Judgement Day

After six sleepless nights in Mumbai, the place I call home, Judgement Day arrived for me. I promised myself in the morning while I was having tea, "No matter what happens today, the first thing I'll do after coming home is write about it on my blog".

I couldn't sleep as usual. After rolling around in my bed for hours, I got frustrated at 6.30 am, so I got up and watched some tv till 8. Got ready and left by 9. I had to go to my accountant first, to collect the revised financial summary. Whenever mom felt that I was nervous, she started some topic and calmed me down in the taxi. At least it took my focus off the subject and reduced my heart-rate. Everything was in order at the accountant's place, we began the taxi ride to the other side of the city. I knew it would take at least an hour, we would reach one hour before the given time and that was exactly how I wanted it to be.

As we pulled over at the consulate, I saw the queue. It stretched along the walls of four buildings. It was long, we had an hour. Just then Rohit called up to check on me. I had received calls from all the people, who I had expected would call, in the past 24 hours. Rohit kept saying, "Don't mention NASA, say that you are coming back, ISRO chalega". My head was a cacophony of panicked voices. We began to move forward slowly. Just then Anurag (forgot his surname) turned to me and asked, "Are you applying for a student visa?"
"Yes", I replied and that sparked a conversation between us. I noticed a girl in front of us constantly turning around and looking at us. She was with her parents. Later she introduced herself to me as Akshata Hegde. I also noticed two girls and a boy standing behind us.

The boy standing behind us joined in the conversation at some point. While we were talking, this guy utters the word "F**K" in front of my mom and Akshata's parents. A voice in my head said, "What did he say? Oh! You have got to be kidding me!" Anurag and myself looked at each other. There was a brief moment of silence after which we never gave that guy a chance to butt into our talks, especially if he was going to say those words.

Anurag, Akshata and myself really hit it off. We started making each other laugh. I felt comfortable around them, comfortable enough to tell them that I'm doing my undergrad from St.Petersburg and will fly directly from there once I'm done. Anurag seemed like the type of guy that you would need around you during a crisis, a guy who knew stuff and wouldn't hold back. Akshata was really sweet, had an amazing smile and would speak her mind. We joked around about how the how they are making a new airport in Mumbai, so the old one can be used for the new consulate considering the queue we were standing in. I can now imagine how many applicants maybe applying every year. Anurag asked me about my views on luck and I told him that it depends. One day luck may play a 50% role, the next day it might be 99%. Akshata liked the answer, "I liked the way you put that", she said, "Very true". Both of them freaked me out every ten minutes about how my case was a unique one, something the visa officer would question me about. Not many people do aerospace engineering from Russia then switch to the USA for masters. I might be the first one ever. But in the next ten minutes, they relieved me in some way or the other. Then, Anurag and me would tease Akshata about how much shopping women have to do and she was probably thinking about what to buy that very moment.

We entered at 12.30 pm, after 90 minutes of baby-steps. After I passed through the security check, they dug up my application forms and handed them over to me. I then went for a fingerprint check and submitted the forms along with my passport and I-20(admission document) at the counter. My token number was 918. All I could do now was wait, alone. Anurag and Akshata were nowhere to be seen. I sat in the first row. There were around 50-60 people sitting, waiting for their number to be called out. At 1.10, I heard 918 and headed for window number 17. I saw Anurag and Akshata standing in a line as I walked past them. Akshata waved at me, but I was too late to react to her thumbs up. She turned away.

I was second in my line. The visa officer was a female in her mid 30s maybe. I had a broad smile on my face. Everyone who knows me, knows that I am a ladies' man. The guy in front of me entered and was asked to show quite a few documents. He was rejected!!!! My heart-rate, my pulse-rate, my blood pressure, maybe even my sugar-level increased. As I opened the door, the lady asked me, "Is that a child over there?"
"Yes", I answered hoping that she would grant me the visa for my correct answer.
"Can you please send her in before you if you don't mind?" she requested me.
I instructed the girl and her mother to enter ahead of me. They were done in about thirty seconds. In those thirty seconds, I tried to say every prayer possible. I mixed up the verses of one prayer, didn't realise where I started it or where it should end, I just kept saying some verse.
After they were done I entered.
"Good Afternoon"
"Good Afternoon Ma'am. How are you?"
"I'm fine. So, why are you applying to the USA?"
"I'm applying for a student visa to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign"
I'll never forget the reaction she gave me to that. When I said the university's name, she gave me a "can't reject you" look.
"Which other universities had you applied to?" she asked.
"Illinois Institute of Technology and Penn State University."
"Eleven? Did you say eleven?" she asked in a higher volume.
"No, ma'am, I said Illinois"
"Who will be funding you're education?" was her next.
"My family members" was my vague answer.
"What do they do?"
At this point, I was actually wondering how many family members I have.
"My father has his business and my mom's a housewife. But, we have some retirement money kept aside for my education. That's what we'll be using"
That was exactly what she wanted to hear.
"OK. Here you go", she handed over my I-20 back to me. "Your passport will be couriered to you."

