My Heart ....penned!

I'm now a Workmate! A note on opportunities and their influence on the course of one's life

2023-12-20T10:18:00.000-08:00

It’s crazy how your course of life, no matter where you begin, gets so highly influenced by the availability of opportunities (and your will to seize them.) Of course, there is a strong connection between where you start and what opportunities are available, but that’s a topic for another day. Today, I just want to gratefully focus on the fact that I stumbled upon the opportunity to join the Responsible AI team at Workday, pursued it, and ended up getting an offer! This note is gonna focus on this specific topic of how grabbing an opportunity changes life so suddenly in various ways and how I am super grateful for it.

I am now officially a Responsible AI (RAI) research scientist at Workday and I am elated to be a part of this wonderful organization! I actually can’t believe I’m already a week in! There’s so much to learn and so much to explore. This is my first big corporate organization post-academia and it’s a tech company headquartered in the Bay area, California. The latter bit is important to mention because I am being pampered at this point and it’s just a weird reality to face (in all positive ways!) In the following, I am going to be penning down my experiences as a former academic experiencing the Workday hiring process and week 1 at a new job!

Let’s start with post-interviews where I learned that I got the offer and I accepted it. From that moment on, I became a new incoming Workmate and I was treated with a ball of a time following the “Congratulations” email. There were dedicated folks to ensure there was a smooth onboarding and then my new manager brought me the news that coincidentally day one of joining would also be the Workday Integrity team (WIT) summit where everyone from WIT, or the WIT nation as well call it, would be in the Pleasanton, CA campus. This coincidental opportunity helped me merge into the fast(track) lane by accelerating my networking (carpooling? 😜 ) with colleagues. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself weaving in the Bay Area / California way of work life.

I am gobsmacked by all the resources available to me as a Workmate. What’s even better is that Workday goes out of its way to explain to you that you need to use these resources! Haven’t we all been through situations where our realization of our lack of knowledge of the presence of a passed opportunity makes us filled with regret? It really felt like Workday is like Andrea desperately trying to let Miranda know what she doesn’t know 😂 (if you know, you know.)

So what are these changes, you may ask. Well, before Workday, I was working at a start-up called Fiddler AI focusing on RAI and I was there for two years. Since I was freshly leaving an academic environment and joining a start-up, I didn’t have much context on the employee perks and benefits of tech companies. Of course, a start-up cannot afford to spend its limited resources on much extravagance and so this baseline experience just further added to my surprise of how well employees get treated at big tech companies. And don’t get me wrong, even with Fiddler, I felt the surprise of the perks, with the lunches and dinners and the team-building events. Every experience is relative to your past ones and that’s the point: getting new opportunities shifts that relative scale for yourself and you can only just feel super grateful that you are experiencing that! So back to Workday campus: At every newly discovered corner of the Pleasanton campus, I was excitedly slacking my manager about the available perks and she couldn’t stop laughing at my kid-inside-a-candy-shop experience! Some of my exclamations to her were: “Oh specialty coffee machine!”, “oh flavored water machine!”, and “Unlimited peanut MnMs?!” c’mon! The Pleasanton campus also has its own gym free for Workmates via a wellness subsidy and a cafeteria with deeply subsidized food. The funniest part was how some folks were apologetic about not being as good as the “big players” like Google with its perks and benefits and here I was just grateful for all of these experiences! Talking about that relativity!

Ok, so perks and benefits are just the cherry on top of course. The cake really is my team and my job remit which focuses on all things Responsible AI! As a research scientist, I am expected to focus on innovation and integrity the two pillars of Workday through which I hope to engage in thought leadership as well as do some cool applied research work in RAI. A sneak peek into this would be (I am also figuring it out of course - I’m just in week 1 for now) - deeply thinking about fairness and bias in the context of Workday products, developing a culture around the responsible development of AI along with my teammates who are already miles ahead in this endeavor, and ultimately contributing to workflows that help build trust in AI! I am super excited for this opportunity to build bridges across various teams and collaborate with engg and product in a way where we can all contribute to a culture for responsibly developing AI tech and independently concluding that it is indeed the optimal pathway for developing enterprise AI!

So back to the crazy changes - An interesting and sudden change via this opportunity for me is how closely RAI at Workday works with C-level execs! Week 1 at Wday I got to meet several C-level folks including the CTO (tech), CLO (legal), and CCO (compliance)! This is an extremely important organizational structural design at Workday which, I strongly believe, is necessary because of the sociotechnical nature of RAI. Of course, as a new hire, this can also be very intimidating but I kept reminding myself about the awesomeness of this opportunity and that excitement helped me through the jitters!

So there we have it, a new job, with a new set of talented individuals, in a new environment, and a sea of opportunities to make an impact and move the needle - all because I pursued an email. Super grateful for this and to the readers who read thus far - go grab your opportunities! Cheers!

PS: these are my experiences and opinions not those of Workday as an org.

From earning a PhD to a postdoc to moving to tech industry - My professional experience

2022-11-02T17:43:00.002-07:00

I wrote this on Nov 1st, 2022. Two years ago, I started as a postdoc at UC Santa Cruz during this fall season. That postdoc was the phoenix that rose from the ashes of a 2020 pandemic Ph.D. graduation and a series of failed applications for tenure-track faculty positions. The amount of labor that had gone into preparing those research statements and teaching statements paled in comparison to the number of hours I had spent imagining a research lab with my students to mentor and living academic life. That labor of academic applications may have been the fuel but the fire really stemmed from that vision that is fed to every Ph.D. grad that – academic life is the best life. I too was enchanted by that hope and tried with all my might to continue to keep that fire alive by telling myself that I was nearly there. All of this changed when I moved to California for a postdoc.

You see, as a lower-middle-class Indian immigrant, who was really there in the United States of America because of merit, those 6 years of grad school made me forget that I couldn’t continue to be a nomadic man-child when there were responsibilities - financial, social, and personal - that I had been putting off until graduation. Suddenly, trying for one more year or publishing two more journal articles was no longer the hope I wanted to cling to while the rest of the world was moving on. This included the sticker shock of moving from Indiana to California. From the mid-west to the wild-west, this $24k per annum earning grad student had “leveled up” to $60k as a postdoc with a fancy Dr title. This 2.5x increase in salary, not gonna lie, did feel awesome when the first paycheck arrived but quickly fizzled away when 65% of that went away in rent! “Will I have to live with roommates, again?” I thought to myself. Each day in the Bay Area in California made me just feel like crap. The job already makes you feel like an imposter with immense pressure to continue to publish and little hope of relevant positions opening up. Add to that the misery of trying to make ends meet with a lack of financial support when the expectation in a typical Indian family really is that you should be the one providing the financial support. All of these thoughts were just crippling and suddenly the emotion of achievement of a Ph.D. didn’t really alleviate the emotion of dissatisfaction and frustration towards a system that almost felt like a pyramid scheme. For the first time in a long time, I felt like I was failing on epic proportions. To make matters worse, I really thought it was me. I wasn’t putting enough effort, I wasn't publishing enough, I wasn’t committing all the time I could, and … maybe…I didn’t deserve this Ph.D.!

Just when these thoughts were becoming more and more self-deprecating, my location change on LinkedIn resulted in a flurry of recruiters reaching out to me for industry positions. Initially, I was so entrapped with the idea of academic applications, that even reading those messages seemed like a betrayal to myself and to my dreams. However, when a recruiter from Google’s Behavioral Science team reached out to me, it was too hard to not entertain the idea of applying there. “How difficult could it be!?” my arrogant self thought. This arrogance was years in the making when all that you hear is constant industry bashing from ivory tower academics. When I actually did go through the interview process, it was eye-opening! This wasn’t easy! A 5 to 6 hour interview process with in-depth interviews and technical questions, sometimes on topics that you have long forgotten! I landed up not getting an offer from Google but I did go through the entire technical process that made me realize that my perception of the industry was far away from reality even for something as simple as the hiring process.

That lack of an offer from a place like Google made me feel like I was being presented with a new and exciting challenge - applying to the industry and getting an offer! I chased this feeling and focused on keywords such as human-AI interaction, human-centered AI, cognitive modeling, etc. since that is my area of expertise. Through this, I stumbled upon Fiddler AI - a start-up focusing on Responsible AI. Mind you, this search process resulted in a lot of failures as well, but somehow here the feeling of rejection was less painful than in academia. Perhaps because the amount of time you spend personalizing and tailoring your academic applications is absurdly high as compared to the one in the industry. After going through the super thoughtful interview process at Fiddler, I landed up getting an offer! In my heart, I had already made the decision to move. I had a chat with my postdoc advisor and she was just super happy for me either way. That kind of support is so helpful and considerate and I am grateful that both my Ph.D. and Postdoc advisors ultimately advised me to choose a path that works for me.

Well, I joined Fiddler on Nov 1st, 2021, as this clueless Data Scientist who continued feeling like an imposter in his initial days wondering if Fiddler made a mistake and whether I tricked them. Today is my 1 year anniversary at Fiddler AI (we call it Fiddlerversary) and I couldn’t be happier! In this one year, I have published a paper at The 10th AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing, a workshop paper in ICML22, and a workshop paper in NeurIPS22 focusing on human-centric challenges with ML model monitoring. I have published a blog series on intersectional fairness, launched a new product feature, understood how startups work, improved my coding skills, and improved product quality through testing and documentation. I can’t believe I have been able to do so much! Needless to say, I am continuing to gain knowledge on human-centered, responsible, and ethical AI - an area I am so passionate about thanks to my journey with engineering design, decision-making research, and human-centered design roots. I feel blessed to have traversed this unique path and to be where I am now.

This transition from academia to the industry has been an awesome one for me. Here is my experience over this one year at Fiddler -

Getting to see an immediate impact, and being able to delight customers is very exciting to me. In my first year at Fiddler, I was able to launch a new drift metric called Population Stability Index (in general this is termed a new “product feature” in the industry when your work results in being able to do something new on the software). This work gave me the opportunity to go above and beyond and work with a machine learning engineer and a front-end engineer and convince them to just get this feature launched. I did this two quarters earlier than what higher-ups were anticipating! That feeling of overachievement was so sweet and when a fintech customer started using it within weeks of launching the feature it was just a cherry on top to see my work contributing to the bigger organizational goals.
I was no longer working in isolation. There are dedicated teams for jobs that I used to have to do in academia all by myself while constantly being aware that the job I’ve done, in an area I am not an expert in, is subpar and feeling like an imposter. That feeling hasn’t gone away completely but it’s not as loud as it used to be.
I felt like I was getting paid more than just to make ends meet. You obviously make a lot more money in industry than in academia and as an immigrant coming from a lower middle-class family, it absolutely matters! Don’t let anyone tell you not to worry about money. It’s generally said by those who are in a different phase of their life, who have accumulated wealth only to realize they don’t know what to do with it and it doesn’t motivate them. Context does matter. Being in a phase of life where you are trying to just survive - you can think of a lot of things you can do to bring comfort in your life through that extra income. Of course, money is not everything. I don’t think a majority of the folks think that way. However, it is a disservice to the impressionable people who look up to you to say that you shouldn’t worry about money and finances.

