"I don't have the poetry that you do. So your longing seems greater than mine. But it's not..."

How I wish I had the ability to compose a sher or a poem for every moment of unbridled joy, deepest despair, maddening passion, mind-numbing helplessness or soulful calmness I have experienced...

Perhaps, then, you would truly understand the rhythm of my heartbeat...

Perhaps, then, you could comprehend every grain of my existence...

And maybe, just maybe, choosing would be a lot easier...

-Aaliya

"Sometimes we reach a point where, in order to move on, we have to wipe the slate clean.." - The Beaver

I've reached that point. Need to clean the slate. Have to make a new beginning...

But some idiot wrote on it with a permanent marker! Can someone seriously be that stupid? How do you not realize how destructive it can be! How do I clean this crap now?

Help! :-O

From Summer to Fall..

You know the seasons are changing when the Starbucks lady stops asking you if you want your White Chocolate Mocha hot or iced..(the idea of iced WCM doesn't make sense in any case, but that's a different topic). Coffee Specials shift from Frapuccinos to Pumpkin Spice Lattes. Grocery store sales move from barbecue paraphernalia to Halloween decorations.

Nature follows a more gradual approach to ease us into the change. You may need a light jacket when you leave for work at 7 AM but you still get enough heat the rest of the day to let you believe it's still part-summer. The sun sets an hour early, but makes up for that by treating you to these brilliant hues of orange and red splashed across the sky so you can enjoy your drive back home. Trees shed their leaves but before they wither away, (if you're on the East Coast) you get to marvel at the most spectacular Fall colors you'll ever see.. There's a perfect balance in everything.. Always a yin to the yang..

Wouldn't it be nice if life was the same way? If everything was proportionate and justified? If the good came with the bad so that it didn't seem so impossible to bear.. There's something wrong in the design of the universe for sure. Right?

Or maybe we make it hard by adding our own variables to an already complex equation. Maybe we get too close to the expected outcome, not knowing how to accept any other alternative. Maybe things would be a lot simpler if we were all like Gautam Buddha- maintain a safe distance - from everyone and everything. No attachment = no pain. How simple can the equation get! Now if only someone deconstructed the "no attachment" part.. :P

As you get older, you tend to contemplate a lot on how you have lived your life- the decisions you made, the people you trusted, the paths you chose to follow. How did you land up where you are? Was it the most ethical and fair decision you could have made at that point?

What if you step back for a minute and think about the decisions you did NOT make, the people you did NOT trust and the paths you chose NOT to follow.. Would the story of your life have been any different? What exciting adventures did you miss out on? Or maybe you were saved from a destructive avalanche! Could it have gotten better or did you escape something worse? Or maybe life doesn't work that way- maybe all paths lead to the same unknown, elusive destination.. Maybe you eventually land up exactly where you're supposed to be- its just a question of choosing country roads where you get to enjoy the slow drive, or taking the express-way..

The seasons are changing for sure.. A whole summer has gone by- what have I missed..
A comeback post that has more questions than answers- that's not a good sign..

The Man in the Arena and Other Thoughts..

This was probably the worst Sundays I have ever experienced in a very very long time.. I'm not going to get into the reasons because that would mean using the blog as a Dear Diary and I want to try to avoid doing that as far as possible.. The world is not interested in my sappy stories, right? Anyway, so let me instead try the thing where I use writing as a means to lay out my myriad thoughts one by one in an attempt to deconstruct the mesh in my head. A Pensieve sounds fancier than a Dear Diary, eh? :-)

[Thought 1]

Today was one of those days where I realized how unpredictable life is. Not that I didn't know that before, but sometimes things happen that make the brutal reality of the situation take over your whole existence like an avalanche. Makes me wonder why the universe is designed in this way, though. Why is it that perfect moments seem to end so quickly whereas the worse phases seem to linger on forever?! Why is it that just when we have taken out our Lazy-boy and decided that we deserve to rest for a measly five minutes, we are called to the war-front all over again? Now don't give me the crap about learning to appreciate the good while it lasts! Just for today, I am tired of being grateful and learning to smell the roses and counting my blessings. It sounds very Oprah-like and I don't like her! :-P

[Thought 2]

Expectations. They say, if you want to learn to be happy, lower your expectations. In a disturbing way, that is true, especially of people. We expect from people we care about the most. We expect them to make us part of their life. We expect them to understand us and be there for us without being told. We expect them to stand up for us, to support us and to love us even when we are at our worst. But very few people are lucky enough to get someone who matches these expectations. Which is where all the problems arise. Of course, the easiest thing to do is to just be yourself and let others be themselves too. Accept people for who they really are instead of making them match the mould you have created in your mind about that relationship.