I exited with a smile, realizing that I had achieved something that took me two years on the whole, right from the start to my TOEFL preparation in 2006. I hugged mom, called up most of the important people in my life. I looked for Akshata and Anurag, but couldn't find either. Luckily, I met Anurag further down the road and we exchanged experiences. All three of us had got the visa.

It's amazing how two strangers you meet can have an impact on your mood, on your state of mind, especially at testing times such as these. I wouldn't want any other two people in place of them at that moment. Everything seemed balanced, everything seemed chaotic, everything turned out just the way we wanted it.

Desperate measures

After a tiresome week, I'm home. The past week has included an encounter with the police in St.Petersburg. I was on my way to shop for some vodka and chocolates for home when three policemen asked me for my documents. In Russia, a foreigner must always carry his passport,visa and registration with him at all times, unlike the USA or UK. This is because of the countless illegal entry points to Russia from all sides. I realized that I didn't have my registration with me. I normally keep it in the passport, but on that day I had submitted my registration to the foreign department in my university and was left with the xerox, which I forgot to place in the passport. I took a ride with them to the police station. There were two Uzbek criminals sitting next to me in the car. The cop in front turned and asked me, "India, right?" I replied positively and that sparked a friendly conversation between us. The two Uzbeks started whispering stuff to each other which angered the officer. He took his stick and whacked one of them, "Shut the f**k up! Don't disturb me when I'm talking to my respected Indian guest". I was starting to get comfortable and knew exactly what I would have to do once we reached the station. Everybody got off except one of the officers and me. He asked for 2500 roubles, but I had been there for five years and knew my way around. I negotiated to 1000 roubles. I could have easily refused to pay him and spend the night there. In the morning, after confirmation from my university, I would be free after paying a penalty fee. But I had to catch a flight the next day, that was my headache. He accepted the money and shook hands after introducing himself to me. At the end of the day, I wasn't too happy about the whole incident but was content with the way I handled it.

Corruption is a tricky thing. At times, I tend to defend it. A constable who is paid a lowly wage and has to feed his wife and three kids has no other option but to take bribes from time to time. What makes corruption bearable and justified? Instead of paying up for a speeding ticket at some government office the next day, one can pay the officer immediately and the officer can accept. That's understandable! But if you want to get away with theft or murder, the officer and the person bribing him need to contact me for the position of "experimental space monkey" becasue they don't deserve to be on this planet. But desperate times call for desperate measures. The "desperate measures" part should be controlled.

Out of the darkness

When life comes rushing at you from out of the darkness, who will you choose to face it with?

Will it be someone you trust?

Will they be wise?

Will their love for you help them guide you to the light?

Or will they lose their way in the darkness?

Will they make noble choices?

Or will that person be someone untested, someone new?

Life comes rushing at you from out of the darkness.

When it does, is there someone in your life you can count on?

Someone, who will watch over you when you stumble and fall.

And, in that moment, give you the strength to face your fears alone.

- Lucas quotes from One Tree Hill - Season 4 Episode 6

Scouting for love

Most people fall in love, and get married. But what happens when you don’t fall in love? An arrange marriage is an option. That gives you the chance to find love after you get married. Some, including me, see an arrange marriage as a risk.

One of my childhood friends, who is around three years elder to me is hunting for a bride. He’s been undergoing the interview process (that’s what I call pre-arrange-marriage stuff) for like ten months now. He keeps emailing me and telling me stuff about the arrange-marriage side of life. He’s not the kind of guy who can settle down and adjust with any kind of girl. He has never even been in a relationship in his life. He lost his father when he was young and his mother isn’t forcing him to get married, but he’s 26, so she isn’t saying “we’ll wait” either. So, the scouting began for my friend a while back now and he hasn’t even got close to liking a girl. He mailed me a few weeks back and it didn’t look good. I deleted the mail but remember most of the sentences, which were really striking. He still feels that he’s lost his chance to fall in love, that now he’s out of options and advised me to try to settle down with someone that I love. Good advice, but apart from that I completely disagree with him. Firstly, he’s just 26. Yes, I said ‘just’. It isn’t the end of the world for him. All he needs to do is find new avenues to meet people. He’s working, so I told him to do so through his line of work. Secondly, if he isn’t ready to get married, he shouldn’t even think about it. That would just make everyone around him unhappy. And finally, things turn out the way they are supposed to. If he does find someone and settle down with her through the “interview process”, she could turn out to be ‘The One’. That’s what I believe and that’s what I told him. He hasn’t replied, which is good because that means he heard what I said and is considering it.

