We need a new Indian Culture! Not the one with 'Sita' and 'Draupadi'!

             After an hiatus of almost a year, i did not want to write about anything sad. I may not even be the right person to comment on the issue owing to the fact that i am not residing in my home country any more and that no matter how much i scream and yell in protest, my words would lose their power and sting after travelling 22000 miles as they reach Indian populace which is a very limited readership that my blog has! and yet, i wanted to pen my frustration onto this blog after reading on and on about the Delhi gang rape in newspapers. There have been numerous discussions about everything related to the case. Right from the technicality of it, the apathy of our system, the protests turned wary as a constable died of cardiac arrest and the entirely foolish 'why it happened' analysis that tend to point fingers at the victim involved!

The amount of pain that the victim went through is not imaginable by someone like me who has always been protected by the family and friends. The scarring of the lifetime that her friend has is even more painful. She is gone but he still has to lead his entire life with the knowledge of what happened that fateful night. His remorse for what has happened must be the darkest at this hour! The poor guy must be batting off questions in his head about why and how! I am sure he must be wondering again and again about why he chose to ride that bus and hence revisiting the horror every single time! I am sure it was tough for her but i cannot turn blind eye to this man who will continue to have nightmares his entire life and may or may not be able to trust 'system' ever again!

As usual, we Indians are excellent at Root Cause Analysis. We just so have it in us to dissect every minute detail of an issue and then finally blame it on West! The statements about how the 'westernization' is the culprit behind all this reminds of a scene in movie Swades where the croaking 'mukhiya' talks about something that Amrika does not have - our culture, values and tradition! Mohan Bhargava's apt response to that is so valid even in this case.
Which Indian culture are we talking about?!
The one where Ram discarded his pregnant wife Sita on behest of an ignorant peasant?! The one where Sita had to 'prove' her innocence and chastity?!
The one where a woman was made to be shared by 5 men against her own wish? or the one where these very 5 men used her as a bait in a gamble and then lost her?
or the one where this menstruating woman, a princess by birth lost by her 5 husbands, was about to be undressed in a room full of men while her husbands useless enough to be called impotent  sat with heads bowed down?!
May be for us God is the culture so He had to descend down to save Draupadi from the 'vastraharan' but sadly God couldnt help the Delhi Gangrape victim as she underwent immense torture at the hands of few men!
Indian men of all should think 100 times before hiding behind the usual excuses of how West has polluted their culture. As far as women are considered, Indian culture was never bright to begin with!

During my 3 years of stay abroad, i have traveled many cities and can tell from my own experience that the men in the West are far more cultured in terms of treating women. Its more American fellows that keep the door held open for you and let you board the elevator first. Its more Indians that engage into catcalls than Americans do! I have never seen an American getting mad because his lady boss told him off. He could be mad about the words used or the feedback received but its hardly ever because its a woman telling him off.
I have seen many more examples of women letting their careers go to dogs to save their marriages in India than i have seen in the 'West'. I have come across Americans that refuse to take their wives, the home cooked meals, the washing and cleaning for granted than Indian men! A woman in west has a right over her body, her mind, her choices of whether or not to give birth to a baby! Instead of taking leaf out of their book, we only take what 'West' itself is trying to discard and then again instead of doing something about this selective aping of ours, we blame 'them' for what goes wrong under our own nose!

More shameful than these cases of rapes is the sick mentality of those who still try and find a justification of why it happened.Whats more disturbing is this blame game with the west and the audacity of people pointing fingers at the victim's dressing sense or the time of the day when she was out!
but at the end of the day if we have to blame it on culture then my question is that whether only women should be accountable for following the traditions and values? Are men allowed to forget that the country itself is called a 'mother'? If covering yourself up from head to toe is culture, is respecting women not? Was helping the naked and shivering victims when they were thrown off the moving bus not taught by Indian culture? Does Indian culture teach us to treat a rape victim as if it was her fault? or that she 'invited' the trouble and hence she must be of 'loose' character?! How many so called cultured men come forward to marry a woman that has have been victimized. Even our movies show men committing suicides when their wives were raped instead of trying to start afresh or to provide her the support that she needs in time such as this?!

and furthermore does Indian culture feel that absence of any physical assault on a woman is equivalent to respecting her 'enough'? that makes me laugh and cry at the same time! We Indians have very wrong ideas of respecting a woman to begin with! Respect is not only about considering her a human but considering a human of intellect, feelings and a voice of her own! Respect is all about not wanting to kill a baby girl while she still hasnt seen the world on her own! Respect is to not treat a son and a daughter any differently. Respect is to slap a boy hard the first time he shows misogyny in his behavior! Respect is to allow a woman to make her own decisions and to treat her in equal rights! Respect is what comes out of humility and not God or religion!

