It was between classes and I was engaged in idle chatter with my classmates. I was talking to this married dude called Kevin and he was asking me where I'm from and how I like it here etcetera etcetera.
"Well, college and academics is great, it's life here in general that takes a little getting used to."
"Oh, so you're not find the courses difficult or anything?"
I laughed and said, "Oh yes, definitely no problems with courses."
I should have either destressed the "definitely" or shut up after that sentence or, preferably, both. Instead, I rambled on, "In fact, I hardly studied at all last semester and still got great grades."
Seeing the expression on Kevin's face, I tried to defuse things with, "Well, it's probably because the courses I chose were easy, I'm sure it wont be like that this semester."
He visibly brightened after that and said, "Oh! So what what courses did you choose last semester?"
"Er... Distributed Systems Control, Expert Systems, Supply Chain Engineering."
Actually, these are pretty non-standard courses and considered tough, so I realized I'd made another faux pas because Kevin's face just went even greener. Fortunately we were then interrupted by another classmate and the conversation changed topic.
Wonder how I could explain to Kevin that I've been coached and trained to the brink of insanity right from 8th standard to do better at academics, and an IIT is anyday tougher than PSU. In retrospect, it seems absurd that a "good student" such as I subjected myself to such incessant training. Then why is it that it seemed such a natural thing to do back in Chennai?
Don't get me wrong, I don't regret doing any of those things, they've made me who I am today and I even found them fun and challenging in a limited way. But looking at the American approach to life vis a vis the Indian way, I can't help but feel that it was overkill. There are so many other paths to the development of an individual leading to a more balanced outlook and skill set. Why this obsession with getting better marks and getting into an IIT and what not? In the end, is it all worth it? Who is to blame for the fact that I don't play any sports at all, outdoor or indoor? Should there be blame for it in the first place?
I don't have all the answers. I feel so much more thankful now that I did get into an IIT, so that hostel life could "cure" me and give me more exposure to life. I am even more grateful that I decided to come to the US and have all these great new experiences and insights into... well, life!
Still, I repeat, I don't have any regrets at all about my old life. Isn't that strange?
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Crash
About a month ago, I saw a movie called Crash featuring quite a start-studded cast, including Matt Dillon, Don Cheadle, Brendan Fraser, Sandra Bullock, Thandie Newton and more. I got the distinct feeling that I was seeing a good movie after a long time!
Don Cheadle speaks these opening lines at the scene of a car crash: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."
The movie is about several sets of people with different ethnic backgrounds living in LA, and how their seemingly separate lives "crash" into each other over a series of plausible events. The movie evokes mixed feelings of sympathy, anger, sadness and hope in the viewer; and I must admit I believe the plot writer deserves an oscar for this. The direction and acting were outstanding as well.
I'm not going into the details of the movie; you can find the plot and reviews at any of a thousand sites on the web. Rather, I wanted to talk about how the movie correlates with the real world.
A storekeeper returns one morning to find his shop vandalized and large green letters on the wall abusing Arabs. His wife stares at the wall and cries, "Arabs? We're not Arabs! When did Persian become Arab?"
In real life, I heard stories of people getting lynched by drunken gangs in the US simply because they "looked like Osama bin Laden" or "acted suspicious, like a terrorist". On most occasions they were, in truth, Indians or Turks or Pakistanis, and most certainly not terrorists. It seems to me that the objective of the terrorists is achieved, at least in part, if this is the paranoia with which people are behaving. Read this post by my friend Rahul, talking about his experience on a PATH train near New York City. It ought to help you understand what I'm talking about.
"We need votes from the black community. What we need, is for the people to see me pinning a medal on a black man.... ok, who was that guy who saved those people at that landslide a few days ago?"
"Er... that wasn't a black man, sir. He was an Iraqi named Saddam (some muslim sounding surname)"
"He was.. what? Iraqi? You want me to pin a medal on an Iraqi named Saddam? Get out of my sight!"
The racial and ethnic background of a person has become more defining today than the actual character of that person. The moment you see a non-white person, what is your first impression of that person? Is your opinion coloured by the colour of his skin? It's really sad today that people can't treat individuals as individuals. University towns are usually quite liberal and broad-minded, but step into the "real" world you'll be surprised by what people think they know about you.
Two black men try to do a carjacking, and it goes awry when it turns out that the driver is also black. After an intense sequence in which one thief runs away and the driver hides the other from the cops, the man tells the thief before letting him go: "Look at me. You shame me. You shame yourself."