Having said all of this above – here are some of the things that are a part of my professional experience by being in the tech industry

There are luck-based factors even in industry and not just in academia. For example, getting the job itself has a lot to do with luck and timing. Other luck-based factors include -

the organizational culture,
your manager’s emotional intelligence,
your starting projects (are you being set up for failure)
economic conditions

The things in your control -

being a lifelong learner - which means being curious, asking questions, getting to know the sociotechnical aspects like the right people for the right questions, creating a mental map of various subsystems of this large organization that you are part of, acquiring intelligence through “transfer learning” == not having to reinvent the wheel, when you have the feeling that you have free time at work figuring out how to make it productive instead of secretly feeling happy about having free time during work hours and whiling away your time. - a lot of this I learned through my grad school life and mostly because I had an insightful Ph.D. advisor who forced me to think and justify every decision I took about the next steps for work. For that, I am super grateful to academia and my advisor.
Finding mentors. This is super important. Knowing which person in the organization can help you is crucial. PS - It may not be your manager but rather your coworkers.
You can be the source of fun and happiness for others.
Make sure to have meetings with others across the organization and not just your team
Take control of your calendar! Block chunks of time as focus time for yourself. Do not let anyone schedule meetings in those blocks.

Politics is everywhere. Knowing which fights to fight and which to let go of is crucial across all phases of life.
Your manager cannot be your friend but needs to be friendly.
Taking an initiative does not mean you forget about the weekly priorities set for you. So don’t get lost/aim for heroics if you aren’t keeping up with your weekly targets.

There is obviously a lot more but I wanted to pen this down before I forget. I hope this helps someone who is currently a grad student and thinking about the academia vs industry debate. There is no right or wrong answer and the path totally depends on your context and your personal journey. If you wanna chat more, shoot me a message on LinkedIn!

My academic journey: Reflections as a first-generation kid

2021-03-03T15:44:00.010-08:00

Part 1: The path to graduate school

I earned a Ph.D.! It’s almost unbelievable to the present postdoctoral scholar me. It’s certainly an unimaginable reality to that first-generation kid who had no clue about the future. Unbeknownst to me then, my defining moment was when I decided that I wanted to get into an IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology). The very idea of getting into an IIT was not mine (or my family’s). I owe it to my high school friend Pratik who started talking about the IITs and the Joint Entrance Examinations (JEEs) and how he wanted to pursue it. It was almost like an act of rebellion for me. To dream what Pratik was dreaming. To be able to dream big, to set myself apart, to not follow a path some loved one told me to, to be able to claim independence of thought and to be...different. I am writing this for all those first-generation kids who realize that their world is imposing restrictions on them, who realize the idea of boundaries is just a perception, who are thinking of breaking those boundaries and are setting goals to pursue dreams no one near and dear to them pursued. Obviously, in retrospect, putting it all this way seems very heroic. Seems very courageous. However, life unfolds gradually and not all days for a first-gen kid are an “act of rebellion.” It’s all about opportunities and being able to pursue them. A majority of the first-gen kids don’t have the privilege of being presented with opportunities like I did. Being in a big city like Pune, with friends such as Pratik who enabled me to think beyond my own boundaries of my own thoughts then. As I started writing, I realized I couldn't possibly finish this in one sitting. Neither do I have the time to be able to dedicate all my hours to this. However, I feel like I owe this to those unseen, unknown fighters and rebels who are, in the very now, striving to do something for themselves.

As a kid who was bullied in school for being different, I got immense pleasure in aggravating those bullies by being weirder and more daring with every new goal I set for myself. I owe this attitude to myself. I have always had a loud personality. So, when I was bullied in school, I was lucky and blessed to have had it in me to give it back to my bullies. Not by physical force but by excelling in academia. It’s hilarious to me now how the little kid me thought I could own my bullies by being a nerd. Like who thinks that way?! I am so glad I did. Of course, I can't say if I owned my bullies or not, but it turned out to be quite advantageous and positive for me. All of this bullying and my reaction to it continued even after getting into an IIT. But before I talk about my IIT days, I want to mention my pre-IIT days when I was working extremely hard to prepare for JEE.

I prepared for JEE for two years during my ten plus two or junior college as we called it. (The 10+2 system is a part of the K-12 education system, and equivalent to the International Baccalaureate and GCE Advanced Levels in the west. -Wikipedia). This was considered, back then, an appropriate amount of time to prepare for JEE. I won’t digress with how people have started preparing for JEE for 5-6 years in advance now. Wild! Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, two years seems like a very small amount of time. Even though JEE preparation time was just for two years, I lived a “mini-life” as our JEE mentors used to call it. I had started dreaming about this ideal world called an IIT and how life would be amazing. So from that standpoint, I had created a vision of the IIT world for two long years. That view was shattered when I went to college (IIT Guwahati). Turns out, when you put something or someone on a pedestal, chances are you will be majorly disappointed. I had this idealistic view of how an academic world would be full of bullied nerds like me and we would all live on one big happy island. To my disappointment, there were bullies in college too. That same rebellious kid came to life and I decided to "own" those bullies by pursuing higher education. Of course, that was not the motivation or the only factor that helped me pursue higher education. There was also a sense of pride, reinforced by the Indian culture aka Indian uncle and aunts who made me feel like a hero. There was also ego, arrogance, and an inflated sense of self all while I continued working hard and having the privilege of being presented with opportunities. It’s amazing how once you have even a little privilege, it snowballs into more and more opportunities. So that decision of the kid-me to get into an IIT, and my hard work to actually get into one, paved the way for another pivotal moment in college. My second-year internship!

During my second year when I was looking for internships, I landed up getting an internship opportunity at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). In retrospect, that opportunity was 90% luck and 10% my GPA, my persistence in applying/spamming to 100s of places, and my fear of missing out. In fact, some of the things that I was doing as a part of that 10% were actually hurting me. I was not personalizing my applications. I was applying to places that had no connection to what I was doing or wanted to do. I didn’t bother to ask how to frame things. I may have also blatantly copied the structure of the applications that were examples from seniors who bagged internship opportunities. I want to write it out there because I know there will be first-gen kids like me who will be doing the things I did and it's only because they don’t know better. I just got lucky. Most might not. Notice that I now have the ability to acknowledge my dumb luck and my mistakes while maintaining the stance that I worked very hard in doing the things I was doing. Life was not black and white, it was all gray. This is especially true for first-gen kids who are sometimes taught to push walls as a part of work hard exercise only to be rewarded with nothing. If you are first-gen reading this, don't hesitate to ask around. Moreover, after you have asked and worked on something, be unabashed about seeking critiques and feedback. I also know the dilemma of whom to ask. Go to the people in positions of power. This includes not only your immediate seniors who are themselves figuring things out but professors. So many of us first-gens don't think of asking for help. Do it! It's not a sign of weakness. It's the exact opposite. Can you believe I got a KAIST opportunity just by sending an email with my CV? There was no posting. No ads. I just enquired.

The KAIST opportunity helped me in more ways than I thought it would. I realized it became easy to apply for internships in my third year. From then on, it was mostly a privilege to bank on previous credentials to continue seizing one opportunity after the other. KAIST internship led to Purdue Internship led to study abroad in France led to understanding the “first world” led to wanting to pursue higher education. (Of course, all while I continued to study for exams and continued getting good grades and playing the number game. I could write a whole new blog about how hypothetically all of that may have not mattered or how it was stupid etc. but I will know whether all of that helped create a perception of me in someone else's mind that lead to the opportunities I got.) Little did I know, a Ph.D. was going to yank me into an environment full of uncertainty, self-depreciation, feeling stupid, and feeling alone. In retrospect, I can’t be more thankful that I got the opportunity to experience graduate school!

Part 2: The Ph.D. Experience (work in progress)

The thing is, I was so used to riding on my privilege by the time I graduated from college, I had forgotten what it was to struggle. A Ph.D. is about struggle. Academia provides opportunities for you to think about the topics you really enjoy and plan things in that direction. Such an opportunity is both a gift and a curse in the academic world. A first-generation graduate student may not know how to think and plan. In fact, I didn’t realize this until I was too deep into the I want to be a faculty member dream. By that I mean when I really understood the academic hiring process and the factors that influence the possibility of you getting a tenure track position, I realized all the things I should have been doing during my Ph.D. including reading more, publishing more, strategizing more, writing more, and working more. The problem with such a realization is that more is a relative term, and rarely something is discussed in absolutes in graduate school. This is primarily because even professors may not know what research results they will find as such is the nature of research only to be exacerbated by the capitalistic nature of American academia. This bears a huge implication on the growth of a budding graduate student, let alone a first-generation kid, who may not understand the intricacies of the academic world. A few of such intricacies are listed below based on my experience and understanding of the engineering academic research world.

Graduate students are expected to be independent without little explanation of what independence means.

Independence means you are free to search for theories from any area which can be relevant to answering a research question and you are free to propose a path to solve the problem with a logical explanation of that path. You are also free to use up all your time and efforts in doing so. In your early academic years, chances are however that you don’t know how to search for theories and how to choose a research methodology. Mind you, it's a methodology and not a method which in itself takes a long time for a graduate student to figure out alone if you do not have the right guidance.
If you can’t be your own teacher and student, academia is not for you.

The academic world lives off of academic underachievement anxiety.

So, given that you will feel the struggle of a lack of knowledge not only about the content but also the research strategies, you will not be able to progress in the earlier years of your Ph.D. as quickly as you thought you would. This results in a downward spiral given that it's highly likely you were an overachiever in academics.

Ph.D. advisors are not incentivized to be good mentors.

I was extremely lucky to have had an advisor who knew how to mentor well. Most graduate students aren’t fortunate to receive a good mentor. Mentoring is an art and very few people know how to truly mentor someone even if it means they may not be able to achieve what they set out to achieve from you given that they had hired you in the first place.

