Test

I'm just testing to see if I can link this blog to my profile on this other website.

Ohh also, today is my mom's birthday. And coincidentally, today is the birthday of Mississippi State University too! MSU is 128 years old today. Surprisingly, I didnt realize that my mom and my University share their birthdays for the past 3 years! I am growing old!

There was a huge cake in celebration of the 128th birthday today. It was 8 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 3 feet in height! On the other hand, mom's birthday celebration was more understated. Mom and dad went to this one tiny restaurant in Thane that serves just excellent south Indian delicacies. Its one of my favorite restaurants for that kind of food.

Mumbai to Mississippi

I was digging around, and I got this one thing that I had written when I had come to the US the first time. Then, school had yet to begin, we had time to settle in and get ids and stuff. Most of the day was spent in the library, chatting up with friends, writing emails, and playing the few Yahoo! games that we could play online on the library computers. After a day filled with this, I thought I'd do some constructive work, and write about my trip over to the states. Some of my class from Engineering school was already here, and most of the rest were in the last stages of preparation to leave. So, I thought I'd post a first-hand experience of the whole journey, right from when you say good-bye to teary-eyed parents to being picked up by a bunch of seniors at the world-famous GTR airport.

Disclaimer: I worked on this thing for a couple of days. So, its pretty long and exhaustive. Please dont get your hopes up of reading it in a minute and getting done with it. Sit back, relax, grab a bag of chips, or get a cuppa coffee.

I've uploaded it to my website in pdf format. You'll find it on this page:
http://www2.msstate.edu/~acb157/aboutme.htm

Enjoy!

Valentine's Day

So, Valentine's Day ha? A day which most people eagerly look forward to, while some others dread and fret. And then, there are people like me, for whom it is just like any other day, mainly because I am yet to fall into any of the first two categories that I just mentioned. So, what do on-the-border people do on Valentine's Day? Well, we dont want to miss out on the fun of it, so this V Day, three of my categorically similar friends and I decided to go out and have dinner at a nice restaurant, partly to languish at how much fun other people are having, and partly to avoid being those who wasted a good V Day evening!

As we stood outside the door, waiting with the beeper thing in hand which would go off any moment that a "table for 4" was open, we contemplated if we should indeed go in and have dinner, and be the source of subtle entertainment to the other diners on V Day, which on any other day wouldnt have instigated any giggles whatsoever. But before we decided either way, the thing buzzed, and we bravely, but cautiously, entered the restaurant.

But guess what? We werent the only ones in there that didnt have dates. There were many guys-only tables and gals-only tables. So whew! We werent the main attraction in the room at all!

We drove back home after a sumptous dinner, squabbling over the car heater, the tortilla chips, and the to-go boxes. As we entered the campus, we saw a gal jogging along on the pavement. At least we buddies had a nice dinner and a good time, but she was alone, on a cold night, jogging all by herself. So, I guess, not everybodys V Day was a hoot!

Dallas

I got back from Dallas last night. I left for Dallas on Friday around 12ish. I had made an online reservation with the car rental company. Their website is pretty tricky. While checking out rates, I keyed in a 12pm time. When I made the reservation, I put in 8:30am. Somehow, the 12pm time stuck, far from my awareness. So, I take a printout of it, go home happily, strain and get up at 7:30am (which is like very very early for me), get ready, get in the mood to leave, pack bags and all. And I call them at 8:15 to come get me, and she says that I have 12pm on my reservation. Dang.

Anyways, thanks to the occasional good nature of the car rental people, I got the car at around 9:45am. So, I got to leave at 12pm finally. A 600-mile journey, with no company, in a car that I really dislike, on a day very much less than perfect, lay ahead of me. I relaxed, stepped on the gas and cleared my mind of all of these thoughts. Just be in the moment, I told myself.. And I was "in the moment" all the way to Dallas!

The traffic-gods were on my side; there wasnt any serious traffic anywhere, no block-ups, no detours. I sped happily to Dallas, making good time, crossing the borders of Mississippi into Louisiana, then Louisiana into Texas. On this trip, I had a strange affliction for talk-radio. I thought I'd listen to some political gup-shup, talk on the girl in Florida who discovered that ice was dirtier than toilet water, some discussions on global warming, the advantages of hybrid cars over very good-engined gas cars and vice-versa, rather than senseless music belching out of the speakers. And I should tell you, talk-radio is a very good past-time. It keeps you involved into it, so you chomp away at the miles without realizing it. And when theres a commercial, the 2.5 minute break (as one talk-show host exactly measured) gives you time to assess the discussion and change the channel, or think about some nice warm food at home while you wait for the next installment of talks at 75mph.

