hello again

Its been a real long time since I last wrote anything here. I donot have a reasonable excuse except that I was just bored in general. Not that I have anything much to write about but whatever.
Its Christmas time so everyone is on vacation. But since I already had mine I am pretty much bringing myself to school everyday. Not that I have a lot to do , but oh well!! what other options do I have anyways??
Christmas this year was very different from last year when a good friend was visiting. This time around I went for a Bong party , a trip to the Vedanta Society of St Pittersburg , and tea party at my boss's house n in bed most of the time from cold n sore throat!.
I just realized a few days back that if one wants to realize how much time has flown by since whenever one should visit some really small kid. A kid who i remember as just being born a few months back can now crawl n sit :O . I never realized so much time had passed since his birth!!!!
One of my friends is currently in India and i am so wishing I was too.( I know I know i was just there , but seems I am missing home more this time around !) Is it cuz I am growing old , I wonder ??

I want to do something useful with myself, something creative , I just dont know what !!! Well.....

wasted!!

An email a couple of days back made me realise how far removed i have been from the rest of the world lately. Have you ever felt like you have a lot to do and so you donot do the things you would otherwise love to and then in the end land up not having done what you HAD to anyways.
if anyone has a suggestion how to deal with this .. let me know , Plzzz!!

aah i wish this phase goes away ....

on a brighter note .. I did watch Da Vinci Code .. i dont really know what to say!! but its amazing how much reseqrch Dan Brown must have done before he wrote the book!

real culture shock!!

lately I have somehow managed to come in close contact with high school kids.. the other day i went to judge a science competition and today we went to a high school to do a "chemistry show", basically do cool experiments to impress them ...
and the two experiences were soo different... the science fair was like any other in india .. except these guys have more electronic stuff to play with ... but boy .. todays expirience was a whole new thing. Oky note that today being 14th .. every kid i saw had bunch of roses and loads and loads of packets of gifts.(i wonder how many valentines they have) .although most of them where soft toys i saw someone with a Victorias Secret carry bag ... n to think they r in high school ... beleive me , if i hadnt seen the sign in front of the school i never would have know .. it looked totally like a kids hangout to me. To top this all off I saw these kids smooching in the hallway .That was by far too much for me to handle. I just couldnt help exclaiming out loud how different our school lives were.
Well that was on the surface .. once we got to our class and started off with the show these same kids were soo different.They were all oohing and aaahing about the same things that we would when we were in school and excited and childish and the rest that comes with growing up .. but not that grown up yet.. made me think : sure we have such different upbring but kids are kids everywhere in the world .wish i could go back to school again .. those days were good.
somehow today it made me feel proud of the fact that i am in graduate school ... hope the feeling lasts though!!

transported in time.

I am amazed at how bad my dads timming is. He called me up today while i was having lunch to tell me how much he was missing me at Saraswati Puja n guess wat happened .. I started telling Prasad about it and landed up crying n spoiling lunch for both of us.
But , that ofcourse was not the point of this post.
Saraswati puja has been celebrated in my house ever since I had " hathe kori" .. thats a bong funda where an elder holds ur hand to write the 1st time on saraswati puja so you turn out to be like here later on in life. Ofcourse what I remmeber of saraswati puja from my childhood is the fun. I would always wear a saree.. when we were little we had "ready to wear" sarree.. the cutest thing on the earth.. and every year without fail my maternal grandparents would come down from Kolkatta to do the puja .. all the kids in the colony were invited and we had the most amazing time chanting the mantras after my granddad(hewas the purohit) , and later having prasad and kichuri sitting on the floor. oh the most popular prasad was the coconut laddoo that my granny used to make.. god .. how i miss being a kid again..
the funny thing is the number of kids comming never decreased. We started off with having our friends over , then their sibblings started comming .. then the sibblings friends until at the last one we had just after i moved to Presidency we had kids who i didnt even recognise. For all the girls this was a chance to dress up in sarees i guess..
its saraswati puja tomorrow .. n my mom is still doing the puja .. only now its no longer on that grand scale.. times have changed .. all our frnds are in far off places and i guess my mom has lost the enthu too..and me .. true to typical desis in US tradition we will have a puja on saturday .:-) its fun in its own way .. last year we had Taquila shotglass for "dudh -er doyat" some eathern pot jisme dudh rakhna hota hai :-)

the aftermath of a car accident.