I can’t wait to get to India and see him pretend he has everything under control. I hope I can support him whenever he needs me.

The mood pendulum

Moods are part and parcel of one’s daily life. I always complain that women are too moody at times. But that isn’t true. Most women just let their mood dictate terms to them. Men can’t have any of that.

I woke up today feeling awful. When you are in such a condition, you wonder whether your mood will rub off on to other people around you or will it be the other way round. If someone messes with me when I’m low, then God help that person. But mostly I like to be left alone when I’m down. I choose the people I would like to speak with because I know who can change my mood for better and who can for worse. But sometimes, there’s no better shrink than a mirror. There’s nothing that some alone-time, a walk in the rain, a shower, a drink (just one) or some meditation can’t fix.

Life deals you the cards. You decide whether to play or fold. What’s more important is that at some point you have to decide whether to put all your money in or wonder what might have happened if you had. Learn to play poker!!!

Hope, faith and belief play an important role and so do destiny, fate and luck. When darkness falls, you could sit on your ass and wait for the sun to rise or you could look up to the skies and let the stars show you your way home.

The Chaos Theory

The Chaos Theory - One of my favourite theories that can be explained with the simplest of examples. A theory which even the dumbest man on earth can understand.

The flapping of a single butterfly's wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month's time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn't happen. Or maybe one that wasn't going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)

A student forgets to set his alarm clock for 8 am on the previous night. The next morning, two of his friends wait for him at the bus-stop. They turn up at the lecture thirty minutes late. The professor detains them after class in order to punish them. As a result, the professor gets late while going home. His wife isn’t happy that he’s late as they were supossed to go out. They end up having an argument. The next day, he’s in a very bad mood and decided to take it out on the students. He gives them the toughest of questions in a test and fails each and every one of them.
None of this would have hapenned if the student had set his alarm clock for 8 am.

One random act causes another…. causes another….. causes another….. and then the pattern emerges.

An early pioneer of the theory was Edward Lorenz whose interest in chaos came about accidentally through his work on weather prediction in 1961. Lorenz was using a basic computer, a Royal McBee LGP-30, to run his weather simulation. He wanted to see a sequence of data again and to save time he started the simulation in the middle of its course. He was able to do this by entering a printout of the data corresponding to conditions in the middle of his simulation which he had calculated last time.
To his surprise the weather that the machine began to predict was completely different from the weather calculated before. Lorenz tracked this down to the computer printout. The printout rounded variables off to a 3-digit number, but the computer worked with 6-digit numbers. This difference is tiny and the consensus at the time would have been that it should have had practically no effect. However Lorenz had discovered that small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome.

For a dynamical system to be classified as chaotic, it must have the following properties:
- it must be sensitive to initial conditions,
- it must be topologically mixing, and
- its periodic orbits must be dense.
Just a small change in the initial conditions can drastically change the long-term behavior of a system. Sensitivity to initial conditions means that each point in such a system is arbitrarily closely approximated by other points with significantly different future trajectories. Thus, an arbitrarily small perturbation of the current trajectory may lead to significantly different future behaviour.
Sensitivity to initial conditions is popularly known as the "butterfly effect", so called because of the title of a paper given by Edward Lorenz in 1972 to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. entitled Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas? The flapping wing represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena. Had the butterfly not flapped its wings, the trajectory of the system might have been vastly different.

Initial conditions…. Strange attractors….. Deviations from the norm…. UTTER CHAOS!!!!

The Reason(s)

I was scheduled to finish my Bachelors in June. I wasn’t ready for what life threw at me back then. It’s almost December and I’m still here. There are two reasons for my tragedy. One of them is bad luck, the other one is me not working hard enough.

The bad luck part can be explained easily. One of my professors got sick in my final semester, he didn’t take class for around three months. Then near the end of the semester, he left a note on the faculty notice board. He was back and had little time to complete the scheduled classes, so he decided to cram it up into 3 days. We had to do 11 labworks in 3 days. Unfortunately, I never saw the note, and nobody told me about it before the three days got over. The professor was very rude and decided that he wouldn’t even consider extra classes. If he would have, maybe I would have been given that credit.

The part where I blame myself for not working hard enough is difficult to explain. I usually am hardworking, especially academically. I wasn’t ready with my project in June, simple as that. I’ve been told that the project is tough, requires a lot of research, but that’s no excuse. After I was told that I would have to stay back and complete the project, I put in a lot of effort. July and August are considered to be months dedicated to rest and vacationing. I got mine at the Russian National Library. I was doing something that I should have done months back, research, research and more research. My project wasn’t bad in June, but after I was done with my research, I realized how much better I’ve made it.

