualified for the numerous teaching fellowships she tried applying to. Apparently, she did not fall under the category of people America deemed fit to allow to teach and educate their children.

She had always wanted to work as a science and math teacher. That was her forte, her calling. That was what she did in India, and that is what she eventually wanted to do in the US. Who said PhDs were overqualified to teach in schools? She was doing a PhD, training to be a professor, but she also wanted to take a few years off first and go teach in a public school setting. She thought she would immensely benefit from the classroom experience while developing her research agenda as a professor, and she loved teaching anyway. Hence, while most people’s careers took off on an upward trajectory, she was willing to step down and go teach in a school for a few years. Don’t get her wrong when she said “step down”, for she in no manner insulted teaching in a public school as an endeavor fit for the lesser achieving. What she meant is, she was overqualified for the job, and hence thought she would definitely get it. The minimum requirement for teaching in a school is a bachelor’s degree. Armed with two masters’ degrees, and a PhD on the way, she knew she would never struggle to find a good school to start teaching.

She forgot something very basic while happily making her future plans. She forgot that she did not belong to this country. She was an outsider, a foreigner. A very unwelcome foreigner in a country where she has been told, “The foreigners took our jobs!!”.

She started looking at teaching fellowships. That was when the truth hit her. Every teaching fellowship she tried applying for specifically mentioned that they require citizens and permanent residents only. They would not sponsor her visa. Desperate, she emailed them, each and every institution, asking if they ever made exceptions for doctorate degree holders. None of the answers came as affirmatives.

There was a clear disconnect between theory and practice. In theory, she was always told by different people, at different point of time that America was in dire need of good science and math teachers who were passionate about teaching. That was when she started to think that she would be a great fit in the setting. Even her professors assured her that visa sponsorship should not be an issue. Clearly, she now knew better.

Her thoughts were mostly sad as she waited for the next bus in the rain. She realized that she did not qualify even for an interview. To deny someone the right to employment by denying them the right to be interviewed, not because of lack of credentials or enthusiasm, but because of the lack of paperwork produced as a result of a random event of being born in the United States was perhaps the ultimate example of social injustice. While America embraced international students with open arms (statistics say so, not I), they were equally reluctant in creating job opportunities for them. No one had taken a look at her academic achievements that she had so painstakingly put in her resume. She was rejected - Just like that. It was an alienating experience. She was neither into chip making, nor into programming, occupations that highly commanded visa sponsorships. She was just an ordinary human being and all she wanted to do was teach. For the first time, thoughts of going back to India seriously occurred to her. Strangely, it was a freeing, emancipating thought. Not that there were any better jobs in India, but she would at least not feel like a foreigner, an intruder. True, millions of people immigrated and embraced this country as their own. Then how could she explain the chilliness, the hostility of the situation she was facing? Certainly there was no pride in living the life of a second class citizen from a third world country, trying to fit in a first world nation. Her ideals were conflicted. She had always wanted to excel at what she did, so that she would be in demand for the quality of her work, no matter where she lived. She wanted to be so good in what she did that the job would come looking for her, rather than the other way around. Clearly, she could have all the respect she wanted, as soon as she could produce proof of citizenship.

Various thoughts and incidents from the past flashed in front of her. She remembered the woman in her late thirties she had met at the Zumba class who had beamed in pride, “Why do I need to work? My husband is a professor. I have married well.” She thought of her friend, whose husband had applied for their green card the moment she married and stepped into the country. None of these women had trouble finding legal residency in the country, and were happily and proudly unemployed. However, when some people actually wanted to work and make a difference, they were denied the opportunity because they had probably not married well. Where was social justice in this God?

She remembered a scene out of a movie she had watched in her teens. The big ship was sinking, and the affluent people left in their lifeboats one by one. Clearly, she was staying onboard, sinking with the ship. After all, she was a second class citizen from a third world country, trying to fit in.

sunshine

Facebook Follies

2011-10-13T01:17:00.001-04:00

Identifying a Facebook moron is easy. They are usually engaged in a predictable and repeated pattern of activities that tend to fall in one or more of the following categories.

1. They write a message on someone's wall informing them that they should check their cell phone voice message because they called them and they did not answer.

2. Someone else's profile picture on Facebook was taken by them, and they comment on it saying, "Wow, great picture. Wonder who the photographer is! Wink Wink!". They might be great photographers, but Facebook morons nevertheless.

3. They are husband-wife in real life and Farmville neighbors or Mafia mobs in the virtual world.

4. They recognize multiple and totally unrelated people in social gatherings like Dandiya or Durga Puja, who they do not know at all (complete strangers), whose pictures they have seen again and again on Facebook. Earlier, people met each other in person and found them later on Facebook. Now, they know faces from Facebook, and meet them later in person.

5. They live and document their entire lives on countdowns. 5 days to the Vegas trip. 6 months before summer vacation starts! 2 hours for the surprise romantic candle light dinner. 3 weeks befoe mother-in-law flies back to India. 9 days for the labor pains to start. And end their announcements with a "Yippiieee!!"

6. They frequently use terms like “awwwwwww” and “XOXOXOXO” in abundance, usually with members of the same gender.

7. They “like” every post you write, every picture you post, and even “like” every comment your pictures or posts earn, but never ever comment. When they occasionally comment, it is never anything more committal than “9ice”, “cool”, or “gr8”.

8. They post forward messages about cancer awareness and about loving their mothers that start with, “I have a request, and I know exactly which ones of you are going to post this ….” and ends with “repost and share this if you are a human, even if for one hour.” Talk about psychological pressure, huh?

9. They post pictures of their newborns still bathing in the amniotic fluid or worse, lying helpless, shriveled up, and without clothes. No offense to mothers, babies, or motherhood, and you might blame me for not understanding the emotions since I have never mothered a baby, but I find it quite repulsive. I wouldn’t be very happy honestly if I found a picture of mine bathing in my mother’s amniotic fluid floating around for people to see.

10. They post messages like “TGIF”. You are darn right, you need to thank God it is Friday, just like you should sometimes thank God that you have a job and are gainfully employed. You might find it a luxury sitting in your plush office and cribbing about the work load on Facebook, because you make work sound like some kind of punishment you undergo five days a week, and not as your means for finding an identity, engagement, and intellectual stimulation. People like me never get to thank God it is Friday, because we work seven days a week, and do it because we love it. Think about well-qualified people who are unemployed, or about daily wage workers who don’t have a Facebook account and hence don’t get to post status messages like, “Thank God the strike was lifted. Now we will get to work and earn our daily wages.”

sunshine

A letter to my PhD

2011-10-11T18:35:00.001-04:00

Dear PhD,

Today, I have come closest to the point of breaking up with you. I call it a break up because I have considered it a relationship, perhaps a longstanding, serious, intimate and the most meaningful relationship I have ever had. At some point in life, I decided that I want to spend most of my time in the pursuit of acquiring knowledge and wisdom. I could have been a journalist, a doctor, or a lawyer, but I decided I wanted to do hardcore research, and teach as well. Hence, I started training to be a professor. When I was done with my previous job, I had a few lucrative options. I could have found another job in the US. I could have moved to India. I could have done any number of things. Yet I decided to do a PhD. I decided to give it a second chance, since I had already opted out of PhD once a few years ago. Yet somewhere deep down, I hoped that I would once again enter the research arena. So, I chose you over a job. I readjusted to living on a meager salary, roughly one-third of what I was used to earning. I moved cross-country and tried adjusting myself to a completely different city, field, and work culture. The first year, I was on a roll. I finished my preliminary exam and passed my qualifiers 6 months in advance. I had three more steps to clear, and two more years to do it. However, the disillusionment started to set in the second year. The PhD trajectory became a curved tube I was stuck in the middle of, so that I could no longer see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was taking four courses, doing research, TAing, and traveling. I was learning new statistical software, learning to code, and trying to be as productive as I could. That was when I started to burn out and disillusionment set in. I have never been a good test taker, or a person who works well under pressure. Perhaps as it happens in some relationships (I don’t know, enlighten me), I started to question the meaning of it. I started to wonder about how what I learned would fit in the bigger scheme of things. I was overworked, tired, low on sleep, but more than most things, I started to question the value of all of it. So I had the write this post.

I wrote this post because just like a relationship, I still love you, although I have had my moments of doubt. You are my priority, and I will try my best to ensure we stick it out together. I start my day thinking of all the things I could do in research, and go to sleep planning my next day of work. But like all relationships, things are never perfect and happy all the time. We have our lows, or periods of doubt, times like these when we question the necessity of it. I wrote this post so that someday when in doubt, I will read this and know how much I have wanted you, and how important it is for me to do what I am doing right now. I write this so that someday when you and I have come a long way together after years of partnership, I can look back on times like these when I doubted my abilities to do anything meaningful, and know that I was wrong. I will know that although I have had my moments and thoughts of breakup, I would never actually do it. Yes, I am having a low moment right now, especially since I need to teach a class tomorrow and send revisions for papers by the end of this week and a dozen other things, but this moment shall pass. I know I will be back to my old self when you were my priority, and continue to do some kickass research which will make our future meaningful.

With love,

A sincere PhD student.

Simplicities to Complexities: Seeking the Absolute Truth

2011-09-29T02:57:00.001-04:00

When I was a kid, I was told that I could have the answers to most of my questions if I got myself a solid education. I somehow believed that theory, that as one grows old, one acquires more skills and knowledge, gets more experience in doing things, and life becomes less complex. I believed it at age 10 perhaps, but not anymore.

I wonder if the purpose of knowledge and education is meant to reduce, or increase ambiguity. As a kid, the answers to my questions were simple and absolute. There was no ambiguity about it. I learned that 2 plus 2 is always going to be 4. I believed that the harder you worked, the better your grades were. I believed that good behavior always earned you appreciation. I knew that no one dies before old age hits them. These were the absolute truths that I had verified with my little experience with the world. I had very set ideas about things, and those made complete sense to me. I knew that you could never fall in love with a man if he was younger to you or shorter in height (those were my theories then). In between grades 3^rd and 7^th, I was absolutely certain that I had found the right person for me (a classmate I had a crush on for years), and would marry him someday. I studied Moral Science as a subject and was absolutely certain about the presence of God (I knew he lived everywhere, but his favorite place was the church behind our school building). I knew students who worked hard studied science, and went to America. Another absolute truth for me then.

However, as I learned more and gained more experience, I realized that there is perhaps nothing called an absolute truth. Sure not working hard doesn’t get you anywhere, but working hard might also not get you anywhere. My inherent programming makes me want to believe in God, but honestly, I am not so sure of his existence anymore. I know that love can go unreciprocated and totally haywire. I also know that it is totally possible to fall in love with a man younger to you, or shorter than you are. The research papers I read usually end with “it is more likely that this is associated with that”, instead of a “we are absolutely certain that this combined with this leads to this”. I have vigilantly presided over my cookery and ended up with unpalatable food, but I fell asleep after setting something to bake, and it ended up being a crispy golden brown dessert that was totally worth eating. I now know that working the hardest doesn’t necessarily make you the smartest, and you could study everything and still flunk. The guy who got lower grades than you in school could be making ten times more money than you are, and not every good deed goes appreciated. Someone with almost no publications could get into Harvard, while someone with many publications could end up in a local small university.

As a kid, I always thought there is an absolute answer that fits everyone’s questions. Not anymore. When I ask myself a basic question like, “Should I get married?”, I honestly don’t know the answer to it, even with all my knowledge and wisdom. On one hand, it sounds like a wonderful idea, companionship and all, but on the other hand, I am not so sure if it is that much of a value addition in my life. The honest answer is, “I don’t know”. Yet if you asked me the same question as a kid, I would have said, “Of course. Everyone should be married before they grow old and have white hair.” Then, there are other existential questions I struggle with, I have no direct answer to. Even in an experiment, the atoms and molecules all do not behave as predicted, and I hear that there is a certain probability of observing a difference or variation due to chance. There is nothing called the absolute reality, and our realities differ, and even exist in multiple dimensions. How else would you explain Dabang being a super hit, and Andaz Apna Apna being a flop?

With time, I see a major rift in the philosophy of my life. The assumptions of physical sciences do not translate to the assumptions of the human sciences. How humans make meaning of a particular phenomenon varies. I always thought science was singular, convergent, and fragmented, as opposed to being multiple, divergent, and inter-related. I always thought that if you can replicate a process and get the same answer, you have achieved the truth. But then you make errors, both type I and type II, where you can either wrongly agree to something which is wrong, or wrongly disagree to something which is right. Not everyone is free, liberated, and happy, even if they have access to similar resources or luxuries. Some people eat a lot and never put on a pound, while some hapless souls like me could live on oxygen alone, and still keep expanding. I once used to have a constellation of values and beliefs about the way the world works. I knew that as you add more to the database of knowledge, problems became clearer and solutions come up, leading to a less complicated and more simplistic world overall. However, the truth is neither generalized, nor can be triangulated upon. The best one can do is achieve the nearest approximation. Now if this is what my philosophy after 25 years of being in school (I discount the first 3 years of my life, and the 2 years in between when I worked), I wonder if my education is worth anything at all. I also question this after the adviser recently read something I wrote and said, “With these ideas of yours, you will never find a job.” If I cannot find a job after being in school for more than 25 years, I question the value and validity of all that I have learned so far.

sunshine

5 Years !

2011-09-28T09:47:00.006-04:00

Sometime earlier this month, I celebrated the completion of my 5 years of stay in the U.S. It meant a lot to me, since I have always considered moving to the U.S. as the biggest “good decision” I have made for personal reasons. It hasn’t been a smooth joy ride, I assure you, and it still isn’t. Things went wrong during the first few years, and I was never hopeful that I would be able to make it. I had to give up a lot, especially the security of a sheltered life, of a secure job, of the prospects of being gainfully married and raising a family. I was singly driven by my desire to pursue graduate school, and to establish myself as an academician. It became challenging and increasingly hard for me to keep myself rooted here (opting out of the PhD program in 2008, job layoff in 2009, resuming PhD in 2010, etc.). However, here I am, and here I was celebrating my 5 years of stay by taking a journey down the memory lane and remembering all the happy and not-so-happy moments that defined the latter half of my twenties.

Incidentally, I was out of town the day I completed 5 years. I was attending a conference, not presenting though. Academic daddy was invited to be there, and since he was traveling, he sent me instead. This was a huge privilege, much bigger than presenting at a conference, because in this case, someone revered in the field gave up his chance so that I could replace him temporarily and do the same kind of work that he was expected to do. I was expected to listen to the talks, evaluate the kind of research that was being done in the field, and prepare a synthesis report. This would not only give me a chance to network and meet the people in the field, but also train me in synthesizing information and making sense of them.

A quick scanning around the room revealed that as expected, I was perhaps the only “Indian-from-India” in the room, if you know what I meant. The conference started, people began to present their work, mostly in the field of developing education and bettering the school educational systems for scientific workforce development so that more students were motivated to continue into college. There was one spokesperson who got up on stage to present. I don’t remember the affiliation, but I remember listening to an impressive talk. The person had some great ideas, and was very enthusiastic about it. The person breezed through the presentation slides, and there was this last bullet point on the last slide that seemed somewhat odd, but did not register anything right away. I am not sure if I had read that point, or perhaps I was beginning to, but before I did, the person repeated what was written in the last slide.

“And hopefully this way, we will be able to stop the foreigners taking up our jobs.”

The crowd clapped and applauded. However, I sat there stone faced. You see, I had never once fooled myself into believing that this country is mine, and has embraced me lovingly. I was always reminded of the fact that I am here as long as I had my visa validated, for which, I had to struggle, compete, learn, and produce superior quality work. I had already faced the consequences of losing a job and thereby ending up without a visa (you get deported, what else?). Although I live here, I always knew I never belonged here, not only for the color of my skin or my Indian accented English, but because of the fact that I am a foreigner, and will always be one. But to be a foreigner sitting amidst a group of natives animatedly discussing strategies about how to keep the foreigners at bay was not necessarily the best conversation to hear. This country has given me a lot, taught me a lot of values. However, I believe that I have given this country at least a little bit in return, and I am not just referring to the taxes. I have given this country my hard work, my ideas, my skills, and my expertise. Look at the irony, on one hand, I was sitting there as the representative of my advisor, trying to become an expert in my field, trying to become “one of them” to help their children continue into college. On the other hand, I was also a foreigner and although this person never realized there was at least one foreigner in the room listening to the conversation, I was listening. I did not know then which side of the argument I was in.

That single incident, ironically on the 5^th anniversary of my entry into the US, changed the way I perceive things. It’s been a month almost, and memories of that initial awkwardness still remains fresh. Academic daddy, who is best known for his honesty and bluntness, listened to me recount this in pain, and told me somewhat impassively, “You get established for your skills, the value you bring into a group, and not because of who you are or what country you belong to. If you become a good researcher and have all the combined skills that most people in this field do not have, if you are the best in statistics and can analyze any large scale data set, America will value you. You can either sit and lament about what happened, or fiercely try to establish yourself in the field.”