Its high time we write new stories for our children than Ramayana and Mahabharata that treated women like properties! we need stories of women that were able to overrule such notions! we need stories of women that tailored a new culture that respected women!

The Nerdy Single & wait for it, Happy Me :)

It's been some time that i seriously sat down to write something, anything! Work is one excuse i can use. The other is the fear of ranting on a paper. That the moment i would start typing, all the frustration for the world around me and inside of me would start bleeding onto the paper and i didnt want it. I wanted to write in a state of mind that was more stable, less complaining!

After a day of yelling at a lot of people for different reasons, i feel stable enough at this hour when i am completely alone in my bed, ready to plop down on a pillow. I should have been this stable and calm when i was in fact yelling at those poor folks but sometimes it just happens. You dont want to be rude, you dont want to roll your eyes, you don't want to ignore people right on their pretty faces but you do. Something inside makes you do all that even when your upbringing and manners tell you its impolite. Doctors call them Hormones - Things that make you go bat crap crazy when gone haywire. The reason they go haywire is because of work induced stress. (some of my much married friends tell me its because i am not getting any 'action'. may be!). Today turned out to be one of those days where the Bus driver was definitely dilly-dallying the bus so that i would reach office late. I knew it the moment i hated those innocent faced kids being dragged by their mothers for school cause my bus was late and then it hit the school zone with its mandatory 20 miles per hour speed limit with double fines for the offenders! How could i hate kids! I love them! Something was definitely up then.

The frustration continued throughout the day. The things i would otherwise pay no attention to magically magnified themselves! So a snide comment about me vacationing alone, a passing remark about my single status all bothered me much more that what they should! Hell, am i not listening to this garbage for the better part of last 3 years!! So i am in United States of America - Supposedly a country that welcomes you with open arms and allows you to do whatever you want without anyone meddling their snooty noses in between but its not so. Why should it hurt so much now of all the times!

I counted one to ten. Then in reverse but my quota for patience was so over for everyone around, its scary! I am not an unreasonably irate person. Yes, i am not fond of every single living thing around me. Most manage to irritate me but i can still keep my face straight or even smile if i am feeling extra generous that day but i hardly ever show that irritation on face cause i know deep down, its not them, its me! Its my lack of sleep, lack of any routine, lack of me time, lack of reading and introspection time thats causing all that. All these wonderful people are being what they have always been. Its me that should take time out, in a corner, with back turned towards the world so that i can think calmly and then react. But sometimes it just doesnt happen!

So when i strode back home, earlier than useful, I saw the ultimate remedy to stabilize myself. Two sinks full of dishes, waiting for me to be done, welcoming me invitingly and no, i am not being sarcastic here. Its weird but doing dishes (the indian way, with all the bubbles of soaps flying around and water tap running incessantly to deafen any noise around) blankets me in calm that i hardly ever experience in a company of humans! Its therapeutic!

A warm and steaming cup of Indian Chai, complete with gingerroot and cardamom later, I was on with my studies for an important exam and lost myself in 'Triple Constraints'. Scope, Time, Cost, Quality and Customer Satisfaction. They are called Triple right, then why are they 5 in total! well, whatever. Time flew past and i was alright! Feeling so much better while the narrator on the slides droned on about BOK. As i finished the module with its 40 something pages and then ticked through Test that was a surprise and fared well enough, i realised how satisfied i felt. As if yelling at those clueless folks was utter waste of time. All i needed to calm down was to read, study and then test myself against a syllabus!


and to top it all of, i am reading a book by an Indian author, very poignantly written tale of an Indian girl, well raised in a southern village that is married off to an NRI doctor. Her trials and tribulations are keeping me wide awake when i should be sleeping. I am liking this Leila more than any human made of real flesh and bones. Her anger, her disappointments seem real even when i know i would never be in her position!
I am so stopping myself from hitting the last page button on my Kindle just to read what happens of her in the end. I feel more engrossed in reading this book than i ever feel while a real person is narrating their story.