One feels horrible if one is involved in a car accident and although everyone around you assures you that its fine as long as you were not hurt there is this terrible sense of dread. Its only as days go by that it hits you what were you dreading. After you have called the cops n your car has been "quickly" towed away, you have resolved the issue , been slapped a small piece of paper with a hefty sum of money written on it which you have been asked to pay at the location also specified on that small piece of paper and everyone has left that you realise that you are standing in the middle of the road ona cold winter night waiting for one of your friends to come pick you up that it hits you, "You are stranded"!!! To make matters worse you might also have a gf with you who decides not to stop her flow of tears at all!!
Well , some kind soul does give you a ride home and you are almost oky when you have to call the Insurance... For some reason they want to ask you all the questions they can think of and at the end of it tell you " Someone will be getting in touch with you soon". That someone ofcourse calls you after 5 days (what with holiday time and all that where do u have agents free haan ?? ) in which time you have almost died of agony, constant calls , answering the same question a thousand time and the constant thought " If only .... " .Its amazing how many "if onlys" can one think of to prevent an accident in retrospect.!!
Anyways once the someone has gotten in touch with you you begin to hope that everything will be fine , but haha you wish !! A phone call to the garage two days before the car is due back reveals that they still havent got the parts to fix the car. Its amazing how they require 11 parts to fix a bumper that came off :D (and ofcourse all are original parts , hence the delay!!). So there you are still without car after 15 days .. n i was just the bumper!!!
Well this was our ordeal , but hopefully it isnt always this bad all the time :D

Status!!

I have finally finished all my coursework and have done reasonably okay too. My advisor is away for a month and so I am more or less relaxing although he did suggest a few things I should look at before the vacation is up! :) (Well as of now, I have "looked into " some and postponed most of it for another time ! ) Research is not really that bad although I did manage to scare a friend due to my last post. According to me the only major disadvantages of being a Graduate studnet are a) one doesnt have money to spare and b)one gets homework which effectively increases the workload 10 times.

It is getting pretty cold here too. There was a freeze warning yesterday. Oky now people living in Askler will probably chide me for claiming -1 C is cold but whatever.For me its so cold that I ask P to drive me to school nowadays.
I am really looking forward to a friend's visit. As part of my preparations I have collected some recipes , put out my tiny little christmas tree and made plans to clean my room :D . Tip about christmas tree shopping: Buy the decorations one day after chritmas when they come on sale and use it next year. I thought this was a pretty cool idea.:)
Oh, n I have decided to do some quality reading , n so now I am dividing my time between a) To Kill A Mocking Bird, b) How to Learn Marathi in a month. c)Research papers ,d) The argumentative Indian.

Btw , I wonder why its so difficult to buy a gift for men (especially the ones who "forget " to put perfume , argument being Deo does the job na !!! )

Merry Christmas guys !!!

"Wats up .. Nuthing Much ...!!"

Well, I am tird of the monotony of this whole process! Every single time I walk down the stairs .. walk out the door etc etc I get to hear the question and the saddest part is many a times the person has walked off even before i could have formed the most spontenous answer. This led me to wonder why people ask this question in the 1st place? Do u think these kinds of people would or do care about your answer?(Well I do ask question too and I know many a times even i dont care). Oky I understand that we are trying to be polite here but wont just a Hello suffice. Initially I used to think this was rather sweet that everyone wanted to know what was "up" .. but lately that feeling has been replaced by an aversion to the damned question!!(and the equally non commital answer).
But anyways .. apart from this I also realised that even if someone did want to know (ex my friends ) I absolutely have no answer. Why has my life become soo boring all of a sudden I wonder!! Everyone says the best time one has is in School. Well I am in school so how come its like this .. Beleive me I cannot recount one nice interesting experience that I have had in the past few months. Is this why people say Graduate Students are a different species??
The other day one of my Profs said only people without a "life" come to school on weekends. When asked if by that he implied that I didnt have a life his prompt reply was "But you are a graduate student". This has led me to wonder if Graduate School an d Life do not just go togetehr or is it something else??
which reminds me .. i should get back to my "non existant" state:(