Advice taken with respect daddy, but not without knowing that perhaps I would never be able to estrange myself from the things I felt at that point, being referred to as an outcast “who is taking our jobs away”.

On a different note, I had to fill out an expense sheet and a tax form by the end of it, listing my expenses. The lady at the conference counter looked at me and said harmlessly, “Oh, I am sure you do not need a tax form.”

Having known her for the last 3 days of the conference, I smiled and almost nodded a yes, assuming she knows best, but decided to confirm again. “You sure?”

“Uh, do international employees pay taxes?”

“Sure ma’am, I do pay my full share of taxes, I assure you”, I said as I helped myself to a form. “Surely us foreigners might be a potential threat who take up the jobs that your children rightly deserved, but we at least pay our taxes”, I thought with bitterness as I grabbed my form and left the conference venue.

sunshine

If Einstein was on Facebook…..

2011-09-27T15:01:00.000-04:00

Graduate school is hard. Cold and colorless. Most often sleepless. Penniless as well. Whoever thought one should take all those 20 odd courses in order to survive graduate school. Then there is actual research involved. There is TAing, and grading. You need to publish, network, acquire academic currency (as papers), and be in the good books of your advisor. The advisor is always pushing you, making you work harder, never approving of or appreciating your potential. So what if he is paying you to get an education? If PhD was that easy or fancy, everyone would be getting one. It is certainly not that easy to have a smooth ride of a PhD. Not when so many other distractions are involved.

You see, the single most distracting factor is called Facebook (there are many others, I assure you). You wake up every good morning with good intentions of doing some path breaking, jaw dropping research. But, what goes with your morning cup of coffee is the compulsive need to look at the tiny red button that tells you the number of comments and messages you have on Facebook. I would not be writing this post if things stopped there. Between classes and meetings, there is this compulsive need to stay abreast of what is happening in other people’s lives. We “comment” on pictures where we are not to be found, “like” status messages from friends that have no significance to us whatsoever, “join” communities on “How to train your adviser” or “PhD sucks”, “poke” people we would never talk to in parties, and constantly check not just the comments of others made to others, but the comments to the comments that others made on a post where we commented. The professor who claimed you were bad with numbers was crazy. For some inexplicable reason, you cannot remember the principles of matrices or determinants you learnt in your last class, but clearly remembered the number of comments and likes your recent update on “I am going to have an awesome time in Yellowstone next weekend” garnered. There is this constant need to update status messages multiple times a day, to check updates from others, to post albums every now and then giving others a glimpse of your awesome life, and deriving narcissistic pleasure by updating the world on the minutest detail like “Worked out at the gym for 2 hours” (who cares?), or “my baby loved eating strawberries today, yumm yumm !!” (20 out of 25 comments for this post would be “awwwwww”). You suddenly know of everything and everyone, the Bangla aaNtel kobita that man you met just once writes (which you hardly understand), that friend of a friend’s friend you don’t know, but still stalk on Facebook, or the menu and guest list of the last potluck party you missed, whose pictures were just posted.

Things do not stop on Facebook. There are the blogs you read everyday, comment, and comment to the comment the previous commentator makes. You read news, you read other people’s secrets on Postsecret (to be fair, I do it only on Sundays). There is this compulsive need to check weather, not just where you live, but in some remote place like Ullhasnagar you might visit in future someday. There is random browsing on Craigslist, Amazon, and Yelp. You need to know of every possible deal in the city. You are still debating whether to cast a wider net on Google Plus and Twitter. Linkedin is constantly sending you updates about the people you recently added. Netflix is suggesting movies you should watch, based on the recent ratings you posted. There is a bunch of emails from stores and services you subscribed to. The local confectionary is giving away free cookies with purchases of $20 or more. There is this long email chain going on (45 emails and counting) about the upcoming Bijoya Sammelani potluck in 2 weeks, where the chicks are discussing what color of sarees they should wear, and if they should be color coordinated with their partners. And last, but not the least, the Google chat window is perennially open (who logs out of Gmail?), you constantly eyeballing who is online and who is busy, in the hopes that someone as jobless as you are will be nice enough to say hi.

Now with the human brain having a definite (and certainly measurable) attention span and the capacity to bear a somewhat fixed amount of cognitive load, I don’t blame you that you cannot finish deadlines on time, hardly get the time to do class readings before class, are perennially sleep deprived and grumpy, just asked for a project extension, and have started to question if getting a PhD is a waste of your youth after all. I am totally empathetic, being guilty of the same follies myself (everything that was written as “you” so far referred to “me”). You see, if Newton was sitting under the apple tree with his laptop, gravitation would never be discovered. Instead of thinking about what just happened, he would get busy updating Facebook, “An apple fell on my head, that’s a bad apple !!!” (a comment that would garner him 45 likes and 30 comments about the best cider places in town and the current recruitment policies of Apple). Imagine how Einstein’s life would be if he was Facebooking and Netflixing from his lab in Princeton. No wonder graduate school is hard these days, and advisers just do not understand.

sunshine

NoSeattlegia

2011-09-24T14:43:00.000-04:00

I once used to dream of living in a big house with glass windows overlooking the lake in Fremont, Seattle. For all of you who are familiar with the city of Seattle, you will know what I mean. I always thought that was the place that suited my personality best. I would never live in Downtown, or close to a pub district. Yet I have never wanted to wander too far from the happening hot spots and live in a 3 bedroom townhouse somewhere in Bellevue or Kirkland. Fremont was the right place. The lake nearby provides a wonderful view and a nice place to walk by, or watch the boats and occasionally the hydroplanes. There is no dearth of great eating places and coffee shops. The area is well connected by bus services, and who wants to drive when you can take the bus? The troll nearby used to be my favorite hangout area. The Space Needle looks beautiful, and so does the Seattle skyline. How do I know all this? I know this because I worked close to Fremont for a year. That was when I wrote this poem.

The joy ride welcomes me aboard
Through thirty fifth and Wallingford

To zig zag left right up and down
The view of water down and town

The needle points straight in the sky
The buildings stand so proud and high

From Stoneway me a stone throw 'way
To the monster troll I always "hey"

The one eyed giant who gobbles cars
All hairy mighty full of scars

And then to left my tastebuds vie
For coffee sushi greek and thai

Through Fremont streets with joy we hail
And watch the ships cut through and sail

The bridge that's now an upside "V"
And azureness is all I see

In skies and waters traverse planes
With lakes and sun and things arcane

Through Fremont ways and dextered roads
My City of Joy, my new abode

sunshine

Kawta Jaama Holo?

2011-09-22T19:16:00.003-04:00

I was shaken out of my reverie where I heard the loud ghonta and shaankh in the wee hours of dawn. It had drizzled the night before, and the cold and dampness in the air made me want to cocoon myself tighter. Shaking off the remnants of sleep, I tried to bring my world into focus again. Apparently, I was no longer in Calcutta, a city where I spent a significant amount of my youth. I was in the U.S. of A., a home away from home, where the heart of Ma Durga beats in a nostalgically similar, yet a painfully different rhythm.

My cousin texted me “Shubho Mahalaya” the other day. It is that time of the year when Ma Durga, her children, and Mahishasura are busy getting spruced up for Pujo. However, Pujo is a different story in this country. Ma Durga’s calendar has been modified for years to suit that of her devotees for the probashi (NRI) Bangali in the US. She visits home not per the tithis of the calendar, but during the weekends, and in the vicinity of community colleges and high school buildings instead of paara, goli, or raasta. Thakur dekha (also known as, pandal hopping) is no longer an activity I associate with hours of walking, standing in lines, brazening the sweltering heat or the torrential downpour that is so characteristic of the pujo-scape in Calcutta. It was refreshing to see such energy reflected everywhere during pujo. I saw it in the faces of people excitedly asking friends and neighbors, “Kawta jaama holo?” (How many sets of new clothes did you buy or were gifted this season?).The real reason of the question was not really to know how many sets of clothes you acquired, but to open up the discussion about all the great places to shop, not to mention announcing to the world of your own count of clothes. I saw it in the scaffolds of the still incomplete puja pandals. I saw it in those craftsmen working diligently to add the final touches of paint on Ma Durga. The otherwise ill-reputed as “dead” city pulsates with life. The smell of pujo permeates the air- a smell characterized not just by the dhup-dhuno, but by puppy love blossoming in every paara or goli, the enthusiasm of shoppers amidst the crazy stampeding, the smell of roadside phuchka and chicken roll, the heart beating to the rhythm of the dhaak, and by loudspeakers blaring anything from “Anjali Mantra” to “Bangla adhunik gaan”, “tu cheez badi hai mast mast” for the braver communities, or “twinkle twinkle little star” recited in monotony by a 4-year old rising star during those “kalcharal nights” organized by her father who also happens to be the secretary of the local pujo’r committee.

Things look somewhat similar here, albeit in a more controlled and otherwise monotonous fashion. You could identify a pujo-hosting high school after hours of being lost in the Amazon rainforests, if only you could find that telltale parking lot filled with the Hondas and the Toyotas mostly in shades of black, blue, or silver. As you shut off the car ignition and adjust your Baluchori sari and the kundan necklace after undoing the seatbelt, other telltale signs clue you in to the venue of the pujo. Mr. Software Sen, otherwise seen in his checkered shorts and Google tee shirt with a cuppa Starbucks coffee as he drives his blue Lexus to office every morning, is spruced up in his dhuti and tussar panjabi and neatly combed hair parted sideways, dutifully handing out lunch coupons and talking unsuspecting and stray pandal hoppers into buying their annual Bangali association membership. Mrs. Anima(ted) Sen, looking straight out of the sets of the movie Devdas in her cream and red sari and her vermilion headed, kohl-smeared eyes and Ma-Kali avatar, chats animatedly about their trip to Greece earlier in summer to spend their 10^th wedding anniversary, urging her ~~bored audiences~~ kitty party pals to check out her Facebook album now replete with “wow” comments and XOXOXOXOs. On a different note, it took years for a dehati-to-the-American-culture like me to figure out that those “showered with love” XOXOXOs found in abundance on Facebook are in no way related to the “kaata-kuti” criss-cross board games you played as a middle school student when the teacher did not make it to class. However, I digress here. The Khokon Shonas and Mamonis are running around in their Baby GAP sweatshirts or Dora pink frilly frocks and Stride Rite shoes. They are happily chomping on their pijjas and Mc Dee burgers especially ordered off the kids menu, because they have been universally stereotyped by their parents to lack the digestive system hardy enough to digest khichuri bhog. Important discussions are churning in the name of socializing and networking- I overhear a group of balding, middle-aged, and bespectacled dadas discussing Green Cards and citizenships, options for stock investment and mortgages, Xboxs andPSP3s, Kinects and Builds, or the awaited deals for the upcoming Thanksgiving Black Friday sales. The mashimas and boudis enthusiastically discuss clothing and jewelry, juicy Facebook gossip, impending annual visits of in-laws, the newest desi store selling Tyangra maach and frozen Lyangra aam, and the awesome videos of their Khokon shonas eating organic strawberries in their Bumbo seats. A bunch of young people form a visibly distinct sub-group – the “fresh off the boat” graduate students, enthusiastically discuss research agenda, upcoming conference deadlines, and demanding advisors, definitely lacking the visible traits and polish of the nouveau riches from the east now living over a decade in this country.

However, no matter how sardonically you choose to look at the Americanized version of Durga Pujo, this is the best you are going to get here. No wonder we convince ourselves over time that there is an undeniable magic, an aura even amidst talks of green cards and Tiffany’s jewelry, our mashima who is visiting her son and his family from Borishal proudly beaming, “amar naati you ass citigen” (My grandson is a US citizen). Our pujari moshai is an investment banker, dutifully chanting mantras, the sacred thread and dhoti a far cry from his menacing corporate look. The dhaaki starts to play the dhaak at some point, ushering people for the session of onjoli, picking up fistfuls of yellow lilies and carnations bought from Trader Joe’s. As usual, I experience the all familiar feeling of getting gooseflesh, tapping my feet to the beat of the dhaak. My blood rings and my soul sings to the beats of the drum. A strange magic suffused with nostalgia fills the air. Durga Pujo will remain a unique celebration for me, incomparable with the pumpkin carvings during Halloween, or the turkey roasting during Thanksgiving. I am shaken out of my reverie yet again when a GAP wearer less than half my height innocuously bumps into me, running around in excitement, followed by his hapless dad who reminds me of a pet trainer. It is the same man who was conversing in Bengali, and now, he is running after his son not with the typically what you would expect “jaashna, jaashna, orey khoka firey aaye” (Come back dear son, don’t scamper around), but with a trained and somewhat accented monosyllabic “Don’t run, come back, sit down, eat your pizza !!”, instructed in a fake accent perhaps for the benefit of the scampering kid who might not understand a word of Bangla spoken at home. I see that “Kaan mola khabi” has been aptly replaced by “You will be grounded!!”.

Somewhere in between my present and my past, in between the uloos (the sounds you make flicking your tongue) and the shaankh (conch shell), I am transported to a different era, awash with joyous anticipation. I am 6 years old and am wearing a bright blue frock my parents bought me from the neighborhood garment store. Then I am a 20 year old, wearing a bright green silk sari that belongs to my mother, that she has painstakingly wrapped around me, safety pins and all. I am with my friends pandal hopping in Madox Square, enlivened by the dazzling beauties exchanging hushed glances and sheepish smiles with the handsomely spruced up pajama-panjabi clad group of young men who have spent the last hour or so visually appraising the chicks (an act also known as jhaari maara). So many love relationships form and dissipate in the vicinity of the pandals by the grace of Goddess Durga every year. While most never make it to the altar, an innocuous glance exchanged or that racing of heart beats as you eyed a bunch of decked up people from the opposite gender works wonders in your otherwise drab life marred by academic pressures, social expectations, and what not. I flip between the past and my 30-year old present, casually glancing around me to look in vain for the now-extinct group of good looking and single men roughly my age. A corpulent mashima just stepped on my sari (and my toes), glaring unapologetically at me for intercepting her trajectory as she walks by. She is the same mashima, I recognize, who was animatedly boasting about her sonny boy studying electrical engineering at MIT. I sigh, zoning out of my surroundings for the moment and focusing on the beauty of Ma Durga’s face instead. Of all the things that have changed around me (for better or for worse) in the last few decades of my pujo experience, people, social dynamics, pompousness and all, Ma Durga is the only one who has not changed, still looking as young and stunning as she used to for as long as I can remember. So beautiful, so powerful, yet so very feminine. The only thing that brings in unalloyed joy for me is the visage of Ma Durga and her children. And the smell of pujo. Not to mention the music of the dhaak. Or sometimes the familiar feeling of excitement I used to have as a kid as I marveled at the six packs and brawns of the demon Mahishasura.

sunshine

A Magnetic Personality

2011-09-13T17:23:00.001-04:00

I sometimes wonder what will happen to all those magnets stuck on the white door of my fridge when I am gone. Surely I don’t have any property to boast of, no land, no house, not even a piece of gold or diamond, but I have around 200 magnets collected over the years of traveling in different places around the world. I suspect I might have to buy a bigger fridge in a few years, but that is a different story. There is this blue lava spewing volcano magnet I collected from Sicily. There is this panoramic view of Philadelphia magnet I bought in 2008. They come in all shapes and sizes, from bears of Yosemite to the bison of Yellowstone National Park. There is a cow magnet from the cheese factory, a longhorn from Texas, a cable car from San Francisco, a dolphin from San Diego, and many more. I wonder what will happen to them when I am dead. I am probably wondering about this since I do not have an offspring to inherit them all, but even if I did, I wonder if anyone would be really interested in collecting a bunch of magnets from a travel addict. They mean a lot to me, having collected them personally over the years, but to others, these are just pieces of magnets. Perhaps I could donate it to the science laboratory to conduct experiments using magnets. Perhaps I could donate it to a travel endorsing club. I don’t know why I am worrying about the fate of my magnets of all things, but it is probably one of those days when useful ideas do not come, and the mind is trapped between the needless polarities of the north and the south, wondering about the unknown future and the even more unknown outcome of worldly possessions when the soul defies all directions and heads toward wonderland.

sunshine

Happy Teachers’ Day

2011-09-13T10:09:00.002-04:00

Good old nostalgic times. On teachers’ day, I was reminded of all the good time I had when I used to teach in Calcutta. It was my first job, I was 24, fresh out of college, and thought I would change the world. Lot of people were surprised, even disappointed, and I somewhat understand why. A measly pay was one thing, and social perception was another. Bright students were supposed to be doctors, engineers, and lawyers, and I can see why such is the perception. Even a professor had a far more social recognition compared to a school teacher. People who had the ability to become something in life did not become school teachers. They designed chips, developed languages, and signed million dollar deals.