And then it stuck me and stuck pretty hard. Have i turned into one of those introverted, nerdy, unsociable kinds that need no living being to make them happy, calm and satisfied?! Should i panic that i no longer need humans to make me feel useful, protected and accomplished?! I gave myself some time to see if the panic was slowly rising the way it normally does but it didnt. My brain was whirling just as much, taking in the complex words and terminologies. I felt just as composed and in control as before. So the fact is sealed now. Bring in the trumpets please - I am Nerdy, I am happy, alone and have never felt this better before!

Its All About Loving My Parents!!!

 When i was little and money was the answer to all my questions and its absence the root cause of all my problems, i wished i had a different set of people as my parents. People who had loads and loads of money, people who would nod their heads in affirmative for the growing list of demands such as books, games, CDs and Picnics, people who would offer me my favorite street food every single day, people who would praise me for every single grade i earned than questioning me for every single one i lost. People who would buy me new clothes for every festival, People who would drop me to and pick up from school in a car. I would often fantasize about waking up in a different house - a house that had everything my home could not afford. Alas, it never happened. Every day i woke up with my same old parents. I wallowed in self pity for a few years as i met my friend's parents - Upper middle class to rich, well educated, soft spoken and well groomed. Then out of no choice I accepted my parents as they are! I bragged about it, put myself on the pedestal to think how effectively i was coping with them and what a favor it meant to them!
             15 years later, 22000 miles apart, i miss them irrespective of the money they never had or their disciplinarian nature that never changed. Past 2 years in US have been stagnant as far as my career goes but i witnessed so many shades of human nature that today, after all the freedom i have to do whatever thing i want or after all the money i have ready to buy me every little thing i ever wanted, i value nothing of it. I have (finally!) come to value my Aai Baba like nothing else!

              I however feel ashamed for the way i thought about them during my formative years. I feel sad for all my outbursts at them. Outbursts - out of the growing frustration of being stuck in a middle class set up for life, out of the irritation of wanting to grow wings and fly away but not getting around to actually do it. I feel repentant for every single time i have hurt them with my words and/or actions. I feel grateful for all the punishments, angry words and the pain that comes with it that they inflicted on me, for its them that i could face challenges in my life without as much as batting an eyelid. I feel thankful for all the values and principles they imbibed in me, for its them that i can still connect to my roots in a foreign land. Temptations to overstep my boundaries do not affect me despite of the freedom US offers me, thanks to them. Their faces flash in front of my eyes every time i so much as think about doing something i know they wont approve of. I particularly am so thankful to my Baba for stressing it early on to me that there is no shortcut to success other than honesty and hard work. Smart work is sometimes over rated for some things in life do need lot of sweat and sleepless nights.

I am so thankful to my Aai for showing me the joy of sharing, for letting me understand the happiness you can offer to people in small acts done with love, care and best intentions. I could have easily been pampered as the only child for the first 10 years of my life before Kiran was born but she never allowed it to happen. Even if it meant just a bowl full of curry, she shared it with all our neighbors. Everyone was welcomed at our small place. Sometimes, that would mean no place for me to study or play but i grew up around people, all kinds of people, that made me ready to face life, accept people with their not-so-pleasing habits. It also made me aware that not everyone has your best intentions at their hearts and you have to keep away from such people, embracing only those who were genuine, who loved you with no hidden motive.

           Both, my mom and dad, worked very hard to fend for our family. I have seen them going out of their ways to help people, to make them happy with small but thoughtful gestures - and all this without making a whole scene about it. I have also seen those very people back stabbing my parents. What however has always amazed me is my parent's ability to forget and forgive. That is one thing i could never learn from them. To let go off people, To let go off your expectations from people. I still get hurt and swear off people who back stab me but again my parents showed me how to move on and i did and felt much better.

                My dad never repented the fact that i was a girl. My gender never stopped him from choosing an ambitious career path for me while, all along, he had an option of marrying me off but he still waited for me at 11 PM, every night at deserted Dadar TT Circle to pick me up from where my company bus dropped me so that i did not have to commute alone in the dead of night. My good grades brought tears in his eyes and a huge grin as i stepped on stage to receive numerous scholarship awards or trophies and medals for elocution, singing, memory quizzes or essay competitions but he never tolerated me bragging about those to anyone else.    He is the man who showed me the difference between possessing a bad attitude and being grounded and down to earth!

