Boring Conversations and some fears

It seems I have nothing left to say. I am bored with the two repetitive conversations, and the one, not so repetitive but most meaningless conversation:

1. I visited Australia, holidaying with some close friends from Calcutta, and met up some old “friends” ( friend is just too general a term to describe such relationships. We went to school together, had most of our fun together, designed and executed high school pranks together, but have parted ways since school) in Melbourne. A few weeks ago, met with undergraduate friends in Chicago. And with all these people, after a few minutes of updating present details, a few more minutes of trying to talk about how our typical days are, the conversations jump back to memories. After some-time, I am just too tired of just reliving the memories.
2. With friends in Madison: This has become so repetitive, that I can anticipate what my friend will say, what I will say in return and what he will say in return to that and so on. It will start with one of us talking about the wedding of some random dude from undergraduate. Then, we will all absorb in self-pity of our single lives and our inabilities to get a girl. Rinse and repeat, till last call. Early last year, one of the guys from Madison got married (sort of contradicts our conversations), and when he gets his wife over, we drown ourselves in whisky and endless games of UNO.
3. Just sometimes, (and although I am grateful that we get out of this conversational infinite loop), 2-3 hours get lost in “discussing” India’s politics and how we can just not improve. I get in all my Rahul baba bashing in, someone tells stuff like indiscipline is our DNA etc and within a few minutes, I stop listening and just hear yada, yada, yada.

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I’ve surrounded myself with so many like-minded people in Madison, that differences with my close friends seem to have blown completely out of proportion. (I guess, it is the case with my friends too. Unlike, school or college, my present contacts/acquaintances etc all have a similar background (nerdy, PhD types), while my friends, wherever they end up working, will have people with similar backgrounds.) It is my reaction to these differences that has startled me.

I’ve known Shriram  and Srikant from since 1989. And since that time, we have know the kind of people we are: Shriram is the enthusiast, the spontaneous person, someone, who does not care about plans and things to do, just follows whatever he wants to do. And a damn good “convincer”. Srikant, has this completely laid-back, whatever attitude. He does not care about plans and such, because anything is fine with him. I am the most meticulous of the three. Not spontaneous, not laid-back. I like to plan things out, think about decisions etc. I get specially irritated when things just don’t go according to plans (my dream is to go on an unplanned holiday, just drive wherever kind of holiday, but I know I can never do that)

The clash of personalities was always there. Especially between Shriram and me. The great part about it was, the differences never bothered us. We would get into small fights, but sort it out finally in a manner in which both of us were happy.

But during the Australia trip, the differences just got to my nerves.

(eg. He wanted to spend an extra night in Port Campbell, I wanted to get back to Sydney as planned. We fought, I won, but I felt sour all trip long)

(eg. He wanted to rent a car in Cairns. I thought it was a waste of money. We rented one anyway)

(eg. I wanted to eat quick grab-and-go lunches from Subway, McD etc, he wanted elaborate restaurants. On the whole, this was even)

(eg. Both of us kept fighting on who would drive).

Both of us were expecting that we would get into fights. As we joked when Shriram’s wife tried to mediate: “Come on, we are on a holiday!”, that it is not fun unless we fight. These arguments did not bother me. It was just that, ever so often, I would get frustrated by our different takes. Negative thoughts like, I cannot even get along with my best friends etc would creep into me and make me miserable. It has me scared a lot.

It was not just the fighting, but our approaches to everything. Being surrounded by people who “think” just like I do, I have gotten very comfortable with the manner in which I go about things. To be then, suddenly meeting friends, but with a totally different approach to “go about things”, just yanked me out of my comfort zone.

There are these cliches about best friends just going on as if nothing ever happened. I hope they are just cliches. Time, work, colleagues, your location, have subtle ways of influencing us. I guess, accepting it and adjusting is also a part of “being” the best friend.

Discipline

While talking with friends about 2011 resolutions, I listed mine as : “Work harder”. On, further thought, I think that should be changed to “Work regularly”.