Surely I worked with colleagues who were bright, energetic, and had a similar philosophy as mine, where they wanted to change the perception of teachers. But they were only a handful. Most teachers were tired, lethargic, and opposed to change. It seemed a certain degree of boredom had seeped into their bones over the years. Ironically, they did not want to learn anything new. I was faced with some degree of resistance when I tried changing the pattern of questions to incorporate more multiple choice questions to help students prepare for the all India entrance exams they were to take later. My colleagues were used to doing things a certain way, and they did not see why a freshly out of college teacher should bring in reforms. I used to be euphemistically reprimanded for finishing my corrections and setting question papers early, and this might create a certain expectation for them from the school principal. I used to finish work early so that I could go home and enjoy, and do a hundred different things outside my work.

Soon, I realized what people had meant when they had shown surprise about my decision to teach in a school. I started to feel stagnation. I realized I could only do so much, and become so much as a teacher. I did not even have a masters in education, and this meant despite my quality of work, my pay scale would always be in the lowest rung, even less than others who had a bachelors with an M.Ed. Surely I could motivate children to go on to become rocket scientists and mathematicians, but that is where I would stay. I enjoyed every bit of my work during the present, but the future looked bleak. I loved my students, and they loved me back. I would wake up at 5 every morning and get ready with much enthusiasm, eager to go to school. Imagine how many of us get to work where they are all eager and cannot wait to reach office. Ironically, as much as I loved my job, I moved past it.

A friend once told me that although she loved her then boy friend, she had to move on because she did not see a progressive future with him. I was surprised, wondering how you could leave someone you loved just because you were ambitious. But this is exactly what I did too. I applied to a bunch of schools in the US and moved to Seattle the first opportunity I got.

Although I look back at my first job as a teacher with much fondness, I realize now that the decision I made was for my own good. I did not see myself as a teacher with that measly pay 10 years down the line. I needed intellectual development. I needed to feel and experience the world. I needed greater challenges. I moved on.

However, that experience of teaching left a long term impact on me. Years later when I was done with my US masters and working in the industry, I decided to come back to school to finish a PhD. The reason? I am training myself to become a professor. And it has been one hell of a challenging experience, doing research and training myself long term to be able to teach in a university. But I realized this is what I eventually wanted to do, be associated with school in some capacity, teach, and motivate others to follow their dreams. This might sounds very clichéd and dreamy, but I could not see myself working in the industry any longer. So I am back to what I have always loved doing- being in school. And for this, I thank my job as a school teacher in Calcutta. It made me realize how much I love to teach and be in academia. It also made me realize how I needed to move past it, dream bigger, create bigger challenges for myself, and push myself harder. No matter what I go on to become in life, a part of my identity will always be that 24-year old, starry-eyed math and science teacher whose job and occupation meant the world to her.

Happy Teachers’ Day everyone – We are what we are because of our teachers, for all the little experiences life was made of, and for that internal compass that guides us and eventually leads us to do what we are the best and hopefully the happiest doing.

sunshine

No Small Town Girl

2011-09-13T03:05:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, I am unceremoniously reminded of how much I love living in a city. I was in Boston for a conference, and there the thought hit me again. What would I do in a large city? No, I would not jump right in and join the hullabaloo and the madness. I love big cities because I love sitting back and watching life move at a fast pace. The busy streets, the crowds, coffee shops, the waterfront, students walking with backpacks, office commuters headed for work, mommies walking along while their little ones monkey around. There is not a dull moment when you live in a big city. I walked along river Charles, visited MIT and Harvard campus, walked the streets of the Harvard Square, admired the waterfront by the harbor, and so much more. Boston smells strongly of history. Bridges, water, international airports, large streets, bad traffic, it has everything. MIT, Harvard, Tufts, and a lot more, you might as well call it the intellectual capital. The view of the lake along the Boston College (Chestnut campus) reminded me of the long walks I used to take by the Green Lake in Seattle. I will probably be happy to relocate anywhere as long as it is a big city by the coast. So perhaps it is time to get my ass on the work desk and work harder, get some publications, propose, defend, suck it all, finish up, and look for a job in a big city. Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Portland, one can only hope.

sunshine

Shaken on a 5.8 scale

2011-08-23T20:45:00.000-04:00

I experienced a 5.8 on Richter scale earthquake today. A first time experience for me. How did it feel? I was in the department, working on some papers, when it felt like a team of horses running and stampeding all around you. The glass window panes were shaking, and shaking badly. Within seconds, realization hit, and we ran toward the exit doors. Soon a huge group had gathered outside the building. It was the first day of the fall semester, and many were in classes. Professors and students had evacuated the building, and together we watched the glass windows shake. However, nothing shattered or broke. Even afternoon classes were not cancelled (much to my disappointment). Everyone was back to business, though unknown people kept making small talk, referring to the earthquake. I walked to the two libraries to collect a few non-academic, fictional novels, and both times, the librarians asked how it was, experiencing an earthquake of this magnitude. The irony is, living in the Pacific Northwest (an earthquake prone region) for 4 years, I had never experienced anything like this. However, this one seems to have shaken up more than half of the east coast.

I came home to discover (much to my relief) that everything in my room looked the way it was supposed to be. The mess in my room was more due to the procrastination of unpacking suitcases. Not a single picture had moved off its frame, not a single book had displaced. However, as I sit and work in my room, I felt two more minor tremors in the last hour or so. This time, I do not know if I am imagining things, or if it is just the couple next door.

sunshine

30 Rock(s)

2011-08-21T16:16:00.002-04:00

Earlier this month, I finally did what I have dreaded the last 5 years. I left my twenties and stepped into my thirties. Not that I particularly had a choice, and not that someone came knocking at my door asking me if I was ready to be in my thirties, or if time should freeze for a while. Turning thirty came with a lot of contemplation, reflection, and introspection. If I continue to live the healthy life that I have lived so far, I would like to think this is where people break for the interval or half-time in movies. Of course, no one knows for sure.

I wonder how I would sum up my life. I wonder if I wrote a book off my life, how it would read. Certain times it has been a joy ride. Sometimes it has been painful. There have been achievements, yes. There have been failures and disappointments as well, lots actually. Did I get everything I had hoped for? Perhaps yes. Yes, there are certain things that I wish had never happened, or had happened differently. Such is life.

I wasn’t really trying to summarize my blessings, but I started to think of all those things, those eventful moments I have at 30 that I am thankful for, and all those things I wish I did. I am primarily an academically driven person, and I am thankful that my academics always got priority. I never had to choose work over academics because there was a dearth of money. I am immensely thankful for that. I have had an excellent education, although measuring education in terms of degrees defeats the purpose of education in itself. I have been fortunate enough to have two masters degrees, and to experience both, the Indian and the American system of education. I have been closely associated with two reputed research driven R01 universities in the US. I consider myself amongst the fortunate who came to the US as a graduate student, and got the opportunity to study without having to pay for it. I don’t think the experience would have been any better had I come for work on-site. My academic trajectory has exactly been the way I wanted it to be. I wanted to move to the US for academics (and not for work), and that is exactly how it turned out to be. Currently, I have a US degree to boast of, and another terminal degree in the making.

Traveling has played a significant part in my interest and development. I have lived and traveled in 3 continents. Sometime in life, I discovered the joys of solo, independent traveling as compared to traveling in herds, and have singly backpacked dozens of places. Along with travel came the interest in photography. Over the last few years, I have tried to better my photographic skills, and feel very special when a particular picture I took is recognized or appreciated. I am fluently conversant in 4 languages, and have workable knowledge of 2 more languages. I am proud that I got rid of my unfounded fears and learned to drive. I love my car (and camera) as much as I would love my family, and in the last 2 years, I have driven roughly a little less than the distance of the circumference of the earth at the equator (about 22,000 miles). I have visited 18 American states, 10 American national parks, and a handful of the wonders of the world. My first flight experience was 5 years ago, when I got to sit in the cockpit of the plane for hours as we flew over Turkey. I love visiting corners, and have been to the north western most and southernmost tip of continental US. I have had 2 full time jobs, one as a teacher and the other as a researcher, and survived a lay off during the American economic depression. I know functional salsa, and have performed on stage in Seattle 4 times, twice for dance performances and twice for a play.

I have spent 26 birth days with family, which is great. I have successfully managed to blog for the last 6 years. An activity that started out of fun and the need to do something with the extra time I had after graduating college soon became a driving motivation for me. I love my evolving sense of humor I have developed over the years, bordering on biting sarcasm mostly. I really like the way I see the world, myself included, and make fun of things around me. this wouldn’t have happened without the practice of writing for years.

I have had a brief (really brief) stint with modeling, when I modeled for a line of products. Don’t ask me more, I am not particularly proud of being in front of a rolling camera. I have managed to stay single, despite immense societal pressure and peer pressure. Most of my friends are married with school-going children now. I am not against marriage per se, I just didn’t want to marriage to become another one of those things in my check list of things to do before I died. I didn’t want to get into something without entirely being sure I was doing the right thing, just because the rest of the world has gone the same path. I have seen too many relationships going haywire, and till marriage happens, I am very comfortable living alone, globe-trotting confidently, and will not feel weird walking inside a restaurant having a meal just on their own or take a train and travel for hours just happy reading or seeing the world go by them. I would prefer it any day, than wake up beside someone not knowing why I married him in the first place.

On the flip side, there are things that I wish I had done by now. I haven’t read a single Harry Potter book, and haven’t watched a single movie from the Matrix series. I still haven’t visited Delhi, a city I have always wanted to see and know more of. I still haven’t written a book, despite contemplating it for years now. The list of things I wish to do, but still haven’t, is endless. However, beyond my entire list of achievements and disappointments, I consider my greatest achievement to be the fact that I have a job, a work life that defines my identity. I am neither financially dependent, nor work deprived. I would rather be swamped with work, looking for a vacation, than have my life as a vacation with ample time but no direction. Sometime during my twenties, my greatest fear was that I would live in the US, but as a dependent. Although I am a poor graduate student with no green card, multi-storied town house, fancy cars, or the so called achievement of bearing American children (like a friend once pointed out) to boast of, I am glad I steered clear of that dependent route, not succumbing to the panic of staying single.

I have had a great life so far. Fast-paced, eventful, and mostly the way I wanted it to be. But being 30 is not just listing the achievements and disappointments. For me, being 30 is also being wise. At 20, I was exactly the way people at 20 are. I was starry eyed, passionate, energetic, a dreamer, took up challenges, and believed that I could become anyone in life. At 30, I have an idea of probably who I am going to become, and am content with the fact that I will perhaps not become everything I aimed for, and am okay with that. Realistic is what I was not then, and am perhaps learning to be now.

sunshine

United (Airlines) We Stand

2011-08-20T18:41:00.002-04:00

Dog tired. Dehydrated and feverish. Too exhausted to think and too eager to get home. The long journey had not exactly been a smooth ride. Occasional air pockets. The chicken for lunch at the airport that could be mistaken for leather. The constant fear of dying midair after reading a book about the exact mechanism by which people die during an air crash. The well built man on my left, whose occasional and unintentional brush of the femur sent faint shivers down my spine.

Long flights were not my forte. I would be too glad to reach home, ensconced in the familiar comforts of my bed. After a wait of a few hours, I was only too happy to be able to catch the last leg of my flight back home. I heard an announcement that didn’t exactly ring warning bells first. The flight was overbooked, and they were looking for volunteers to take the flight the next day. In exchange of wasting my time, they would compensate me with a travel voucher of $400, plus free accommodation for the night. Naah, the offer did not seem lucrative enough to tempt me. Spending the night in a hotel, with the knowledge that my luggage had reached somewhere before I did, and was lying unsupervised, and the hassle of clearing security again, wasn’t good enough to tempt me to volunteer to take the next flight. Why did you overbook your flight dear United Airlines? Don’t you always do it? Last time, you were going around offering almost double the amount, begging people to stop their work and be jobless enough to spend nights in hotels. Why were you so greedy?

No one volunteered. Which responsible person with work commitments would? The boarding started, and I confidently walked toward the aircraft. They scanned my boarding pass, and there, the familiar beep of the scanner was playing out of tune. This is not exactly the chord you sing in, dear scanner. They asked me to step aside, as if I was a convict. It seemed I was a few of the “chosen ones” who would not be allowed to take the flight that day. Since I did not volunteer to miss my flight, the system did a random search to see who had paid less for their tickets, or who had booked their flight long back. I was paying a price for planning my trip early enough, because that is how I paid less for my ticket according to them. This wasn’t good news.

To cut a long story short, they did several things that did not seem right. The women at the counter were curt and rude, and cared least about my work priorities. They did not oblige even when repeatedly asked about what was happening, and why was I picked not to board the flight. Wait, this gets even more interesting. My luggage was already in the plane, and the lady looked at me accusatorily when I asked if I could at least have my luggage, because I did not have any change of clothes with me, and because I was not comfortable with the idea of my bags lying unsupervised for the night. She rudely asked me if she wanted to stop the plane, take out all the suitcases, and find mine, as if I was responsible for my luggage making into the flight, when I was not allowed to. Then she just asked me to sign somewhere, and gave me a gift voucher of $400. Note, when I asked if I could have cash instead, she refused, with her “take it or leave it” tone. Basically, she was giving me a voucher to be redeemed within the next 1 YEAR ONLY on another UNITED AIRLINE FLIGHT ONLY. So if I had pneumonia and could not fly for a year, or if I decided to fly somewhere United Airlines did not fly, for example, directly to Kolkata, my voucher was doomed. I later came home and did some reading, only to understand that the customer has the right to information. Here is what their website says,

“If you are involuntarily denied boarding and have complied with our check-in and other applicable rules, we will give you a written statement that describes your rights and explains how we determine boarding priority for an oversold flight. You will generally be entitled to compensation and transportation on an alternate flight.”

Another website claims the following:

“The airlines are obligated to offer you either a travel voucher *or* cash compensation (in the form of cash or check) up to a certain value … Most people are unaware that the airlines have to give you that compensation in cash if you so wish. In fact, most gates leave off that little nugget of information in hopes you’ll simple take what they’re offering as a voucher. And most do.”

No wonder they did not bother to explain me my rights, and I would obviously not be reading stuff off the internet the moment they denied to board me.

They offered me a hotel voucher too, a hotel outside the airport. How I got to the hotel, and how much I spent on transportation, was not their headache. Thankfully, I was a few hours driving distance from home, and sometime during my life, I had done myself a favor by learning to drive. Hence I politely declined their hotel voucher, and rented a car out of my pocket. It was more important that I reached home, than stay at a hotel or at the airport for the night. I drove for the next few hours, picked up my luggage abandoned at the airport (unlike their claims that someone would keep an eye on my bags, they were lying unsupervised at the airport), and reached home long past midnight.

United Airlines, you were not flying me in for free, were you? What kind of a service was this, especially after I was denied boarding? I had heard the story of United Airlines breaking guitars (do watch the very enlightening video). If I was creative enough and had the time, I would not just write a song, I would make a movie out of the episode.

sunshine

Daddy knows best

2011-08-18T13:24:00.002-04:00

Last semester, who else but academic daddy asked me to take 2 core courses in statistics together. This was along with many other courses I was taking. I was baffled, scared of failing, and wondered why he would urge me to take 2 heavy courses together, when others in the department took their own sweet time to finish them. I tried to resist, reason, argue, even sweet talk into wriggling out of this predicament, but daddy is not really renowned for being very easy going. I was definitely in for some fun times ahead.

The semester was a nightmare. I struggled for hours every day, trying to finish the assignments, trying to understand the Greek and Hebrew the theory behind both courses were, and tried to understand the logic behind why God selected me, an unsuspecting innocent who has never willingly meant any harm to anyone, to go through this suffering. Thursdays were a nightmare, with 6 hours of classes, and I was amongst very few in the department who took both courses together. More than once, I have feared failing in one or both, and have shuddered at the thought, knowing how daddy would feel about it. I could go on and on describing my pain.

Magically, I passed both courses at the end of the semester. I had cried in anguish after it took me hours of effort to finish the finals for both courses. The day I submitted both exams (yeah, to make it worse, both courses had close deadlines for the finals), I had slumped defeated, too numb to realize I had put two core courses behind me. I had felt so lightweight once I was done, that the feeling itself was surreal. I did well in both courses.

It was time to thank daddy. Throughout the semester, I was convinced that I was going to fail. Right now, while most students are to go through the torture of taking the advanced course, I am done with it. I am on to more ~~difficult~~ advanced courses now, but that is a different story. The reason why daddy pushed me to take both became clear much later. First, I used the knowledge acquired by taking both to get some serious research done this summer, when I did not have the pressure of taking courses. If I did not have both stats courses under my belt, my research achievements this summer would be limited. More importantly, something happened that was beyond the scope of my understanding. This summer, the professor for one of the two advanced level courses left to take up another job elsewhere. I had no way of knowing this would happen (perhaps daddy did), but my peers who were hoping to take the course next semester will have to wait for a while now.

