Commemoration ....

The D -Day is finally here . I am going back to india after 1.5 years in the US ..i call it commemoration because it kinda sums up my blog ...i started 1.5 years back documenting my survival in the US ...and i managed to that for 1.5 years now ...

lot has changed ..i met so many wonderful and most importantly humble people ...learnt a thing or two about living life ...finally managed to get a a good gradepoint of 3.8 after all the ups and the downs ...grew my hair ..:-) ...njoyed nature at its best here in minneapolis ...financed myself on my own for 1 year now ..bought my own tickets...some rights , some wrongs ..overall it has been a very happening year ...

will all this in my satchel i head by to india ..every time i fly in the US and look down upon the lights of the towns below ..i always wonder how india looks from up there ..so that is the first thing that I am gonna see this time I fly back to india ...i can hardly understand how I feel right now on heady back to india ...have been waiting for this for so long now ..that when it comes you dunno how to feel about it ....time to catch up with my roots and eat some masale dar food ...india here I come ...

Evolution of Haricutting

From Kamruddin nayi (barber) @ Jhansi , Uttar Pradesh India to Aveda Hair Cutting Institute Minneapolis , Minnesota , USA ..its been quite a journey ....coming to think of it all the barbers and the barbarians :-) {female barbers } i went to signify a lot of important phases in my life ....

From our very loving , homely local kamruddin nayi ..who gave me and my sister exact same hair cut as he would give to any of the guys in our locality to Ghadse Aunty and Jumrani which were our first attempts at getting stylised ..though we would always lack the motivation and the urge to ask them to make it actually stylised ....that were our first attempts to look city like while sticking to what we were ..Gaonwale stuck in middle of nowhere in a town called Jhansi ...


Then came hyderabad ..where ppl charged so exhorbitantly and did no better than my small modest town Jhansi ...and then came the realisation that everything from now onwards would be charged ..even if the hairdresser was making a chit chat with you ..that was added to your bills ..nthin came free from now on ..and no one was actually meaning it when they were asking you how you were ...but still we are Indians and although we dnt mean to do it ..we are always genuinely interested in others affairs ..and so I will not call all of it a fake ..

Then came Rourkela..back to being in town ...Going to beauty parlours with friends where each was trying to look better than the other ...it was great fun ...once me and Aritra got the exact same haircut ..got quite a laugh for that in our daily mess chit chat ...!!! ..At that point it was all about friends and not about the beauty parlour ladies ...

And Now coming back to the land of Uncle sam ...attempts at trying to be American ...the first time around that I went for an haircut ..I was plain tense though it was just a haircut ..no thats not it ..it was haircut in a different country all together ....Used to the Indian way of haircut I nicely took a hairbath and went out into the chilling cold...5 mins down the line I felt my hair getting heavy and to my utter dismay my hair had all been coated with layers of ice..the water in my hair had frozen..!!!! It was only later that I realised that they give you a shampoo when you get there ..you dnt have to do that ...Nyways I made it there and then came the need to make the all american small talk ..ask any Indian to do that ..we cannot .....all the people around me where discussing everything with these hairdressers ..how on earth do you do that ..eveything done ..haircut over ..I forgot to tip ..!!! Big Blunder ..nobody does that ...

Ya but then its been a year now and this time around I just new exactly the right things to do and say ..not very well though ..still I can give a pat on my back and say ..I say Good Job buddy ..!!!

God knows which other hairdresses life will take me too..!!!

Fall 2008

Its been a year since I came to the US now .... feels longer than a year though ..so much has changed , I have seen so much and learnt so much in this one year .

Its fall again , the wonderful green all around , the river blowing from the missisipi river ..i remember writing about it all around the same time last year and feel the same kind of serene feeling I felt when I saw it the first time . Nothing stands before the beautiful missisipi river and the green carpets all around in bringing serenity and desire to do better to ones life.