I have sunk deep into a “chalta hai” attitude quick-sand.  My work mostly consists of pen-paper derivations or simple simulations ( ones which does not require a muscular computer), and lately, I have just kept pushing them for later, while horsing around on the internet all night long (like today). So much so, that there have been days this winter when I have hardly seen sunlight, and more days in which I have cooped up in my apartment, having fooled myself into thinking that ; a 10-15 minute “thought to the problem” is work.

It is one thing to be distracted by something and the distraction affecting your schedule, but to be distracted by nothing? I did not work, but thinking back, I achieved nothing else in that time.  In 2010, my casual reading decreased like anything, from 22-23 novels in 2009 to just around 10-11 in 2010. I hardly blogged or read anything useful online. All the time went away watching TV serials online.

But despite all this time wasting, November-December saw some exciting possibilities of solutions to the research problem that I have been “working” on for the past two years.

I know 2011 is going to be a very important year for me, and much of what I do (or not do) this year is going to decide, how soon I can graduate. 2011 is also going to be important because, I have to start thinking about graduation and job. I have to decide what job I want, research the preparation required to give good interviews for that, and prepare for the interviews. Importantly, If I am looking at jobs outside corporate research, I need a lot of reading and preparing to be done.

The foundation for all this comes back to the one thing that I have been lacking since school: Discipline and Focus.

I need to be disciplined to utilize time effectively. Determined to just work for a long periods in the day. I want to start with basic things like waking up at a regular time daily and going to the department at regular times. With the ideas that came up last month, bulk of what I need to do needs no inspiration but hard work. I need discipline to sit and get the code written, the proof completed etc.

Last year has been spent completely out of focus. I need to focus on finishing, on preparing for the future.

I need to get out of this rut. I have to. I must.

I hope I will.

I have always regarded self-help books as useless, but just a few moments ago, I got myself a “motivational poster” to remind me of the importance of staying focussed. I am beginning to think that a self-help book might help too. I know that, I cannot become an efficient person overnight; that the move towards efficiency has to be gradual etc etc, but old habits, especially the bad ones die hard. For instance, another restriction I made to myself was that I will refrain from doing a few “stupid” things, and 15 days into new year, I broke it.

I thought, after a refreshing holiday with a great start to the year, I will give a great start to my research this year. So far, it has been disappointing; having spent the last 10 days trying to convince myself that today is the last day of the old me.

I hope that as the year moves on, I become more and more Organized, Focused, Disciplined, Hard working.

I hope that, I be able to balance time on the stuff I need to do with the stuff I don’t need to do. I hope that I read more often (that gives me the most pleasure, but TV is addictive), blog more often. I used to love to read blogs, tweets etc, but since my internship, I have just refreshed FB a few million times a day (FB is internet’s TV, for sure).

Hope!

 

Four unfruitful years

It was sometime in May-2006 that I first got into “research”. In four years, many of my friends have gotten themselves a 200 page Thesis and a few papers, a couple of trips to Europe/ Hawaii etc for conferences and a DEGREE! My friends in Computer Science average 3 papers a year. Their resume’s are 3 pages long because 2 pages have to be dedicated to papers and conferences.

In the same 4 years, I have 0 papers, 0 conference talks and 0 results that I can proudly write in any thesis as my contribution to science.

I did not expect anything great from my M.Tech project. It was a downhill project from the beginning. Initially, I took more than I could handle, and as I slowly got to grips with the process, I had narrowed my scope vastly. Yes, I learned a lot about Monte Carlo simulations, model reduction, system identification, markov chains and master equations and such, but the end result of my research was as badly thrashed by peer-reviewers as Portugal thrashed the North-Koreans. Did the work have any merit? I guess not, otherwise the paper would have been accepted!

In Wisconsin, I took up Supply chain optimization using MPC. I was super excited when I started, because the topic looked full of awesomeness!