                 Me being a girl has never forced my mom to drag me to kitchen to stop studying and learn cooking but she always taught me how being a girl, a woman to be, i had the power to make or break a family. When i would eventually grow up to be someone's wife and someone's daughter-in-law, how my little adjustments would mean peace of mind for my family. How the good old spanking at correct time would mean my children would learn to toe the line. How respecting elders in the family and agreeing to their reasonable demands never means a hit to your well educated self and ego fueled on professional success.

 Today when i see people around pass me an incredulous look for the things i say or do, when i sometimes find myself underestimated or unaccredited for certain things, when very often i feel others finding my company utter boring, uninteresting and lackluster, when i am being judged based on the most trivial things, i feel heavy thinking about how my parents tolerated me all these years. How their patience never ran out. How their love saw no dearth for me. How only they could see as a diamond and not as apiece of coal like so many others do. It seems so funny now that ever, in my delusional mind, i had patted my back for 'accepting' them. The reality has now dawned on me that they are the ones who had to accept me for the way i have sometimes been - argumentative, indifferent, standoffish and very insensitive to their needs. They are perfect, have always been.

We never shared a relationship so formal for me to be able to say sorry but i hope God would allow me to be with them, to do something for them that would make them tremendously proud of me and enormously happy.
I think a huge Thank You is in order to God as well. He surely gave me poor parents but He compensated by making them just so perfect!!

The Year Thats Gone By...some musings on 31st..

Every year on 31st, i come up with a long list of resolutions for the next one and right at that point of time even when i am jotting them down, i smile inwardly knowing very well that i wont stick to any of them!
but like so many other things in life we do in the name of tradition, this is one of them and i stick to at least writing them down ;)
one more thing i always do on 31st is to visit the memory lanes that were lost somewhere in the hustle bustle of the highways and flyovers that go grand and grander with every passing week. With every new shiny object, new label, acquired skill i tend to forget something old but equally precious so this day is when i open my trunk and get out with all that would now be old - something that happened 'last year'. :)

This year the highlight of the year was that i managed to strike out two 'to-do' things from my bucket of 'Things to do before you die'.

- Stayed alone in an apartment
- Traveled alone in a foreign land

my mom always called me a loner. Never quite liked the company of humans so naturally for me, someone who is very well shielded by her family, all her life, someone whom people challenged that she would never be able to live independently, i always wanted to stay away from my parents and alone. This year, Devi's marriage gave me the opportunity and on the first night alone in a 750 Sq Ft apartment, i cursed all my dim stars for wanting to be this way. She did go away with tears in our eyes but i chose not to have a roomie. some people and some things in life are never replaceable :) Few nights passed with me sleeping upright in my bed, my eyes flying open with every single crack and hoot from outside and all horror movies i dragged people with me to watch flashed in front of my eyes but i survived and now i love it to the core. Sometimes i do feel the need to have someone by my side when i am not well or am depressed about something that happened in the office but otherwise i am just fine and doing spectacularly well with a satisfying feeling at the back of my mind that my best friends are just a phone call away and that i may not have garnered anything else in the past year but surely have 4 am friends that i can call and vent!

Traveling alone was a conscious decision. Not that i did not enjoy my previous trips to other lands. i did but being a loner (read: Psycho ;)) i always wanted to do things differently on a tour. I always wanted to take my own time to sink in the new place, its feeling, its history in me instead of rushing from one landmark to other. It has its own charm to just sit at a street side cafe with a book, no camera, no cell phone, no maps. just sit there and watch people around you. people who dont know who you are and you arent bothered about them either. people who are forgiving towards you cause they dont know what mistakes you have made, what blunders you have committed. a stranger can smile at you and you hesitate at first but smile back and the moment is gone and still written on your slate forever. So i went to Boston for my Thanksgiving vacation and fell in love with the city. If ever, i had any doubt about me being a city gal, its all gone now. Give me the cities! any day! Visited places where i always always wanted to go. walked miles and miles and came back to hotel tired but happy. Of course there is fun when you can share it with people you love but then i love myself too. :) this meant no photos of mine but i could, on a whim, hire a cab to find out the exact place that i wanted to visit at the night time to catch nighttime skyline of Boston in my camera. cost me $60. its crazy but its essentially something i could do only when i was alone. Cant work out your whims when you are with a gang. you have to behave when you are social. you necessarily dont have to when your actions dont put others in a spot :) i returned to Dallas, my heart heavy with memories, with a want to go back to the lovely city and wallet a lot lighter but hey...i could very well be packing my bags next month to go back to India and never return to this fascinating land. Why rely on future when you cant see it for sure :)