It was colder in Dallas than it was here. My car wind shield froze over-night; we had to thaw it out with some warm water since we didnt have enough time to sit and let the car heat up. Saturday morning was spent on helping my friend get some errands that needed attention. Well, let me rephrase, Saturday morning was spent on some well-needed sleep, and Saturday afternoon was spent on the errands. Dallas downtown saw us whizzing through it for a while as I gave my friend an in-car tour of it. I strained to remember which freeway went where, as I had never driven through Dallas downtown myself, and all I could rely on was my memory of Abhijit giving an awe-struck me a tour of Dallas the first time that I had been there. Saturday evening was well spent chit-chatting with Abhijit and Deepa, catching up on stuff, and general irrelevant discussions!

Sunday was another day altogether. As my friend and I waited at a Waffle House, his cell-phone rang.. It was from the car dealership that he intended to buy a car from. The next 7 hours were spent in two cubicles, nodding in disagreement with whatever the dealer, his subordinate, his boss, and a very weird (but overtly smart) finance person were throwing at us. Finally, they got irritated at around 7:15pm (15 mins after their closing time) to such an extent that they put forward a price, and made sort of a take-it-or-leave-it thing. Well, we were ready to leave after about 2 hours of unfavorable prices, but they wouldnt let us go, so I dont accept that their irritation was our concern. Anyways, we did agree to their final price, made them knock down a few dollars off the extra things that they make you buy, and flatly refused this one option that they made such a big deal of. So, at the end of the day, my friend had a car that he wanted, at just a notch over what he was ready to pay for it from the beginning. There, Sunday was accomplished!

Monday morning was spent on more chit chat with Abhi and Dee, while laughing over Ace Ventura's antics, and some very good veggie-patties from Costco, all washed down with a good dose of caffeine. After happily accepting a bag of chocolate covered cookies from Dee (which were really good, and were a focal point later when a truck had over-turned, and I was stuck behind a long line of furious impatient Texans, contemplating either crossing the median and going back, or using it to swing ahead of other furious impatient Texans) finally, it was time to say good-bye to Dallas for a while, and begin the long ardous journey, in my favorite car, back home. I took a breath, relaxed, pressed my foot against the gas pedal, and cleared my mind...

Deception Point

I just finished reading Deception Point, by Dan Brown. Well, it is similar to The Da Vinci Code in the speed with which the story progresses. I thought it was an exciting read, what with vivid descriptions of action scenes that play out in your head just like it would do on the tv if you were watching a movie. I like Dan Brown's style in which he builds up on the same event from the points of view of different people. At the end of every chapter, where theres a context change, he heightens the story so that you have to keep reading on to find out what happens next. That makes it a big "i-gotta-read-some-more" type thing.

I just visited Washington D.C., walked down Pennsylvania Avenue, saw the White House, the Monument, a couple of musuems and all. And the book contains references to the White House, and some buildings and memorials around it. So, it was really fun to just have seen the actual thing, then read about it in a book that weaved it into a dramatic story so effortlessly.

There are a couple of twists and turns in the story; well, one, mainly that might shock you. The other broader twist is revealed slowly but steadily. You can't call it a twist as much as you might call it the premise for the story. The characters of the players are well made out, just enough history about them and their impact is described, so not a moment in the book is dull.

Overall, on a scale of 1 to 10, I would grade this book an 8. It has enough action and adventure in it to spend a couple of nights in a cosy chair reading it, cursing any noisy room mates. It somehow is made out like an equation, in the sense that it is exact in what it portrays. But, there are some very predictable settings that can be easily guessed, which, I guess, can be attributed to exposure to a lot of movies that have somewhat similar situations. Also, when you think the characters just cannot get out of an impending disaster, they tend to use information to save their lives which the reader is yet unaware of. I somehow feel that as cheating me; make me aware of what the possibilities of them saving their skins are, and let me think about how they can use those possibilities and resources to their advantage. That is exercise for my mind, making me interact with the story. If you show a situation, give a certain amount of information, and ask someone to solve it, and after they cannot do it, show a hidden door D, that they should have chosen, its not as appealing to me as explaining the solution from what information you've already provided. But I'm sure this issue is pretty debatable, and from the opposing point of view, showing all the cards before-hand may just over-simplify the plot. So, keep guessing!