Nobody expected anything great to come out of Jan-08 to Jan-09, and I was not too disappointed with what I achieved. I could run some simulations of things that looked practical and useful. But it was too simple to be anything. I don’t even remember what I did in the spring and summer of 2009, except that I wrote up a huge simulation, which took almost 2 months and finally ended up not working ( I nibbled on the non-working idea again in Spring 2010, and still it remained the same: non-working!). Fall-09, was spent in making up innocuous Game theory examples and reading loads of papers on game theory. But by the end of December, I had no idea where I was going with the multitude of examples that I made up. Each of them were too simple to get any result out of, and in-fact because it was out of our group’s domain, the published papers had stuff with much greater detail in them. One such idea, I got to work on again during my internship this summer, but which again died a swift death, with it not adding much benefit.

Spring-10 was spent in vain trying to come up with a solution to yet another different problem. As you would guess by now, in vain! And today’s meeting with my boss and super-boss: 2 hours of discussion and we are back at the starting point of summer. It was a strange deja-vu during the meeting today, because we ended up discussing the same thing that we discussed at the start of the internship. I was asked to come up with another new idea, which I partially did by the end of the day, but going by past history and my luck with ideas, I  think I can guess where it is going to end up. (To add to my misery, the other intern that joined with me, has 11 papers/publications and he finished his intern project 1 month ahead of schedule)

To add salt to injury, during the summer, I attended quite a few talks given by applicants to jobs in my group. As the talks varied over a wide range from supply chain design, tactical supply chain optimization, advanced controls, scheduling, monte carlo simulations etc, I realized I have more than a decent grasp on all these subjects but without a paper, and a few “good” results, I would remain a dud! I mean how else would you show that you have prove that you have working knowledge of the field AND innovative research potential. Maybe, I just don’t have any research potential.

I remember the interview with Shell in the December of ’06. In the technical interview, I was asked to talk about my project. I explained it to them, about thin films growing on a substrate, about how the process was stochastic, about the intractable “true” solution to the problem, about the need of a simpler control relevant model and about my unsuccessful attempts at finding one. The feedback at the end of the process was that  I could cannot complete a given task.

Happy Birthday

“Come stay with us in the hotel tonight. You can go to college from the hotel tomorrow”, Ashish’s parents urged him. However, Ashish was adamant that he had to return to the hostel in the evening because he had to finish his lab report for class the next day. Thus, he took an auto back (when parents are in town, you don’t look to save money) to the campus. And by 10 PM, he was back in his room.

He knew the drill well. He kept the door to his room slightly ajar, played Floyd on his computer and kept the lights switched off. When Atul stopped by his room to ask him for the nightly sutta, he politely refused and pretended that he had an headache and needed to sleep. Atul, uncharacteristically  did not  pester him and left by himself. Ashish knew that even that was the part of the drill.

He had been lying awake on his bed for nearly an hour when the clock stuck midnight. It was now that he had to pull on his comforter and pretend that he has been woken up from deep slumber when his gang of friends will storm his room. He played the rest of the drama in his mind. His friends will drag him to the grounds, strip him to his underwear, kick him, and then someone will pour a bucket of cold water on him. Then there will be the cake with something absurd written on it, which will be eaten less and smeared more. And then, there will be some vodka and chicken kababs at the inn across the street (The money for the treat had already been transferred to his wallet).

It was a couple of minutes past midnight and there were no signs of people gathering near his room. “Well, my watch must be fast”, he concluded and continued to pretend to be asleep. And then, it was 12:05, and he said to himself “They will be here any moment”. Slowly, the clock ticked to 12.30, and by then Ashish knew that his birthday was not going to be celebrated in the hostel that night. He walked into Atul’s room and asked him if he would like to come for a sutta, hoping that Atul, will suddenly remember on seeing him. That did not happen, and the two of them walked upto the sutta shop discussing Spain vs Netherlands.

India or USA?

This weekend, I had the opportunity to visit  the relatives belonging to the American branch of our family tree. A cousin was getting poonal-ed. As I have already mentioned in this blog earlier, my patti had 5 brothers (mama-thatha for me) who had ridden the first generation of brain-drain and settled in America during the 1970’s. Now, their kids (my aunts and uncles), born and raised in America (better known in Indian circles as the ABCD) arranging the  Poonal ceremony for their kid, who has never visited India.