apart from these two, a lot of small things happened. Some broke my heart beyond repair and made me take stock on how naive and immature i still am, 26 years after birth. How my silence or tongue held at the right moment could have saved a little damage but i dont repent for anything. at that point of time, i did everything cause it felt right, for me it was the right thing to do so i did it. No going back on one's words or actions. I would have said sorry if i had felt it. i didnt so i couldnt :)

made lot of good friends that would stick with me through thick and thin or so i hope. Who would call me names, tease hell out of me, comment on my profession with an authority that pisses me off completely but i know one thing. if the day comes, god forbid, when i faint in my apartment, my dead body wont be eaten by a stray dog or cat.
They may not call me every other day but they do keep me in their thoughts and that i figure somewhere as a  tiny spec in the bigger scheme of things in their lives. That they help me realize in their own way of how much growing up i still have to do. People who accept me with open arms with all my psycho ways of thinking, my fears, my obstinacy, my poor jokes, my rigidness and my helplessness with letting things and hurt go.  I have always always thanked God for people around me and this year he did not disappoint me from adding some more to the list.

I want to thank each and every person that taught me a thing or two last year. I surely am a little different person this year than i was the last and the lion's share goes to you.

Resolutions for new year:

- Reduce weight (not going to happen since i will soon sink my teeth in something sinful and something that will take days to come off my hips)
- Read more (this does not include online reading. i mean real books and nook!)
- Write more (try not to hide the lazy bum under the pretext of writer's block)
- Travel more (alone and with groups)
- Spend less (hrmph)
- Call old friends
- Be happy with what you have and forget about what couldnt come to you. (the most difficult one)
- Get a promotion (shouldnt really be on my list. should be on my Manager's list as a to do ;))
- Find love (not through the weird matrimonial sites)
- Think of more resolutions for the next year

Badbad from Boston - Day 2

I do live in present but half the time i am reminiscing about the past and the remaining half, i am daydreaming about the future.

Today however was different. My second day in Boston - Sightseeingwise the first one :) Today i lived in past and mourned over what could have been an alternate future that i didnt have. 

I walked through two Universities/colleges that are in reality are huge & crowded cities. Harvard at Cambridge and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). I have visited a lot of colleges in Bombay and always found two very close to my heart. One - Ruparel - My own Junior college and IIT Bombay - We went there during Mood Indigo during my engineering final year and i had fallen in love with the place. I had never thought any other place would rekindle the magic again, ever but today MIT did. 

A little history on MIT is in order. It is a private research university founded in 1861. It has a 168 Acre campus dedicated to various buildings that house laboratories, classrooms, lounges (yes with neon green couches), libraries and endless corridors. Though it started off as an engineering and Applied Science's facility, it has now expanded into Biology, Economics, Linguistics, Political Science and Arts as well. The institute is on the banks of Charles River. As you get down the stairs in the backyard of The Great Dome, you see Boston's very impressive bay skyline. The highrise is no wonder in US but it still amazes you. Or may be it did to me cause highrises are a novelty in Dallas! 

First building that i visited was "The Stata Center" - It houses CSAIL, LIDS and Department of philosophy and linguistics. This strangely stacked building was designed by Frank Gehry - A Canadian American Pritzker Prize winning architect based in LA. 

Second was the Building 7 thats considered as the official entrance to MIT. It is also known as 'The Great Dome'. This building has endless corridors. All that you need is a strong pair of legs and energy to outdo its length. Its daunting! No wonder they call it "The Infinite Corridor". The backyard overlooks the Boston  Bay and i stood there for atleast half an hour clicking pictures and generally taking in the view. 