The moral of the story: Listen to your daddy, even if you do not agree with him. For he might be as clueless about your life, abilities, and your difficulties as you are, but given his experience in general, chances are less likely that he will screw up.

sunshine

28 and Unemployed - Part 1/3

2011-07-28T20:21:00.000-04:00

Part 1/3 .....

Part 2/3 ....

Part 3/3 ......

I was a month past 28. Barely a year out of graduate school. Recent owner of a car after 3 years of dreading and 1 month of learning to drive. Happy with a job that wasn’t necessarily THE job, but was something. It paid the bills, maintained my visa status, gave me something to talk about in typical Indian gatherings when people asked what I did, and bought me enough time to decide where I wanted to see myself headed. I was married to my job- a classic case of an arranged marriage. We met on campus, the recruiters hooked us up, and although I didn’t love it at first sight, I learnt to appreciate the perks that came with it- a name, a recognition, a box of business cards with my work designation boldly imprinted under my name, an unbeatable security, a boost to my self-confidence, a steady paycheck that took care of my passion for travel, and enough time and energy to pursue it. A double masters graduate (a PhD dropout actually), I told myself that I would never go back to school to finish my PhD. There was no pride living the life of an overworked and underpaid PhD student, and the smart way was to get a job and have a life. As I drove to work every morning, listening to the bleak updates of the recession on the National Public Radio, of people losing jobs and organizations downsizing, my heart reached out to these people I did not know. I told myself I was the luckiest person to hold on to my job, more so because I was single and did not have a “fallback option” for a husband. The security that came with my job was something worth every hour I spend doing mundane stuff in office, not knowing who would care about my work if I died working on it. Little did I know about the ill-fated layoff that was awaiting me.

When the clock struck twelve, I stood in the cold and rain, watching the fireworks explode over the Space Needle. Squished in a merrymaking crowd in a pub, I had welcomed the New Year with unemployment. No more playing office every morning. No more pay checks for an indefinite period of time. Unemployed, penniless, homeless, visa-less, and barely a year out of graduate school, I had cried broken-heartedly for all the catharsis in my life.

To be continued .....

28 and Unemployed: Part 2/3

2011-07-28T20:10:00.000-04:00

Part 1/3....

Part 2/3.....

Part 3/3 ......

Do you know the one big thing that losing a job does to you? No, it does not drive you bankrupt instantly, it does not make you friendless, nor does it strip you off your visa status immediately. However, it strips you off your confidence big time, eating into your self-esteem, and leaving a dull void of self-doubt at the core. You know you are supposed to go out and meet people, network to ensure you find a job soon, but it seems you have ended up with legs made of lead. You do not want to meet or talk to people. The world symbolically gets on the train leaving the station and you stand there feeling deadweight, seeing the world leave you in slow motion. You hate meeting people, or even picking up the phone because they will either ask you how you lost your job, or will tell you not to worry at the time when you have lost your happiness, your sleep, and your old self beaming with confidence. You hide and sulk, stop taking calls, eat wrong, put on weight, end up looking even more pathetic, question your abilities, look at your degrees with doubt, and sift through your graduation album and cry. Suddenly your friends are nice to you, they take you out for dinner and do not let you pay, and there you are sitting and watching them suspiciously. As an outsider, it is a simple situation where you have lost a job, and you are supposed to move on and find a new job without making a big deal. However when you are in the situation, it is the biggest deal of your life. The voices in your head forever keep nagging, “Maybe I was not good enough”. Our upbringing trains us to deal with success, but does not train us to deal with failure. You tell yourself that you were the college topper, the best performing employee in your previous job, and it does not make sense that you don’t have a job anymore. Few realize that although it is sad to lose your job, you can sail through this phase of unemployment with style, so that the world around you would die to be in your shoes.

Did I sail through my unemployment with style? I do not know about that. I am a liar if I said I accepted reality and moved on. Oh, it affects me till date. It was one single, isolated event on a fine morning when I was told I was leaving. However, I have replayed that incident in my head a million times now, making me feel the pain a million times. I still have nightmares of being asked to leave my workplace. The face of my employers change, but there is someone I always see in my nightmares sitting behind a mahogany desk with an intimidating and overpowering expression, asking me to leave. I was scared, vulnerable, and somewhere in the subconscious, I learnt to believe that I will never be good enough to hold on to a job, friends, or relationships.

I tried for months to get another job, but nothing worked out. Tired of feeling sorry, I gazed out at the waterfront, and asked myself one sunny morning what I would do if I didn’t have to worry about money, success, or what people thought of me. Pen and paper in hand, I started to make a list of the things I would do if I got a break. I was single, unattached, healthy, enthusiastic, could live in whatever part of the world I chose to, didn’t have a child to look after or a mortgage to pay, no ties absolutely. I wondered how I had overlooked these blessings. As I kept writing, my “wish list” kept growing longer. There were so many things I had always wanted to do, waiting for the opportune moment that never came. My unemployment turned out to be that opportune moment in my life. I now had a plan for my life, and a fun plan indeed. My crazy list looked something like, “Going back to school. Traveling Europe. Visiting family. Learning a skill. Losing weight. Watching all the top movies on the IMDB list. Writing a book.” I knew I could not finish even half of them, but I was already excitedly planning my unemployment period. What a welcome break it was from the boredom and monotonousness of doing routine things that everyone around me did.

To be continued ........

28 and Unemployed: Part 3/3

2011-07-28T20:07:00.003-04:00

Part 1/3 ........

Part 2/3 ......

Part 3/3 .........

By January, I found myself sitting in music class, cleaning the cobwebs off my voice and relearning my Sa-Re-Ga-Ma. I used to sing with my grandfather as a kid. He took with him the culture of evening riyaaz when he died. 24 years later, I started my classical music lessons. Now that I was singing, I wanted to dance too. I felt self-conscious, I had gained a lot of weight in the last few years, but I had always wanted to dance with the local dance wing, and realized this could be my only chance. I auditioned with them for a show, and the weekdays saw me singing and dancing to the tunes of music for the upcoming show. My muscles screamed in pain, I no longer felt that nimble and flexible I used to feel years ago, and came so close to giving up at times but dragged on for that day I would be on stage feeling proud of myself. February saw me live that moment of pride, performing on stage.

I had a lot of time now but no money, so I started living with a close friend. I helped her take care of her baby, another unique experience for me. Baby and I became best friends, and I learnt skills like feeding a 1 year old, keeping her entertained, talking to her, making her learn new words, and singing to her. By the end of my one-month long stay with her, she was singing Sa-Re-Ga-Ma with full confidence. I had circulated the gift of music I had got from my music teacher, to baby. Taking care of the little one taught me love, patience, and the art of understanding little humans who do not talk to communicate or make themselves understood, not to mention bits and pieces of Tamil. Next, I moved to another friend’s place where I had another baby to take care of, not a little human, but a very understanding and communicative cat. Anyone who knows me would know how scared I am of animals, and I would not even go close to a harmless, innocent animal, let alone live with one. However, I saw this as another opportunity to get over my fears and take temporary responsibility of a living being. Kitty and I had the house to ourselves and we would often sit together in the evenings watching television, playing, or talking to each other. I told her stories and she responded by purring and mewing. We even watched a Bengali movie together once.

By the end of March, I had heard back that I was not granted an extension of my US visa. I was expected to leave the US, my home for the last 4 years. It was yet another calamity that came as an opportunity. I looked at Google maps and asked myself if the world was a playground lying invitingly in front of me, where would I like to play next. I had my answer. I sold most my stuff, packed the rest of my life in boxes at a friend’s garage, left my car in another friend’s driveway, and took off. I took a flight to New York, and another flight that didn’t stop till it reached India. I was in India after 4 years, meeting my family and friends. I rejuvenated myself, felt nurtured with unadulterated love and support that a family provides, and went back to work voluntarily at my old school where I used to teach 4 years ago. I saw this as a unique opportunity to re-establish my contacts, and to do something I was passionate about- teach. All it took me to be happy and feel useful was to discover something I loved to do, and start doing it again.

Before I knew, I had spent months with family, possibly more time than anyone living outside home could ever imagine. It was time to move on. The next 2 weeks saw me backpacking, living, and breathing in the places I had only read about and dreamt of, but had never thought I would visit in this life. I had always wanted to walk the streets of Vienna where my favorite movie “Before Sunrise” was shot, and I did it. I had always wanted to visit an active volcano, and here I was climbing Mount Etna in Sicily. I walked the streets of Dresden, had Gelato in Rome, got a first hand experience of marveling at awe inspiring work of Michelangelo in Rome, stood mesmerized by the beauty of Salzburg, visited the castles of Prague, walked inside the world’s largest ice caves in Werfen, hiked the Alps, even took a train that boarded a ferry while leaving mainland Italy towards Sicily. Map in hand and an indomitable wanderlust, my dream of backpacking Europe, traveling in trains, and living on a shoestring budget had come true.

The best things in life were spread out for me as a buffet, and in 8 months I got a taste of almost everything I had ever desired. Music, dance performance, babies and pets, meeting family, teaching, and walking the streets of Europe. But I still had to figure out my life and decide what I would do after this transitory honeymoon phase. This was my chance to start something new, and learn from scratch, since I had already made up my mind not to go back to doing bench science again. After 8 months of a journey that seemed more like a never ending fun vacation, I wanted to be a student again, but not in the same field studying cells and molecules and writing scientific documents. I wanted to learn more about how people learnt. I applied to a dozen schools, got around half a dozen admits, and went back to school. It was time to start working on that unfinished dream of a PhD. Life had given me another chance to do something I loved, and I grabbed that opportunity and converted my passion for teaching to the pursuit of research. These days, I work on how to make the process of learning more effective. By changing fields, I relearned my sciences from scratch.

My greatest lesson from this journey of unemployment was to see things I built over years, things valuable to me, crumble in front of me, and for me to learn to build from rubble and from the ashes of unfulfilled dreams again. It taught me how to be significantly detached from my dreams to be able to work on rebuilding newer dreams again. I have learnt that it’s okay to have nightmares about losing your job or not succeeding in life or see people leaving you, because your insecurities mirrored through these nightmares will only make you wake up and work harder towards your commitments to ensure that things don’t screw up in real life. I feel like a new person, free of baggage, unfettered from the thoughts of how the world perceives me, and secure in the knowledge that I have taken good care of myself through these months and haven’t failed myself.

My journey through these 8 months of unemployment changed the way I learned to count my blessings. The door that had marked the end of things was also the same door that marked the beginning of brand new, and a better life for me.

sunshine

27 and Unmarried?

2011-07-20T17:10:00.002-04:00

This is a work of f(r)iction, and should not be confused with the author’s intentions of documenting her subdued desires of getting hitched, or claiming that she is 27, when she is long past that age.

"27 and unmarried? Hai Raaam !!! Are you romantically challenged? Kuch gadbad hai kya? Aren’t most girls your age already married?"

You know what shaped my romantic conditioning while growing up. The fantasy world I created from reading hundreds of Mills & Boon (MB) romantic novels, and Harlequin romances. Crumpled yellow pages, a cover best hidden in a newspaper jacket. No matter how much I tried to look indifferent, the size of the book and the fervent way I skimmed through the yellow pages always gave away what I read. Yeah yeah we all know about “the lack of variety in plotlines and their inevitable happy endings”. So what?

The problem is- my imaginary world of romantic hunks sauntering half naked in towels became more real than my real world and the men I met there. In school and college when my friends were mate hunting, I drowned myself in books with these fantastic men, vicariously deriving my romantic stimulus from them. A decade later when my friends have found their mates, I have woken up to the realization that I am perhaps running a good 10 years behind schedule. I haven’t been able to find someone on my own, and the random men I talk to every weekend as a routine of this arranged marriage drill, barely live up to my expectations.

My Indian forefathers had turned in their graves when at 14 I was convinced I was marrying an Italian. To my understanding, all my fantasy men resided in Italy, Greece, and France. Brought up with middle class values and dozens of Mills & Boons hidden between my text books, I have always wondered why the fantasy men I read about were so different from the real men around me - lovers, non-lovers, ex-lovers, buddies, colleagues and the ones I talk to these days, hoping that I would end up marrying one of them. Why was it that the Kamal Kishores, the Venkat Rajans and the Obhrokanti Kumars never stood a chance to these Jakes, Lukes, and Nicks?

No prizes for guessing that the fiction writers had transported me to this imaginary world of men who didn’t exist in reality. But it didn’t make the fantasy men any less appealing. You know why? Because they are self made. Born with a silver spoon, yet a go-getter. Exceptionally tall, always towering and above 6 feet (something which Bengali men rarely are). My mother never really understood my need to tiptoe to the man I marry, and still makes me talk to these short men with the notion that “a good character and a secure job is more important than height”.

My MB men are always dark. Brooding. Broad chested. Very angry with life. It seems every woman wants to chain him down, though frankly, I don’t know why none of his flings ever made it to the altar. His charm and virility increases as an exponential function with age. Very devoted to his huge family of 4 generations residing somewhere in Italy. Usually Greek or Italian (but never Indian). He travels all around the world and he owns a chain of art galleries or Victoria’s secret stores. Drives Porsches and Ferraris. Sleeps in boxer shorts. Doesn’t snore or fart or scratch himself like a hairy porcupine. Well toned. No hanging pot bellies or a receding hairline. Never found shopping in Walmart, IKEA or Target. Unparalleled sartorial elegance. He doesn’t do menial jobs like – coding, writing software, or cloning animals in the lab.

Reality bites. I remember talking to a doctor as a part of my mate hunting routine. I placed him in the genre of medical romances where the doctor always fell for the nurse. Then I discovered that the man got his kicks describing gory details of what went in the operating rooms. He was too engaged in conversation to notice me cringe as he described the entire process of childbirth over a cup of coffee. Who did he think he was, Dr. Gregory House? I mean, for all my dreams of him undressing me mentally, who knows if he was dissecting me mentally. No, things never really went anywhere with him.

My MB man owns private islands in the Bahamas, while the common man, even after topping the JEE, the IIT, and ending up as a software luminary, spends his entire life paying off mortgages for a house in the outskirts of Seattle. My MB man always gets attracted to the plain Jane no-non-sense girl with oodles of self esteem. In fact, I never wore makeup for years, just to live up to the plain Jane image. My MB man always initiates the first kiss and is never slapped for such unwarranted animal lust. Sometimes, my MB man is the father of the baby he never knew existed because he did not want to be tied down to marriage despite his miraculous procreative abilities. Sometimes, he is the only employer in the vicinity and offers marriage when you are least expecting it. Sometimes he is that man you find in the desolate island where you went for your last field trip. Soon, you are thrown into a situation where neither of you can do without each other. A hurricane strikes the island, he discovers a secret of his life you are the key to, or he simply realizes that you belong to an exotic species naïve enough to not use contraceptives during these accidental, unplanned acts of passionate love making.

I grew up firmly believing that the man I marry would be like one of these characters. The ones who would pin me down against the wall to initiate the first kiss. Not the ones who describe how pancreatic cancers are cured. My world of romantic fantasy came crashing down with every relationship gone haywire. Tainted are those, marred by the gory wrath of society, who are unable to sail through the trials and tribulations of a socially acceptable relationship. I saw this train filled with potential grooms leaving the station while someone pushed me frantically to run after the train. I thought of my MB men and my make-believe world in Italy and how happy I was there. I wondered why I didn’t find the Indian version of my MB man. While the world eagerly awaits Mr. Right’s arrival to put an end to my miseries of singlehood for life, Mr. Right is a split personality, who in his other personality, is a mama’s boy brought up with good values who only listens to mama.

My conflicting worlds confuse me – the one with the Jakes and Lukes, the one with people pushing me to get married to whoever was smart enough to make it to the US, and the world of these prospective grooms sitting in a train, one of which might be kind enough to marry me someday. While these worlds of mine collide, I bear a heavy burden on my chest, traumatized at the thought of dying an old spinster. My feelings remain unresolved so far- call it tragedy or consider it comical. Like my friend says, “27 and unmarried? Hai Raaam !!! Aren’t most girls your age already married?”

sunshine

The C’s and the V’s: A peek into the hilarious past

2011-06-24T11:08:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you have a chance encounter with a picture of yours from a different era, and it is like being introduced to your Neanderthal twin from a different world. An emaciated look, sallow eyes, with the only thing worse than your sense of makeup is your sense of dressing, when wearing oversized tee shirts or yellow skirts were in vogue. You look at yourself from the past and wonder, who is this obnoxious creature? I guess it is okay to make fun of oneself publicly. I had one such chance encounter, but not with a picture of mine from the past. Well, it was a picture sort of, but more of my academic achievements, or the lack of it. I happened to bump into my first ever written Curriculum Vitae (CV), and it was like having a glimpse of the outdated, backdated, anything but the glamorous past.