It’s almost December and I’m almost done with both, my credit and my project. The past few months have taught me lessons that I couldn’t have learned in any other situation, at any other time. But the job isn’t done yet. Testing times lie ahead, only this time, I am ready.

Phone-a-friend

The following conversations took place in the last few weeks :

Friend 1: Ashwin Jadhav, when are you coming here (India)?
Me: Soon.
Friend 1: That’s what I’ve been hearing for the past 4 months.
Me: Oh. Then, sooner than that.

Friend 2: Hey, come to India soon so that you can ask me out.
Me: Why bother? You will say ‘no’.
Friend 2: At least get your ass here so that I can say ‘no’ to your face.

Friend 3: When are you planning to come here (another country)?
Me: Maybe around the 1st or 2nd week of *******.
Friend 3: Ashwin, if you come here and not talk to me or ignore me….?
Me: Then…then what?
Friend 3: … I’ll hit you!

Friend 4: When are you finishing?
Me: Soon.
Friend 4: Are you doing a project for your Bachelors or your PhD? Why is this taking so long?
Me: The project’s complicated dude. It involves a lot research and it’s rarely used in today’s aircrafts.
Friend 4: If you screw it up this time, I’ll find a job, just so that I could fly to St.Petersburg and kick your ass.

Friend 5: Good Morning. How are you? Hope to see you here next week.
Me: I’m good. How are you doing? Next week? No ways!
Friend 5: Bitch! You better tell me when you are coming for sure right now.

People are so 'nice' now-a-days. Just a simple "I miss you" would have been enough.

Religion-wise

Religion is something every Indian has, built into his/her system since birth. I’ve been asking myself why it plays such an important role in modern-day life and still haven’t found any answers. There have been riots, mini-wars, murders, acts which are more than sinister, in the name of religion. My question is “what would have happened if all men belonged to one religion - humanity?” Humanity still does exist, but it deserves a place much higher in today’s world.

I’ve been going to temples, churches, even mosques sometimes since childhood. My parents are both Hindu, but my father is a Maharashtrian and my mom is a Gujarati. If you’re Indian, or have any idea about our religions and castes, then you’ll know what I mean. My grandmother (mom’s mom) is a catholic, which makes things very interesting. Both my dad’s parents belong to the same caste and religion though, which kind of doesn’t balance things out religion-wise in our family. I’ve had nicknames ranging from ‘fruit salad’ to ‘mixed breed’ to ‘hybrid’ - a result of cross-pollination to ‘ash’ – something you get after anything regardless of its colour, shape or size is burned. I’ve never heard a single word against any religion ever taken in my house. Everybody is involved, everybody goes to the temple, to church, everybody prays. It’s funny, when you’re brought up in this world, how the outer-world looks. A place where there are quotas in schools and colleges for a particular religion, a place where you are asked which God you pray to before you agree to a date, a place where a bullet will not ask you which religion you belong to. I’ve gone to interviews and given the boldest of answers when it comes to religion. An interviewer once asked me which religion I belonged to and I answered “No religion, sir, I’m just a human being.” It was a role in a catholic play and I got the part.

For me, God is God. It doesn’t matter where, with whom and why I’m praying, I always pray to the same God. He always looks the same, answers my questions (sometimes with a slight delay) and blesses me and my family and friends. Now, all my parents are waiting for is for me to marry a Russian girl to really spice things up at home religion-wise. If she were to be orthodox or a protestant, then we could have our own soap-opera.

Now I'm living in your afterglow

Sometimes you can't describe what's going through your mind. But a melodious tune and meaningful words combined together does you a favour. I was browsing through a friend's videos today and heard this song. Can't get enough of it. Truly a masterpiece of a track. Here's my song of the moment.

Here I am, lost in the light of the moon that comes through my window

Bathed in blue, the walls of my memory divides the thorns from the roses

It's you and the roses

Touch me and I will follow in your afterglow

Heal me from all this sorrow

As I let you go I will find my way when I see your eyes

Now I'm living in your afterglow

Here I am, lost in the ashes of time, but who owns tomorrow?

In between the longing to hold you again

I'm caught in your shadow, I'm losing control

My mind drifts away, we only have today

Touch me and I will follow in your afterglow

Heal me from all this sorrow

As I let you go I will find my way

I will sacrifice 'til the blinding day when I see your eyes

Now I'm living in your afterglow

When the veils are gone, as I let you go, as I let you go

Touch me and I will follow in your afterglow

Heal me from all this sorrow

As I let you go I will find my way, I will sacrifice

Now I'm living in your afterglow

Bathed in blue, the walls of my memory divides the thorns from the roses

It's you who is closest