In spite of all my talk about individuality, statistics do not lie. There is some measure of logic even in the paranoia. That one fact is even sadder than all the things I've said uptil now.
The USA is quite a cultural milieu, and has begun to come apart at the seams. Terrorism has probably just catalyzed the inevitable. I don't quite blame anyone; I think the paranioa and the stereotyping is natural for any country forced to endure the presence of a hundred different cultures. I wonder what the future holds; but I think that the gradual absorption of people from eclectic backgrounds over generations has had a moderating and healing effect. Perhaps one day in the future people can truly interact as equals. One can only hope.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Don Cheadle speaks these opening lines at the scene of a car crash: "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."
The movie is about several sets of people with different ethnic backgrounds living in LA, and how their seemingly separate lives "crash" into each other over a series of plausible events. The movie evokes mixed feelings of sympathy, anger, sadness and hope in the viewer; and I must admit I believe the plot writer deserves an oscar for this. The direction and acting were outstanding as well.
I'm not going into the details of the movie; you can find the plot and reviews at any of a thousand sites on the web. Rather, I wanted to talk about how the movie correlates with the real world.
A storekeeper returns one morning to find his shop vandalized and large green letters on the wall abusing Arabs. His wife stares at the wall and cries, "Arabs? We're not Arabs! When did Persian become Arab?"
In real life, I heard stories of people getting lynched by drunken gangs in the US simply because they "looked like Osama bin Laden" or "acted suspicious, like a terrorist". On most occasions they were, in truth, Indians or Turks or Pakistanis, and most certainly not terrorists. It seems to me that the objective of the terrorists is achieved, at least in part, if this is the paranoia with which people are behaving. Read this post by my friend Rahul, talking about his experience on a PATH train near New York City. It ought to help you understand what I'm talking about.
"We need votes from the black community. What we need, is for the people to see me pinning a medal on a black man.... ok, who was that guy who saved those people at that landslide a few days ago?"
"Er... that wasn't a black man, sir. He was an Iraqi named Saddam (some muslim sounding surname)"
"He was.. what? Iraqi? You want me to pin a medal on an Iraqi named Saddam? Get out of my sight!"
The racial and ethnic background of a person has become more defining today than the actual character of that person. The moment you see a non-white person, what is your first impression of that person? Is your opinion coloured by the colour of his skin? It's really sad today that people can't treat individuals as individuals. University towns are usually quite liberal and broad-minded, but step into the "real" world you'll be surprised by what people think they know about you.
Two black men try to do a carjacking, and it goes awry when it turns out that the driver is also black. After an intense sequence in which one thief runs away and the driver hides the other from the cops, the man tells the thief before letting him go: "Look at me. You shame me. You shame yourself."
In spite of all my talk about individuality, statistics do not lie. There is some measure of logic even in the paranoia. That one fact is even sadder than all the things I've said uptil now.
The USA is quite a cultural milieu, and has begun to come apart at the seams. Terrorism has probably just catalyzed the inevitable. I don't quite blame anyone; I think the paranioa and the stereotyping is natural for any country forced to endure the presence of a hundred different cultures. I wonder what the future holds; but I think that the gradual absorption of people from eclectic backgrounds over generations has had a moderating and healing effect. Perhaps one day in the future people can truly interact as equals. One can only hope.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Sunday, January 15, 2006
Glasses and Fitness
Its that time of the year again, when the campus is teeming with people walking around taking or giving orientation speeches, meeting friends after the holidays, going to one of the zillion offices to haggle with some adminstrative-type, etc. Basically, if you step out on any of the streets in the campus at certain times of the day, you will be caught in a deluge of undergrads with a few grads thrown in for variety.
As usual, I was walking by myself and being dead bored, I decided to play my old game of guessing other people's traits from their faces, gait, clothing, etc. I gave up doing this in India long ago because I kept arriving at combinations of stereotypes like, "That guy looks like a holier-than-thou urban partying-type," or "That girl looks like a typical studious conservative telugu girl who works hard and makes her parents proud with good marks," and so on and so forth. I accept that I was probably wrong most of the time, but anyway, my point is that I can't do things the same way in the US because I can't differentiate American features as well as I can with Indians. That makes it more interesting, actually.
While I was engaged in my guessing game, it suddenly struck me that I kept analyzing women wearing glasses. I don't know what quirk of my subconscious made me do that, but I was thinking, "That girl can probably knock me out in an intellectual conversation," or "That's a self-assured confident woman who knows her differential equations," etc. So much for guys-don't-make-passes-at-girls-who-wear-glasses. If I were an American undergrad I would be making passes only at women wearing glasses... or so I believed at that moment.