I saw a movie today called aap ka aasman , a art movie ...it is the story of a mentally challenged child and his parents who are in great despair bcoz of their child . They discover a brain booster medicine which changes their child into a mathematical genius but at the same time makes him emotionally zero . He takes to drugs , starts hating his parent and ultimately assaults both of them . They then discover the antidote and bring him back to being a mentally challenged kid . They then encourage him to paint , since he seems to like that and eventually get him to present in a art exhibition ...

Gave a very important message to me ..sometimes we forget to appreciate what we have ..hoping it was something else ..but when it does become something else we realise thats not what we wanted ..

Another thing that I heard recently was a speech by Steve Jobs ..he mentioned that always remember that death is great leveller ..if you were to die today ..what would you have done ...
life is too short ..try living it and not watching it pass by ...

Royal Treatement

3 months of living life kingsize has left me dreading getting back to the third world graduate life at school .

For once you get to work in a company that pay you the highest amongst interns all over. You are all set to come in when you realise you dnt have a car and no bus goes to your workplace. The gentlemen that they are , my employers agree to reimburse a cab ride for me . Whow!!!I arrive to work in a chauffeur driven car every day to work now .

Inside the brightly lit building painted in all hues of the sky you get to know the one of most intricate technologies that exist and if technology excites you , this is the place to be . They have Phds from aerospace , electrical , mechanical , chemical all bunched together making one of the best drives in the world .

And then you get to work on a really cool project . I put in only half of the effort that I did at school and my mentor asks me if i m getting awed by the work ...:-)...If thats not it , free tickets to valley fair , harry potter screening and bunch of inside activities . Just icing on the cake .

Add to it free evening , free weekends ...zero nagging by your brain about the amount of work you have left ...and money to travel ...i went all over the US in these 3 months ...:-P

The past 3 days have just been wonderful with the farewell lunches , people coming to ask you if you liked the work and what you think of the company ... now thats some respect ...hmmmm ....

Well Well but all good things come to an end ...

Now starts a new chapter with me trying to figure out algorithms in the brain ..:-D

Indianness

I was watching Gandhi my father , the other day and then something struck me about what Indianness actually means . Before I go further I would like to recommend watching the movie . Its refreshing to see movies like this being made. Chak de would fall second in this list .

Coming back to the point , it struck me what being an Indian actually meant . Its our innate spirituality that makes us different from every one . Not falling prey to temptation and desires and practising tolerance. Thats what sets us different from these people. Since we are children we are taught in our houses that materialism is not the way to moksha , the more you can get rid of your desires , the more closer will you be to the eternal one . I believe anyone at any place in the world if he follows this is Indian enough .

This flattening of cultures poses a grave danger to the Indian culture. There are certain things you should learn from other cultures and certain things are to be avoided. Like in the case of Americans there dedication to work and perfection is something to be learnt from . Also another remarkable thing is the co-existence of so many cultures simultaneously . Unfortunately this learning process also brings along some of the other things like the fast food , dating , divorce into our cultures.

We are at a very important stage in flattening of cultures . We have never know so much about the outside world as we do now .What we choose right now and give up would define a lot of how all of us along with India in the future would end up being .

World is Flat

Recently have been reading this bestseller called World is Flat which is about flattening of economies world wide. It got me thinking about flattening of cultures all over the world .

Coming to US has been a eye opening to this phase which is taking over all of us with a storm . I sometimes wonder that with the pace at which this flattening of cultures is taking place , by the time we realise some thing has happened it may be too late.

For me this has been a very confusing setup. There are certain changes you have to make in the way you live when you start following a different culture. It always becomes a question as to how to decide where to draw a line.

Eating non veg is wrong acc to Brahmin Indian culture but what do you do when you get nthin else to eat . still try and find something veggie to eat ?

Wearing saree is Indian , what if I wear jeans and skirts or clothes which people in other cultures wear . Have I stopped being Indian?

Going to temple is Indian but what if I don't find going to temples pious enough . I believe in meditating in my house .

Talking in my native language is Indian. Flattening means more and more Indian families prefer talking in English bcoz parents usually are not of the same native language these days.Have they stopped being Indian

Kids here in the US get confused deciding if they should behave in the way there peers behave or should they follow what there parents say . Should they go to proms , date girls and drink on weekends which a lot of there peers and there parents consider to be normal or should they stop socializing and stick to there other Indian friends whose parents think the same way their parents do . The parents are also stuck not knowing how they should raise there kids.