It was a slap in the face of the Traditionalists in India, for here was a second generation American-Indian parent, transferring an Brahmin tradition to a third generation American Indian, while many of us, having been bought up in the so called “cradle” of such traditions are apathetic to them.  For example, most of these relatives are still vegetarians (for religious reasons) while I, (although I try to avoid eating meat as much as possible) don’t mind eating it when the only other option is a salad or lettuce and tomato between two buns (My strategy to avoid meat is to pack my own lunch).

While driving back, it got me thinking about this question that many of us will have to answer in a few years time: Settling here in America or settling back in India?

There are just two choices: India or US. And as with many of these subjective questions, there is no universal correct answer. But here are my thoughts:

Among the two choices,  I think that the choosing US was the harder choice for my mama-thatha’s while choosing India will be the harder choice for us.

Back in the 60’s, what we call as the “staunch orthodox” was normal, and it would have been awfully difficult for my mama-thatha’s to decide to settle in the US, into the completely different culture and way of life. Air travel was  expensive and time consuming, meaning that settling down in the US would have to come at the expense of losing touch with family in India ( at that time, when postal service was erratic, telephones expensive and virtually non-existant in India and Internet still 20-30 years in the future). Also, the US, back then were still struggling to solve their own internal problems: Cold war, racial segregation, McCarthism etc, and was in general not as receptive to a new culture and new people as it is now. It would have been a a monumental decision to knowingly forsake the comfort of our own people, of our own culture to chase the “good” life. Economically India was stagnated at that time, with the “Hindu” growth rate of 2%, the babu culture in which talent and hard work were probably the least required attributes for some one to be successful. Chasing the “good” life in India was hardly an option to my mama-thathas (and many others in the “Brain-Drain” time), who had only their intelligence and hard work for sale. So, it came down to selecting between status-quo and the limited success of a career in 1960’s India or settling into a completely alien country and an even more alien culture, not much receptive to new people with the option of unlimited success. I believe the second choice to be the harder one to take.

Sunnyvale, CA is called Suryanagri. Arlington, TX is called Arlingapuram. Dallas, TX has a 24/7 Desi FM channel. Edison, NJ is so much in the news for having been taken over by Indians. US in 2010, is very much an extension of India. Air travel is cheap, takes 16 hours, much less than Delhi-Madras by train and call rates and internet have reduced the distance even further. You can live in the US, and yet stay connected with India more than ever before.  Move into an Indian community, and I bet it will be easy to find an maami samooham having Bhajan congregations every evening.  Economically and quality of life wise, India has drastically improved now. Although it may not be as comfortable and luxurious as living in the USA, a comparable lifestyle in India can be had. Talent can take you places, even in India now. But the most important reason to live and work in India now, is to be a part of the change, is to contribute, in whatever small way we can in developing our country. In being there, doing something, rather than being here, cribbing “Des ka kuch nahi hoga”.  The chance to be a part of an increasingly  political middle class, and the chance to have a say in shaping the path of our country. I am not saying that one has to go back to India and join a political party, but just living and working in India, we can be a part of the change, just by wanting to improve conditions just for our selfish goals.

The “good” life that was the reason for people to leave the country is no more a compelling reason. The easier choice is to sit cosily in an Indian neighborhood in America, drink beer while watching Football and crib that India cannot improve because of the culture in India. The harder choice will be to take a (rather big) pay cut, a small lifestyle change and move to work in India.

*****

I am well aware that I might end up taking the “easier” choice, just because it is easy!

*****

In my opinion, we have made a mess of our understanding of culture, tradition and religion. I believe that this mixed understanding is what is making our generation confused. Culture is something that has to evolve with time, and practices that made sense a century of two ago need not be practical today. For example, this whole business of Horoscope matching is a silly exercise in guess-work, but we still follow it.

That is what we are doing now, cutting, copying, pasting and reinterpreting and reinventing our cultural history, traditions etc.

I think there are two distinct point of views here. When the first wave of Indian immigrants came to the US (or Europe/ Australia), they have had the opportunity of distilling what they thought was important from their cultural/ traditional upbringing and mixed it up with the popular US culture here which has added a new flavour to our customs and traditions and has started the unique American-Indian culture of the US.