And then it happened that I passed by the window-studded wall of the treadmill room of the fitness center. A brief digression. In India, I noticed that most people only go to gyms to take the edge off the flab and there are only a few who are religious in their fitness and diet regimes. However, in the US, there is a good percentage of people who are very particular about these things and work hard at keeping their bodies in perfect shape.
So, when you pass a fitness center in the US, the odds are you'll see some really gorgeous women - and handsome men, for that matter. Hence, I'll admit that my staring this time was not for analysis but merely to gawk. Now, I'm not the type to stare at women usually, so I quickly reddened and turned my eyes back on the path, only to see that every single person near me irrespective of age, gender and sexual orientation had slowed their walking pace and were staring at those same windows.
Relieved that I am not a lecher but merely a normal human being, I pondered the eternal question: glasses girl or fitness center girl? Brains or looks? Which quality do you first look for? It's like asking Joey Tribioni to choose between Food and Sex.
Oh well, the point is moot for me anyway, given I speak to members of the opposite sex (face to face) for, like, 20 minutes a week in my current situation. But what about you, dear reader? What's you preference, brains or looks? Let us say, for arguments sake, you can't have both.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
As usual, I was walking by myself and being dead bored, I decided to play my old game of guessing other people's traits from their faces, gait, clothing, etc. I gave up doing this in India long ago because I kept arriving at combinations of stereotypes like, "That guy looks like a holier-than-thou urban partying-type," or "That girl looks like a typical studious conservative telugu girl who works hard and makes her parents proud with good marks," and so on and so forth. I accept that I was probably wrong most of the time, but anyway, my point is that I can't do things the same way in the US because I can't differentiate American features as well as I can with Indians. That makes it more interesting, actually.
While I was engaged in my guessing game, it suddenly struck me that I kept analyzing women wearing glasses. I don't know what quirk of my subconscious made me do that, but I was thinking, "That girl can probably knock me out in an intellectual conversation," or "That's a self-assured confident woman who knows her differential equations," etc. So much for guys-don't-make-passes-at-girls-who-wear-glasses. If I were an American undergrad I would be making passes only at women wearing glasses... or so I believed at that moment.
And then it happened that I passed by the window-studded wall of the treadmill room of the fitness center. A brief digression. In India, I noticed that most people only go to gyms to take the edge off the flab and there are only a few who are religious in their fitness and diet regimes. However, in the US, there is a good percentage of people who are very particular about these things and work hard at keeping their bodies in perfect shape.
So, when you pass a fitness center in the US, the odds are you'll see some really gorgeous women - and handsome men, for that matter. Hence, I'll admit that my staring this time was not for analysis but merely to gawk. Now, I'm not the type to stare at women usually, so I quickly reddened and turned my eyes back on the path, only to see that every single person near me irrespective of age, gender and sexual orientation had slowed their walking pace and were staring at those same windows.
Relieved that I am not a lecher but merely a normal human being, I pondered the eternal question: glasses girl or fitness center girl? Brains or looks? Which quality do you first look for? It's like asking Joey Tribioni to choose between Food and Sex.
Oh well, the point is moot for me anyway, given I speak to members of the opposite sex (face to face) for, like, 20 minutes a week in my current situation. But what about you, dear reader? What's you preference, brains or looks? Let us say, for arguments sake, you can't have both.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Monday, January 09, 2006
A Year!
Thats how long ago I started this blog. Apparently my first post was on January 8th 2005.
I think I started it out as a vent for my need to write. Reading and writing are two things which I absolutely have to keep doing or I'll go mad. Both are so easy to forget in the scramble of college life. I was late to the world of blogging, but once I found it I realized that it gives me an easy way to continue those two things... and best of all, nothing ever has to makes sense! In fact, I started by talking about some of my weird theories, which some people actually mistook for wisdom. Over time, I guess it developed into some kind of a personal diary. With limits.
One of the nice things about blogging for me is getting to read about how other people think. For one as reserved as me in real life, it is extremely interesting and rewarding to read the outpourings of other hearts. People are so different, yet at some level they are much the same. Quite a paradox!
But the best thing about my blogging experience is making friends across the barriers of age, sex, distance, mother tongue, etc. All things in life are ephemeral... yet somehow I get the feeling that these "insubstantial" friends I've made - people I've never met and may never meet; people with whom I communicate mostly via electronic text in some form - are probably going to be more permanent than many of the friendships I cultivated in the past and for some unknown reason, left behind. I salute you guys and girls... you've made my life more bearable these past few months.