The same goes with life. I remember this TED talk I heard by Sir Ken Robinson where he says that we need to dis-enthrall ourselves from the natural order of things in order to really bring about a change. So true, right! Breaking away from the patterns we have created in our minds is the only way to allow new ones to take their place. But why is it that the sanest solutions are always the hardest to implement?

[Thought 3]

How many of you believe that we are always given signs which let us know whether we are on the right path or not? A dear friend and I were talking about it once- she was about to make a very big move from place A to place B and was in two minds about it. And somehow since the past few weeks, random things just kept falling into place in B and falling out of place in A - which was sort of a sign that it is indeed time to move. I have experienced that once before too.. Just one more element of mystery in the design of this universe, I say..

[Thought 4]

I was talking to this guy and he was telling me about the girl he is dating. He seemed to like her a lot. But in the course of our conversation about many things- he happened to mention how much he hates a particular profession, which coincidentally turned out to be her profession. Then he mentioned that he hates products of a particular company, which turns out to be the very same company she works for! I don't think he realized this, but it kind of hit me in an odd way. I know your profession isn't your life, but it does form a very large part of your day-to-day existence, right. In such a situation, how can you truly admire a person if you don't respect their profession?! Imagine talking to your partner about his/her day at work while in your head you detest the amount of money he/she makes because of their stupid degree or because you think the work they do is not at all significant! Is that okay, or are my ideas a little too idealistic for the real world?! :-)

[Thought 5]

This one has been bothering me for a few days now. I was playing chess with this person; and let me tell you, it is not a game I am very good at, simply because I have probably played it six times my entire life. Anyway, so I lost the two games I played with him and while he was teaching me what I did wrong, he told me he had understood "my game" in the first few moves I made. Two things he said - One, I am always waiting for the opponent to make their move and then trying to defend instead of attacking first. And sometimes in a game, offense is the best defense. Second, I never make my opponent think about what I am trying to do. Now I don't want to swear by this guy's analysis of my game-playing skills, but what he said somehow made me wonder about whether I incorporate the same strategies in life too? If yes, then there are some drastic changes I need to make.. I have always loved this quote by Theodore Roosevelt - "It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best he wins,and at worst he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly." Am I this Man in the Arena...?

A Measuring Stick for Life?

I am a scheduler by profession. According to my boss, they founded our group in my company about seven years ago because they needed people who would be trained to look at the big picture, instead of always trying to temporarily work around issues as they came, which is what Operations tends to do habitually in a company of this size. So essentially, an important part of my job is to think of how what we do today, impacts our tomorrow. If I fire people today because I am over-staffed, will I need them three months later? If I work overtime this weekend, will we be out of work next week? Things like that.. And for problems we notice to be repeatable or significant in nature, we know the issue needs a much deeper analysis - for this we seek the help of the Industrial Engineer - which is what I am by training.

You know one of the main reasons I like IE - it is because, by principle, IE's are supposed to be the fix-it people- which is something I have always loved to be! IE's have tools for everything- to determine root cause of a problem, to predict and account for inherent risks to a process, to determine how things are supposed to be versus how they are, to eliminate non-value added activities in a process, even to study human behavior. They may not always be effective in the first go, but if applied correctly, can really help lay out all the pieces of the jigsaw.

If you think about it, the above skill-sets are exactly what is required to solve all of life's complexities!
Make a new friend? - okay, look at the big picture - is this relationship going to be a season pass, or is it a lifetime membership? Invest your resources accordingly.
Trust too often and too soon? - make an Ishikawa diagram of what is wrong with your own brain that makes you do that - fix the root cause, and your failure rate will drop.