This is not the situation only here in the US . Students in colleges back in India , parents in metros every one faces the same question day in and day out . What acc to a person is Indian?
Now when I look back I realise how much more our lives are different from our parents. With more and more girls going out of homes. Increased interaction between boys and girls , the social structures are changing rapidly. Love marriages are becoming norm of the day. So what is it that you consider right ?

People here in the US have multiple affairs before marriage . They do not consider it wrong but are we ok with considering it right yet.

With every evolving generation the younger generation faces tougher question about how do they want to move ahead . What part of there culture do they want to keep and what is that they want to leave.

Only time will tell what this flattening of cultures will do to us . Meanwhile there will be this whole generation of youngster who have to decide on a daily basis what to pick and where to pick from ?

So what exactly does it mean to be an Indian ?

5 miles

Yesterday was one of the small accomplishment day . I ran 5 miles non stop on the tread mill .
I had decided I would write a blog on the day I accomplish this .

Finishing my last mile on the tread mill I could see the whole of last year gone by before my eyes . Intially when I started , running half a mile would kill me ...i had cramps all over my body , couldn't move. Over the entire process I realised it was very easy to give up . Your body is as lethargic as your mind makes it to , as soon as it sees your body getting out of the comfort zone it sends out signals ..ohh , i m so tired ..i just cannot make it any further ..the trick is to realise that your mind is playing games with you . The minute you do not give in to your mind , the journey ahead becomes really simple .

All this while I thought running was all about having the stamina , but now I realise it just about how strong your mind is ..bcoz in the end it is just a mind game .

Obviously this nowhere means that my mind was really strong and so I got here ...it was only bcoz of the constant pestering of my geeky marathon runner friend that I got here . All thanks to him.

There have been these times in my life where I have seen someone do smthing and wanted to be there ..and the day you are there just feels awesome and I guess thats what makes life worth living ...not the moment of accomplishment but the life you live since you concieve that dream , to the day you get there ...

Now on starts another goal in my life ..to sustain what I gained ..the struggle starts again ....

Sicko
One of the most touching documentaries that I have seen in recent times . It questions the medical system in the US . Privatization of medicine as compared to socialistic medicine.

US is the land of capitalism and it has always been led with the philisophy of greatest good to the greatest individual ( as in not character wise , business wise ) . The downside of this is medical care where in insurance companies are in a fierce battle to make as much money out of the medical business as any other private company but the only problem is that this profit making firm sometimes results in the lives of ppl .

US is the land of scientific discoveries and often one of the first countries to make breakthroughs in medicine , we would never imagine that ppl will not be able to take advantage of this bcoz their insurance companies think that this is experimental and so they will not cover it under insurance . The insurance companies consider money sent out as loss and the number of applications denied insurance as profits ..

The critics argue that in socialistic medicine a person who is working really hard has to shell out money in his taxes to take care for someone who cannot afford it but if you look at it the other way around every person from the bus driver to the garbage can man makes your life easier to live and for every other person that falls sick the overall productivity of the nation falls down which indirectly affects your own productivity too . After all life is governed by too many uncertainties , one day you maybear the brunt of it too.

Others may argue that it is the survival of the fittest . The fittest and the wealthiest survive , the poor on the other hand have to die . If that is so I just hope we dnt end up like the ppl in the hitch hikers guide who sent away all the barbers , technicians and gardners boz they thought their jobs were too menial . Utimately the smart ppl perished but the dumb ones formed a planet named earth .

Turkey - Two lifestyles was the heading of a article i read in the morning today . Immediately the numerous discussions I have had for the past 1 year with my lab mates one Turkish and one Iranian came flooding back to me .