I also visited Simmons Hall and Kresge Auditorium - both build post war and represent contemporary architecture. I also chanced upon visiting the MIT Playgrounds and they are just as huge as the college buildings are! 

Some interesting trivia. The undergraduates can wear a ring that is parted only to those that are students in MIT, depending upon the year of the course. The initialism IHTFP is engraved on the ring along with a beaver to mark the experience attached to each year. so for the 

First Year - IHTFP stands for - I Hate The Fucking Place

Second Year - I Have Truly Found Paradise

Third Year - Institute Had The Finest Professors 

Fourth Year - Its Hard To Fondle Penguins.

Isnt that funny ;)

I was surprised too! i had always imagined MIT students to be all sincere, devoid of fun & sense of humor but here you are! :)) 

While i was returning back to Red Line to catch my next train to Harvard, a boy - Indian and very simple and studious looking said hello. i smiled and said Hi but continued walking. Finally after walking in parallel for more than 5 minutes, he asked me if i were a student on MIT campus. I said no and asked generally if he was and he said yes. I was bowled! i so wanted to talk to someone who was the actual student. His name was Sandeep and he narrated how it was to be an MIT student. Ofcourse the affiliation is the best thing you can do to yourself afterall MIT is world's number 1 technological institute but it does come with very very hectic schedule! He is doing his PhD in Applied Mechanics. May be i put foot in my mouth as usual but i gasped and told him how i had KT in mechanics during my F.E. and he laughed! he said it wasnt that difficult - Mechanics and i was ready to bow! Thats what you call modesty! He has been staying on the campus for last 3 years and is planning to continue his career in research. He walked me to one of the Indian restaurant nearby - flocked by everyone since its Thanksgiving Day and all the rest of the shops were closed down already! Over the lunch he told me how he thought i was a Bengali. Now thats first. I do get labelled as South Indian quite very often but Bengali is different and first! While he offered to pay for lunch, i denied vehemently saying he was still a student while i earned, albeit a lowly IT engineer. He smiled and said he got a good grant $8K every month! and i was gaping open mouthed. I was like, please pay. He did. We bid goodbye after he walked me to Red Line. Its true that intelligence should always be accompanied by modesty. Its a lethal combination! 

The next destination was waiting for me.. 

I will continue this badbad tomorrow, cause my legs are killing me. I must have walked atleast 20 miles today. The only break was the lunch i had and well 4 Chai Tea Lattes. There is starbucks all over the MIT and its 20 F outside!!!!! 

Agenda for tomorrow:

- The famous Duck Tour

- The Freedom Trail

- Prudential Tower

- Museums 

- Boston Bay Tour 

See ya tomorrow!!

Badbad from Boston - Day 1

There are a few things every person vouches that they cant/wont do. For me it was 'being alone'. Those who know me also know how much i love to talk. I have always been a people's person. If this sounds a little dramatic then lets say that i had/have dependency on a lot of people around me to feel good. I had always maintained in the past that i could have never stayed alone but now i do for past couple of months and though i miss Devina - my ex-roomie, i havent found staying alone as traumatic as i always imagined it to be in the past. It has its pros and cons like everything else. I had fantasized about living a carefree bachelor life while i was back in Bombay and that is now checked off my list of Things To Do.

So after staying alone, the next obvious To Do was to travel alone. So here i am, in the City Of Commerce, City Of Colleges, city thats very very similar to my hometown Bombay - Boston! you would ask why Boston!

- I had heard a lot about this city from a friend and had planned to visit it someday. The day is now here :)

- It houses my broken dream - MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) - back in Bombay, i had tried my bit to see if i could join. I couldnt. 

- Harvard - Need i say more!

- This is one of the fewest US cities where you can get around without having to have a car at your disposal. They have amazing Metros available known as 'T' and if you are a little on splurging side, you have Cabs...all you have to do is hail! A weekly pass that works for buses as well as for Metro cost you 15 bucks! not bad by the Boston standards!! its an expensive city. 