The weird part about academia is once you get a Ph.D. you have the power of giving PhDs to others.
Data-scarce Academia is trying to compete with the data-rich Industry to make advancements in data science of course in the context of your research area.

If you are a non-CS student, you will hear about the enigmatic AI/ML terms thrown around in your department and you will be mesmerized by the knowledge being thrown around casually in conversations without realizing that most of the people in your own department may not know about AI/ML as much as you think they do.

CS knowledge is an implicit expectation without the path provided or resources made explicitly available to acquire it.
You will notice that professors use academic terminologies that impress the vision of Program Directors and expect students to truly decipher the meanings of those terminologies.
As an academic, you will always be underpaid but after a point, you won’t be hand to mouth.
Every Ph.D. is different and not everyone puts in the same amount of effort to achieve the “Dr” title.
A Ph.D. can make you feel very lonely as you are deciding to take on a path where you would want to claim you know the most about a topic which also means you will only find ears to listen but no mouths for words of advice except your advisor who may be a nice person if you are lucky like I was.
Conferences initially seem like an opportunity to travel and visit a new place. However, it should be mostly treated as an opportunity to meet people and discuss ideas with them as a part of your job.
Reading is different from reading right.

There is just so much to read! This feeling can be crippling when you come from a zero state of knowledge about the very area that interests you.
The way to deal with this feeling is to initially read your advisor’s work to try to get on the same page with them. However, this also needs to be balanced with reading about the things your advisor is currently talking about in the context of the current project that is funding you. Chances are your advisor is also relatively new to the current project from the perspective of not having answers to the problems (because that’s why they are interested in exploring the area!)
So, the key is to read about gaps in knowledge which means understanding what is currently known and what is not known in the current project.

Integrating Gradescope and Blackboard (Purdue)

2019-08-13T16:07:00.000-07:00

So if you're looking for how to integrate your roster from blackboard to gradescope, here's what to do:

Go to Blackboard
Select the course
On Course Content with edit mode on (for instructors) go to Tools
More Tools
Gradescope
It will take you to a page which creates a gradescope link
Create that link
Now go back to course content page and you should see gradescope link.
Click that link, it takes you to gradescope. (You may have to "launch" that)
Integrate the course!

Uncertainty

2017-09-13T08:08:00.003-07:00

You lay in my arms,

conflicted and troubled;

Is this is how it's supposed to be?

Your inner voice mumbled.

I heard that voice,

loud and clear;

Before your lips,

even moved my dear;

I know how it feels to be uncertain,

to live in that moment of unsureness;

All I'll do is play my part,

and build us a founded love fortress.

Impenetrable it will be,

to uncertainty first of all;

Honesty guards it strong,

and looks after the walls.

Your eyes would be,

it's opening gates;

Straight to my heart,

that path would take.

When you reach there,

you'll have a smile;

That'll last forever,

This is worthwhile.

I look in your eyes,

and they speak to me,

as my lips they see,

Yours I wanna be...

I understand that uncertainty,

but I'd love to love you indefinitely.

How real are lab experiments?

2017-02-08T06:34:00.001-08:00

I have recently started reading about the difference between field experiments and lab experiments. Most of my work is now hovering over understanding human behavior and relating it to the impact on design environments, albeit impacts of human behavior in general give valuable insights. It's interesting how reviewer's comments towards journal and conference papers relating to understanding decision making in design gravitate towards realism of the experiments and more often than not rejecting the papers on this intuitive but misleading idea of "realism".

Still in process of reading, but I intend to keep filling this post up with arguments for lab experiments.

An interesting read for those who argue for field experiments and consider lab experiments as "unrealistic". It's interesting how a lot of social scientists have been arguing about this for ages but as engineers we disregard the effects of bias towards loss aversion or judgement biases.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/326/5952/535

Be yourself my child

2016-12-09T07:28:00.001-08:00

As a kid, I was told to carefully listen and to carefully see,

“Be yourself my child”, my mother told me;

I used to wonder and ponder about that piously,

Anything but myself? How could I be?

As I grew I learnt about diversity,

All those different colored birds that flew gleefully;

Not all birds fly I learnt slowly,

Frame of reference in Physics now meant so much more to me!

Those debates in college and those rivalries,

Made me understand that I should think before I speak;

Such reflections on actions became the key,

To muddling through to adulthood, from being a baby.

Making like-minded friends along the way,

Helped this co-evolutionary process;

Those cards and cups and clothes we shared, became artifacts of friendships,

Meaning so much more to us, though no one else cared!

The rebel in us didn’t need those prescriptions,

Deviating from norms was reflecting in our actions;

This framework we’ve followed hopefully takes us somewhere,

It has helped me rekindle with a dazzling flare.

Now in this light I am realizing,

How some frameworks I followed without understanding;

I merely accepted someone else’s assumptions,

Didn’t think if it’s applicable to my disposition.

“Be yourself my child”, my mother told me,

Those words as an adult are dawning upon me!

Together should be how we are

2016-07-28T20:52:00.001-07:00

How can i tell you,

The things i feel for you,

When you seem to keep me afar?

I’m shouting from within,

I feel it in my skin,

What I’m looking for, that you are!

How can i make you see it?

My love will not give you scars.

I’m not like your last love,

I’m the one you’ve been dreaming of,

who thinks about you for hours and hours;

How can i make you see it?

Together should be how we are.

oh this impatience,

is coz of the distance,

I no longer wanna be far.

Come to me oh my baby,

I’ve left this door ajar.

I just wanna tell you,

I intensely love you,

Together should be how we are…

Como esta Los Cabos!? Day 1

2016-07-17T19:01:00.003-07:00

The concept of vacation for a kid growing up in India is as foreign as the country he lands up in after years of studying and working hard for engineering entrance examinations. Coming to the US has definitely been a change of lifestyle, the least to say. I’ve been on internships to South Korea, US and France but never really saw them as summer vacations because trust me the pressure of doing well academically supersedes the idea of visiting a foreign country. Especially when you really want those professors to write a letter of recommendation for you while applying for graduate schools. Basically, I’ve never been on a vacation since I joined IIT Guwahati.

When my friend Blake, at 12:40 am, inebriated by a couple of Modelos and Long island asked me if I wanted to go to Mexico, I just thought he wanted to get laid with a latina. However, the next day when I actually asked him about the Mexico trip he was pretty damn serious. The seriousness was of course reflected through the private facebook group he had created for the trip, the irony.

The place we were supposed to visit in Mexico is called Cabos San Lucas. Its on the southern most tip of Baja California and as soon as google maps loaded to that location my heart skipped a beat. Blake was kind enough to give me the freedom enough to ask my friends to come along too. Of course the first name that popped into my head was John Oliver. I’m a great fan ;) John as expected considered the idea and was willing to join. My colleague Adam also agreed. We booked our tickets on expedia with some really great deal. Booking tickets is like getting engaged. You’re almost sure the plan is going to succeed. That called for a celebration and I was ready for Cactus and super excited for my Mexico trip.

The tickets were booked for July 1^st through July 9^th. It was wonderful for me because June 25^th to 30^th was the DCC conference I was supposed to attend in Chicago and so the continuity of it with a Mexico trip was just perfect. I had a wonderful conference in Northwestern, Evanston. Also made some new friends.

Finally John arrived on the 30^th of June and we hung out with our friend Arthur. Went to a place that played Blues music and I fell in love with it. It was a great night and I couldn’t wait for the next month Aka July to begin.

We flew out through O’hare International Airport. Our itinerary was pretty interesting. We flew from Chicago to Atlanta. We had a 5-hour stop there. We decided to visit Atlanta downtown and Johnny realized his friend works there at the aquarium. We met him and I realized I have friends too lol. So I hit up my friend Pratik. It was great catching up with him. It had been 8 years since we had a proper conversation. Gosh time flies by. While meeting him so many memories just came back to me. School, JEE, Pune and those countless hours discussing about life and future. Atlanta didn’t impress me much. There was nothing great to see downtown. I’m sure the party culture due to Georgia Tech and other universities must be great but downtown in itself failed to catch my attention.

We then flew to Mexico City from Atlanta. We had a 12 hour layover and we landed on a Friday night at 11:30 pm in Mexico City. I was finally out of USA after 2 years! It felt wonderful that I was on vacation with nothing but fun to look forward to. My college senior interestingly works in Mexico city. He was kind enough to show us the party scene in that crazy city. We partied all night and damn Mexico felt just like India except with a lot more booze and clubs. We were of course exhausted by 6 am. The look on Adams face was priceless. I have never seen him this sucked out of energy before. He looked like a red Indian Mango that had no juice to offer.

We reached San Jose airport and were waiting for the shuttle to take us to our resort. We landed in Terminal 1. It was a barren terminal with only Subway to save the day. Blake was also at the airport but apparently he was at Terminal 2. Our shuttles were supposed to be from Terminal 2 so Johnny, Adam and I walked there. It wasn’t that bad a walk as Blake put it. ( He’s a princess ) Terminal 2 on the other hand was full of tourists, Pina Coladas and shuttle services. It was interesting to see how Mexico greeted Mexicans on terminal 1 and internationals on terminal 2, just like India.

We had a 30 minute shuttle ride to Villa Del Arco in Cabos San Lucas. The view was breathtaking. The watercolor was as soothing as the waves that crashed on your feet while walking across the soft sand. We were right by the famous arc in Cabos San Lucas. The arc wasn’t visible though.

Our room wasn’t ready yet and I was just so ready to take a shower. So was Adam who had mentioned it a zillionth time by now. I wanted to throw him in the pool and be like here’s your shower, but then my sympathies were with him too. We all were exhausted.

The smell of the resort and the fragrance in the lobby made me realize that the place was pretty fancy. It was of course a very white dominated resort. It was interesting to see how the upper echelon of society relaxes. There was a splendid swimming pool with all the resort rooms surrounding it. The swimming pool was basically like a celebrity with the hotel buildings being its paparazzi. There was a pirate ship like structure on one of the pool corners, which was a restaurant. There was a taco bar on the side too. The pool borders were strewn with beach chairs that accommodated sunscreen loaded humans, mostly white families. I felt I was the only Indian there who was mostly mistaken for a Mexican given that a couple of people started speaking to me in Spanish.