Both Turkey and Iran are Islamic states but no where else can you find such stark contrasts in how the same religion is being followed by 2 different nations . The turkish lead processions in their country when they found out that there were chances of a fundamentalist becoming the president . People took to streets bcoz they feared that their secularism was being jeopardized ....people resent a woman wearing a scarf bcoz they think it a threat to their ideas of secularism and modernity

And then on the other end stands iran , where the moral police are enforcing women to wear head scarfs bcoz they believe that unless religion is not imposed on ppl they may go wrong . Secularism is unheard of in these areas . Boys cannot talk to girls , alcohol is banned . The government has taken it on themselves to teach the people how to lead lives which are the proper muslim way of life .

Two sides of the same coin you can say , on one hand people are afraid that their govt may become fundamentalist , on the other hand the govt believes that fundamentalism is the only way .

To end on the rite note ..i like this quote which one of the guys in Turkey said

" Some people worry Turkey is in danger, but I think people who are used to modern life will never return to the age of ignorance "

This quote stands true for a lot of fundamentalist groups in India too , who believe that globalization of India is destroying us and our culture .







http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6596933.stm

Cabbies

In the land of Uncle Sam the most interesting and knowlegable conversations that you can have are with cabbies. They are the people who know it all . It just needs some respect for them on your part to get them to talk and once they do they open your eyes to a world of knowledge .

My own cabbie Sadik is from Somalia . We often talk about customs in his country and how they are similar to ours back home . Now Somalia is nation which has been in civil war for almost 17 years now and has no government at all . Sadik told me a lot of interesting facts about Somalia . For once since they do not have a govt they are official refugees in every country . They can just drop in in any country and the govts there are supposed to support them . Minneapolis for once has a very big somalian population .

The conversation we had today was most interesting . He asked me how many siblings I have and I said one younger sister . He said thats it ...back in somalia even today ppl have 10 - 11 kids ..as many as they want . So then I asked how do ppl offord to have so many kids ..he said thats easy ..we dnt have to pay for education..actually rite now there are no govt schools ..only private schools , healthcare anyways is screwed . I asked so what about college education and he said well we dnt have any colleges .. Any body who wants to study further has to run away from the country to neighbouring countries like Kenya...and from there they can go to any country like US or Australia ..and find a Job there ...if they still want to , some of them go on to study further ..most of them dnt ...

I was shocked to find out that an entire nation of 5 million people is without education and govt ..this is the state of just one of the countries in Africa...lack of education and healthcare epidemics ..God knows how those countries even manage to survive .

HIV AIDS

My first confrontation with the problem of HIV aids was back in India when I worked with my fellow rotractors to increase awareness in truck drivers regd HIV aids . Till then I was pretty much like many other Indians trying to tell ourselves that the problem is not there . It is kinda justified in the situtation that we are in too , ppl in india have so many other things on their mind that they do not have time to bother about HIV till actually harms someone . It was then that I realized at what rate HIV was taking over us . What was most shocking was that the main cause of HIV was not unhealthy use of syringes , that is the main reason of HIV the world over , it was unhealthy sexual practices that were leading to AIDS in India .
I had almost forgotten about HIV till I met this wonderful lady from Tanzania , Susan . Susan is a student in sociology and her thesis is about how gender relationships in Africa are being affected due to the widespread of HIV AIDS . Gender relationships in Africa are almost similar to those in India . A woman is not considered feminine enough if her husband cooks etc . What is more important is feminity means not having you sexual preferences and subjecting to your husband or sexual partners will .
Susan is trying to study if AIDS epidemic in Africa has finally instilled a voice in African woman wherein they can go and tell there partner to go use a condom or some from of protection . It is amazing how a epidemic had the capability of changing gender balance in a entire civilization .
I plan to follow Susan's dissertation at close quarters bcoz this is the first time I am seeing epidemics from a sociological point of view . I feel we sometimes fail to see history when it is being built by our side . I am sure to follow this one bcoz no matter good or bad , HIV sure is going to bring changes to our society .

Think Media .

Over the past few days I have been thinking a lot about how the media is making us think . I am from India , one of the world's biggest democracies in function and now I stay in the US which is another one of the world's most successful democracies . We are believed to have the freedom of thought , speech etc and we believe that our opinion is our own and nobody can tell us what to do but it seems like we can be told what to do .