I understand that mastering the above techniques to, what crazed psychologists call, "whole-hearted living", would essentially make us akin to God - but hell, what if we all had a few God-like qualities? Okay, if not a lifelong plan, even the ability to foresee the next one year would be appreciated by many a humans, don't you think?! Life's mysteries be damned! :P

Talking of psychologists - people doing research in psychology, every-day human behavior and interpretation, social work, happiness (yes! people do research in happiness too!) like to come up with verbiage for what they think gives people a "sense of fulfillment" in life. I've heard of words like connection, compassion, vulnerability, choice, courage, purpose, meaning etc etc. Well, it's 2.15 AM on a Friday morning and my head is swirling with a ragoût of unasked questions, unwanted answers, questionable actions and unanswerable reactions; and I can come up with only two things every human being seeks out in this lifetime -
1. To be seen, really seen.
2. To know they are not alone.

If only someone invested their time and research grants on figuring out tools, real concrete tools, that would help us do that instead of beating about the bush all the time. If only we didn't have to untangle the mess and pave the path by ourselves all the time...

When you are home..

What is it that makes a place, home?

Every year, I go to India in December- it is almost like a yearly ritual, like a pilgrimage I must complete. I enter the Bombay airport (which I still call Sahar International; I can never get around to calling it Chhatrapati Shivaji International Terminus.. :P) and always find myself smiling all through Immigration, Baggage Claim and Customs, because I see the inherent Indianness of all the people come to the fore- the usual cutting of lines to be the first in the queue or fighting for every square inch of space around the baggage carousel- it is not irritating or strange, it is just the way it is supposed to be. As I exit the airport, I scan the crowd for a pair of hands waving frantically to attract my attention- my dad who painstakingly tracks my flight all through the seventeen hour journey, and arrives at the airport half an hour before the plane is supposed to land- even though he knows that the formalities do end up taking more than an hour. We hug, he takes the trolley from my hand and makes ten calls to the rented car driver announcing my arrival and asking him to pick us up. It has been the exact same routine now, four years in a row. It would actually be strange if this were to not happen some year- because this, the very essence of this moment, is what I call home.

Somehow airports have a way of letting you know instantly whether you are welcome or not.. Knowing that you are returning to a place where there is someone waiting for you; knowing that your arrival brings a smile to someone's face - that is what makes a place, home

Moving away from Rochester was one of the most-needed and necessary decisions of my life. But regardless of everything, this was a place which taught me all there was to learn about myself and about people - it showed me the best and worst of situations and it also tolerated me through my own best and worst. Knowing that a place has seen you in your nicest, meanest, friendliest, angriest, happiest, saddest, proudest, weakest moments and still accepts you the way you are - still helps you discover the cafe with the best coffee, or the cutest bookstore, or yummiest pastries for those midnight cravings - that is what makes a place, home.

I think we are all on a quest to find our own home. To find the place or those people that make you feel as if you belong, as if you are wanted. But in the face of the unknown and uncertain, how do we know we have reached our destination? Is it truly a matter of chemistry - sometimes the missing pieces of the jigsaw just fit - and you keep going until you have completed the puzzle? Or is it a matter of trained acceptance - learning to make a place your home; learning to nest and see the beauty in imperfection?

How do you know you are home? When the wandering mind beckons and urges you to move on, how do you know that it is time to stop?

A handmade greeting card.
A phone call from a colleague to your boss, just to tell him you're doing a good job.
A weekly SMS from a friend from another continent asking about your day.
Reliving happy days from the summer.
The comfort in familiarity.

Whoever said it was the big things that count! Most people lead crazy, hectic, busy lives with a thousand things to accomplish each day. But even in the madness of it all, the ones who choose to take out five minutes for you- those are the people that matter; those are the people for whom you matter...

Weekends tend to be very contemplative nowadays - I guess the week goes by so fast that there is suddenly a lot of time to think without work! The good thing about that is that I'm learning to appreciate solitude- which I think everyone should know to do. The downside though, is that the introspection is often about where I am versus where I thought I would be! And as a rule, human tendency is to never be happy with the present!

Oh well... As always, Calvin says it best...

When a lonely bird walked the sands of (what is now) Wyoming, 125 million years ago, he did not know that his seemingly insignificant parakeet-like foot prints would one day be an exhibit in one of the largest museums of natural history in the world; and people would be staring at the piece of metamorphosed rock he once walked on, enclosed in a glass box, with confused amazement. The foot-long bird was probably only trying to understand how to be strong enough to survive in a world of dinosaurs.

Jupiter is up there in the Solar System with his 63 (source: Siri) / 64 (source: Wiki) / 66 (source: astronomer in Cal Academy of Sciences) moons, trying to make sure they all exist as one happy family. Little does he know that every day actual living people on a planet called Earth, not too far away from where he is, are looking at him through some ancient asteroid-like telescope, amazed at the fact that they can see not one, but four of his moons at the same time!