It was 4 pm and the room was ready. We had met Blake by then and I got introduced to Blakes friend, Tabitha. She was one of the most beautiful women I have seen. Her eyes simply blended with the color of Los Cabos waters. I just hoped she wasn’t a bitch, the probability was pretty high :P

We went to the “room” 2701. I inserted the card key into the door and opened the room. My heart just stopped. IT WAS A FUCKING PENTHOUSE. It was nowhere close to what I had imagined. My whole desire of taking a shower transformed into the desire of growing a pair of wings and gloating across the sky, dipping myself in and out of Pina Coladas. The place was extravagant. It hit me hard with the realization that I haven’t asked Blake for enough favors. I should do that, damn! The door opened to a living room. There was a guest restroom at the very beginning which just was enough to let me know how classy this place was. As you walk through the door, the left side had three couches surrounding a table and it displayed the view of the swimming pool and then the beach that opens up to the bay waters. The seventh story view made me feel like I was the owner of nature’s most wonderful marvels. The right side of the living room was the kitchen and laundry area which also opened up to a balcony with the view of the desert and downtown direction.

The hallway further down had the three bedrooms, one being the master bedroom and the others were great themselves. There were two hot tubs and Jacuzzis btw. One of the hot tubs was in the balcony of the living room that opened up to the beach view. Everything was simply marvelous. I ran into Blake’s master bedroom for a shower of course. The toiletries made me cry with happiness. I was dying to take a shower!

We then decided to head to walmart to get the “essentials” and “bare necessities”. Long story short, it was a fun walmart trip ;) It was july 2^nd and it was a Saturday. I had to head to the clubs. Rest of the bitches were tired. I decided to head downtown. I went to this place called El Squid Roe. I thought I would get squid there. It turned out to be a party extravaganza. Anyone who knows about Cactus at Purdue should multiply its experience 20 times and you’ll have El Squid Roe. That place was a riot. The fatigue of my body departed as the music filled me up. I was ready to party. I came back at 4 am and I see people chilling in the hot tub. It was one of the most wonderful sights to come back to the room to. These were my friends! A bunch of awesome people and I was happy to spend time with them.

Day 2…. I’ll update soon

Early twenties

2016-04-14T16:59:00.001-07:00

I am 24 now. Almost a quarter of a century old. I think this is the age group when we all realize the importance and potential impact of every decision we make in our personal and professional lives. This is a point where we all feel the pressure of making decisions. Whether we learnt to make good decision or not, we have to make them. We know we have choices. But of course they are difficult choices. Some of the choices we have are so absurd that it could take away everything we have. The dilemma posed to us at this juncture is not just that of a good decision or a bad one. It's decisions which are the best one for us or the best one for us AND the people around us. Sure we read a lot about how the former decision which is for us and only us is the best one however if only people could understand our contexts. The amount of mood swings and emotions we’ve dealt with since we turned 20 are more than the words in a dictionary that one could use to describe such emotions. All of us have our own emotional problems to deal with. We all wish at this point that our persona during teenage could include certain elements which it didn’t and now we have to deal with our own persona and image. Its funny how our problems with other people as teenagers, shift to our problems with ourselves in our early twenties. We think our friends are doing better than us. We think we’ve achieved nothing. We think we soon have to settle or at least start considering it given that the world around us is so eagerly talking about it. We keep the rebel in us alive by pushing marriage further away. But we also know that the rebel in us as a teenager has lost its energy as the bitch called maturity came and fucked everything. Theres so much to say and yet so little that comes out of our mouth now. Being in early twenties is one hell of a ride.

I fell for you

2016-03-11T07:34:00.000-08:00

It’s funny how much you meant to me,

just a couple of days ago…

But my life was just a stage for you,

it was all just a show.

All that talk and all those dates,

were just to get to bed…

and now finally when you have your way,

you dont really seem to care.

Now i’m laying on my bed alone

thinking what did i do wrong?

i have no answers for myself

and so i’m writing up this song

I can’t believe

how easily

i fell for you

oh hey!

love just happens

no guarantee

that its gonna

be okay……. x2

I’m glad that i have friends who’re

making me feel okay….

Coz o you i spend less time with em

i dont know what to say..hey!

I can’t believe

how easily

i fell for you

oh hey!

love just happens

no guarantee

that its gonna

be okay……. x2

that its gonna be okay…its gonna be okay!

Forgotten Love

2016-01-15T09:00:00.000-08:00

I know your past is making you weary,
I know its never gonna be the same;
don't worry I'll n'er break your heart,
I don't know how to play games;

Baby just let me in your heart one time,
I won't be begging, oh! no, thats not right;
It's just that I think I deserve a chance,
to let you know it'll be alright;

'coz just a few moments is all I need,
To show you what all I can do for you;
I am capable of that forgotten love,
that you knew would take you through;

I know you fear what if past repeats,
would you be fixable again;
baby I'll stand through thick and thin,
I'll love you now, I'll love you then;

You don't how much you mean to me,
You don't know the magic you create;
In my heart, that beats for you,
Since that smile and dinner date;

'coz just a few moments is all I need,
To show you what all I can do for you;
I am capable of that forgotten love,
that you knew would take you through;

Happy Holidays '15

2015-12-17T01:13:00.003-08:00

Alright! So today is Dec 17, 2015. After a long time I am getting to update my blog and well I am glad I can. A lot has happened since the last blog post which was somewhere in July. A lot of which probably I might not be able to share and some which I can.

For starters, I’ve qualified my PhD examinations and thus I am an official PhD candidate. Feels more like a relief from the necessary evil part and feels like its time to do some actual contributive work. I’ve also become a legal driver now! Well it feels great. I guess my feeling of adulthood came to me after I bought my own car and now with the license it is empowering.

Professionally, I feel I’ve started getting a hang of academia and I feel like I'm in control of my work. I feel I have the knowledge ( which is ever increasing every single day) to be able to logically argue with my advisor (at least) about what are the next steps that I can take. I guess I am going slow with my research and possibly my advisor thinks I can do better and well I’m glad he keeps me on the hook coz I seem to be enjoying it. Its frustrating and painstaking of course when things go wrong but I cant even explain the happiness I get from the feeling of accomplishment with every tiny goal that goes according to plan. PhD is definitely a way of life that you choose and its not just an option that you incorporate in your work life. It affects your living and your motivation of existence. You can have several perspectives of course. One can be: You get up every single day, work your ass out, get tired, sleep and repeat. The other is, you start your day with some objectives, try to achieve them and in the process keep realizing the other objectives and at the same time you’re trying to ensure that the objectives at the higher level of abstraction are making sense and you move forward keeping a vigil eye for any interesting results. I like the latter perspective of course and this whole idea of augmenting this sense of awareness just keeps getting better everyday. I am currently working on something very interesting and drafting a research paper for the same thus cannot discuss it now but hopefully soon enough.

The friends I introduced in the last post have of course become closer and our friendships have transcended the formal boundaries of acquaintance and as a graduate student you definitely need a support system. Talking about support system, my parents had their first time visit to the States and they came to see Purdue. I’m glad they loved it. I took them to chicago. It was great to see them go nuts in the chicago winds. The tradition for thanksgiving has been set with me heading to Omaha for the second time to be with my american family, the Oliver family, which I am glad I've become a part of. Meeting Libby finally was a wonderful experience and boy I’m in love with her persona. After John, I think shes the most intriguing Oliver to me. I had a wonderful thanksgiving with a new born addiction to Settlers of Catan. It’s a wonderful game and you all reading this should try it.

Personally, I’ve grown a lot. I’m still learning to be an adult but I guess i'll get there at some point. This December, Gourav and Shibu are gonna be in Chicago so im super excited to meet em over the holidays. Of course undergrad friends or more like SAMS family is meeting me without Sam himself. That is, Achal and Shailesh are gonna be there in chicago as well and Srijan is back in India so well we will just miss him ( may be :P) . I’m gonna bombard his facebook with all our pictures haha.

Wish you all a very happy new year!

Anyway, that’s it for now. Pretty sleepy, I hope I update the next blog sooner than last time

If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written It Shorter

2015-07-21T20:59:00.000-07:00

Today is 21st July, 2015. Today I moved stuff from my bedroom and apartment to get ready to move in to a different apartment on a new lease and with roomies who are two of the dearest friends here at Purdue. No sooner I started packing my stuff than I realized that its been almost a year now in the States and Purdue.

Looking back at this year personally and professionally I feel really good that I’ve been able to develop my own social circle. A circle of special people who are unlike high school or college buds. These guys are different, this is adult friendship I guess. Its very mature, very rich and intellectually stimulating. It doesn’t involve judgements or silly jokes on personality types. There are jokes but they are truly funny and doesn’t involve any pretense. I’ve been able to expand my personality, my knowledge, my behavior and my take towards various relationships. I’ve become an adult. This feeling of adulthood actually came when I started driving my own car. It wasn’t puberty or porn or living alone. It was driving for me. The sheer responsibility of your own life and the possible impact financially, personally and professionally in case of an accident is just too high to mess around with any rule or be ignorant about it.

Financially looking back, although with the measly pay as a graduate student I believe I did a good job on my savings. A macbook pro, a trip to NYC, a trip to Omaha and several trips to Chicago were some of the perks of my savings. I still don’t count my car as my own, as I still have a loan but I’ve managed 7k payment and about half is left to pay off. Well that will happen with time too :)

Socially, well in alphabetical order, Akancha, Ishant, John, Kshitiz and Parul have become the closest of buddies. I spend almost all of my leisure time with them. Gym buds include Parul, Shitty and Akancha, recently Ishant too. It’s just brilliant. These guys know every detail that there is to know about me. Like everything! It is just surprising how much power they have to fuck me over lol.