Recently saw one of bbc's documentaries about why US went to war in Iraq ? The reasons not withstanding what caught my eye the most in the documentary was that an entire nation of free thinking people could be convinced by a carefully planned publicity program that war was the way to go about it .

And then yest I went to the movie Sivaji . The movie sure had a story but who was bothered about that . All that mattered was the whoses and the washes ..(thats the sound that you get every time Rajnikanth moves a bone in his body ) . Here again the carefully planned publicity program made sure that the a movie which no where stands up to the cadre of good movie making ...is right now making crores in 120 countries all over the world .

Public opinion ...public's opinion or opinion which is potrayed to be coming from the public ...

well its for the media to decide and tell us so that it can be called our opinion ....

Imagine a dollar being credited to your tax refund account bcoz some bummer somewhere in the US wrote down the same SSN number as yours and decided to send one dollar to the US govt as his expression for solidarity with Bush !! Well whatever his reasons were that guy cost me 500 bucks coz the computer just bumped over my account as it could not figure out what to do with that one dollar and bingo I never got back my tax returns . Several days and a hour length of phone call later the guy at the IRS fixed up smthing which would I think enable me to get my hard earned money back ... I m still not sure though ...

Now that happens to one in a million people ..what are the chances that it would happen to me ..

Not until today though when I start my internship at Seagate . I come in all dressed up , raring to go and the lady tells me that my name is not in the system . My manager is not in town and the lady who can fix this is in california who doesn't come in until 2 hours later. Some forms which were to be sent by my manager to that lady never went thru ..rest all of the interns head happily to the orientation while I wait there ..1 hr down , 2 , 3 , 4 ,5 ...and I see the interns all heading back happily with the orientation goodies waving at me . I m still there stuck in the lobby .... Finally they figure out a way to get me in ..only to be followed by a cold reception by a computer which doesn't like me too much ..it refuses to install any of the softwares ...The guy helping me says ..." Well its almost like you were not meant to be here ..." ..aha ..thats wat an intern wants to hear on her first day at work !!!! ...

Well so now what are possibilities of all this happening to the same person ...Pretty less you would say ..

Well I dnt think so ..get talking to people and you realize that each one of them have had these chance games ( thats what I like calling them ) ..happening to them some time or the other ...and I guess this unpredictibility is what makes life so much fun ...
Even when we think we have planned out a lot of stuff in our life ..there is still a lot of unpredictibilty involved there . I some times wonder how different my life would have been if I had stayed back in India , or maybe chosen a different university or done a MBA as I originally planned . It would sure be fun to get back into a time machine ..take up the other choices and see what they result in ...!!!!

Remember some times in life when nothing seems to be going quite well ..i remember a few in my life ..well now would go down in the memory lane as one of them ..you dnt do well on course ..you think oh well i will make up for it ..not quite though ..you left a job back home in intel thinking jobs were not a big deal and to your utter suprise nobody here even wants to higher you for a internship ..and well to top it all your prof realizes that you have been feigning interest in his subject all this while and that you no longer are a important enough comodity for the lab ...
wat did i want to achieve when I started on this path you wonder and suprisingly you get no answers bcoz you no longer know ..but then life's not always fair is it ...
but what is not good you know ..to sit down here brooding about it all the while and wait for things to get rite ..bcoz thats just not going to work ..
having said that i should get back to work asap ...

A Lesson

I got my detection and estimation marks yest . I got 9/30 . I guess just one more person in that class of 30 has marks less than me , terrible performance .

Why so you may ask ..? The problem is I haven't taken the probability and stochastic class which is the prerequisite for this course . Earlier on I believed I could manage the course by the probability I had learnt in my engineering . I had a few warning signals before I started the course , for once it is a 8000 level course , the toughest one could take , the professor told me its going to be difficult , also I could not do the initial self assessment assignment meant to tell you if one could do the course but I kept telling myself I could do it . Taking up on a challenging task can be quite exciting , that rush of adrenaline saying you can do it ..but if not thought about well can land you into trouble some times .