Back in India, people in our generation (or for that matter even in our parent’s generation) have started questioning various aspects of culture/tradition etc and are trying to forge a new set of rules, that is widely adaptable, with more and more people traveling west while still retaining, for want of a better word, the Indian-ness. The Americanized-Indian culture.

Both problems however, in my opinion are answering the same question: What to retain from what has been passed on to us, that is sensible in today’s world, and what is outdated, out-technologied, out-developed and out-thinked. The challenges though are unique. In America, it is about the will to resist being eaten by the American culture all together, while in India, the challenge is to form a consensus amongst the various people, ranging from the ultra conservative group who have a false sense of pride in declaring that “India has culture, which America/West does not have” to the  ultra-modern wannabe’s who think aping the west is the coolest thing to do.

****

A few random thoughts:

• A black car in which the A.C does not work is a recipe for sweating out a few kilos on long drives. The inside of my car was a furnace, and the temperature outside was uncharacteristically in the mid-90’s.
• There are so many “firsts” and statues and art-muesuems in Philadelphia. I am neither a history or art-buff. I guess, such types will really enjoy Philadelphia.
• The poonal and meeting  relatives were great, the evening at Janani’s parents house was also awesome. Aunty made up some awesome dishes and the conversation was fun. New Jersey is a continuous piece of civilization, and was fun driving through, after the long drive through the hardly inhabited Upstate New-York.

Procrastination…

…is in my genes.

Take this blog…Neglected for so long because there is always a tomorrow.

Calling friends up is a lost cause because I always wait for 5 more minutes till it gets really late.

Take today at work: I had taken some pains in writing a script that automated a huge chunk of the work that I had to do, and yet, at the end of the day, I finished only about an hour’s worth of work.  My attention span is in the order of seconds. Every minute I need to take a break. The worst part was, as I was driving back, I had no idea how the time went in the office today. I just knew that I ran 10 scenarios and each one takes about 5 minutes to setup and execute.

Last few weeks, I have taken it to another level altogether. I just do nothing. Nothing, except for refreshing Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader. There are about 5-6 movies that I have left unfinished after starting. I don’t even want to start reading “The Good Earth”, even after really liking the first 30 or 40 pages of the book, for the fear that I may get sucked into reading it for hours together. I haven’t seen a soccer game or a Tennis game entirely, switching channels aimlessly every minute or so. I am hardly going into the kitchen, but am cooking out of necessity (the office mess sucks!)

All I seem to want is to do nothing. I sit at office, waiting for 4.45 so that I can get back home and do nothing.

When I knew that I would be coming to Tonawanda for the summer, I had planned so many trips to increase the states I have visited count, but it has been a month since I came here, and I have not been to Buffalo downtown, hardly 8-10 miles from where I stay.

I want to get out of this rut, but don’t know how. 😦

Speed of light

Anand was staring into his monitor. It was well past midnight. He had already consumed seven cups of coffee in the past ten hours, and presently, he quickly glanced at the coffee machine. There was some coffee left. He cursed his job, as he got up for another refill. His cell-phone beeped at the same time. A sms from his mother. It read, Kanna, there is a super match for you. Can you check ssmatri.com for ID f92822. He sighed and cursed under his breath again. This was the “hell” week, days before the project went live and his mother had started bothering him with photos and profiles again. “Just what was missing eh!” he chuckled to himself, and knowing well that Amma will not understand his work pressures and deadlines, replied back to her sms saying “I am really busy with work. Lets talk about it next week when I come to India”.

His mother was averse to any kind of technology. When he gifted her a mobile phone few years earlier, she would bring it to him as though it was an a bomb when it rang and ask him to answer it. But the bride-search business had made her a sms and internet expert. So, Anand was hardly surprised when the email notifier beeped after an hour or so. “Kanna, this seems to be a great match. The jyotsiar has given 100/100 for the match and the girl’s family is also interested. She meets most of your criteria. I am attaching the family profile that her father sent me and some pictures. Take a look and tell soon. This is a good match kanna”.