The first time I had ever made a CV for myself was maybe 7 years ago, when I had suddenly had the desperate realization that I will be out of college soon and will need to fend for myself. The dreams for America had just started to take shape, and an impressive resume seemed like a good idea to make initial contact with the aliens. Yeah, the feeling was something akin to that. The only trouble was, there was nothing much impressive for me to show off. No summer internship, no fellowship, no real research experience. However, something had to be written, and that was what I did. Over the next few months, the resume was forwarded to a hundred different professors across American universities, of course after some serious feedback from the seniors. Then, my life witnessed a series of disastrous phenomenon of computers crashing, email ids getting hacked, and various other cyber wreckages, and I lost my first ever written CV. After years, a fortuitous phenomenon happened and I got back a copy of my CV from the hinterlands of don’t-ask-me-where. For the next few hours of my life, I sat there wide eyed, looking at the wreckage from a disaster movie my CV looked like.

It started with a very confused-looking (also known as boka boka in Bengali) picture of mine (who gives their pictures in CVs?) with that desperate look on my face, begging to come to the US. What was I thinking, they would take one look at my beautiful face and let me in? Then came the information no one cared about. Address. Telephone number. Father’s name. Ancestral property’s location. Name of the first pet. Some of these are exaggerated of course, but I will leave it to you to figure it out. What, were they going to write me letters? The next “ahem” part was, well, “Sex: Female”. It seems I did not have the distinction between sex and gender back then, but more importantly, who cared? I am impressed I did not mention caste, ~~mother tongue~~ native language, and the name of ancestral village.

Then came the “Biographical Information”, which was fine I guess, but for the parenthesis that said, “In reverse chronological order”. Yeah, as if the order mattered, and more importantly, as if it was rocket science to figure out what order things were in. Of course, every institution I attended had to be listed with the “marks obtained”, because how can one trust the transcripts of my great university, assuming the transcripts reached them on time? Then started the actual meat of the CV thankfully, institutions attended, random projects undertaken, with the mention of everything, from killing a mosquito in the lab to growing bacteria on abandoned lunch from last week. Even things like “had 95% attendance in class”, “recited nursery rhymes 28 years ago”, “sung a song on Teachers’ Day”, or “could eat during class without getting caught” found an apt place in the CV. Then there were awards and accolades. “Stood 10^th out of 20 innumerable students in ICSE”, “won awards in debates and calligraphy” (who cares?), or “sat through boring seminars” would find a place as well. If only the keyboard had not taken over pen and paper, my calligraphy skills would have found me a great job in the industry. If this was not insult enough to my academic achievements (or the lack of it), there would be a separate section dedicated to extracurricular activities, because being a house caption, an indispensible member of the sewing club, writing rhyming poems, singing songs on Tagore’s birth day, or anchoring soporific events should also count. Not to mention learning 10,000 words from Barron’s, or writing research reports that would never see the light of the publisher’s shop.

Whether I like it or not, this will be an indelible part of what I was. It took years of grooming, feedback, and doing some actual research to build my credentials in the field, and to evolve as a professional. To put it differently, the present me is because that was the past me. I looked at my old CV with a mixture of both love and hatred. Is this who I used to be? Desperate to get recognition even for a seminar I attended and slept through? Or collecting chunks of tiger poop in the name of a scat encounter survey study? Was I hoping my experience with being a part of the nature club, or having a good handwriting was about to get me admitted into a good school?

Yeah, I know we all have to start somewhere, and build from there. Just that early men did not have that polish doesn’t mean they were any less successful in their environment. However, call me smug, arrogant, thankless, whatever, but it doesn’t hurt to make fun of thy own once in a while. Except that 10 years down the line, I would be reading my current CV and laughing again. “Went to Vancouver B.C. to attend a talk on the mating habits of the Hominidae family”. Who cares?

sunshine

Philosophizing

2011-06-20T00:08:00.001-04:00

It must have been a brief moment of something significant, a tug, a pull, a communication from above, something too brief and in passing, but something that definitely was. Call it a spell, call it hallucination, or counting the years misspent and in anticipation, the years that melted away into memories and more memories piling up, of a big, fat album in the mind. I would often turn the pages of the album in solitude, in loneliness, alone in a crowd, watching the world go by me. I would flip the pages in my mind and before I know, minutes, and hours would sift and slip by my fingers, like fine silk. If it had been a message from somewhere that was destined to be, and not to be at the same time, I would not know. For when something doesn’t make sense, doesn’t have a reason, or doesn’t seem explicable using the finiteness of the senses, science turns into philosophy. I sit for hours in a crowd, waiting to catch the next plane, and think of all the philosophy packed into the head, flipping through the pages of the album that exists only in my mind now, and like a movie, credits roll and things play by again and again right in front of me. I become a spectator of my own life. To think that it is but a faded memory, living far and deep into the recesses of the past now, to try and distinguish the fact from the fantasy, or the things that exist in the mind versus the things that exist, is an ordeal. To see a carnival of people walk by me, away from something, toward something, with something, and to wonder why I see the people I see, for is it but a chance event, a phenomenon of randomness, or something conspired and connived, is beyond me. I know not if they are but apparitions floating around me, tricking me into believing they exist, but not in reality. If one could see beyond the natural, they would see thin green lines connecting people, almost like a laser beam, the tug, the pull that we do not sense or perceive, but which exists nevertheless. There was a similar line between us, something that could potentially make me sense you, your existence in a crowd of unknowns. The sun that set from your window is the same sun I just watched rise. And we continued our efforts, trying to make sense of the atoms and the molecules around us, how they behave in particular ways, and why they behave thus. To think we were all a part of the grand scheme of things we had no knowledge of, and no control over, happily walking by the ocean in a perfectly moonlit night, not cognizant of the thousand forces that make paths cross, and the thousand more forces that make people go their own separate ways. Call it fate or destiny, or call it an accident, maybe a happy accident, it is the same feeling of deciding to choose to take this bus every morning, or wear this dress one morning, and not that one. Who knows where the other bus would have led. So true it felt when you said, the future is scarier than the past. For the past is what it already is, immutable, like an imprint, a page out of a diary, a picture out of an album of memories. I speak predictably, and in clichés, yada yada yada. But for the same reasons you give me, the past to me is scarier than the future, for it is what is already is, immutable, like an imprint, a page out of the diary that is already written, and cannot be erased. When accidents happen in life, things do not come crashing into one another. It is subtle, and perhaps more potent and dangerous thus. Sometimes, all it takes is an innocuous click of the finger, a nod of yes or no, an assent, or a dissent. And years into things, you sit as lonely as ever amidst a crowd, looking back and wondering. Wondering who you ended up being, and who you wanted to end up being. And then you close the album, get up, walk past me and take the next plane, moving onto newer things, continuing to pile on memories one above the other, totally oblivious of me. Life goes on, and so do you, and I, and everyone around us. But sometimes, a random face amidst strangers would remind me of you, make me slow down my pace and turn back to look, to wonder if it was indeed another sign to be picked up, a sign amidst the million ones that were already lost on me, and then some more.

sunshine

My Traffic Theory

2011-06-10T02:07:00.000-04:00

A few months ago, I generated a social theory stuck in traffic for almost 2 hours. I had to visit the city to get some work done. Aware of the office traffic in a big city after living in one for years, I started at 5 in the morning to be able to reach there on time. The drive was just 2 hours, but I did not want to be held in traffic at any cost.

As luck would have it, I was caught in the worst form of traffic 18 miles prior to hitting city. I looked at the time. It was still 6:45 in the morning, and the drive had been smooth so far. However, little did I know I was going to spend the next two hours cruising through those 18 miles in bumper to bumper traffic.

As the minutes ticked by, traffic started to get heavy. My plans of being there on time, or even finding street parking were jinxed. Sitting in traffic having nothing to do, I observed an interesting phenomenon depicting a particular risk-taking trait of human behavior. The freeway had 4 lanes on each side. The leftmost lane was a High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane, also known as the carpool lane. This means that at certain times of the day during peak hours (from 5 am to 10 am, and then from 3 pm to 7 pm), only vehicles with two or more people could use that lane. This is mostly to encourage people to carpool. Knowing the number of people who drive singly in the US, you would be amazed how empty the HOV lane usually is.

In the process of waiting in bumper to bumper traffic, I observed from my left mirror that more than half the people using that lane were single people in the car. It confused me somewhat, angered me all the more, not only because people were not supposed to break traffic rules, but also because here I was going to be stuck in traffic for the next few hours. None of these people driving singly had any expression of guilt on their faces. When observed closely, it is possible to notice the behavior or facial expression of other drivers. People drove in the “forbidden” lane with a stoic, business-like expression, without caring that they were breaking the law.

As I inched a little forward, I noticed that the cop got hold of one of the girls, and was giving her a traffic violation ticket. Since it was not possible to speed in heavy traffic, and since she was alone, I figured she was getting a ticket for driving in the wrong lane. However, during the entire 18 miles, I just saw 2 cop cars giving tickets.

Now let’s forget morality, traffic rules, and civic sense for a while, and see what’s happening here. I was frustrated as I was caught in heavy traffic for just one day. These people are regular office commuters who need to face this every day. They need to get to work on time. The traffic was horrible even as early as 6:45 in the morning, God knows what it would be at say 9 am. Now the entire 18 mile stretch of road (even more for some) was going to be like this. Who could afford to wait for 2 hours in traffic snarl every day? The daily commuters must have figured out that not more than 2-3 cop cars span the entire stretch. With hundreds of people breaking the law, and just 2-3 cop cars in 18 miles, what was the probability of getting caught? If 2-3 people get caught and fined every 18 miles, what is the probability that you will end up being one of them? We are talking probability here, and not morality, okay? For every person getting a traffic ticket, there were hundreds of cars that sped by. So let’s say you get caught once every month for driving in the wrong lane, and then get fined for say $100. That is the price you pay for getting to office on time every day. Since this is not a speeding ticket, I am hoping the insurance premium would not go up every time you got a ticket.

Of course it is all wrong, the idea of having rules is to stick to them as best as you can. But how does one cope when faced with dire situations like this every day? Should they start even earlier, maybe as early as 5 am to reach somewhere at 9 am? Every day? Or just take the risk, pay like a hundred dollars every month (which is about $5 everyday to reach on time, not a lot for people who earn), and move on in life? Certainly the roads were not equipped to handle peak hour traffic without people resorting to unfair means. Clearly there are more cars than what the roads can hold during peak hours. Thus, isn’t this a workable strategy to lessen your stress by not getting caught in traffic for hours? Surely when enough number of people do something that is wrong or forbidden, it does not remain that wrong or forbidden any more.

[To be clear here, I am not advocating for the phenomenon that was going on. I just observed a human behavior in a small sample of people, and tried generating my theory to interpret the risk-taking behaviors of these individuals]

sunshine

The beast that would not let go

2011-06-07T15:25:00.000-04:00

It was out of the blue that I was attacked. This time, I was driving. I barely had time to look in the rearview mirror to see that it was a creature with serrations all over its body. I somehow managed to park my car, but this time, the creature was trying to jump off, run away, and hide in the forest. I have never been a brave person, never the ones who would observe fasts for human rights or be vociferous about issues that plague us. I never thought I was bold, courageous, and fearless. But something in me snapped. I didn’t want this creature, half-man, half-beast, with a green skin and serrations all over it to scare me and hide away. Not knowing what to do, I gripped it by the arm.

What happened for the next few minutes was strange, surprising, and scary. I saw the world go by me without noticing me. I saw my mom, and then my sister, talking to others, laughing, and walking by me, without a look. It seemed like I was trapped in a glass shell, wherefrom I could see people, but people could not see me. I tried screaming as hard as I could. But as it always happen with me in fear, no voice would come out. I took a deep breath, and tried screaming again, but no sound this time as well. My grip was getting slacker, the animal was trying to wriggle itself free, but I would not let go. I felt tears stinging my eyes, for I was so helpless that my own family could not see me struggle while I could clearly see them. What made is worse was that no voice would come out, no matter how hard I tried to scream. I was resolved to not let go, so I remained the way I was, unable to scream, but my grip tightly on the repulsive creature. I had not noticed before, but the creature emanated a foul smell from its body, an odor far too repulsive for comfort. With one hand, I tried reaching my phone ad dialing 911. It took me quite some effort, but I eventually managed to do it.

Within no time, the cops were there, freeing the beast off my grip. What I don’t remember is, how did they know who I was or that I needed help, when I had lost my voice? I have no remembrance. However, they freed me, and I slumped on the ground, looking at the breast, now captured by the cops. I held my hand close to my forehead and started crying. I was stunned, exhausted, taken aback, relieved, tired, and had lost my voice, all at the same time. It’s true I did not let go, but I sensed a dreariness, a sense of loss, even after having won a battle. Who this animal was? What was it doing here? Why did it choose to attack me of all people? I had no idea.

I have seen different versions of this dream for years now. Different versions because the situation is different every time, sometimes an animal, sometimes a man. But I always lose my voice while seeking help. And the dream always ends with me crying. And then I wake up, shaken, tired, scared, and relieved at the same time that it was just a dream, and cry some more.

sunshine

The Big Three Ohhh !!!

2011-06-02T13:42:00.003-04:00

You would foresee it years in advance, coming at its own slow pace like an ominous red signal prepping to stop everything fun in your life. Like a morbid, fear instigating animal sprawled on its limbs, slowly crawling and showing its claws and tentacles from a distance, you will never be more aware or petrified of something approaching. It should not be a big deal after all, it’s just another birthday. But then, it ends up being a big deal. In a way, it’s a milestone reached and crossed, a milestone after which you are no longer considered in the bracket of energetic, enthusiastic, eligible, and highly coveted age group that you call the twenties.

They say you do not hit thirty, thirty hits you. Whoever this “they” is, they could not be closer to the truth. Like a whack of reality on the head, it hits you hard. So what changes so drastically in that one day? Everything actually. You go to sleep being 29, and then you wake up the next morning not really knowing what hit your life and changed it forever. That is called turning 30.

I have been dreading this birthday even before I was 27. Call it social programming, cultural upbringing, whatever. It feels nothing close to the energetic Jitendra, white shirt, white pants, white shoes and all, gyrating his hips while playing badminton and popping those “30 plus” pills by the dozen. When I was a teenager, anyone 30 years old was just OLD. Plain and simple. When I was in my mid-twenties, I would not even look at anyone 30 years or older. Little did I know how I would feel while I approached that age.

The interesting irony is, I do not ever remember being so petrified of entering the twenties. Heck, I do not even remember my 20^th birthday. Back calculating, I know I was in Kolkata, somewhere at the fag end of my undergraduate education. However, I do not specifically remember the 20^th birthday as being a big deal or a milestone. If anything, I was happy to be done with my teens, and hoped I would be henceforth taken seriously and not be dismissed from adult conversations and asked to go entertain the kids of uncles and aunties who visited us.

So how would it feel like being 30? I thought I have two more months to find out, but I think I know the answer already. You have perhaps never been more aware of your bones creaking every time you try to shake your hips to the beats of Beedi Jalaile at a dance party. There are imminent health issues and you have suddenly entered the “more at risk” category. The acne and oily skin nightmares of the twenties are replaced now by the wrinkles and white hair nightmares of the thirties. In fact, you would be lucky to have whitening hair, which means you still have hair on your head to boast about. Some unfortunates with receding hairlines and balding issues will not even get a chance to color their hair.

99% of your friends are married by now, and you cannot relate to 99% of them. The career and job-hunting uncertainties of the twenties are now replaced by “mother-in-law is a pain in the ass” issues, “my husband never throws the trash” issues, or “the child needs to be reared well” issues. Your friends discuss alien topics animatedly, alien to you at least, which include, but are not restricted to paying off mortgages for that house, getting a citizenship, or investing in the college education of the child who is yet to be born in 3 months. Although you are in the age bracket eligible to be the president of the United States, you realize dishearteningly that you were never bright enough to be the President of any country, not in this lifetime anyway. It is a big accomplishment training the domestic partner to vacuum the house bi-monthly, let alone having big aspirations for changing the world. A moment of truth, faced with certain stark realities, you realize you have grown more respectful towards your parents, whose opinions never mattered to you before this.