I did plan early and booked all the tickets well in advance but i am still clueless about where to go and how to go. So tomorrow morning, over the free breakfast at my Hotel's restaurant, i need to browse through stuff and  plan what i should have planned before the touchdown :( 

So far the trip has been fun! *touchwood* 

- My first flight from Dallas Fort worth International Airport was dot on time! My shuttle arrived just in time. i did not have a window seat on my boarding pass and that got me down! i love window seats on the planes :(( but as soon as i boarded, the girl occupying the window seat asked me if i could trade my isle seat with her, she had a connecting flight from Chicago and her connection time was just 11 minutes!!! i gladly did and wished her best of luck. O'Hare International Airport is world's busiest and getting from concourse A to B by their skylinks itself takes more than 10 minutes. 

- Next to me was the cutest American guy i have ever met. He had green eyes and was reading 'The Classical World'. A guy who loves to read - thats my perfect man! We did exchange smiles over my Coke and his wine but didnt talk *sigh*.

- My connection time was only 30 minutes to catch the next flight to The Logan International Airport, Boston and i was stuck in the plane for more than 10 minutes. While i was generously wishing the other '11 minutes' girl best of luck, i hadnt seen me needing that as well. but guess what! my next flight was an hour delayed for 'Air Traffic Control' reasons so i had enough time to run to the Duty Free shops to buy a 'Chicago' fridge magnet (yes i am crazy for them! i buy atleast 5-6 at every new place i visit) and get my Chai Tea Latte and have it calmly while reading on my Nook! I got good time observing people around me. I love airports!!! i enjoy the hustle bustle. For me an airport can never be boring, doesnt matter how delayed my flight is. There is so much you can observe....! 

- One of the confirmations fell through and i got the window seat yet again! talk about being too much lucky on one day! and yet again i had an American as my fellow passenger. and while he was a married man (i have turned American in this one aspect - when i like a guy, my eyes automatically scan his ring finger ;)), he was extremely handsome! if i were the on duty air hostess, i would have upgraded him to first class, all for his looks! (may be thats why i am not!) 

- First thing that hit me hard in Boston was the COLD! its 1 degree Celsius outside and will drop further during the early hours of morning! i was well packed from head to toe. My hotel shuttle arrived just in time to get me to my Hotel. 

- My room looks fabulous! i did pay a little more to have a good 4 star hotel, close to airport etc etc cause i couldnt stay alone at a shoddy place and this hotel is worth every penny!! The lobby and the room, every tiny place is warmly lit, its not flashy. its cozy.. and they have a real fireplace and candles burning near the reception, yielding it a festive glow... loved it!!! 

All in all a good, hasslefree day! I am in new time zone and my body is still adjusted to my CST time. so i still have time to do some reading, watching TV etc. yieppe!!! 

I know that my family and my well wishing friends are worried for me and may have thought this decision of touring alone as 'insane' but none of them have said that. Each one of them have encouraged me and i cant thank them enough for it. Sometimes all you need is courage & excitement and my friends made sure that i had both in plenty :)

Agenda for tomorrow:

- Get up on time (preferably before noon)
- Feast on the complimentary hotel breakfast ;)
- buy Boston Metro Pass 

- The Freedom Trail

- Harvard Square

- Lots of walking

- Fridge Magnet shopping

- Local cuisine tasting

- Lots of photography

- Meeting Tanushree for Dinner (hopefully in Downtown) - my foe turned friend ex colleague (we were 'cutthroat bitches' of our QA training batch in Patni for all the men folk ;))  

 Catch ya tomorrow! for now, my comfy inn's comfy bed is beckoning me! 

Cheers & Happy Thanksgiving!!!

- Himali

Life lessons - Learn till you live!

Yesterday a colleague of mine asked me a funny question! I was about to leave when i realised i needed access to one of our new Oracle instances so i gathered all my stuff and went to him to get it. He must be at least 60 years old and tries to teach me a word here and there in Spanish - the second most used language in USA and sometimes French. A week ago, we decided that for every task he does for me, he needs Mordida - its a Spanish word for 'Bribe'. I told him promptly that i am not getting paid in 5 digits every month to afford that. I would rather log a ticket and wait for him to pick it up - as the process calls it. He laughed and said it would be an answer to his question. One Task - One Question. I shrugged my head and said fair enough as long as the questions were not personal & indecent. So yesterday was the first task after this unwritten treaty between us and i had almost forgotten about it as a joke till he drummed his fingers on desk and asked me


"Whats the best part of being alive?"