Anand was tired and irritated and had no intention of reading the profile mail, which bored him to death about the family details, the good-looking, smart, intelligent, multi-talented girl and her need for a friend and a person who understands, and a few pictures, with a mandatory one from her abroad trip with the IT company. He knew his mother well, so he did not even think about telling her to wait for a week, and quickly replied “OK. Proceed”, planning to tackle his mother next week during his holiday in India.

Even the excitement of India could not infuse energy into his tired body as the plane landed in Chennai. He dragged himself through customs and baggage claim, the bed and a fifteen hour sleep, very much his only desires at that moment. He got out of the airport, searched for his mother, found her and waved at her, and then was surprised to find his generally reticent mother talking to an elderly woman beside her. He reached to her, gave her a quick hug and found himself being introduced to Nandini and her mother by his mother. As they were walking to the parking lot, Nandini told him that she was against this but the parents wanted to surprise him, and started enquiring about his job and life in SFo. In the car, Karim, the family driver for over fifteen years winked at him with a mischievous smile. And back home, Amma told him that they had been invited for dinner at Nandini’s home the next day, and before Anand could even protest, she added that it would just be an informal meeting. Nothing needs to be decided yet.

He woke up well past noon the next day and quickly opened his email and read the “profile” mail that his mother had sent him. Chitappa and Chitti joined later in the afternoon, and in a blink, it was 6pm and they were headed to Nandini’s apartment in Anna Nagar. The tiny apartment was filled with relatives spanning every possible relation, neighboring maami’s and Nandini’s friends. After what seemed like an eternity of introductions, began the “informal” question-answer session. After being thoroughly interrogated and deemed fit, Nandini was ushered into the room and Anand’s amma and chitti got their turn to ask questions, to which she replied meekly with a subdued yes or no and the shake of her head. At around 7.30 pm, some uncle quipped that they should let the main actors speak in private for a bit. Privacy was the bedroom, which looked tinier with all the furniture from the living room being dumped there, and for a bit turned to be exactly 5 minutes. At 7.35, some maami knocked and invited Anand for dinner.
Anand did not mind the dinner, as he could concentrate on the food, and did not even bother saying no to extra large helpings of food at periodic intervals.

After half an hour of furious eating, as he was devouring yet another Rasagulla, Nandini’s thatha blurted out ” What Mapillai, did you like our daughter?”.  And instantly all activity ceased and forty pairs of eyes turned towards him. The room went silent, and each tick of the clock made it worse for Anand, and he in a feeling which was an equal mix of embarrassment, fear, shyness and to hell with this crap, faintly nodded “Yes”. Nandini’s mother then whispered the same question in her ears and she coyly nodded her head. The room quickly filled up with happy chatter, and thatha, again in his booming voice declared that the next day was an auspicious day for the engagement because of some arrangement of the boy and girl’s stars. The happy chatter, quickly turned into purposeful chatter about the modalities of the ceremony, and Anand, slowly slipped back into his chair, hardly believing anything, wishing that it was better during the hell week back in SFo. Things were completely out of control now.

Back in the car, Amma was gushing happily about finding a good family and how the girl would be just correct for Anand, and how difficult it was for a widowed woman to search for a bride, talk to people etc. Anand, turned towards Karim and asked “How the hell were I to say anything other than yes in that intimidating environment”. Karim just looked back at Anand’s mother and she started telling Anand that it will be ok. This is how marriages happen. It is destiny. Anand just felt that he had no control over anything and that he can never regain any control again.

The engagement happened in a flash.

Later that evening, he called her and told her “It was exhilarating to travel at the speed of light, but would you mind a casual stroll in the mall for coffee and dinner”. She giggled and agreed. And somehow, Anand felt that everything would be alright.

—————

The story is inspired by Vidya’s and Sashi’s (@sashikrishnan) engagement stories.

IPL position predictor

As Ravi Shastri would say: “We are in the business end of the tournament”. The points table looks really crowded with a few teams on 12 points and a few bunched together on 10 points. There are 17 games left as of today (4/7/2010) and most teams have 4 games left. The range of points that cannot be used to predict who will make it to the top-4 because who plays who also becomes critical.