Your worst nightmare is no longer related to maintaining a perfect figure, you are long past that age when you could even hope for a presentable figure. Now, you are worried about sagging bellies and mammary glands, dysfunctional hormones, plummeting ~~sex~~ drives, approaching menopausal issues, and imminent health issues like cholesterol, blood pressure, and cancer. You hear horror stories about someone’s colleague’s relative who died of a heart attack on his 32^nd birthday in the process of cutting the cake. Blowing 32 candles with gusto just proved to be fatal for him. Going to the gym is no longer optional, it is the only option you have if you do not want to die like that colleague’s relative. Every time you try to sit, stand, or start fantasizing about running that half-marathon, your knees make a funny sound, mocking you. Your biological clock is not longer just ticking tick tock, it has gone berserk like the shrieking alarm that wakes you from your sweet slumber every morning. You are no longer a badass hiking the rocks of Badlands in South Dakota on the weekend. You are a well-settled, domesticated member of the species with a family to shoulder the responsibility for. Accept it, you are no longer the lion or even the wolf of the jungle, hunting singularly and living singly with pride. You are now a cow, a big, fat cow that only mingles with other cows and chews cud with other cows in herds. Your belligerent personality is gone. The mountain bike has been replaced by a family size SUV, strollers and diaper bags and all. You are found spending the once adventurous weekends (when you hiked 20 miles or had 20 straight tequila shots in a row without falling sick) at the farmer’s market or at Chuck E. Cheese.

To avoid complications, repercussions, and outcries, I will keep this as gender neutral as I can, which will still not dissolve the bleak clouds of possibilities the gates of thirties open for you. You can hate me for this post, or make strong arguments, which will only establish your lack of humor, or lack of understanding of humor as you approach your thirties. And it’s not only the lack of humor. You are slowly approaching that age of hormonal lull, and these days you can fall asleep, snoring and drooling and all, even in the middle of watching porn. You are more philosophical, sedentary, hang out in packs or herds of other people similar to you, and while you spent the previous decade being a party animal dancing away to glory high on alcohol, you feel more at peace singing bhajans and devotional songs in “satsangs” and learning the art of living (pun unintended), breathing in through one nostril and out through the other, to keep expectations low, anger in control, and to adopt pain, suffering, and the lack of materialistic greed as a means to obtain nirvana in life.

I can imagine how many people I have pissed off with this post. You would argue saying, “Hey, they say 30s is the new 20s”. Whoever these “they” are, they are a bunch of morons who either failed their math class or made a life out of bullshitting. 30s can never be the new 20s, you learnt your math way back in elementary school. If anything, thirty would always be forty minus ten. So if you are an optimist like I am, your only consolation is you are not turning 40 right away, an impending doomsday that would be approaching in a decade anyway if the world doesn’t lose you to heart attacks or high cholesterol. Although I would rather be in my twenties than in my thirties, I would any day be in my thirties than be in my forties. So I’ll stop inviting the same feeling of helplessness that I get when a dentist comes near my mouth with an injection, his assistant strapping my limbs so that there is no escape and I bear my pain and torture in silence, and stop resisting something that is so inevitable. I will try to stop mentally resisting turning thirty. For I have a few more months left to cherish the last bits and pieces of my twenties, or whatever remains of it.

sunshine

Reading between the lines

2011-05-24T17:48:00.002-04:00

As a PhD student learning to do some credible and innovative research, one question I have often asked, and am often asked about is, how much academic reading one needs to do for a PhD. The politically correct and socially desirable answer would be, “A lot. As much as you can”. However, my frustration stemmed from the fact that terms like “a lot” and “as much” do not mean much, unless you are able to quantify it. Even if you could put a number to these values, the number is bound to vary across fields. Thus, it comes back to the same old question, how much reading must one do in order to be best equipped to do some meaningful research work.

I have pored and pondered over this question for years, and over the years, I have come up with my own “Reading for Research” strategy. Since these are my own ideas that have stemmed from MY perception of the research world around me, it is needless to say that what I claim would not have any scientific basis or background research, and should be taken with a pinch, no, perhaps a fistful of salt. What works for me might not work for you.

I am the kind of person who can cure my own insomnia by reading. The moment I start reading academic papers or book, I fall asleep. Now this is ironic, given that I am expected to do some heavy reading because of what I do for a living. I heavily rely on two strategies to get my healthy share of reading nutrients for my academic diet. First, while reading a paper, I start with the abstract, the research questions, and findings. If I find it useful enough, I go on to the introduction, the literature review, the methodology, and the discussion. This is a skill my academic daddy taught me. As a person reading voluminous work, you need to master the art of skimming through, and glossing over things that would be superficial to your knowledge base, first focusing just on the findings. I am not advocating for such a practice, it’s just that it works brilliantly for me, and I heavily rely on this technique.

My second technique is even more sophisticated and less time consuming, for the lack of better terminology. While reading something, almost anything, I always try to keep track of the key words, phrases, and terminology used. I can always look it up later on when I want to, but for my primary reading needs, I hunt for keywords rather than reading every line and focusing on every word. Let me give you this analogy. In order to get an overall bird’s eye picture of a forest, you need to know that there are trees, and then there is some grassland, and a river flowing by. But you do not need to have an exact count of the trees, the small plants, or the number of fish in the river. This is how I view my world of research. It is important for me to know that the forest of information out there has trees and plants and animals. The day I need to keep a count of the number of trees, I will zoom in on the trees and count them. Till then, it is enough for me to know where things are in terms of their positionality. Let me put it this way. In order to be a good storehouse of knowledge, you don’t need to know where everything is. However, you do need to know where to look for things when you need them. My keyword strategy works excellent that way. It is far less of a cognitive load to just focus on the new words and terminology used, than to read every sentence about something. Sometimes, I even carry a scratch pad with me and write down all the new terms I learn so that later when I need it, I know where to look for it. Months later, some stalwart in the field will bounce off an occasional buzzword and already familiar with the keyword, I will know where to look it up. I get almost 4 times more reading done using this technique. Of course your reading speed and skills get better with time, and the more time you spend in the research world, the more acquainted you are with what is out there. Till then, for beginners and slackers like me, it is unproductive to fret and worry and be intimidated by the whole process of familiarizing oneself with the extensive body of knowledge out there. And like my academic daddy keeps telling me, it is important to think hard, but what is much more important to be successful is to think smart.

sunshine

From virtual to real

2011-05-17T00:59:00.002-04:00

In my almost-6 years of blogging, I have had the opportunity to meet some of my readers and fellow bloggers. For those I have not met, I have been able to talk to some of you over the telephone. The meetings are always special, and people are always very warm. What thrills me is the fact that there are people I didn’t know of, who take the time to read and appreciate what I write, and remember very minute details. While chatting, the topic usually comes to how did they discover my blog, and how did they manage to read it for so long. I have a good friend who was interviewing with Microsoft and hence asked if we could meet up over dinner. While chatting, we discovered that we have a dozen friends in common. There was another friend I met at the local bakery and talked to for hours, and discovered more friends in common. Last Christmas, I met another dear friend and fellow blogger. When I was at a conference last month, I had the opportunity to meet another reader friend of mine. The list is long.

When it comes to talking about my blog, everyone usually asks a unique question, and no two people have asked me the same question. It is interesting how people remember different posts, and certain things they read resonate and leave a lasting impression. Someone asked me my name, and it is then that I realized I had talked to that person without telling them my name. Someone else actually wanted to remember me as sunshine, and didn’t want to know my name. Someone had asked me if Baby Kalyani is real (yes, she is very real and an important person in my life). Someone else asked me what make and model was sunshine car. It is interesting how different posts, and different characters resonate with different people. People remembered G, Baby Kalyani, or my car from the posts. However, I was talking to another reader friend of mine, and this was a very interesting response. I asked my reader friend how it feels to communicate with a blogger in real time, talk to them, and see what they look like. I asked if it feels different to have a face to a name. My reader friend said, it is the same as meeting a person at a conference, whose papers you have been reading for a long time J

Being a PhD student myself, I loved this response, and this way of putting it.

sunshine

2 hours of watching 127 hours

2011-05-10T03:52:00.001-04:00

My experience of watching the movie “127 hours” has been, for lack of a better word, harrowing. It took me much more than 2 hours to finish it actually. I started watching it, but had to pause repeatedly to take a break, breathe easy, drink some water, feel better, and wipe off the sweat. Then when I could take no more of the mental exhaustion, and I was not even half way through the movie, I fell asleep. I woke up the next morning and finished watching it, after more breaks, deep breathing, drinking water, and fast forwarding the gory parts of the movie.

So does this mean you should watch the movie, or does it mean you should not watch the movie?

Good question. The movie is so good that you will not be able to take your eyes off it. however, parts of it is so gory that you will wish you had not watched it. I have a weak stomach, I often fall sick at the sight of blood, and cringe in pain when someone gets hurt. You can imagine my condition here.

For the uninitiated, this is a movie based in my favorite place, Utah, telling you the true story of a man who loved outdoor activities (another thing I relate to), and often went alone for canyoneering without leaving behind a note. On one such occasion, he happened to be out there in the rocks, when his right hand got trapped under a loose boulder while jumping off a crevice. Unable to get help or take the boulder off his hand, he is stuck in the claustrophobic space, standing by a boulder, for 127 hours. How he survives those 127 hours, with limited water, no food, and harsh weather conditions, is astounding. What he does to free himself thus is another story. The good news is, unlike the movie “Into the woods”, he doesn’t die here. The bad news is, in order to survive, he cuts off his right hand with his blunt pen life out of desperation. I am cringing again as I write this post, to think that this is not fiction, but a true story. It is something to be sick, go to the doctors, and to be operated under anesthesia. It is something else to make a decision about whether you want to be stuck in between a rock and die, or bear the pain of chopping off your hand, without pain medication, and free yourself. We often watch supernatural and horror movies, to be scared by things which do not happen in our conscious space of existence most of the time. This movie will make you feel the same horror, at a magnified level, out of a true incident that could have happened to anyone of us. You will realize that sometimes fact can be way scarier than fiction.

To write a review about the movie is pointless here, of course the movie was well made, depicting every nuance, with great attention to detail, the fear when he realizes he is trapped, the pain, the desperation, the hallucination and comatose state after going without food or water for days, the survival strategies he is forced to take. It is in moments like this that I realize how small and fragile I am, compared to nature. If a rock can cause this much havoc, surely we are nothing compared to the power of things around us. By the time I was done watching the movie, I was crying, sobbing, unable to stop myself. To think of all the pain this person went through, and his self-determination and instinct to survive, is amazing. Honestly, I do not know what I would have done under such a situation. God forbid someone gets into such a situation.

Watch the movie, if you can take the sight of pain and blood. It will be a good reminder of your smallness compared to the world around you. Ever since I watched it, which was 3 days ago, I have subconsciously touched my right arm on multiple occasions, trying to feel the bones, the joints, and the flesh. I am thankful I have my limbs intact. And I am also thankful I fast forwarded the scenes where he chops off his arm. I don’t think I will ever have the courage to watch it.

Next, I am hunting for the book it was based on. Anyone has read it?

I salute you Aron Ralston. I bet you never thought a rock that came out of nowhere would change your life so much. I couldn’t have done what you did. Your indomitable spirit, courage, and determination are worth many such salutes.

sunshine

“Mere Paas Ma Hai ... Aur Tumhare Pass?”

2011-05-07T02:58:00.010-04:00

They are the reserve stores of love and affection (and adipose). Their pious feet (with sacred dust and all) mark the sanctuaries of the doors of Heaven (jannat) for their sons (not to mention the existential identity crisis of the Bengali men following it). They are mostly seen wearing ill-fitting, neutral colored traditional clothes, salwar kameez or sarees, either black or white (depending on the shades of badness or goodness of characters in movies). They are the storehouse of tears, and they cry for everything, be it when their sons come home wearing cool tattoos imprinted “Mera baap chor hai” (My father is a thief), or when their sons go on to become “Badaa aadmis” (great men) in life. They are endowed with superpowers, sometimes snatching away their kids from the jaws of danger and death, and sometimes banging on bells in the neighborhood Shankar Bhagwan ka mandir till Shankar bhagwan himself fulfils her wishes that usually center around bringing back her son into consciousness, who has been knocked out following an accident that either involves a vehicle, a girl, a communal riot, or a villain. Sometimes motherhood comes without an expiry date, surpassing reincarnation or amnesia/memory loss. It is an amazing feat to be a Bollywood mother, shouldering responsibility of everything, from organizing tea parties to the weddings of their children (be it Tina Munim dancing to shayad meri shaadi ka khayal, dil mein aaya hai, isi liye mummy ne meri, tumhe chai pe bulaya hai, or Kajol gyrating to the music of mummy daddy meri shaadi karwa rahe hain). Neither age, senility, or blindness deters them from fiercely protecting their children, especially sons. They are seen raiding Shivji ka mandir, berating God himself for being mean and unfair. Their faith can move mountains, and in case they have bad night vision, it can be cured by the strike of a lightning or serpents. They are the ones first kidnapped, roped, and harassed by the villain if they have a son who is the hero and has pissed off the bad guy in the movie (not mauled though, that is left for the unwed sister in the movie who no one would have married anyway). Occupationally, they are seen lugging bricks at constructional sites (that will be later owned by their sons as a mark of respect for the mom), ploughing fields, or sewing clothes for the entire community even with a straining eyesight to be able to raise enough money for the son’s education. They are usually called Mamta (not Banerjee), Lakshmi, Savitri, Tulsi, Koushalya, or better still, maatey, amma, or maaaaa!!! They are usually the ones who have the privilege of hugging the heroes, all in the good name of motherhood.

So while the whole world is gushing with a sudden developed love for their mother as Mothers’ Day is nearing, let us remember the mothers of Bollywood, for the way they have touched our lives, living as role models, smothering their children with love and affection, and always being the unselfish, struggling, usually poor but respectable denizens of the movie world who are the strength of pillar behind the success of their sons.

Aruna Irani in Beta (1995):Where mothers could be villains.

While Madhuri’s dhak-dhak shook the country, Aruna Irani shook the image of a good mother with her powerful, dhak-dhak-less performance in the movie. Rightly named Lakshmi, she had her eye on Lakshmi (wealth) and was the depiction of selfishness and greed for a change, where mothers were stereotyped to be these simple women whose love for their children would move mountains. She keeps her stepson from going to school or educating himself, not that it prevented him from getting Madhuri for a wife, many an educated and highly competitive students in best colleges would argue. Of course, things have to end on a happy note, giving the right social message, so she has to have a change of heart, but not without lots of drama, melodrama, tears, apologies, and dhishum dhishum at the end.

Reema Lagoo: When mommies cause family breakups.

Perhaps best remembered for her role as Prem’s mom in Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), a decade later, she was also the Maiya Yashoda in the controversial movie Hum Saath Saath Hain (1999). Things are so right and everyone is so much in love with the concept of family here that you would feel like puking out of the picture of perfection and the excess of goodness. But then of course the seeds of doubts and jealousy are planted, causing separation in the family. But as always, things work out, a few heart attacks and galloons of tears later, and the movie ends on a happy note, until of course the incident of the poaching of the black buck is discovered. Reema Lagoo has been the model mommy in a number of other movies, including a movie named Mere do anmol ratan, that no one remembers.

Rakhi: When motherhood surpasses the expiry date of life.

The woman always simmering with “Badle ki aag” (need for revenge), Karan Arjun (1995) and Ram Lakhan (1989) are two of her powerful mommy movies (there being many more), where she avenges the villains solely based on the conviction that her sons are going to set things right. With resolve of steel, you should see her challenging the villains Bishambar Nath or Durjan Singh (Amrish Puri in both cases). In one, she holds on to the blood-soiled clothes of her husband murdered on the train tracks, and the other, she is seen challenging in her usually husky voice, “Mere Karan Arjun aayenge, dharti ka seena cheer ke aayenge, blah blah blah karke aayenge”. A very black and white role, she is usually seen wearing either white or black in both movies, with no hint of either sindoor or smile in the movie. She is the perfect example of a mommy who shows us that the bonds of motherhood can surpass any barrier, even reincarnation.

Jaya Bachchan: The mommy jisne …. Bas keh diya !!

This mommy has revamped the entire image of Bollywood mommies. If I remember anything of her in this movie, it is the wealth, the pompousness, the grand clothing, the ornate mansion they lived in, the straightened hair with a hint of white, the pooja-paath and naach-gaana that ensues while her son lands in a helicopter, she getting on a stool to fix the tie of her one and a half foot taller husband, and of course her (only) powerful dialogue in the entire movie revolting against her husband, “Bas keh diya!!!”. She broke the image of the mommies of the 70’s movies who were poor, wore the same cotton sari throughout the movie, and washed utensils at other’s homes to bring up their children. This mommy wears zardosi sarees, lives in castles, and has a husband who dances with chicks at parties.

Farida Jalal: The cool and friendly mommy.

She will always be remembered for her role as Lajo in DDLJ (1995). Although a BBCD mommy, she is the epitome of tradition, dupatta clad and all. A dutiful wife and a mother who tries to be more of a friend that a mother, she is the model mommy for many girls who grew up in my generation, the mommy who wouldn’t rebel against daddy, but who would secretly support her daughter to love and marry the man of her dreams, even if it was an undekha, anjaana chehra from the mustard fields of Punjab. She is a contradiction of sorts, non-conventional with her ideas of “bhaag ja Simran, tu ghar se bhaag ja”, yet conventional, so much that she wouldn’t shoulder the responsibility of permitting her daughter for a summer Eurotrip (apne baoji se pooch le). From the sister of Amitabh (remember the song, dekh sakta hoon main kuch bhi hote huye?) to the mother of Simran, she is quite the person you would want to be your mom if you were the heroine with an angry, disciplinarian dad.

