10 miles 

It all started with a meaty 0.5 miles almost 2 years back and culminated at a awesome 10 miles yesterday . Well I would not call it culmination , there might be many more races to come but ya this would sure be a landmark to mark it all . 

I have been running off and on for 2 years now and slowly but steadily improving on the scale . One thing is for sure  , once you get to a point say 3 miles its so easy to stop yourself there and not proceed any further . 

The way I like to put it is that after 3 miles it is all in the head . If you can run 3 ..then you can as well run 10 but it all comes down to pushing yourself not to stop and achieve your maximum potential . 

The preparation for the race started by a gently nudging by a friend saying I should give it a try .

I had been practicing for the last 2 months going steadily upwards from 3 miles to a high of 8 miles until 2 weeks back I started getting cramps in my leg and thats when I started worrying if I could actually make it to the race . 

But the race day came and I was there cheered by my friends who unfortunately had to get up at 6 in the morning to drop me . The race day was simply beautiful . Early hours of the morning there were around 600 women aged 20 to 70 all participating in a 10 mile run for the benefit of the girl child . It was the exact time of the year with fall colors just starting to set in and the trail being right next to the missisippi river . The whole ambience was just so great that once the race started there was no stopping back . I used to run and walk , take breaks while practicing but on the race day the adrenaline rush just kicked and there I was running 10 miles at a strech not stopping anywhere till I crossed the finish line . 

At the end of it I was ecstatic , it was unbelievable that somebody who used to huff and puff for running half a mile had finally cruised through 10 miles . This sure goes down my diaries as one of my proud moments . :-P

Predictability of Future 

This is a question I have been pondering over a lot over the past one year . How is it that some astrologers who know nothing about you can predict your life so acurately ? What kind of patterns exist in this world if any . There have been almost the same answers every where , yes life is predictable but ultimately it lies in the hand of the human being to decide his course .

Recently I came across this beautiful written paragraph of predictiblity by E.F.Schumacher in his book Small is beautiful ( which btw I think every Indian should read ) .

Here is how it goes  " When the Lord created the world and people to live in it . He must have reasoned with Himself as follows : " If I make everything predictable  these human beings , whom I have endowed with pretty good brains with undoubtedly learn to predict everything and they will thereupon have no motive to do anything at all  because they will recognise that the future is totally determined and cannot be influenced by any human action . On the other hand , if I make everything unpredictable , they will gradually discover that there is no rational basis for any decision whatsoever and , as in the first case , they will thereupon have no motive to do anything at all . Neither scheme would make sense . I must therefore create a mixture of the two . Let some things be predictable and let others be unpredictable . They will then , amongst many other things , have the very important task of finding out which is which ."

Knocking on doors !!

Coming to US has taught me the beauty of something I call knocking on the doors . Although I seem like a pretty outgoing person , I have my decent share of butterflies in the stomach when I have to go and meet someone new or talk to them . I always hesitate in going and knocking on the door but then life in the US has taught a little about how nothing really bad can ever happen to you , there is always the worse you can rely on to cheer you up .

Coming back to the point , I knocked quite a few doors in my two years here and I have recieved so much love and joy from behind these closed doors that I have become a ardent believer in this concept . The first door that I knocked was of the Minnesota International center which has led to me to the homes of three wonderful families who have opened up their house and heart for us . It has introduced to me to Karin and her family who are now almost like home away from home to me . The MIC also let me to elementary schools in Minneapolis , where I got an opportunity to have lots of fun with hundreds of kids from kindergarden to the 8th grade , each one has offered me something to cherish and remember throught out my life .

The next door that I knocked was off my next door neighbours which gave me a whole group of wonderful friends whom I cherish being with ...

Then comes the door to the Barbara center for dance and the fergueson hall for music ..I almost decided to turn around and go back half way . the dance class that I wanted to join was full and I had almost decided to go back when the teacher asked me to go down and meet cythia garner who takes modern dance ..I went down the door was closed ..my first impulse was to go back but then I stayed on ..the door opened and I was ushered into a beautiful world of dance , which has given me something more than just dance moves ...an internal joy which is hard to describe...it also introduced me to a world of totally different people ..the world of artists ..the language of the heart as opposed to the language of reason that I am used to ..

And finally the latest door that I went in through..the Mc Donald Home for children suffering from long term diseases ...once again a totally different world and a entirely new experience ...

Here is my story of knocking doors and I believe I will continue to do that for a long time ..