Why did you take the course you may ask ..? I believed this course could get me a career in medical electronics which seems bleak too after my intern reject from medtronic . I often go back to all the academic and professional decisions I have made in this place and often wish I would have taken them otherwise , if only I had known better .

But then I am not complaining . I believe this is all a learning lesson for making better , informed decision later on in life .

One good thing ,courtesy this jolt I have given up all my slack persisting this semester long to make most of the rest of it knowing if I dnt give my best now ..."Somebody's gonna get real bad.."":--)

Teaching bug

My teaching bug got the better of me today when I spent 6 hours teaching till i finally hoarse and could not talk anymore . I taught 3rd , 5th grade kids and engineering sophomores all in the same day and answered questions ranging from whether there is electricity in india to wrong transistor connections on a microcontroller circuit board .

You might wonder as to what it is that I am talking about ..well here is the deal ..I volunteer with the minnesota international center as a result of which I got to talk to 3 and 5 grade students about how life for a kid their age in india is ...I got to hip hop dance with those kids and teach them how to do a few bharatnatyam steps in return..and boy were those kids curious ..they had questions ranging from does it snow in india ...do they tie ppl with a rope when they get married ..(they were refer to the mangalsutra ..) ...do kids in india like watching tv,what about video games ..do they have video games , are roads of india made of clay ? how many gods do they have ..are shops in india really small , what jobs do they do ..do they have ramen noodles for lunch ..how much is one dollar in india ruppees , do they still have kings in india ...so on and so forth ...

By the time I had finished giving my fouth presentation , my voice was hoarse but all of it was washed away when I saw the smile on the kids and their eagerness to meet some one new ..it could not have been more rewarding ...

and then I was back with my sophomores trying to debug their circuits , though the ignorance of a child is not there , the gratitude and respect remains ..you may not be able to answer all their questions but the fact that you took the pains for being there for them itself is enough for them ..

getting knowledge is quite a rewarding experience but there is nothing like being able to share it others ...

Pampering myself ..

After 22 years of leading a financially dependent life ..i suddenly got up one day and realised to my utter surprise that I was finally financially independent ..Now thats a big step in everyone's life ..and I should tell you it feels great ...

So I thought I should celebrate this momentous opportunity in my life ..and what better way to celebrate than to shop ..I went shopping my dear friends ..and I shopped till I fell ..for once I did not care to look at the price tag , convert it to Indian rupees and then stop to wonder if the stuff was really worth it . I bought what I liked and let me tell you it sure feels good ...we ought to pamper ourselves once in a while for all the other time we spend working so that we could get these few moments of pampering ourselves ...

Eating good food , wearing good clothes and doing activities you have always wanted to do ..I believe that should be the sole motive of the money we earn ..

Khali haath aaye the hum ..khali haath jayenge ...

Processed life ....

Every time i start to cook i begin to realise how processed life here in the US is ...wanna cook ...??? ..put ready to eat masala ..tomatoes ..well we have the tomato puree and the garlic paste ..ok now to vegetables ..frozen cut vegetables ..want a lemon squeeze to add the tangy taste or else take a pick at the preprocessed tamirand paste ...

Lets make rajma you would say ..now thats a exotic dish ..well no more ..you get pre cooked rajma soaked in sodium concentrate ..just put it in with the other puries you have and here you go rajma is ready ..

Well in no mood to cook ..why dnt you just take one of the ready to eat pizzas or paratha and put them into the microwave oven ..add a little salsa to taste ..and ya i guess you will have one of those fruit juices ..well its better we call them sweetend water coz they actually have no natural fruit content..

You dnt even want to do that ..take a cereal bar or a chocolate of the vending machine and eat it while you sit in front of your computer waiting for someone to come online ( sarcasm intended at the singlehood and hence loneliness of grad students ..)

This is not to say that people in India these days dnt do all this stuff ..Its just that I remembered how much time my mom used to spend trying to make stuff as healthy and as fresh for us as possible . Now we just do the post cooking of the already precooked food ..the aroma of the freshly made masalas ...the love and the energy my mom put in to make those dishes is completely missing ...