Intellectually, my research is extremely intriguing and I am glad I chose Purdue, DELP. I am working on crowdsourcing in engineering systems design. More specifically, I am working on game theory and behavioral experimentation. You see, game theory assumes rationality of players. Kahneman and Tversky in their seminal paper have already proved that people are irrational and are not driven by the utility of their decisions but on their gut feeling and misconceptions. This means that depending on the context, game theoretic models can be completely useless despite such mathematical brilliance involving probability. That’s where the role of behavioral experimentation comes into the picture. Understanding the behavior of people and integrating it into the game theoretic model can actually and pragmatically be of some use. However behavioral experimentation is unlike the “social experiments” we see as viral videos on Facebook. This is the field of design of experiments which helps you understand the painstaking task of setting up controlled experiments where the behavior you want to test is exclusively dependent only on the control parameters you want to correlate to and no other bias should be involved. This is an extremely difficult task because you never know what might bias the participants. Each word of the problem statement needs to be carefully constructed to ensure such that, for example, previous experience doesn’t interfere if thats not a part of the control parameter. Having an experiment and problem statement ready isn’t just gonna get you the results either. Firstly, a mathematical model of the tournament is important. The theoretical assumptions are as important as actual behavior. So I started reading a lot about contest theory. This is where I was also introduced to hypothesis based research where developing hypothesis on “intuitive” relationships and then rejecting or not rejecting the null plays a very important role. Thats where statistics comes into the picture. To talk simple, my research objective is to understand outcomes in engineering systems design by studying design under competition. Outcomes mean, solution quality, profit and innovation. If designers of a contest can predict the solution quality especially in a crowdsourced tournament where spamming is one of the greatest concerns then it can be realistically implemented and well that will be fantastic. So back to the research objective. Outcomes in systems design. What affects it? Peoples decision making in a tournament. What affects decision making? Their behavior and the tournament itself. Behavior is easy to understand, that an experienced person will tend to make the better decision, a risk prone person will tend to make the less probable choice etc. When it comes to design of the tournament in itself, i can explain from an example: Consider a 1 million$ competition and a 10$ competition. Of course the higher the price the higher the motivation to win it. Thats how your decision is affected by solely the price. There are other options, like single stage, multistage types, the distribution of the price as winner takes all or multiple winners etc that will affect the behavior in not so intuitive ways unlike simply increasing prize. So studying all of this synergistically to predict outcomes in engineering systems design is what my research is about. I have been able to publish a conference paper in decision making using an eye tracking device and well I am excited for my Boston ASME IDETC conference on the 2nd of August.

Academically, I have been maintaining a 4.0 GPA which to be honest is nothing great. A lot of grad students manage that, but of course it feels great. I have my PhD qualifying examinations coming up this September and well I am bucking up for it too in the mere 24 hours that we unfortunately have in a day. Wish there were more.

And finally, personally, I am just feeling grateful that I decided to pursue a PhD. It is not just an academic decision. Its a lifestyle choice. I end this with a note to myself that

"If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter”-Blaise Pascal

John Oliver, Alaina Hembree ( and alright, Dio)

2015-01-18T07:38:00.001-08:00

There is no better teacher than your own life experiences. I’m those sorts who loves to be an open book, transparent and innocent with my ideas and actions. I cannot plan or plot things consciously to do something hurtful to even the worst of people. What I forgot was that there are people who can do that. It’s such a dilemma. I’ve always been told to be who I am. The problem is if I be that self, I will make myself so vulnerable to some people whom I think are friends and land up being sad and lonely. I call it the sieving process. It’s funny how, be it relationships or be it friendships, you have to go through a bunch of sad people to finally boil down with some decent ones with whom you can share everything, not be judged, be respected and have a great time. Since all of this is probabilistic, some find a good bunch of friends too fast and for some it takes ages. I consider myself extremely lucky in this case because I do have a bunch of great friends. John and Alaina this ones for y’all. I love you both (and Dio haha) . I am glad you were born :P

I would...

2015-01-17T16:50:00.002-08:00

I like the word serendipity. The sound of it, it’s meaning, it’s all very perfect. The same perfect that one expects and hopes and wants for one’s own life. Haven’t we all spent those countless moments being lost in the “if only” of a situation? Especially when the “if only” is associated with someone whom you’ve become fond of, with whom these recent emotions of happiness and joy, like you’ve never felt before, have started emerging, with whose existence you feel reason enough to live that perfect moment you’d imagined. That someone whom you so dearly want to call special but still hesitate because you don’t know if it is too early to say so. Love, affection and fondness are the three hot balls ones heart juggles through while keeping up its beats. Anxiety, worry and fear are the three hotter balls. Fear and love go hand in hand because of the value and preciousness associated with the person in concern. But sometimes the fear is uncalled for. Sometimes a leap of faith is more necessary than anything else. If one gets too scared of heart breaks, before even getting into a situation that one assumes to create such a conclusion, it is no point falling in love. You never will. There is all the good and the perfect associated with love but there is compromise and commitment too. There will be jealousy, there will be misunderstandings but it’s that very love that would help over power all of the imperfect. We spend so much time thinking about our “if only” that we forget about the importance of imperfect. When it comes to love, imperfect is the perfect. No one seems to acknowledge it. Including you and me. We all eliminate millions and millions of possibilities with so many people just because of some stupid reasons which if you think deeply about wouldn’t have mattered to you if all worked out well. Sometimes the practicality of a situation will be totally different from what your heart wants and that’s where I guess the tightrope walk of fear and leap of faith comes into play. Just so you know, I would take the leap of faith.

Night's grown warmer

2014-12-24T20:25:00.003-08:00

Every night when I close my eyes,

In disguise, you just quietly come into my dreams..

I’m wondering now if I wanna open these eyes,

And realize, whats the reality..

I spend my time thinking all day

About the way, in which

your warm breath tickles my neck..

I don’t keep a check, on what should I feel..

That soft touch of those gentle lips

that tight grip, that passionate kiss…

I cannot miss, that look and moan..

Oh our nights grown, warmer …

The way your skin in raw feels..

Makes me kneel, and worship you

Baby.. take me through, this journey

Oh honey! That’s what I would call life…

Grad life @ Purdue

2014-09-24T15:39:00.000-07:00

Woaaah! Finally got some breathing time to sit and write my blog. Graduate life!! Things have begun so quickly and I’m surged into the current of research in such a way that there was hardly any time to think about anything else or give myself that “slow start” cushion. Days and nights are just passing by. Every day there are these small tasks that need to be done which if carried over to the next day could turn out to be a BIG problem. Everything spoken to everyone, every little detail, needs to noted, carefully calculated and made sure that it fits your schedule. Any task be it personal or professional needs to be done with royal time management. Well it’s more like doing professional work and then accommodating the personal chores within howsoever less free time you get.

Returning to Purdue has been great. Being an intern here has helped a lot to get me adjusted to everything so very quickly that I have hardly wasted any time figuring out the way of life here. Starting with my apartment I guess I have made an excellent choice this time especially when the name of the apartment complex is a French one ;) Beau Jardin Apartments is a very well connected complex to Purdue with Payless supermarket right next to it and all the junk food chains around the supermarket. Basically you can never go hungry there. Also, some of the most important roads like the Northwestern Avenue and Salisbury Street are cutting across this area which makes the busses easily available. It’s great to have 2 apartment-mates, one being the brother of my batchmate from IIT Guwahati and the other is his friend with whom I met for the first time and realized he is too paranoid about insects in the house apparently from his past experiences. This led him to give me a lengthy explanation about how things are to be kept in the house and how I am supposed to wash off everything in the kitchen ASAP. It was quite interesting and funny as I was remembering my mom just a week ago giving me the same instructions whilst I am living in the States. Nevertheless, we landed up having a good conversation and I realized he has a healthy way of life so I just expressed my wish of being healthy too and most probably join the gym. It all went well.

Being to Europe for an exchange semester and then returning to IIT Guwahati and then to Pune and then flying to US was really tiring. Everything just went very fast. I had left all my scholarship in the European bank as I was waiting for one last payment and then I had asked the banker to transfer it to my US account. France did not fail to disappoint me one last time. The banker did not transfer the money which resulted in me being a pauper in the States with hardly any cash to buy even food. Luckily some good friends in US and in France facilitated the process and I received my wire after a week. With the account decent, I finally went to the supermarket and by now I was used to the huge markets with infinite useless options for infinite useless things. I saw ice creams of course and decided to buy two tubs of them ( What? They are just for 5$ here!! ) It was death by chocolate of course and I went back home and was relaxing during the weekend coolly enjoying the taste of USA when my roommate (the paranoid one) came and asked me for a taste of the ice cream. Very happily I shared the tub and he approach the tub with his spoon looked into it and just smashed the tub on the kitchen table looked at me and started laughing. This is by far the weirdest scene that has happened with me. I looked at him bewildered and stunned and of course I asked him “Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?!!” He looked at me, still trying to control his laugh and told me, “I thought you were worried about your health and all.” I had absolutely no clue what he meant by that and I was like “Yeah, of course I am” to which he very amusingly expressed that finishing half a tub of ice cream in a day is gonna take me very close to my aims, just hypothetically. In that very moment a gush of embarrassment, horror and sadness engulfed me. I can never forget that moment. It was that day I had decided to turn that wish into a reality and actually do something about my health and live a healthier life. A lot of past experiences in my life have given me enough reason to believe that health is the biggest priority however nothing ever pushed me that hard to actually go and do something about it. That moment. That very laugh was and is a very strong motivation for me to continue gymming and I am glad that since then I have hardly been eating junk food or unhealthy stuff. My food intake and eating habits have changed drastically coming here and I am so very thankful to Mr. Lalit for this. He is like the Dark Knight roommate. Not the one you need but the one you deserve. :P My other roommate is as cool as a cucumber. Well, he is a PhD student. ‘Nuff said! I am glad I was able to find three other really amazing set of people in Beau Jardin –Shitty, Aalu and Pahrool who are becoming really good friends with time. The Lake Michigan trip organized by the ISS at Purdue kick started a series of events which led to finding friends like John, Shitty, Aalu, Parul, Akancha, Alper, Diogo, Felipe etc.

Regarding my lab and my research group, I am super happy and excited to be a part of DELP which is such a dynamic design group at Purdue. Some faces are familiar and some are new. Everyone seems to have blended really well. Working on interesting topics like game theory, economics, design innovation and getting to know more about cryptography, 3D printing, crowd sourcing etc. There is so much to learn and so much to read and so less time. Things are going well. Super hectic but so so so glad to be doing something worthwhile. As for now, 6 days to go for the next stipend and then party wohhuu ;) Cheers!

Happenstance, Foreordination or Volition

2014-06-19T16:34:00.001-07:00

Words and phrases like overwhelming, in awe, stunned, astounding etc. are not even close to explaining the repertoire of emotion I have been experiencing since February 2014. No the reason is not Valentines day but the exchange semester opportunity I got at Ecole centrale de Nantes in Nantes, France all the way from IIT Guwahati, Assam, India and this has been truly and in all gravity of the word: Special!

A lot of students nowadays get the opportunity to intern or study at more than one college in probably more than one country however the special thing about an exchange program is in fact it’s short period. The very fact that one can live in a new place with new people and get an opportunity to start afresh without worrying about the outcomes (because of the short period of time) was very exciting. I am glad I was able to use this opportunity in the best way I could. One of the best part about this nouvelle voyage of mine was my travelling with my backpack across western and central Europe. It is the best thing that could have happened to me at this age.