Graduation

I have been meaning to update my blog for so many days now but it has been by far the busiest holidays ever . So this blog is now going to be the culmination of three separate blogs .

First things first …I graduated …seems like a big word and I was supposed to and tried to feel something like an achievement done or something likethat..Unfortunately all it felt like was a nice big party day with the colorful robes, joking around with the friends and walking up the stage to receive the cover for my yet to be received certificate.

I was more excited about my one week in the wilderness of boundary waters trip as a commemoration of my graduation and to celebrate probably the longest break I will get before I start working ..i was shouting around at the top of my voice telling friends about this once in a lifetime trip , shopping etc etc .

Ever heard of smthing called how things can change in just one day ..thats what happened on this wonderful sunny Sunday in the May of ’08 . I was all dressed up to take my shinny new car to the temple and get puja done as per my dad’s wishes . The friend I was supposed to go with called in and said he cannot make it …hmm well I thought let me get some medicines for the trip just incase ..off I went to Boynton , got 12$ worth of medicines , came back joked around with friends ..just when I got a call from my trip leader ..” Hi Akhila , Laura here , I have a family emergency at home ..I am sorry but we are cancelling the trip ..”….5 sec down ..10 secs down …I was numb ..now this cannot be happening , I remember telling myself ..this was one of my most eagerly awaited trips and adventures of all times ….how can it go wrong ..I was finding it difficult to compose myself …went home called a friend , almost broke down …called one last time to confirm if all that I had heard 10 mins back was for real ..Yes it was ..Ok relax …lets put backup plan into operation ..prepone tickets to the family getogether …well as you might have guessed by the flavor of the day till now ..tickets are non-refundable , non – changeable…

Friends are starting to call in ..we have other plans for the day ..one deep breath , I composed myself and off we went in my shiny new phantom gray Toyota camry ..and well what do you expect …I drive beautifully on the highways ..my first time without a trained driver sitting next to me ..and just when we are near the lake we were meant to go to,on a local road ..My car's bumper gently kisses a red car bumper right in front of me …déjà vu ..the same numb feeling is returning to me ..10 secs blank out …well I pull over like a obedient immigrant following unknown rules in an unknown country . A totally disturbed young girl comes out of the car …I am counting my secs and there she goes ..crying away to glory …déjà vu again ..a total blank ..”crying for a gentle kiss?? “ …what do I do now …I faintly hear her telling me she needed to call some one to calm her down ..she is very disturbed etc etc ..next minute we are in the centre of a busy marketplace on a bright sunny Sunday afternoon surrounded by cops , paramedics ..the fair lady who I hit is barking out a story off how everything in her body feels numb (all due to a gentle hit at 2 miles per hour??? …Americans should be crowned hype masters ..!!!) …my other alien friends with citations in there records called up to congratulate me for joining the club of law breakers …:-)( a friend in need is a friend in deed ) …

As if that was not enough at the end of the day I gave my dear roomie a slight neck massage by pulling up the window when she was looking out of it ..don’t worry she is still alive ..:-)

Wow that was quite some day …!!!

And so it has been for the rest of the holidays till now…a vacation worth cherishing …starting from the adventures in my new car ..to jetsking at 60 miles / per hour with the water splashing on my face ..sticking up live earthworms to fishing rods and watching them being wasted away since the fish were too smart to get caught ..weekend at the resort like home of bemmu atta with wonderful dancing ,singing , cricket , pool with the family …stacking away donations at the Mc Donalds home ..followed by a weekend of blissful camping in Itasca state park munching away at barbecued mushrooms , sweet potatos , paneer with mosquito repellant flavouring ,canoeing and kayaking till all my bones broke and finally hip hopping away in the zenon dance centre …

With 2 more weeks to go there is so much more to come ..!!!

To just be

My dance and music classes this semester have been quite a revelation to me . It has been something like stepping out of my comfort zone and trying something new . Its not like I have not danced or sang ever , I have been doing them ever since I remember . Its was more about doing it in a different environment with a different set of people but mostly about learning art forms which are thought of and interpreted so differently .

When I learnt dance or singing in India , it was more about going over the sequences till you got them by heart and learnt well . We never talked about our body as an instrument for singing , stressing on different parts that could help acoustically if used in a certain way . While there are a lot more technical details that I learnt in these classes , that not what I want to talk about in this blog.

Today we went to a painting exhibitions by one of the people in my dance class. She had a bunch of these abstract paintings and I asked her why she made them the way she did . She replied that she painted mostly on intution , she just felt that something should look like smthing and then she did that . This idea was something pretty new to me . Being an engineer , for me every end result in guided by a logical reasoning as to why something else was being done .