Nirupa Roy: The “baap” of all mommies.

Perhaps no other mommy has played such a powerful role as she did in the movie Deewar (1975), still best remembered for the dialogue “Mere paas ma hai”. Funnily enough, as a kid, I somehow got the idea that her name is Nirupay Roy, that fits her nirupay image perfectly. She doesn’t need to be named anything in this movie, bas “ma” hi kaafi hai. Maaaaaaa !!!! Poor, lachrymose, sullen and sad, oozing with self-respect, both her sons go on to choose different paths in life, despite being brought up with the same values. The suhagan who lived like a vidhwa, working at construction sites and fainting multiple times due to low levels of glucose in the blood, the ma with the hyper functional lachrymose glands, she should rightly get credit for starting the whole movement also known as mothers’ day.

Honestly, I never knew about mothers’ day as a kid, or thought that there is one particular day of the year when you are supposed to smother your mother with love (more on Facebook than in real life), but that might be because I wasn’t brought up in so cool or happening a family. I understand birthdays and anniversaries are celebrated once a year, but mothers’ day? Slowly I got the idea, that there is going to be this one day every year, hopefully coinciding with the break after the spring semester, when you should inundate your Facebook page with posts about how much your mother means to you, and how much you love her. You are supposed to bleat like a goat, myaa … myaa… post your mommy’s picture as your profile picture to confuse your friends, and inundate your wall with messages of matribhakti. If you are a mommy yourself, this is your chance of demanding anything from iPads to diamonds, not from your child who is 1 year old and barely knows to talk, but from your husband, all in the name of mothers’ day. Like I wrote earlier, that the love has to keep showing, for it isn’t love if it does not show. So on this occasion of mothers’ day, I am going to remember my mom, who lives halfway across the world, by remembering all the cool Bollywood mommies whose movies I grew up watching. Honestly, it wouldn’t make a difference if I lived with my mom. For thankfully she is one person who does not care about Mothers’ Day.

Happy Matri Diwas mummy log.

sunshine

The wrath of the MAC

2011-05-03T14:30:00.000-04:00

Over the years, I have toyed with the idea of letting anonymous commentators comment. My settings have changed at various times to allow or disallow comments from people who don’t leave behind a name or an identity. Single blinded comment (where you know who the reader is, but the reader does not know who you are) is unfair, and disturbing. Because the malicious anonymous commentator (MAC) suddenly feels all powerful, with the right to spew malicious thoughts shrouded by anonymity. Of what I write, you would either agree with me, or disagree with me. But spew venom in the name of disagreement? Naah, there is always a classy way of doing things, which you obviously don’t know because you choose to be anonymous. Here, take a look at this comment written by who else, an anonymous commentator as a response to this post:

"I am apathetic toward politics and current happenings, unless they directly affect me."

Being the kind of self-confessed self-centered person you are, I wouldn't expect any deep analysis from you, at least on political topics.

"If I have inadvertently hurt your sentiments by bringing up the visa or backward caste issue, stop being a sissy and live up to the reality, like everyone is."

No you didn't hurt my sentiments by bringing up the topic of reservation. I am a brahmin by birth (though I don't give a damn about it), a PhD student in USA, and I find your casteist rant against OBCs to be quite amusing.

Now I don’t know what got into this person when he wrote this stuff. I didn’t think I have ever held anyone at gunpoint and forced them to read the allegedly “self-confessed and self-centered” things I write. Also, the commentator deems it necessary for me to know about its high caste, a PhD status, and its residency in the US (which obviously is a big deal). But this person forgets to mention its name (and hence I have no idea if this is a man, a woman, a robot, or a pet). So now I am left with a bunch of information about caste, educational background, and the coveted US residency, but without a name. Isn’t it exactly what a malicious anonymous commentator would do? Like a person who gets his thrills by wasting people’s time giving them blank calls, wording profanities, and then hanging up? Of course it is so easy to hide behind the curtains of anonymity and do this.

Anyway, I hope this anonymous commentator continues to read my self-confessed accounts, obviously because there is nothing better it could do with its time. But the next time you leave an unrelated, personally attacking comment for no reason, make sure you leave your name behind.

sunshine

From Royal Weddings to Royal Killings

2011-05-02T21:32:00.001-04:00

From royal weddings to royal killings, too many interesting things have been happening around me to focus on work. I have always been sardonic about flashy wedding ceremonies, wondering with cynicism how long it would be before these doe-eyed, love-infested couples start to swear, blame, fight, and be unfair to each other. So, while my colleague woke up at 4 am and watched the royal wedding with renewed interest, I slept soundly on my sofa bed in Missouri. Once I returned from Missouri, I had the exciting news of the royal killing awaiting me. Random thoughts crossed my mind as I digested and processed the news. There were serious issues, like, is Obama going to be re-elected as the President again? Not that I find his policies very pro-immigrantion, and I am apathetic toward politics and current happenings, unless they directly affect me. Then I thought of more serious issues, like, now that the villain is dead, will they let me carry lotions, moisturizers, and beauty products with me in planes? Since I moved to the US many years after 9/11, I have always seen high security at the airports, have been frisked for some serious feeling up by people of the same gender in the name of security. Trust me, the last thing you want is some woman touching you here and there in the name of security. And then I have had expensive makeup bottles stolen from hotels (which were complimentary anyway) being mercilessly thrown away. The bottles of water were gone, and so were the bottles of juice and iced tea. For years, it was a challenge to have a clean security check up, or carry contact lenses and their solutions. The TSA forced me to wear glasses and look less glamorous. My friend suggested I visit Washington DC with an appeal, “The motion for lotion”. To cut a long and nagging story short, will there be lesser security hassles at the airport now, since the villain is dead? Will I be eyed with less suspicion, because I am brown and more importantly, considered a potential immigrant, since my mom and dad weren’t smart enough to think ahead of time and give me birth here? Will someone willingly let me extend my visa once it expired, because I am now an acclaimed professor very worthy of producing good quality research in this country? Or, will things be the same as ever, if not worse? No makeup lotions, being frisked, employers not willing to sponsor my visa or let me work in peace without losing sleep over a green card? The reason I am ranting about strict immigration laws is because I have had to go through a lot of hassles in the past because of this, and this has no connection with my post anymore. Honestly, I would never greedily eye that green card or the citizenship people kill each other (or worse, marry each other) over. I have never wanted to be a green card hungry immigrant. When I moved to this country, I did so because I wanted a life of freedom, a life where I was free to study in the best educational institutions, and move and see places and not be restricted to a single country. Given a chance, I would gladly work in Europe, or any other place for the matter. I came here because I thought I could live a life of freedom, without the person from the other backward caste next door competing with me, and outshining me for that coveted place in my dream institution. I wanted to be in a place where my worth would be the value of my work, and not the function of my caste (or the backwardness of it), the clout my father has (which he has none), or the amount of butt licking of the political parties in power I could do. That is why I left India. But in moving here, I got myself into different kind of chains. In order to break free of the shackles that held me back in India, I became a prisoner of different kind of social, political, and visa-related norms. How I wish I was hired for the quality of my work, at any government or private organization, without being rejected because I was not a citizen. No, I will never want to be a US citizen. It’s nothing got to do with patriotism and stuff. I was born an Indian by chance, I could be born in, say, Israel, or Italy. But I grew up in India for decades, and no matter where I live now, I like to be called an Indian by default. It is the kind of programming I grew up with. I would be very confused if I had to introduce myself as an American.

Anyway, all my thoughts about moving to the US because I wanted to break free, and then chained in the vicious visa cycle here was meant for a different post altogether. Now that I have talked about it, I wonder how the death of the most wanted terrorist affect the political, social, and visa-related ongoing of the world. But till those radical changes happen (hopefully for the betterment), I will hope they will let me carry my makeup kit, bottles and lotions and all, and will not mercilessly chuck them in the trash cans every time I board a flight.

(If I have inadvertently hurt your sentiments by bringing up the visa or backward caste issue, stop being a sissy and live up to the reality, like everyone is).

sunshine

Working on a configuration upgrade?

2011-04-26T00:04:00.000-04:00

I cannot help but notice that these days, my blog is all about PhDism. I know how annoying it can get for someone whose life doesn’t significantly revolve around a PhD. It is an irritable feeling akin to reading those gushy mushy status updates from new moms who, from breastfeeding to the texture of poop, cannot stop themselves from discussing anything under the mommyhood sky. On a side side note (anti-mommy updates being the side note here), I realize I have now opened up my blog for some sex seeking desperate people on the internet who end up at this blog while looking for keywords like breast, sex, or even car mein zabardasti [I have a cool way of tracking what words people were looking for when they landed on my blog], but I digress here. My post was neither about the activities of pornsters on the prowl, nor was about women who cannot stop showing off their newly acquired motherhood status. My post was very much about me, my academic daddy, and the amazing gyaan he gives me gratis that makes me want to rechristen this American dude as Sant Gyani Singh. No matter how intimidating and academically charismatic he is, once in a while he never fails me amuse me with the plethora of gyaan he has to offer.

We were arguing about my scintillating academic life (or the lack of it) and about how many courses I should be taking to make myself a coveted candidate while I am out there job hunting (I don’t believe he is discussing job hunting already, and I have been like 8 months into my program). The story goes that I made a face when he said he wants me to take 6 levels of statistics courses and 3 levels of qualitative methodology courses. That is a lot, given any standards, ensuring I have to take 4-5 core courses every semester. Some of them are not even required courses, and the problem of crossing the age of 16 or all this “living and thinking independently” jazz of an American life is that sometimes you don’t listen to academic daddies, and wrongly believe that you know more about your academic well being than your daddy does. Anyway, I will paraphrase what he told me, and I will take the effort of doing this because I believe this gyaan will benefit at least some of you who are trying to do a Ph.D and don’t argue with academic daddy as often as I do.

While in graduate school, you are like a computer processor in the making. As you take classes and learn new skill sets, you are constantly enhancing the features of your processor. Your configuration is constantly improving. You take classes, write exams, and learn new skills. However once you are out of graduate school, out there in the job market, the features in your processor have been determined, and you cannot change it. Sure you can go for those external upgrades, adding a feature every now and then by auditing a class or attending a conference, but these are external features. What you learn in graduate school goes in building your core, your inherent qualities of a researcher. Hence, it is very important for you to take every remotely relevant course, take exams (and not just audit courses), learn new skills, and do everything that you hesitate to learn and fool yourself into believing that you will learn once you get a job. Anything you want to be in life after PhD, graduate school is the only chance you will get to build your processor from the scratch. The rest of it gets added along the way, but only as additional features. So go take that class because once you graduate, you will never get to take a class again, no matter how much you want.

I don’t understand much of computers or technology, but I loved his analogy. Hence, these days I am found neck-deep in course work and assignments, building my processor before they tell me that the model has been outdated again. And finally, I learnt an important thing from this conversation. I learnt that it is awesome to have a smart, geeky, and technocratic physicist for an academic daddy.

sunshine

Interest and Attitude

2011-04-22T22:38:00.001-04:00

I was reading someone’s statement of purpose (the clichéd bullshit you concoct for the Ph.D. committee, marketing yourself as the best thing that happened to humanity since Einstein) with a somewhat sardonic expression. Don’t get me wrong, I did the same thing 6 years ago, and again 2 years ago, but when you are sitting at the other end reading stuff, you see through certain things downright. The person wrote, “I am really interested to know this and that”. Perhaps yes. However, I have realized over time that interest is not what will sustain you through your Ph.D. life. It is attitude that is going to sustain you.

Don’t get me wrong, you cannot be not interested in something, and still study it. However, interest plays a very basic, introductory, and minuscule role to sustain your academic life. Let us put it this way. In the process of doing research, there are many innovative ideas you think of. That is why it is called a Ph.D., because you do something no one in the world has done before. However, sustaining the travails of a Ph.D. life on a daily basis is not possible with interest alone. You don’t keep thinking of new ideas everyday for 5 years straight. It is here that attitude comes into play. Many of us live with the misconception that doing a Ph.D. means sitting in plush offices and thinking of innovative ideas. That just happens for 1% of the time. What then? What do I do with my ideas? How do I execute it? What I do in my day-to-day life is not innovative research. What I do every day is mundane work, that might lead to or that might be a product of an innovative idea. Every day, I do stuff like getting printouts, making photocopies, taking lecture notes in class, making presentations, editing papers for spelling and language errors, grading exams of undergraduates, replying to emails, learning to use new statistical software, and digging out research papers for literature reviews. I go to the gym to keep myself fit and thinking. I buy groceries and cook to feed myself. I figure out maps and make decisions about the mode of transport to take that will get me to the department quickest. I travel and attend conferences and listen to stalwarts share their ideas. I organize team meetings and document the meeting minutes. I do homework and assignments, with data that belongs to someone else. I learn new skills like organizing conference calls and making posters. I solve analytical puzzles to sharpen my brains. I establish good relationship with my batch mates to see how they do their research. I write blogs to be free flowing in my thoughts. I talk to school administrators, network, communicate, write institutional board review protocols, and make up questionnaires. I learn to think of intelligent research questions. All this is a part of my Ph.D. process, little steps that will hopefully earn me a degree someday. But is this innovative or interesting work? No, all this is very mundane work, no different from what an office secretary would do. The difference is, I am my own secretary, managing my own academic life. That innovative spark of an idea I got 4 months ago was a brief moment of eureka. But in order to materialize that innovative idea into a tangible research product or publication, I have to go through all these mundane things I just discussed. I need the tools to help me think in the right way, for which I take classes and often piggyback on my advisor’s knowledge base. Sustaining this and still remaining focused has nothing to do with interest. It is all about the attitude to work hard. Ph.D. needs interest as a trigger, as a starting point, as much as that match that lights the fire. But attitude is that oxygen that sustains the fire through years. And do you think my advisor is sitting in his plush office and thinking of new ideas with an interest all the time? He is a stalwart in the field, with an Ivy League tag to boast of and all that jazz. He is bright, successful, tenured, and often awe inspiring. Yet he doesn’t spend his time sitting in his office thinking. What he does is mundane work like writing grants and proposals, making phone calls, giving lectures and presentations, bringing in the money home so that we can do the research and get paid, and of course advising and motivating brain dead people like me. And it is not interest that sustains us. It is the attitude to keep going. If a simpler analogy works, let us say doing a Ph.D. is like learning to make an innovative dish that no one has cooked before. But to be able to do that, we must decide on the ingredients first, and then start with tilling the soil, growing the crops, picking the crops, milking the cow, making the curd, extracting the oil, culturing the fish, growing the spices, cutting, chopping, grinding, and take the other mundane steps that leads to the finished product for food.

If you came into a Ph.D. program with the expectation that your interest will sustain you through the bumpy ride, chances are more that you will end up frustrated and go back to what you did before this. However, if you come with the right expectation that for the next few years, you are going to work your ass off doing all the mundane things that eventually lead to innovative work, it is more likely that you will actually enjoy the ride. So come prepared not with the interest, but with the attitude to hang in there and keep working hard.

If you know of a person who is planning to start a Ph.D. and might benefit from this perspective (which is solely mine), do share this writing with that person.

sunshine

Statistical Faux Pas

2011-04-15T00:08:00.000-04:00

Another of those 3-hour long statistics classes, the second one since morning. I was already losing focus, and I logged on to my email. My friend had just delivered, and she had sent me a cute picture of the baby. For a while, I zoned out of what the professor was teaching, the statistical data handling and output. I looked at the baby’s picture, wearing a nice little froggy dress, smiling cutely. I wanted to comment on the baby’s cute outfit. I wanted to write, “Nice outfit”.

All I ended up typing absentmindedly was, “Nice output”.

[As recounted by a friend in class today, after which, both of us rolled on the floor laughing. Nice output of a baby? How statistically apt!!].

sunshine

Running out of fuel

2011-04-14T16:04:00.001-04:00

As a graduate student, getting through a semester is analogous to running on a treadmill for a workout. At the beginning, it is all nice and rosy, you look at that treadmill, all new and bright, sitting far away, and you know that you are going to run on that for the next 4 months. You can’t wait to get started. You are prepping, dying to show off those shiny, new and nice gym clothes you bought, eager to show off those grey cells, get some challenging courses out of your way and go show the world what a gift to the educational fraternity you are. Classes start, the first few days look nice and rosy, you are still warming up, flexing those brain cells, getting that nice little pace for a jog. You pace yourself, eye the calorie meter in front of you, smile at the calories you are burning, the pace at which you are running, your accelerating heart beat rate, and so on. The professors are still spending their time getting to know you better, and familiarizing you with the course requirements. The lost looking TA just handed you a handout with the syllabus, course expectations, deadlines, and the grading policies all nicely written. This is the rulebook for the semester that tells you how to play. You don’t really look at it, toss it somewhere, you are just happy smelling your new textbooks, finding old friends in class, and discussing your travel and other fun plans for the rest of the semester.