Somewhere down the line our entire lives are being processed by the technology and competition around us ..the freshness and the love is lagging behind ..but thats the real essence of life and we ought to keep it alive ..

-30 c

They always tell you but then who wants to listen . Minnesota - its really cold will you be able to survive the cold..think again ...but no we wouldn't listen ..after all we are on a mission to change this world by doing research , how can such small things matter ..surely they will not ..

So here we arrive , we stock ourselves with weapons for the winter a 1 kg downjacket , uncountable no of sweat shirts , gloves , thermals a nice fashionable cap ..who is afraid of the winter if you are so well stocked ..

And then comes my darling winters , it first tests your immune system with minor snow falls and winter chills , you are happy the free flu shots from boyton seem to working . Some one says that global warming has arrived and this time the winter is going to be mild . You ponder over the ill effects of global warming for a while and then realise that as long it serves to keep the winter at bay you would rather want it , than act to take GW away . With all the tensions for the winters pacified you get back to your task of changing the world .

But then winter has a way of catching you off the hold . All this while when you were being complacent about the winter , it was working its way through you immune system and just when the time is ready it strikes ...phew and then you suddenly realise its -30 C .

But then I was nicely stocked for the winter rite , the eternal optimist that I am , I think I can survive it . So here I go - Day 1 trying to make it to the univ , after all its just a 15 min , what worse can happen in 15 min . Here I am all decked ready to face the cold ..ok so now ..1,2 ,3 and I am out of the confines of my cosy apt ...First thoughts ..well its not that bad ..I can make it ...
5 mins down ..my nose starts freezing ..the cold vapours from my mouth and nose start freezing on my specs , I take them off to clean to them , realise the ice is frozen on top of it and it wouldn't go off ..so I stove them into my pocket .

Ok so now 5 inches of my face ..i.e my eyes and half of meter of legs ( covered only by a single layer of jeans ) are most prone to windchill ..but then thats very less ..what can possibly go wrng ..2 mins down ..my eyes start aching , i have a terrible headache ..and it seems some one has taken a ice pack , put needles into it and wrapped it around my leg ..Well there I am near the bus stop ,lets take a bus I decide ...I wait for 4 mins ..the next bus is still 5 mins away ..I decide I can walk rest of the distance ...there thats the biggest mistake I could have ever made ..5 mins at the bus stop has never killed anyone but 5 min walk in the cold has ..

5 more mins down the line I can hardly feel any part of my body and now to add to it all , the winter accesories that I have on me are pushing me down with their weight ..

There I can see the univ some distance away ...I wonder if i can make it till there but then I remind myself that I should survive to tell this story of mine ...

I survive ..

Finally I write ..

People have been wondering as to why I have stopped writing . Now I have no specific reasons actually . Lethargy and montonicity of life maybe . Life has become quite comfortable after being here for 5 months now . My apt feels like home and people I know feel like friends too . No offence ment but intially everybody starts out as aquantainces ....

I remember my initial days here ..I used to just wonder if I would ever feel comfortable in this place and with all these people around but its amazing how life has a way of making pieces fall into their place ..just give it the desired amount of time and life can do wonders to you .

The only regret ..I am moved far away from books ..been ages since I read one ...

The most happening thing ..my teaching assistantship ..I love it ..although I hate getting up so early in the morning and being their in the lab ..2 hours down the line I am happy that I did it ..for the first time in my life I am getting to put myself in the teacher's shoes and mind you ..it is a totally differnt world out there .

I get night mares the day before the lab thinking whether I will be able to perform satisfactorily or not ...and my joy knows no bounds when I am able to solve so one's problem and make them understand something . It sure is a noble profession ..as long as people take it that way . I have known too many bad teachers in my life to actually believe that ...

So that quite sums up what been happening around here ..apart from the minnesotan winter which has been making headlines .. - 34 C ..can you believe that ..feels like hundred of nails piercing your face ..everytime the wind hits you .

Keep surviving for you never know when you may find a reason to start living ...