I definitely have a few things to mention about the things that travelling has taught me. It made me believe that the world is not that bad after all. It made realize that I was always judgmental towards others and thus in fact very harsh on myself. Travelling allowed me to put my faith and trust in people again. Moreover it made me comfortable and confident with myself. Being an extrovert since childhood, everyone believed and still do, that people like us have no problems socially however we do have major issues. Problems which the introverts could never imagine in their worst nightmares. Definitely the other side of the hill is always green however being an extrovert is not always cool. It’s exhausting at times and travelling provides you with just that adequate amount of tranquility an extrovert desperately needs.

Born and brought up in a country like India forced me to be super conscious as a guy about my height. It is not a Tyrion Lannister case however Indians leave no stone unturned to make things overly exaggerated and super melodramatic. Travelling in a continent like Europe reinstated that confidence in me to be okay with who and how I am. It also made me realize that not everyone is judgmental and there is a good chance to encounter like minded people anywhere. Before I wore my confidence as an external shield and now it just seems to be an integral part of me. I have reduced spending a portion of my energy staying on guard about the inconsequential things and rather channelize that portion of energy into something more productive. I also learnt certain things the hard way like losing my super expensive coat in a bloody train to Paris just within one and a half of my journey and then realizing to be more attentive. It has definitely allowed me to be super organized and be aware about the little things without losing the main purpose of travelling which is to enjoy every moment.

Studying and Travelling in a country like France for 6 months helps you definitely in one way: Developing patience! I have never seen any country so arrogant about its own language to this extent! Luckily I was with students and the younger generation is definitely more open and cosmopolitan especially in an academic setting which makes things better. However travelling to different cities within France made me realize how reluctant people are to embrace other languages. Nantes is a very a different and special city. Everyone seems to be super cool here however Paris gives such a bad impression of the whole country in general being the capital. Sometimes people just don't listen to you if you speak in English. The more bizarre part is when they understand the english language and still don't respond. It is definitely difficult to stay in this country as a foreigner. However one of the silver linings of this dark cloud was that I have learnt a new language and my french has improved to a great extent now. It is a super difficult language but it is beautiful. However my preference is Italian. Probably because of my Italian friends but I still love the way Italians speak. It is the coolest thing ever! I try Italian accent while speaking in english by adding A or O at the end of all my words. Its super funny!!

The amount of acquaintances I have made from all over Europe and the experiences I have had with strangers is truly amazing. Each person I met has been special in their own unique way. The old couple on the bridge, the girl in the train, the parents in Germany, the pianist at Montparnasse, the Indian lady on the TGV, the biologist on the train to Nantes, the mother on the train to Lake district, the girl studying medicine at my age, the professor on the way to Disneyland, the numerous people in the various hostels and so many more. There is just no end to the amount of strangers with whom you can feel connected only to make you realize that after all the world is your country and everyone around you is somehow related to you. Travelling is therefore now my hobby and I have stopped ruminating arrogantly about my situation to be a result of my act of volition. I used to hate when people called me lucky. I used to think that I have worked hard for it and I would not like my handwork to be diluted to luck. However as a traveller after pensive debating with myself I stand confused at the crossroads of happenstance, foreordination and volition. In fact after coming here I have reduced my constraints that shape my logic and perception. I am trying to make my thoughts and principles globally more accommodating. I have definitely become less judgmental and I have stopped assuming things. Interestingly I feel more calm and composed than ever. I hope to build on this trait and try to continue to focus my energy on constructive things...

My personal note..

Places Travelled:

Paris
Cannes
Marseilles
Cerbere
Nice
Monaco
Diano Marina
Cinque Terre (Monterroso, Vernazza, Manarola)
Pisa
Florence
Rome
Alberobello
Bari
Venice
Vienna
Prague
Munich
Amsterdam
Brussels
Rennes
Le Mans
Strasbourg
Pornic
St Nazaire
Barcelona
Chamonix
Les Alpes, Mont Blanc
Swiss Mountains from Chamonix
London
Lake District

Next destination: The Lavender fields, Provence, France

Europe and Everything Else! (Part 1)

2014-03-25T15:50:00.004-07:00

Europe! What a continent. What an amazing place to be. After accepting the exchange semester offer from Ecole Centrale de Nantes and coming to terms with leaving the final semester, the 8^th semester of my IIT life, I had decided one thing: to make it absolutely worth it. Luckily, Europe allowed that to happen. Let’s start with Nantes: I was told that France is an unfriendly country and people aren’t helpful at all. Nantes proved all of that wrong. Being a university town it bustles with a lot of students be it French or other nationalities which makes it a very liveable place in France. The French people are extremely helpful and do try to comprehend the English speaking students and go sometimes out of their way to help. This was totally contradictory to what I had heard. I had thought that the French people do not like foreigners. However, Nantes wasn’t like that at all. I guess it only exists in Paris and some other places. Rightly called the capital, Paris is responsible for creating a very negative image of France. I am glad I get to stay in Nantes. However, one thing is for sure and that is you need to know French to make friends with the French. I haven’t made any French friends yet which isn’t very surprising given my abysmal French and nearly zilch zeal towards learning it. I in fact landed up making a lot of Italian and Spanish friends given their awesome social nature. These guys are so much fun and take life as it comes. There is so much to learn and grow living with people who have totally different culture than the one you have become comfortable with. Meeting Antonio was the best thing that happened. Antonio Manco! A crazy Italian who carries his heart on his hand and is in love with every other girl he meets. Simply put he is the Joey from Friends without much action for real :P An amazing friend and a vibrant person. Thanks to him I met a lot of other Italian guys and it has been always an amazing time with them. Be it the Hangara Banana time ( Pub place in Nantes) or the dinner or the clubs. They are always crazy wherever they go. I have also become good friends with Barbara who is like an elder sister always smiling and fun to hang out with. The St. Patricks day fun, the Berlioz dinners, the Australian Disc, the Irish Pub are just a few fun moments to pen down out of the infinitely long list of awesome times that I’ve had with these guys. Nantes wouldn’t have been so alive without them.

An exchange semester is totally different from an internship. It’s a significant period of time in a new place and it’s not just about spending good weekends after a week full of work. Each and every day is a surprise. New people, new places, new information, new food etc. it’s amazing. It’s not just about a professor or your work, it’s about how well you can gel in the new scenario and be able to totally exploit the opportunities the place has to offer within whatever time you’ve got. The voice at the back of my head always made me feel guilty for missing the last semester and all the related memories. This in fact is turning out to be a great motivation to go out there and just have fun. Just participate in any activity which I think an undergrad needs to participate in before graduation. Of course it’s Europe so I spend very less energy thinking about what others think of me and just keep doing what I wanna do.

As it’s said the other side of the grass is always green, I haven’t explored Nantes yet and have been all over Europe. (Which reminds me I need to visit the Elephant of Nantes.) While I am discussing about Nantes itself let me mention about Ecole Centrale. It’s a small college area wise and makes me miss the landscape of IITG of course. However, it’s a pretty decent college. The courses that I have been pursuing has a relatively good set of professors and the timetable is pretty relaxed as an exchange student. For master students it’s definitely a busy week just like it would be in general. The best course I feel is the Numerical Analysis course which is so challenging that it’s irresistibly engaging. I haven’t yet seriously started preparing for it (examination point of view) but it’s fun to have a 2 hour class if it’s interesting. It's because sometimes preparing for an examination is very different from actually enjoying the subject. I am glad that I have been able to do the latter. That was one thing which is very different here. Every class is for 2 hours! Now that can be pretty good or preettttyyyy bad. However this saves a lot of miscellaneous time that’s wasted for students like commutation etc. which overall gives an extra couple of hours in the week.

Speaking about time, for exchange students like me it’s good to have a couple of extra hours for cooking and all other home related activities. It’s living for real “ostsut there” and I am loving the independence. The other activities reminds me of a lethal activity I do every day and that’s cooking. My body is constantly fighting the toxicity it is subjected to with my cuisine. However the reason why cooking is become less worse is thanks to Prathamesh, another Heritage fellow from IIT Bombay who takes the pain to come to my apartment every evening to eat with me. Another one task we share is going to Leclerc and LiDL – the two supermarkets close to our place. The memories of carrying infinite food and domestic stuff and walking all the way back home is not going to missed but is going to be cherished forever. This one time we literally overloaded ourselves with so much shopping that there were 5 minutes breaks for every 2 minutes of walking back home. Crazy days! However foot is not always the option in Nantes given it’s awesome bus and tramways. One exclusive joke between Prathamesh and me is the way the recorded voice announces the station names in French in the trams and busses. “Ligne un terminus Beajoure!!” A very special memory indeed.

The great part about ECN are the continuous holidays and breaks we get for things like Easter etc. This allowed Prathamesh and me to come up with a highly researched and exacting Euro trip plan. It was going to be a 17 day continuous trip covering France, Monaco, Italy, Vatican, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Netherlands and Belgium. Just the statement “ A 17 day Euro Trip” had so much gravity in it, we were pulled into the idea categorically. One what the fuck moment was when we ordered our Eurail Pass and it was going to be shipped to India! Thank god Prathamesh realized that and had Skype credits to make an immediate call to Singapore and divert the shipping from India to France. A narrow escape! After all it was 380 Euros each at stake and we would never get more than half a month’s time to travel carefree! All’s well that ends well. The Eurail passes arrived :D

We decided to travel from Paris without making a reservation of a TGV because apparently Paris via Orleans was a “scenic” route mentioned by Eurail. What the great people did not mention is the time of the year when it is scenic. We began our journey early in the morning from Gare SNCF ( I am reading this stations name in that ladies recorded voice in the tram which I so wish could be put here) With Prathamesh missing the bus to the station and then walking all the way to a stop to reach SNCF we finally made there. We sat in the train from Nantes to Orleans and soon realized there was nothing scenic. Felt so stupid within the hour 1 of the Euro trip. We slept through it and reached Paris in 3 hours instead of 1 from the high speed TGV. Anyway, I was too excited to be in Paris to even think about it that time. One very funny memory was that of seeing the communication tower from the train and looking at Prathamesh with innocent eyes yelling and inquiring, “ Is that Eiffel?” and I really meant to ask it with all sincerity and Prathamesh just shrugged me off saying NO! Well, Prathamesh is a lucky ass. You see, he has been to Europe before thanks to DAAD. His love for Germany is absolute and he had been to Paris. I mean come on! At the age of 22 he was visiting Europe twice with his own money?! Very few people I presume on this list in the world!