A few weeks into the semester, and they have accelerated the pace on the treadmill. You are working out a nice sheen of sweat, but things still look pretty good. You are warming up, wish you had put on a little less clothes, or hadn’t been too ambitious and had taken maybe one course less, but it’s all okay. You will do it. you have your enthusiasm and self-confidence, although these days the lectures are getting a little monotonous, your eyes glaze over more often than you would like to admit, and on the last few occasions, you were caught disinterestedly sitting in the class lectures Facebooking. There is no dearth of distractions around, and monotony sets in when things fall into a pattern, you know you are required to follow a pattern, show up at the 9 am statistics class every Friday, show up for the 8 am team meeting every Monday, and so on. The professors are bombarding you with assignments, the advisor is asking you to get that report finished in 4 days, and you are slowly skipping the thrice-a-week dinner meets with your buddies.

You are beginning to get out of breath at this stage, and you look at the calendar to realize that there are maybe four or five more weeks before the semester ends. Things look really bad now, you are running as fast as you could, as if your rear end is on fire, but the speed isn’t good enough. You are sweating like a pig, and run the risk of drowning and choking in your own sweat mixed with the tears that you are now shedding at the sheer torture of barely meeting deadlines, deadline after deadline, class after class, week after week. You are now beginning to skip classes at the pretext of a stomach ache just because you know you must finish up the assignment from the other class first. You realize you were never a gift to the educational fraternity in the first place. Things are piling up, all the professors are looking at you with expectations, as if forever asking you, “When are you going to finish that homework?”, or “What were you thinking when you wrote that report and used that regression analysis? Were you stoned?” The advisor is giving you a hard time, constantly reminding you how much time and money he has invested in you, and rather than being super-efficient, you find yourself being stressed, nervous, sleepy, hungry, grumpy, menopausal, and angry all the time. You have long since stopped showing up for the 8 am class, are usually 20 minutes late for the Monday meeting, mumbling up an excuse that no one listens to, and the number of status messages on Facebook like “I hate school”, “My advisor sucks”, and “I was born intelligent but education ruined me” has significantly gone up. You are barely holding on to the deadlines now (as if they were your lifelines), submitting assignments 2 weeks post due dates, and have started to question your existence in the academic world. The sight of the advisor gets you paranoid, and you have started to take roundabout routes to the department that go through the jungles and not through the main entrance so that you can avoid eye contact with as many professors as possible. You are running on the treadmill as fast as you could, because you know some bulls named “deadlines”, “assignments”, “advisor”, “meetings”, and “conferences” are chasing you. You can hear their hooves at a distance, not a comfortable feeling I must say, and you just turned back to see the bull named “advisor” charging and sniffing angrily at you. You look at the display meter in front of you. 20 more days, 18 more days, time has lost its pace, and it seems a lifetime before you will be done with the semester and attain some kind of nirvana. Time stands still, you can no longer differentiate the days from the nights (because you are always in the lab). You are struggling to stay barely afloat, the A’s have been replaced by B pluses and then B minuses, and you would be happy to pass the course and be done, forget showing off those A pluses or giving that highhanded look because you once fell in the top 5 percentile of the class.

I am at that stage right now, happy to be alive and breathing, but so running out of fuel. Working in the department all night, showing up in classes all puffy eyed, giving blank looks whenever someone asks about a new deadline, sore, hungry, looking at that treadmill display meter and wondering if I will make it. 3 more weeks, and dozens of deadlines packed in these weeks, hopping from deadline to deadline, fighting in the battlefield with my last remnants of strength, and most importantly, just happy to be alive and breathing.

sunshine

Feeling like Miss. Clooney

2011-04-11T18:01:00.003-04:00

As I entered my home after yet another work-related trip (the third one in the last four weeks), I could not help but remember the character Ryan Bingham (played by George Clooney) in the movie “Up in the air”. I don’t really go around flying and firing people, that is not the similarity, but yes, I do get to travel a lot for work. Despite what others might think or argue, I love it. The thrill of packing suitcases, booking airline tickets, and more so, the sight and smell of airports and airplanes excite me. This is not just it. My traveling also involves a fair amount of driving, which I love. During my Florida trip last week, I drove 600 miles in 4 days, and I recorded another 500 miles of driving as my North Carolina trip ended today.

My PhD was not really supposed to turn out this way. Like most students, I expected to spend my days and nights working in the closed confines of my lab, crouched over some important problem the answer to which would admittedly change the world. Yes there are long hours of research work, classes, and home work involved. To add to it, the last month saw me traveling like crazy. Washington D.C., Florida, North Carolina, Missouri and Boston. People who know me also know how much I love traveling, and what amount of time and effort I put planning trips for vacations so that I don’t have to sit at home watching TV. Now I have surpassed even my vacation standards. The kick I get every time the plane takes off, or I enter a hotel and jump on the mattress, or when I set my sights on a new city is priceless.

I usually try to include some non-work sightseeing in my work-related travels. The DC trip had luckily coincided with the start of the Cherry Blossom festival, and I spent 4 hours on a certain chilly evening going around seeing and taking pictures of the cherry trees and freezing my hands. I added a few days to my Florida conference to see St. Augustine and Daytona Beach. The drive to North Carolina is one of the prettiest drives I have done, and I held on to my love for seeing new school campuses and went around Duke University. Every trip had something to offer that I had never done before.

It does put me under a lot of stress, since I am still taking 5 courses, and doing research work. Since I take classes, I travel during the weekends, which means I have no time to study or take care of the home. I realized I went grocery shopping after 3 weeks today. For 21 days, I have been eating out while I traveled or finished deadlines or accepted the generous offer of my roomies to eat what they cooked. Most Thursdays I finish class and hop on to a red eye flight. I miss out on sleep, feel sleep deprived, sometimes doze off on the wheel while driving, have a suitcase permanently packed, and miss out on home cooked food. I had to bail out of participating in a dance program because I was spending too much time traveling. But I’d still do what I am doing any day. It makes it easy that I don’t have family here, a relationship to devote time to, or children to look after. I couldn’t imagine doing the kind of globetrotting with a family. You would think traveling alone is like living with loneliness, but that is not the case. I get to observe people, meet up with old friends, drive through new roads, learn the names of new shops and streets, eat new varieties of food at restaurants not known to me, see mountains, climb lighthouses, walk along beaches, visit forts, see world famous campuses, shop at new malls, and yes, get to take lot of pictures. My interests in traveling and photography perfectly align with each other. It is a temporary phase of travel, I know, and things will calm down soon. Hence it is amazing while it lasts.

Mr. Clooney, when I watched you in the movie, I just adored you. Fancy suits, charming personality, and so on. These days I get to wear such fancy formal clothes too, going around networking and talking to people. I live in hotels I would have never afforded with my meager student salary. I love driving a new car every time I go somewhere, listening to the local happenings at National Public Radio (NPR) and nodding to myself as if I have always lived in that city. And more than anything, I love the thrill of seeing a new place, and all the things that come with it and prevent my life from boredom. Someday I will be perfectly happy spending a nice vacation at home, a frothing mug of hot chocolate in hand, reading a book or watching a romantic comedy movie. But while I wait for that to happen, I shall still enjoy my hot chocolates, in new shops at unfamiliar places, poring over the area map in order to plan what I can go visit next.

sunshine

Toeing the line

2011-04-07T16:43:00.003-04:00

My granny is someone worth adoring, mostly for her antics. She is the oldest amongst women in the family, and the most organized, stylish, and fashion conscious. While I am seen mostly in some ragged clothes, usually without makeup, and I don’t even bother to comb my hair every day, she is just the opposite. She is fair (and this is based on societal notion that being fair is synonymous with being beautiful), petite, and is amazing with self-care. Every morning, she will first take a bath, oil, comb, and braid her hair, put some Bath & Body Works lotions I get her from here (she takes so much pride in using US cosmetic products), dab some face powder, and would then go around with the household chores. In the evening, she will take her own time off, go for a walk, take another shower, wear a nice sari, apply more cream and face powder, and would spend time in front of the television watching her favorite shows. Too bad she isn’t seen wearing a gown, glass of wine in hand, wearing her pearls and watching the television. What amazes me is the way she works around her schedule to do what she needs to do with household chores, and still manages to find time for self-care. She would spend some time everyday glossing over fashion magazines and watching the latest stuff on television. She might be old, but far from ignorant. Sonu Nigam is her favorite singer, and she is aware of every latest Hindi movie and Bollywood gossip. She also takes great pride in the fact that her granddaughter can speak fluent English, and lives in America, which is accessible only by airplanes. She seriously thinks I would have done great in Bollywood, so breathtakingly beautiful and talented I am.

Neither my mother nor I have inherited her impeccable sense and taste for fashion. A few weeks before Durga Puja, my mother would be frantically finishing her last moment shopping, not knowing what to buy for herself or for the family. It is then that my granny will smile smugly, for she carefully manages her time and resources throughout the year, and does her shopping year round. Honestly, neither I, nor my mother care about the ritual of wearing new clothes for the Pujas. Granny will surprise us, because she will have something new to wear twice a day, every day during the Pujas. She will never repeat the same sari in succession, and will always wear a different color. With the limited money and mobility she has, I am amazed at how well she does for herself, looking always prim and proper, her wardrobe neatly stacked with saris of every color and make.

These days her eyesight is getting bad, hence she asks my mother to apply bright red nail polish on her fingers every time she visits my mother. We make fun of her, calling her the “beauty queen of the family”. She doesn’t mind, she thinks we are too casual and do not spend any time with self-care. This post is based on a telephonic conversation with my mother a few weeks ago.

When my father underwent a brain surgery, my granny decided to come stay with my parents for some time and help my mother with work. While mother did the outside work, visiting the hospital and taking care of my father, granny took care of the house, cooked, supervised the maid, and so on. Eventually father came home, and there would be dozens of people visiting him every day. The societal support we get in India during crisis is amazing. There hasn’t been a single day when I have called home to see how he is doing, and there haven’t been a bunch of people surrounding him. It is so much work, especially since you have to offer them tea and snacks and cater to them.

So my granny comes with a bottle of bright red nail polish one afternoon and asks mother to apply it on her toes. Mother looks clearly confused, since she didn’t want it on her hands this time. Mother tried her usual trick of shrugging it away, arguing about who really notices the feet. It is then that granny shocks her with her new theory about nail polish on the feet. She argues that since so many people are visiting to meet my father, they always bend down to touch my granny’s feet as a sign of respect. Hence, granny doesn’t want her feet to look ugly, and now wants bright red nail polish on her toes. Can you beat that logic?

Granny is adorable for all her antics and eccentricities, and for whoever she is. It is a virtue, to hold on to someone's values and beliefs even during the most trying circumstances.

sunshine

More Hairy Tales

2011-04-01T00:28:00.001-04:00

Is it true that women notice women more than men do, or am I just imagining things? After my last haircut, my roommates immediately commented on how different I look. A few days later, my department mate commented about my haircut. The class instructor who I meet once a week who I thought barely noticed me amidst the huge class size also commented on my haircut. The comments kept coming in weeks after the haircut. It was nothing fancy, just a one liner “Hey, nice haircut”. At least 15 people noticed. All of them were women.

Yet I went out to dinner with a male friend the same evening I had the haircut. Not a word. I sent some latest pictures to a good male friend. He noticed the iMac behind me in the picture, but not my haircut. I kept bumping into other men, all good friends, but no comment about the haircut.

I wonder if women notice the minor and not so minor changes in other women’s appearance significantly more than men do. And if so, why?

sunshine

Life as we know it: Review

2011-03-28T22:21:00.001-04:00

I wouldn’t be wasting my time writing a review if I didn’t like the movie. What baffles me after watching it, however, is how come it received such average reviews and responses. I am not talking of something phenomenal like “A beautiful mind” or “Shawshank Redemption”, but they belong to a different genre, and let’s not compare apples and oranges. As a romantic comedy, I think that the movie stands out. What I like best about it is the sense of balance and proportion- just the right amount of comedy, emotion, romance, drama, and tears. Nothing grossly overdone or overcooked, and the human emotions of happiness, doubt, and uncertainty so well depicted.

The formula of the movie works. When a good looking (lean, tall and handsome) man is seen with a cute baby, women suffer a hyper-secretion of whatever hormones that make you learn to sniff for a mate or coax him into fatherhood. When the man is big time into sports, rides a bike, shows up late for a first date and doesn’t seem to care, he becomes more endearing. On one hand there is “Doctor Free Range Turkey”, all “predictable and dependable”, and on the other hand there is Mr. Messer, someone who perpetually messes up things with the good looking and killer smiley Holly. When they get into a situation where they have to bring up Sophie together, neither one has a clue about what to do. They are scared, confused, and do not want to mess up. I love the way the movie develops part by part, scene by scene, and every little nuance that is added to it. Holly reads a book where they talk about giving babies time to “self-soothe” when they wake up. The way Messer makes up the songs instantly, “Keanu Reeves saves the bus”. The way “Doctor Love” says, “If I and my ex-wife fought that way, we’d still be married”. The way Messer’s gradual acceptance of Holly shows when he lets Holly ride his bike (Isn’t it is a big thing for men to let women touch their cars or bikes?). The way Messer demonstrates how he picks up women at the grocery stores, by being his charming self with a baby in arms (I loved the brilliant smile he flashes when Holly realizes he is picking up on her). And the best of all, Messer’s facial expression on two occasions, first, when Amy the baby sitter says “You both make a cute couple” (God knows how many times I have rewound the scene to watch the look he gives Holly), and second, when Holly and Messer argue during Thanksgiving and he replies to Holly’s “But not with a man who didn’t love me back” with “But I did. I still do”. Floodgates of emotions broke, and I was found shedding buckets of tears.

The film has its great moments and its aha moments. The baby is a pleasure to watch. Holly is an independent woman, yet unsure and vulnerable in just the right amount. The movie has no “ghyanghyane” and “panpyane” and “nyakamo” moments (can’t find an apt translation for these Bengali terms). And I would never take my eyes of Messer if I could help it. I could go on and on about the movie, the fine editing, the way one scene develops from another, the quick, witty retorts, and the fine eye for detail, but let me stop here. For a person who sleeps through most movies, it is big when I tell you I have watched the entire movie two and a half times in the last four days.

sunshine

Fools Rush In

2011-03-24T01:34:00.000-04:00

Why is the sudden realization of love always followed by a hastily unplanned and usually futile trip to the airport? A trip where the “love has newly dawned upon me” person gets intercepted by traffic snarls, airport security issues, bad phone connectivity, and even something as clichéd as a corpulent security officer who personally escorts you to the plane once you convince them that these are matters of the heart? Bollywood and Hollywood, you have disappointed me again and again. Pyar to hona hi tha. Chalte chalte. Life as we know it. There are “n” number of movies where love went undiscovered until the end, which meant a hasty trip to the airport to stop the plane, usually a futile attempt where the person comes home only to discover that the guy never took the plane, but came home instead.

There are multiple things that seem fundamentally wrong in this situation. First, is love so unnoticed an emotion that it suddenly dawns upon you one fine evening? And once it does, why is it reduced to something as urgent as the urge to poop during a stomach upset, that one has to find a way to do it then and there? If I suddenly realized I am in love, I would call, email, text, even wait until the next meet. If the person lives in a different city, I would happily wait for the next time I can take a vacation. I don’t have to take a cab, be stuck in traffic snarls, or run to reach the airport, only to discover that the flight took off 3 minutes ago and my urgencies (to propose) are never going to be satisfied. If nothing, the laborious process of security check is going to be a huge deterrent. Remove shoes. Remove belt. Take out laptop. Remove sweater. Take out camera. Let the metal detector go off only to realize that you forgot to part with your keys. Repeat security process once again. Let the security officer fondle you for strictly professional reasons. Then remember flight number, find terminal, run to terminal, run the risk of colliding with kids who run around, bump into luggage bags, fall on unsuspecting strangers, and so on. Why can’t I just sit at home and call or email? If nothing works, I can send a message on Facebook (which I assume would be checked faster than missed phone calls or emails), and then write on his Facebook wall to let him know that I had to message him on Facebook because he wouldn’t take my calls and reply to my emails.

Naah, I guess I will never understand the fun of chasing someone to the airport, the adrenaline rush, the suddenly discovered hormones, the anticipation of pheromones, the evolutionary instinct to chase a potential mate, the thrill of stopping someone from taking a flight and letting them know about newfound romantic intentions, the fun of creating chaos, and so on. You are right, I will never get it.

sunshine