So I wrote up a simple simulation which looks at a 1000 possible result scenarios to determine the probability of each team ending up in positions 1 through 8. The  major assumptions in this simulation are

1. Each team has equal probability of winning a game. It might not be a great probability estimate for individual games but it is some starting point.

2. Net Run rate obviously has not been used to separate the teams on the same points. Thus, these probabilities reported below must be read as the probability that each team scores points that will put them in that position 1-8. Actual qualification may be more complicated with net run rates messing things up.

So here are the results:

Team	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8
Mumbai Indians	0.803	0.124	0.044	0.021	0.007	0.001	0.000	0.000
Delhi Daredevils	0.232	0.343	0.203	0.135	0.055	0.028	0.004	0.000
Rajasthan Royals	0.113	0.283	0.213	0.187	0.124	0.076	0.004	0.000
Royal Challengers Bangalore	0.125	0.282	0.171	0.171	0.122	0.091	0.037	0.001
Chennai Super Kings	0.034	0.182	0.164	0.199	0.176	0.182	0.062	0.001
Kolkata Knight Riders	0.057	0.167	0.160	0.208	0.184	0.182	0.042	0.000
Deccan Chargers	0.001	0.017	0.037	0.067	0.128	0.216	0.418	0.116
Kings XI Punjab	0.000	0.000	0.000	0.002	0.021	0.048	0.266	0.663

sin(research) = -1

Yes, my experience with research is that it is a sine-wave, periods of pure happiness follows periods of abject sadness.

Back from the awesome India trip, the picture was rosy. My talk at LA was well received, lots of interesting ideas and directions emerged from the meeting with the industry partners. And, I was bullish with confidence. I thought about major chapters in my thesis and defense and graduation. I was confident. I got my car (which has since been named Mylie) without a second thought, and almost as soon as I spotted it in the dealership, I was a walking idea machine, I was working on the simulations, tweaking things here and there and I thought I had a theory that was really good.

And this is where I haven’t learned anything from anything that has happened to me in the past, in a lesson that should be a mantra: “Nothing too good is going to be true.”

And it happened when I spoke to the adviser. (Although, I still think the two months that I spent on it has some merit, he thought that the results were not worth the time spent on it and advised me to move on to other things)…thus in 4 hours, 2 months of euphoria and positive energy drained out of me. Flushed.

And, I was left with the familiar March feeling that has haunted me for the past two years. Winter gives way to Spring, but for me days in the neighborhood of Spring break, everything leads to gloom, and I spent the last 5 days locked up in my room, mourning for my idea (and clash of different approaches of thought with the adviser), eating and watching movies.

Shriram sent a mail yesterday, confirming his wedding dates which miraculously coincides with my India trip in May. It has been a huge victory for him after raging a cold war, war, battling threats and counter-threats with his girl-friends parents. I am extremely happy for him, and extremely pleased that in a couple of days, I will get the tickets to go to Kannore and to the wedding itself…

But, now, I wished so badly that the good news would have come 10 days before, when I was just happy without a reason to be so, so that I could have enjoyed it more. Because, now happy that I am, the accelerated depression has highlighted the relative blandness of my life with a  pang of jealousy.

In other related updates: Because I was generally being happy, it meant that my blog was getting neglected. But here I am, back again. The movies and books page need updates. I haven’t been reading much in March, so the books page is relatively easy. The movies page is a tough task. Here is an attempt to remember everything that I have seen since Karthik calling Karthik: Vinnaithandi Varuvaaya, Crazy Heart, Greenzone, How to train a dragon, Ghost Writer, Alice in Wonderland, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Cop-out, Cashback, She’s the one, Mr Smith goes to Washington, How to steal a million, Knock Knock I am getting married, Mumbai matinee.