Paris!! I mean what can I say about this city which hasn’t been said before?! We definitely saw a lot and took a lot more pictures which will be a good reminder of the things we visited. I will mention those which are the most fondly remembered. The most striking memory of Paris was seeing the Eiffel tower from the metro window. It was the most unexpected sudden flash of the tower beaming in yellowish orange in the night. That will be a long lasting memory. I obviously went much more close to the Eiffel than the scene I saw from the metro however the surprise of viewing the tower had made me exclaim “Woah” even in the metro. The French easily figured we are the usual Paris tourists and were too busy in their own life fatigued by the awesomeness of Eiffel to even bother looking outside. Generally speaking after using the metros and public transport of Paris it was easy to realize it’s a fast city. It’s "know or go" here and that is how speaking in French becomes so important. The lifestyle is so fast! The stations are so intricately connected and it’s super complicated. You need to be young to be in a city like this. I had felt this in Seoul after the rustic life of Daejeon but it wasn’t even half of what I felt about Paris as compared to Nantes. It can suck up all energy you have, I bet! Another amazing memory of Paris is Berthillon Ice cream shop and the salted caramel ice cream suggested by a kind Srilankan guy! I mean cummon! It was fantastic. I couldn’t even find that taste in the Gelatos of Italy but we will come to that later. Salted Caramel! I had never thought there could be salt in an ice cream and it could taste so incredibly good! What an amazing time sitting on the banks of Seine River and enjoying an ice cream so awesome in such a chilly weather. Priceless! Then comes the obvious Mona Lisa ma’am and Louvre museum. The ability to see Eiffel tower in the background while hopping around the city is such an amazing feeling. I don’t know how but it was titillating. Rightly called the city of love! Another important highlight was Disneyland! It made me realize how much less of a kid I was now. I wasn’t that crazy as I expected to be while seeing Disneyland. I was sure happy to finally see it but that happiness which bubbled in me thinking about Disneyland when I was a kid was lost somewhere in the process of growing up. I always thought I could be rebellious enough to not let that child in me fade away but alas! We grow and bang ourselves under the speeding truck called maturity on the highway of life.

Nevertheless, it was a brilliant day spent and that too free of cost thanks to Prathamesh’s landlord’s (who is also a professor) daughter, Mathilda who worked there. 60 Euro ticket for free! I thank Prathamesh for that. He has proved to be more advantageous and helpful as an acquaintance than many of the so called friends in my life. Acquaintance! It’s no longer a word valid between Prathamesh and me now. He is definitely a good friend. A rather quiet friend of mine (probably because I speak so much I never allow him to speak) but a good “hooman” being. [A joke which only both of us will understand] Overall, it was two very exhaustive and rejuvenating days at the same time. It was a difficult feeling to sink in that I was in Paris. I could probably write a whole new blog about the feelings and experience of the Eiffel tower. To sum it up, one needs to visit the top of Eiffel tower. As a student probably climb up and feel exhausted but thrilled. As a mechanical engineer it was beautiful to see how a 3D truss could look so beautiful in real and become much more than just a truss! I will run out of words to mention beautiful in different ways and that’s what it felt when I looked at the Eiffel tower. With bidding good bye to Paris through Louvre in the night and it’s stunning beauty and of course having salted caramel once again on day#2 we were ready to board the overnight train to Cannes!

To be continued….

Bonjour France!

2014-02-08T13:16:00.002-08:00

Bonjour France!

If you’ve read my earlier blogs about South Korea and USA trips, you know how good my travelling events can get. I believe now it is customary for me to have some crazy thing happening during my travel to a new continent and Europe did not disappoint!

Heritage: Erasmus Mundus Partnership program provided me with an opportunity to study at Ecole Centrale de Nantes, Nantes, France as an exchange student for a period of six months. With inexplicable excitement, the time had come to big goodbye to Friends and Family and scratch off a few things from my checklist as the Euro trip was going to begin! After bidding goodbye to IIT Guwahati, I flew to Kuwait to visit my family after a really long time. Those 13 days with family passed faster than I could say “I wanna stay more”. It was a 15 day trip as such but as I said something interesting always needs to happen, I realized all international flights to Delhi were getting delayed or cancelled due to the Delhi fog and weather conditions. I was supposed to reach Delhi on 31^st Feb at 8:30 pm and catch my flight for Paris departing on 1^st Feb at 2 am from Delhi. It was a tight schedule and as concerned as family members always are, they told me change my tickets to reach Delhi 2 days earlier. With a lot of calls, calculations and friends help I finally got my tickets changed to the 29^th of January. It was going to be 2 nights and 3 days in Delhi alone. Frankly, the 2 nights in Delhi experience was nothing less than a 3 month internship experience abroad. Having heard so much about the capital it was surely intimidating to be there alone. However, the experience in Delhi was great! Sometimes we really underestimate the pleasure of being alone. I used to think travelling alone was depressing and lonely however it turned out to be great. It actually can be great everytime if you allow yourself to enjoy your own company now and then. Visiting the malls of Gurgaon and looking at various people, the way they were dressed and their way of life sure makes you ponder about a lot of things. It made me think about the diversity of India with beggars on one side and shopping malls on the other all being reflected in its justly called capital Delhi.

The Indira Gandhi International Airport has always been special! My first international trip (to Kuwait), my sophomore internship (to South Korea) and the latest, the exchange semester trip to France, all have been through the IGI airport. I had never flown through Air France before and I had got mixed reviews about this airline. I must say after flying with Qatar Airways, your expectations from the airlines really increases and it was but obvious that Air France was disappointing. It began with the luggage check-in. My check-in bag was exactly 23 kilos and there was absolutely no problem with that one. The Air France personnel was about to print my boarding card when suddenly a random person who was apparently their team leader tapped me on my shoulder from behind and told me to weight my laptop bag along with the hand bang. It was 2 kilos extra than allowance and god they pained me for that for 2 hrs! I mean who checks the handbags unless you are very unlucky! Thank god I had gone to the airport quite early. Had to throw away my dear food packets and reduce the weight before they allowed me to check in. I started hating Air France from that moment onwards. 2 kilos considering a student should have been allowed given that other flights allow an extra 10 kilos for etudiants.

In the 9 hour flight to Paris I thought I would sleep as the flight was from 2 am as such however, kids always ruin travel! One sweet looking kid showed his true colours as soon as the flight took off! The constant squeaky, cancerous, piercing sound of the kid’s cries royally screwed my sleep. With a bursting head I landed at Paris. Oh wait! Paris!! Who cares about the headache! I was in Europe!! It was too much to accept in that moment. The CdG Paris airport was huge! The way pAris was written was beautiful with the Eiffel Tower drawn in the “A” of Paris. It was raining outside and it was definitely cold! The excitement with which I removed my new winter wear clothes was like that of a kid removing the shiny wrapper of Kinder chocolate! The winter wear would be so exciting I had no clue. I am usually the ‘wear nothing but shorts’ kinda guy. Well that’s the reason I love summers more than winters however I was in love with winter wear like an infatuated teenager. With a few hours of wait I was on board for Nantes!

With just 45 minutes of flight and awesome chocolate cookies being served I became a little considerate to Air France finally. FYI It’s always the chocolates to change my mood :D I landed in Nantes and the ACCENTS (A Club of CEntrale Nantes for Travelling Students) member Audurey was there at the airport to pick me up with a tram ticket to travel to my accommodation. This is the most amazing club for social service I have seen. She gave me general information about Nantes and welcome kit with a bag of EC Nantes. Helped me with my luggage and I finally reached my accommodation. 59 Rue de Nancy, Nantes was going to be my abode for 6 months here.

Thomas Monganne, my landlord is pretty cool for a 40 something French guy. Thin and tall like almost any French guy he was very welcoming and made me feel at home. His English was comprehensible and I realized there wouldn’t be a lot of communication gap. The house was beautiful 80 meter square apartment with four rooms on the top floor and the kitchen and bathroom below. Interestingly the other 3 rooms are occupied by French, Spanish and Russian girls!! My landlord left me with this information and a humorous wink.

Nantes is a beautiful city. The most beautiful aspect of this student university town was it’s helpful people. I was told otherwise about French being helpful to foreigners however the exceptional case is Nantes and I am glad I am here. The first instance of help began with my trip to LiDL: The supermarket. In Nantes here, and I assume in other parts of France and may be even Europe, the shopping carts need 1 Euro to be inserted which you get back after you park the cart. I never knew about the fact that we could get back the coin so just like any other student on budget I decided not to take the cart. I went inside the market and after idling away in the isles for quite some time I approached one guy to ask him about salt and pepper. Accompanied by the guy was an old lady, Michelle, who spoke English really well and these two people were the sweetest people I have met. They asked me about the cart and I explained my predicament. After a good laugh, she handed over to me a fake euro coin which could be used for the carts out of her purse. It was a very small gesture but it touched me greatly. After shopping for a while I was in the queue for the bill and she told me to save the 20 cents for the bag and removed a bag and gave it to me. I had shopped a lot and the stuff was heavy. The most surprising thing that happened was they walked me back till rue de Nancy with my stuff. The lady was definitely 60+ and her gesture had categorically helped me realize how Nantes as a place was going to be.

Trotting in Nantes has its own sweet pleasure. The seven degree temperature, light rains and wind could either annoy you or make you feel ecstatic depending upon which day of the week it is. On Fridays and weekends when you decide to aimlessly walk in downtown you feel elated with such a weather. On weekdays during college you will curse the same. The European culture and architecture was visible through the streets of Nantes. The small windowed houses and streets with intricate façade makes one feel Europe in it's true essence. The beautiful Cathedrals, Restaurants, Historical places and Museums deserve hours and hours to be spent on them. It’s breathtakingly beautiful. I have to still see the Elephant of Nantes and I guess it’s gonna be very soon.

Ecole Centrale de Nantes for a student from IIT Guwahati turned out to be very small. The university is small however the place is really happening. There are some other universities too juxtaposed with ECN and you can see only students around there. The good part is you can speak in English and find many who can respond well. One interesting aspect that I discovered for myself are the cheap vending machines in college with Moccachinos and Hot chocolate in just 40 cents which is not bad at all.

I met Antonio Manco, a fellow Heritage Erasmus Mundus student who is as crazy as me. Friday night in Nantes turned out to be awesome with him. Have made a good bunch of Italian and Spanish friends here. Hope to strengthen our bonds over time.