Later on we had a discussion about this in the class , my class had a whole bunch of artsy people ...actors , dancers , historians etc . They all talked about listening to your soul or intution or inner feeling while producing a creative piece . In there words you need to just be and that is when you get your answers . My teacher is trying to design an ending for her dance piece and all she does is she "just let herself be " , till the piece finally enters her ....

A lot of my dance class has been about improvisation and understanding your body ...when I started it was all in my head zone ..I am slowly learning to let it just be ...and there is lies a totally new realm of myself that I never knew .

I am learning that in my life too ..I can think really hard about a problem trying to find answers for it or just planning things in a certain way ...then later on when I just stop doing that and let myself just be ...poof!!! the answer pops out ...

I do not know what to call this realm of myself ..something like muscle memory ..a new term I learned in the dance class ....my teacher tells us we dnt always have to remember sequences in our head ..our body knows the most natural sequence after a certain step and thats the way it goes ..it remembers them in the muscles ( if that makes any sense ..)

I would think this is what happens when you start to get in sync with what you really are ..than what you project yourself to be ..!!!

Human face

Saw , heard , performed a lot of acts ( all the world's a stage and so I think the word acts encompasses all that happens around us ) in the past few weeks .

Attended a play called women of persia ..which talks about the women of persia ( mother , daughter , sister , slave and queen ) who have been left behind when there men goes to war and what these hapless souls have to go through when led by there arrogant and foolish king the persians go to war with greece , tens of thousands of men die and the persian empire crumbles . A particularly touching scene was when after coming back from the war , the king has to face the spite of all his people ..but then the same people are forced to bow to the king against there wishes,when summoned by the queen mother .

The play was a actor centric play enacted in arena ..with minimal prop used , the background score was also sung by the actors and the persian chants just added to the whole feel of the play . The scenes where the actors grieve there lost ones shook me to my core .

Then I recently saw the bbc documentary on story of India by Michael woods . I recommend it to every India , this is a must see for everyone . It talks about India right from the time of rigveda to the british invasions . Through all of it you realise that India is basically a land of immigrants , first the africans settled in south india , the aryans from central asia came into india developing the manhattan of olden times , also called mohen jo daro , then the mughals and finally british . We are a combination of all these civilizations . The world has learnt to live conveniently with each other in India ,while respecting each others differences .

I also attended a lecture by the founder member of Engineers without borders , a organization which works with underprivileged people all over the world trying to provide basic amenities such as clean drinking water , sanitation facilities etc. I will need a whole new blog to write about all that I heard about that day . One thing I wanted to mention was that when the Professor decided he wanted to build a sanitation project in a godforsaken place in south america , half of the class offered to work on it . The professor was surprised and asked the people why they were never seen near his office earlier and all of sudden were all so enthusiatic . The students replied we are here bcoz we are bored of the meaningless engineering taught in classes (namingly solving problem5.1 to problem 5.5 ) ..since what you offer to do is engineering with a purpose we want to work with you .

Today I saw the movie Page 3 . A wonderful movie on human relationships and the fraility of them . The power hungry and the ways power can fight down a person's good motives and intentions . Once again to quote the movie ..."It is no longer good have a good motive , you should have the intelligence to make sure you can translate your motivation into the change that you want to see " , " Be in the system and fight the systems ".

So what do all these non relating stories have to say ....As my Professor once said ..We become engineers bcoz we do not want to have anything to do with the people , let the managers do that ..its only when we step out of the school that we realize that its what we had been running from that we need to deal with ....

All the stories talk about a part of the human face , be it forced reverence to a foolish king due to his stature , nobody dares to stand up against the king and thats what gets passed on to generations ...reverence of the people in power ...

The foolhardiness of engineering schools when they think that having taught there students how to integrate or build a circuit board , they have made the students ready to change the world.

The story of India made me wonder about the rights of fundamentalists trying to state that the ram mandir was at a certain place or the north indians should leave mumbai because they do not belong there . We are a country of immigrants and does anyone at the end of the day have any right to say that a certain place is ours .

People all over the world are trying to throw away others from their country because they are afraid of the people of foreign origin .They are afraid of being outnumbered or over thrown , there is so much of mistrust , fear and anger existing every where ....I guess we all need to learn from Akbar, peaceful co-existence is the need of the day and not rulers or dictators .