The last day of the holiday

As soon as the flight lands in India, I stow America away in the deepest recess of my mind. For the next 15-20 days in India, America becomes that country. All the daily routines, the cooking and the cleaning, the bus ride to the department, the grocery shopping; the big clean streets, the disciplined traffic, the 75 mph interstates; the ubiquitous coffee shops, subway and the friday night pub; research and studies; everything that to me reminds me of the US feels like an impression. As though, I have never experienced them, but have read a book about it or seen a movie about it and it is those visuals that I have borrowed upon to build my memories of the US.

As soon as the flight lands in India, my stay in the US becomes like a good fiction. A book written so well that you get immersed into the world of that book, knowing quite well that the world of the book is not this world. There is a place for that world in my thoughts, and US takes that place. Sitting in India, reading the Hindu sports page, sipping strong filter Kaapi, the pleasant Maargai morning, the pooja the the kovil and the birds singing, America becomes a fictional world for me, a non-existant idea about a world that I will never visit.

Reality strikes a couple of days before the flight back is due. Like waking from a nightmare into the nightmare itself. Every second becomes precious. Every second that reminds me of the US is an agony. I have to force myself to remind me that the US ”world” is not fictional. The mind wills the clock to work backwards. But back just a 15 days. The stray dog, the lazy cow, the crazy Auto, the crowded bus, the noisy Station road, each image evokes “Aw, I am going to miss this”. The heart becomes heavy thinking that another 330 days separates me from family and India again.

The last day of this India trip too was much like this, until early evening when Appa took me to meet his Mama’s. All of Appa’s mama’s had travelled to the US/Canada in the late 60’s and since then have called the Americas home. Now, they were in India to attend a few marriages, to look after some property and for a holiday. As they started conversation with me, that ranged from reminiscing about their Grad school days to cribbing about the snow and the winter to comparing Indian grocery stores in their cities to Madison, I realized that while I was talking about America as that country, they were talking about it as Home with love and longing.

And that made the fictional US real again for me. I was no longer scared and apprehensive about getting back and I was no longer sad and heart-broken about missing family and India.

***

I had some time to kill in Singapore and Shriram had come to meet me. We spend the whole day mall hopping and talking. We even spent two hours disturbing everyone in a cinema theater. But as departure time came, both of us wanted to stretch time. Thus, we spent almost 30 minutes in Mustafa mall moving from aisle to aisle. Then as we moved toward Ferrer Park station for Shriram to catch the train to Harbour Front and for me to take a cab to Changi (I did not want to take the train as I was getting a little restless). Shriram suggested that I take the train and using his awesome convincing skills, convinced me that I will make it to Changi with a lot of time to kill (which I did). So, I get into the train and we got ourselves a few more minutes. The plan then was to take the NE line to Dhobi Gaut, the next stop, then take the NS line to City Center and then the EW line to Changi, because Shriram thought that the alternate route of NE till Outram Park and EW to Changi will take more time. As the train pulled into Dhobi Gaut, both of us instinctively agreed to ditch the Dhobi Gaut plan and go with the Outram Park plan, and we got ourselves a few more minutes, minutes that were spent planning for the next reunion with outrageous ideas like making a trip pool in which each of us contributes 50$ each month etc. Both of us knew that the next meeting might not be anytime soon but still planned like Singapore, Australia, India and US were like 4 suburbs of Calcutta.

***

I felt that I belonged in Singapore both the times I was there. Who knows, maybe I end up working there. I will not mind it. Singapore feels like it can be home.

***

On the 27 hour journey from Singapore to Chicago, I must have slept for around 20 hours. The best of which came at the Narita airport. I generally find it hard to sleep if there is light around (so much so that I used a sleep eye patch at home last year because the blinds allowed some light to come in). I find it harder to sleep if I can listen to anything. I find it even harder to sleep on a chair. So it came as a surprise that I spent 5 hours sleeping in the Narita airport. And such a deep sleep that I could not tell that I was dreaming. I believed I was in Chennai even after opening my eyes and seeing some airport. Even after recognizing that I was in an airport, it took me a few seconds to realize that it was in Tokyo and a few more to make the connection that I have to board a 12 hr flight to Chicago next. Such deep sleep is so rare, that I am going to remember Tokyo by the fact that I slept so well there for 5 hours 🙂