While he launched my application to grant me the access, he kept an eye on me. Now Now! This can be a very easy or a very difficult question. Depends upon how you take it. In that short duration of time while i shifted my weight from this leg to that, a lot of things flashed in front of my eyes.


Just few weeks back i had been to Six Flags - a thrill park with amazing rides. The best part of being alive i thought was to be able to do something that would push you off the edge. To be able to feel the fear and excitement mixing up in a concoction that fuels your brain & pumps the extra adrenaline in blood that your heart needs. To be able to hear the heart pounding in your ears, To be able to overcome your phobias and your inhibitions and just scream your lungs out and laugh hysterically when its over.


OR


It could be as simple as being able to sit in your apartment quietly and read your favorite book. As the lines after lines pass from under your eyes, your brain works its magic and you interpret their meaning. you transport yourself in a whole new world. It could be J.K.Rowling's magical Potter's world or the sterilized and cold Operation Rooms of Robin Cook's. The visualization can be so dramatic & engrossing - its something only a voracious reader can understand.


OR


It could be the ability to feel emotions. Yours and others too. It could be love, affection, belongingness, anger, frustration, awkwardness, happiness, sadness, a longing, a feeling that you dont fit or sometimes when you hit it off with a stranger. It could be the touch as you lift a newborn in your arms. It could be tears and a gnawing feeling of missing someone in your life. It could be laughter - unbound and cascading. It could be hurt and pain. There is a whole spectrum out there for you and its up to you to decide where you want to lie on it. Its your ability to forgive or forget or your decision not to do so! It could be your inability to enjoy the most that others do or a different perspective than the ordinary.


OR


Could it be dreaming? It may sound ridiculous but i spend a definite amount of time per day daydreaming. I feel it keeps me alive and longing for more from my life. I imagine myself in a lot of situations that i am not currently and chances are more that i would never be and then i try to gauge how i would react to it. Sometimes that discovery is disconcerting. I never knew i could feel that way. Sometimes its very predictive. Yeah! i always knew i would feel it that way. Its in the moments like this that i realise and accept how less i know about my own self and how much of my mind and nature still remain unexplored. I imagine myself Pregnant and all the stuff i would want to do for my baby. I imagine myself as the woman i just saw in Starbucks, happily serving coffee and looking far more happier than my boss who must be earning a lot of money than she does. I imagined myself parent less and that scares me. At the end of the day they are the only people who accept me with all my negativity, stubbornness, mood swings and failures in life. Others taunt, tease and make fun of me. Sometimes i am hurt but i dont show it. Sometimes i just let it go. Sometimes i imagine myself in a position to be able to control other's lives and how i could help them or my one mistake could bring their world crashing down. The possibilities are infinite & so is the fun behind the imagination.


Of course i couldn't say all this to him. I stood there thinking. I knew i had to keep my word and say something. He wrote down my password and offered it to me but not before i answer. so i said -


The best part of being alive is to be able to learn something every single day! the learning never stops and it doesn't have to be a rocket science. It could be a simple cooking trick or a complex planning algorithm. It could be as simple as a new word in a foreign language or a life lesson that would guide and help you all your life. It could be a self discovery or something that makes you look at a person in a whole new different light.


God has a way of teaching. He may not flash you the cards or circle up things and make them easy for you to understand. Sometimes they are right there, in front of you - all that is needed is for you to wait and think about it. He doesn't believe in theory, He puts you in the field and gives you all the necessary tools required to learn and then its up to you how to use them to your advantage or forget that you even have them.


for example, it could be a word or an expression that hurt your sentiments. You still learn not to use the same word and expression for anybody else unless the provocation is beyond your tolerance.
It could be how someone criticises you and you learn a thing or two from it. Even if you feel that it wasn't so constructive after all, you can still learn how to put it in a way that would not discourage a person.
It could be how some people laugh at you. You can still learn how to laugh WITH others than at them.
It could be how you learn to lower your guard for a set of people while some make you feel unwelcome & unimportant. You still learn how not to be affected by how world sees you.


These lessons go a long way into making you the person that you are or a person that you will be. When life is unfair to you, you have two choices. You can get your frustration out on others to make them feel just as miserable OR you can save them from making the same mistakes that you did.


The key is to not merely survive but to live life with all its Dos and Donts and fine printed instructions that you never read and learn on every step of the way.