The same fear shows in the page 3, people who are all trying to hide behind the facade of power in the hope that it will provide them the happiness that they desire in there lives ...

I look at my own life and see influence of numerous human faces on my own life and my success and failures in dealing with them . The more I see of the world the more I realize how much this so called human face affects our lives and no matter how many technical , medical or economic advancements we make ....its the human face at the end of the day that shapes our lives ..and it is not until the time that we have unconvered the myth of these varied human faces that our lives will continue to be as chaotic as they are today .

Dharm

Just finished a brilliant movie on communal violence .."dharm " ..starring pankaj kapoor . It brings to light again one of the major issues that we have to deal being a part of such a diverse culture . India on its part has managed to not be a part of religious fundamentalism as compared to other nations on the earth but then we still have been part of it now and then in our own ways . Be it the cast system or hindu muslim communal rights ..they have affected us all in a way small or big .

When I was growing up we were a part of a small cosmopolitan township where caste , creed hardly made a differences . Friendships were being fostered there and it was just the person there that mattered , your ancestory did not mattered then . In our small happy world we never even managed to think that the caste , creed , status of a person actually mattered . Infact we convienently forgot that distinctions like that existed . The only distinction were the people you like to hang around with and the ones you don't .

The first time that I actually realised that distinctions like that existed where in my 10th standard when people in SC category were asked to register separately . It suddenly created a distinction which was no where to been till now . Unwantingly there was a extra line line added in my mind beside the introduction of the person . From now on it became a common theme in our lives , the people with quotas getting into colleges ahead of us ...it was a grudge everyone seemed to have ..but then later on that became a part of life and we did not think back on it ..

College was again pretty cosmopolitan , had friends from all states in india ..it never mattered where each one of them had come from , what they ate at home and once again the distinctions seemed to have been forgotten .

There have been shocks in between though ..like when 7 year old described to me how all her friends were brahmins , i did not even know a distinction like that when I was 7 . I also once heard a story of how my one of my uncle's got a tired beggar home one day to help him out and my grandfather just wouldn't have that person come into the house ..for he was a shudra ...

It was only when we reached andhra and after listening to my sister , family friends and my parents i realised how fundamentalist caste has become in andhra ...people group acc to caste in colleges and if they don't they are threatened by people from there caste . I heard my grandfather refer to one of cousins who had married a muslim , he thought that was one of the most demeaning things to do . My sister who has studied 3 years in andhra also seemed to grasp it ..she told me how people from different castes were really difficult to talk to .

Me being an outsider all this while had failed to realize the divide ...until it hit real close ....

seeing this movie now brought back all the memories ...the main character in the movie although follows dharm the way thinks it is right to the fullest , doing the toughest of vratas and working towards the betterment of brahmins ...his discipline is noteworthy ..but somewhere down the line he forgets that dharam is not just bettering one's self or betterment of people who we think are like us (due to some unfortunate ways of dividing people ).. its about rising above our differences and searching for the ultimate happiness or bliss ...and the person who will aid you in this process could very well be a muslim or a shudra ...

Coming to the US I have met people who have managed to go beyond the boundaries set by political maps and spread solidarity amongst people in the whole word.

Having said all this ...I know its easier said than done ..I myself get caught in some of its hassles and find courage failing me to get out it ...

Little men and women

Somedays we come across certain people who make us realize how blessed our lives our ....soon after landing into the US I went into walmart to get basic supplies ..My roomie and I were getting restless in line waiting for lady in from of us to finish her billing ....they dnt take so much time here in the US we thought ....

Then I just stepped back to look at what that old lady ..probably in here late 60s or early 70s was trying to do ...she had a neatly clipped together pile of discount coupons in a sandwich bag . She was handing them out one by one to the cashier to get her total reduced ...finally when the coupons still could not get the total down ..she started handing back her items ...

then she turned around to see the sea of faces acting as they were getting busy for the most important thing in the world ...and said apologetically ..sorry i dnt get make pay till next week ...
she then fumbled around in her bag for all the money that she had to pay the bills ..the bill however was now a dollar less than what she had ..she happily stowed the bill away and said alteast I am not broke...!!!


We had hardly walked out in the chilling cold to the next store when we saw the cub food guy shivering in the cold and collecting the food carts and taking them back ..just when a lady came in a big truck and bumped into the entire train ..no matter how much the guy asked her to back up ..she just did not ..he had to go back ..put each cart individually and make way for the lady's truck ...

I will not draw any conclusions for these events ..they speak for themselves...