I never put up a hit counter on my blog for fear that if I find out how many people actually read it, it might make me wary about what I write. And I don't want to care what I write on this blog. Many people have already said that they don't understand what I'm trying to say, and often from the comments I've gleaned that many more who don't say it still don't understand much of what I write. Well, the truth is I myself don't understand a lot of it, but I don't care and I don't want to care.
Anyway, whether the number of people reading this blog is ten or a thousand, I just want to say thank you... am not even sure why I'm thanking you, but thank you all the same.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
I think I started it out as a vent for my need to write. Reading and writing are two things which I absolutely have to keep doing or I'll go mad. Both are so easy to forget in the scramble of college life. I was late to the world of blogging, but once I found it I realized that it gives me an easy way to continue those two things... and best of all, nothing ever has to makes sense! In fact, I started by talking about some of my weird theories, which some people actually mistook for wisdom. Over time, I guess it developed into some kind of a personal diary. With limits.
One of the nice things about blogging for me is getting to read about how other people think. For one as reserved as me in real life, it is extremely interesting and rewarding to read the outpourings of other hearts. People are so different, yet at some level they are much the same. Quite a paradox!
But the best thing about my blogging experience is making friends across the barriers of age, sex, distance, mother tongue, etc. All things in life are ephemeral... yet somehow I get the feeling that these "insubstantial" friends I've made - people I've never met and may never meet; people with whom I communicate mostly via electronic text in some form - are probably going to be more permanent than many of the friendships I cultivated in the past and for some unknown reason, left behind. I salute you guys and girls... you've made my life more bearable these past few months.
I never put up a hit counter on my blog for fear that if I find out how many people actually read it, it might make me wary about what I write. And I don't want to care what I write on this blog. Many people have already said that they don't understand what I'm trying to say, and often from the comments I've gleaned that many more who don't say it still don't understand much of what I write. Well, the truth is I myself don't understand a lot of it, but I don't care and I don't want to care.
Anyway, whether the number of people reading this blog is ten or a thousand, I just want to say thank you... am not even sure why I'm thanking you, but thank you all the same.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Sunday, January 01, 2006
Armour for the Heart
Till the age of sixteen or so, I was quite a pessimistic and cynical kid. Since then, over the years, that attitude has changed. With my own example held up against my eyes, I recognize pessimism in others for not a reflection of a callous heart, but as armour for a sensitive one.
Life is always with its crests and troughs. But when you wall out one, you are also walling out the other. I've come to realize that the things that can bring you the most joy and happiness are the ones that can bring you the most pain and sorrow. I consider it as more than a fair trade. I don't regret any decision I've ever made, because I know that I risked the pain for the chance at joy; perhaps unknowingly at that point of time.
Yet, without that armour, this heart is quick to despair. But every time a stranger wishes me a merry christmas or a happy new year, my well of hope fills up that little bit. Every time an acquaintance gives me a smile in passing, my well of optimism fills up that little bit. Every time a friend offers a word of comfort or wishes me luck, my well of strength fills up that little bit. Every time a loved one gives me a reassuring touch - something which I sorely miss here - the despair evaporates that little bit.
I always try to return that smile or wish, even if I don't always voice my thanks.
Perhaps I am being melodramatic; but I mean every word. Wish you all a happy new year, and may your well of optimism ever stay full.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
Life is always with its crests and troughs. But when you wall out one, you are also walling out the other. I've come to realize that the things that can bring you the most joy and happiness are the ones that can bring you the most pain and sorrow. I consider it as more than a fair trade. I don't regret any decision I've ever made, because I know that I risked the pain for the chance at joy; perhaps unknowingly at that point of time.
Yet, without that armour, this heart is quick to despair. But every time a stranger wishes me a merry christmas or a happy new year, my well of hope fills up that little bit. Every time an acquaintance gives me a smile in passing, my well of optimism fills up that little bit. Every time a friend offers a word of comfort or wishes me luck, my well of strength fills up that little bit. Every time a loved one gives me a reassuring touch - something which I sorely miss here - the despair evaporates that little bit.
I always try to return that smile or wish, even if I don't always voice my thanks.
Perhaps I am being melodramatic; but I mean every word. Wish you all a happy new year, and may your well of optimism ever stay full.
Cheers,
Prashanth.
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