Antonio and me

New Italian Friends

I also got the opportunity to meet Prathamesh Joshi, a DD from IIT Bombay. Pretty cool guy, very quiet as compared to me but a fun guy to travel Nantes with. He stays close by to my location and I thank god for that. Will explain the accommodation issue with Heritage later. For me it's mostly with Prathamesh for cooking, travelling and bakaring etc. Chu says he has no enthu for taking pics! I told him if he is with me, there will be pics :P

and that's Prathamesh!

I am just waiting for my bank card to arrive after which I will finally get a cell phone connection and most importantly the Eurail Pass. Can’t wait to begin the travel! Hoping for the best, let’s see what these 6 months have in store. Hope to learn some French. Till then Au Revoir!

The promise of constancy

2014-01-13T13:18:00.004-08:00

Promises! We make it and we break it. This New Year too began with a lot of hopes and a lot of a promises which are already breaking faster than they were even made. 2013 was a year full of memories. Some of these memories were outrageously fantastic and a few were ridiculously heart breaking. The period beginning with the 2013 New Year celebrations to Alcheringa 2013 is a time that passes swiftly with a new semester to begin with. With the acceptance of the US visa, followed by a crazy 36 hours delayed journey to the States it was exciting all the way. I am glad to have listened to my senior’s advice and finished off my GRE and TOEFL in the summers of 2013 itself. With the US joy ride over and done and a PhD offer in hand I was ready for the pseudo-penultimate semester to begin. I call it pseudo because to my surprise I got through the Heritage Erasmus Mundus Exchange program for Ecole Centrale de Nantes in France. The penultimate semester turned out to be my last semester at IIT Guwahati. After getting the news it was as though I went through those great phases of realization as stated in various scriptures. Firstly, I had to sink in the feeling of being accepted to the program. Secondly it was to calm myself down after being titillated every other second thinking about Europe. I then realized it was my last semester in college and then it was the phase of convincing myself that I wanted to accept it. Phew! What a joy ride it had been! I thought I was all done and then there was the whole duolingo experience of learning French and oh! It is fun to learn a foreign language. The Kolkata French consulate experience was also amazing where being an Erasmus mundus scholar was nothing less than being from MIT. Finally I was set to go back to Pune having consumed half of December in the paper work and formalities to be out of college! On a bittersweet note I landed to Pune only in a few days to realize it was a 9.91 spi this time. Damn! I could never be a perfect 10 in college! Had it in my checklist. Was terribly upset but well it was my all-time highest so that was a consolation. Also, moti always says the best of the things unexpectedly. I was as usual cribbing about my spi and she told me “there is much more to you than being a 10 pointer!” I don’t know if she said it casually or what but there was so much weight in it. I convinced myself of what an ass I am and I got back to normalcy :P I then got to attend the Indo-US conference organized by TCS on ICME thanks to my Purdue Prof. It was a great experience too. New Year’s Eve has been the most special and I don’t think it will ever be this special again. As this year proceeds a lot of relations will fade away and a whole lot more are gonna spring up. Amidst all of these there are a few bonds which I dearly wish, hope and expect are for life and won’t break ever. I wish the promise of constancy remains. With the Schengen visa, an accommodation after a lot of pain and a ticket to France I am all set to experience the European way of life! Before that, a small trip to Kuwait where after 2 long years I will meet dad and bro. A lot of surprises in store for me for sure, hoping for the best. Alvida India, Assalawalekum Kuwait!!

ICME Indo-US workshop

2013-12-19T20:24:00.005-08:00

It’s always an edifying experience to be a part of something which you know is way above your level. The same was the case with the Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) Indo-US conference cum workshop organized by TCS in Pune. The professors and delegates from the US and India are the gurus of their respective fields and to see them give their presentations and seminars about their work in their field activates and improves your gray matter like the eclectic combinations of metals forming enhanced alloys. Although mostly esoteric, I tried my level best to keep up with the seminars. Topics ranging from ICME protocols to material properties and discussions about durability and sustainability to databases and computational design, it was an intriguing and exciting experience. Being the only undergraduate present there with most of the people at least double my age, I was just trying not be stupid. I am not sure if I am supposed to reveal the details of the conference so I shall stay shut about the discussions.

The interesting part was I did not fail to live up to the stereotypical expectations from an undergraduate student. There was free and fast Wi-Fi which helped me update my windows 8 to 8.1 after clearing my proxy settings with help from some smart juniors [“netsh winhttp reset proxy” in cmd prompt in case if anyone is as stupid as me]. There were 20 varieties of dishes for lunch ending with fruit pudding, ice cream and chocolate mousse [which I did not pronounce as mouse like I usually do]. The buffet table was endless and there was no line at all. Delegates were more interested in the research discussions and I had to take the responsibility of keeping the buffet alive. I did not disappoint the Hyatt hotel butlers.

I was completely at sea as to how to begin discussions with such awesome people and realizing my vacant expressions my professor was kind enough to introduce me to everyone and that too very grandly. I sheepishly just asked them about their current research because there was nothing else that I could have contributed. I hate being stupid.

I have taken all the brochures and schedules with the list of the delegates who had attended the conference for my reference and now I shall get back to reading papers of some interesting people I met there. Au revoir!

Life @ IITG

2013-12-16T02:02:00.002-08:00

I can’t believe I am sitting and writing a concluding blog for my IITG life. These days have passed so swiftly that it has left me bewildered like the elderly who try to cope up the rapidly transforming technology. Phew! Treading down the memory lane just broadens my smile ear to ear. What an undergraduate life it has been!

In my freshmen year I had to deal with a wide range of labels. Spanning from a ghissu to a dassu I am just very glad that I truly did not give any weightage to any of it. I know most of the college guys reading this will give an eye roll in the most ludicrous manner possible but the truth is that people do not like to listen to a lecture. No matter how true it might be it’s sometimes better to be quiet. My incessant questions about aims and ambitions and goals and future life and so on and so forth were straight away dismissed without the slightest of thought or consideration. This was the case with the masses however then there were a couple of people who were ready to talk. Talk about all the topics they really wanted to and it was obvious that I got really close to them.

I guess every college student will have a story of their own with the basic elements more or less the same. These elements include an awesome hostel, the world’s best lobby, a lot of acquaintances, a few good friends, a crush or two and one or two closest buddies on whom you can count on anytime and anywhere. My college life included all of this too. In the end I am glad to have at least three names that spontaneously come to my mind when I think about true friends and I am grateful that I was able to find them.

IIT Guwahati is an eclectic combination of peers. You will find here every kind of student (or professor for that matter) that you can imagine. You need to be strong headed. You need to know what you are getting into and be consciously aware of all the actions and their implications. Well frankly this task is easy for most of us. Being aware. The problem is to be aware and to act on it. Most of the people I observed in this college were very talented and extremely smart. The problem with most of them was their laziness coupled with the college stigma of being a ghissu. People just did not want to be associated with an obvious label. As for me, I hardly cared about stereotypes or demeaning lingos which were just a cheap attempt by losers to anchor down the flying spirits reaching towards their goals.

Frankly, in the first half of my freshmen year I was nothing but ungrateful. I was whining and cribbing about the place, the peers, my not so awesome JEE rank, the fact that I was away from two of my closest friends and most importantly whining because I was not happy with myself. I had categorically decided that there is nothing that I will learn or take away from this place. Having thought about IIT Bombay as the archetype of the undergraduate engineering college since the beginning of JEE preparation, being in IIT Guwahati did not really boost my confidence.

So what did I take away from this place? Now when I look back and connect the dots, I realize that IIT Guwahati has silently helped me turn into a person that I could not have expected to become if I was in that dream college. With deep introspection I thought about this question and I had to just look at myself and realize that the answer was very simple. The answer was me. IIT Guwahati gave me an identity. An identity of an awesome (machau ) senior for a really average and relatively okay person like me. That which I know would not have been possible in Bombay. With every other person there getting admits and internships in the dream universities, a KAIST intern would have been hardly counted as an achievement. I am not comparing anyone or anything, neither am I talking about mediocrity. I just know it for a fact that I would have developed an inferiority complex which is the last thing I would have wanted in my undergraduate life. The kind of boost and energy (positive and negative) you receive from peers in IITG is life changing. You just need to be with the right people at the right time and I am glad I was able to do that wisely. All these external factors strengthened my internal desire of being associated with academia and slowly I transformed into someone who became self-sufficient in developing enough confidence and surplus enthusiasm while pursuing various tasks and really doing what I like and vice versa. This interwoven fabric of many reasons ultimately supports my decision of pursuing graduate school as well.

Getting through the Heritage Erasmus Mundus Exchange Program was totally unexpected. I definitely wanted it and that is the reason that I had applied as well but I felt as if I would not get it. I was probably just trying to be real. Getting to know the results brought a wave of joy followed by the tides of realization. I wish I could have been a part of the final semester or the finale season as some call it but I guess I have to come to terms with the current situation. It’s like playing the role of the supporting actor who gets killed a season before and the actor can just hope that the character is dearly missed.

I would conclude by mentioning that IIT Guwahati gave me a thousand reasons to hate it but then it also gave me a few overpowering reasons vetoing in its favour. It made me realize the fact that everyone is fucked up in some way or the other in life, but who is cribbing and who is happy is decided by what matters to them and what they choose to act on. I am glad I acted well.

Here is the link to a song I made about my College life

End of college life...

2013-11-16T23:16:00.004-08:00

As it’s time to bid goodbye,

I look back and see the result;

Four years it took for me to grow,

From a teen to an adult;

Never thought that I would feel this way,

Such repertoire of emotions;

I don’t even have “next sem” to say,

That hypothetical cushion;

The things I learnt, the world I shared,

With the best and brightest peers;

Will stay with me for eternity,

This place has been so dear;

It’s not that it’s the end of life,

But an end of phase it is;

That phase where we, explored ourselves,

Where we tried all of it;

The shit we did, the shit we spoke,

Makes me chuckle every time;

Crazy we are, with logics bizarre,

We set a new paradigm;

I know we won’t meet often now,

But whenever we do;

We know our eyes will dwell deep in past,

Remembering how it was with you;

I will miss this place, I will miss this world,

But I will miss you the most;

With wet eyes and a shivering smile,

To you I raise a toast;

Call it fate may be or destiny,

But I pay my gratitude;

To this place and to you my friend,

I am sure gonna miss you!