The point being - the world is an unfathomable, highly-randomized, yet probabilistic experiment which we mortals think is controlled, but no one has been able to provide evidence to that effect yet. In a place of such realities which we cannot even perceive, who is to say where the tiny experiments we run on a day-to-day basis will take us?

Ten years down the line, I could own a famous patisserie/cafe in downtown Manhattan..
I could also have my own travel show on Discovery, where I get paid to travel where I want and take a thousand pictures a day..
One day, some publishing guy could read this blog and think that I am decently talented enough to write a book that is NOT about a conservative girl from a small town in India, who learns the ways of the world in the big bad city (which seems to be a recurring theme among first-time female Indian authors)..
Or maybe one day I could finally get to do research on the psychological complexities of the brain which make people do what they do and behave the way they behave..
And finally, I could get to give a talk at a TED conference...

On a day that is singularly significant because it's my birthday, who is stopping me from wishing for one of these wishes to come true, as I blow the candles on my cake?

The world is highly randomized, after all.....and I aced my Design of Experiments course... :):)

Happy Birthday to Me !! :)

The Tale of the Juju

It all started when my cousin told me about ten years ago about how wishing on a sardarji brings you good luck. We were sitting in the Mumbai local train, when she saw a sardarji uncle enter the train with his family- she instantly turned to me with her index and middle finger interlocked and in all the seriousness of a sixteen year old, asked me to tap on her head thrice and "release" the lock! Were turbaned, paratha-eating, big-hearted Punjabi gentlemen around when the east-Africans invented this "sacred ritual" while dancing around a holy pyre in the wee hours of a full moon night chanting "Obala obala....!!" Who knows! But for my sister, this was the best and only form of juju she knew!

I, as it turns out, am an even bigger juju-believing junkie than she is, because I took the story a step further. Don't laugh, because this is important. So, there is one really sweet-looking, small-built sardarji who always wears a red turban and lives somewhere close to where I stay in India. I saw him once, riding his cycle on a very busy intersection- I was returning home from a particularly terrible practical exam and like an obedient sister, did the tap-your-head-thrice-and-release-the-lock ritual! By some stroke of luck, I got an A in that exam! And just like that, he became my most favorite juju-sardarji uncle in the whole world! I see him very rarely, mind you, which only adds to the angel-like charm I feel for him. Over the years, there have been many such objects and people which have been delegated to a similar divine stature - a yellow UCB T-shirt I got as a gift (which I wore once during my entire board exams!), my mom (if I argued with her before leaving the house, my day went bad!), blue Scorpios (yes, those Mahindra SUV's in India), shooting stars (I've only seen one till now, but it was so awesome that I almost forgot to wish!) and many other things! Friday, the 13th and wishing on fallen eyelashes were too common for me- what is special about discarded hair, right!

Before you dismiss me as a crazy fanatic, let me assure you that I do understand the science behind it - it is an extension of the placebo effect - a strong (even irrational) belief in something which causes the perception of a therapeutic reaction.The other aspect of it is that unlike a true scientific experiment, in such cases, one keeps record of only the hits and comfortably disregards the misses each time. But then again, who said I was trying to prove my theory using science? Trying to prove the juju is almost like dissing the juju in their face, and you never diss the juju!

Where do all these crazy beliefs come from? Why is it that we follow logic and reasoning to describe almost all phenomena around us, but still reserve some space in our minds for these superstitions? The fact is that we cannot use rationale to explain everything. The fact is that no matter how practical we may be, we still want to witness miracles every day...

Maybe my data will yield good results..
Maybe the interviewer will like my personality, even though I may not have the best experience..
Maybe there wasn't a camera at that last traffic light..
Maybe he will finally stop pretending that he doesn't care..

There is a very big divide between things we can and cannot control. Bad things do happen to good people. And sometimes, you can't help but want to be a little bad, but still not have to pay for it. And while the nice, grown-up thing to do is to learn to accept things we cannot change, it is never an easy thing to do! The kid in us wants to believe that maybe if we wish hard enough, we will get that toy. Sometimes we need that tiny push from within; sometimes we need to know that while all the odds may be against us, we still can hit the jackpot....if only we see that red sardarji on the cycle!

Find a penny, pick it up; and all day long, you'll have good luck! :)