From the previous post...

"Why did I do this?" is a question I do ask myself sometimes... I mean I wasn't that cool about ACTUALLY coming down to a far away land... I was also not sure if I was doing the right thing... Yeah I knew that I need to go to a great school atleast once in life, and after 2 1/2 years of work ex I wasn't really sure about going to the IIMs ( not to mention that it is very very difficult to get into one and I simply didn't have that much time to prepare for them... again :P).

I did it coz I wanted to do it all by myself. I have always had this picture of me standing without any help facing all the brunt that is possible.. well not really, but in some ways I wanted to give myself a test and see for myself if I could do it all by myself... All the paraphernalia around me should be my creation.... no legacy to boast of. In fact what added to the kicks was a fleeting risk factor behind joining this course... people who cared about me weren't quite sure about this course... which kinda made me go for this even more... In cliched terms, I wanted to create my own tests, make them risky, and then take them... and maybe pass them too :P


At UIUC's Alma Mater Statue
(With arms wide open... Bring it on!)

This might sound a lil hedonistic but I guess thats how I am! I am usually not on an 'EgoTrip' trying to think highly of me, but yeah i have my own highs... I had one such thing in the past... I bunked a semester of Engineering mostly for kicks, having a good reason helped me then. This time was no different. The stakes were high again , it was about the next step in my career, the rewards were high and so was the cost of giving up a decently forming career to take a 'lift'.

Maybe I mess it up, but most probably I think I should be able to pull it off...

In Aerosmith words I always want to be 'Living on the edge'...

Continued from last post...

If I were to maybe sum up US (only all that I have seen of it) in few words, I can shortlist a few contenders...

a) Keeping the door open for the person coming behind you
b) Multi cultural society ( generally accepting for all sects)
c) Skyscrapers
d) All types of cars ( not that there aren't in other places, but here U have almost All types of cars)

But I think if there is something that maybe represents the US as a society (again as much as I have seen), I would say it's their buses here. Not quite what people might expect, but I have truly not found anything as apt as this to portray the cukture that people have here...

It was my first day on the buses here, and I did not have my University ID as yet... we climb into the bus (here the tickets are sold by the driver himself) and move towards the driver. Here is more or less what the conversation was like...

Driver (D) : Good Morning!
Me (M) ( kinda taken aback coz I havent been wished by a bus driver in my life) : Good Morning! I don't have my University ID... what should I do?

D: Oh! in that case you would need to buy a ticket from me! I am sorry but I hope you make ur Univ ID quickly...
M: ok ... How much do I have to pay?
D : you can do with a Dollar.
M: thanks .. here ...
D : Thanks ! have a good day...

I don't know how educated that guy was.. I kinda think he should be at least a 12th pass...
but his manners pleasantly surprised me... people got on the bus.. and got off... usually people thanked the driver while getting off and he would wish them a good day... people here usually wish each other.. smile while crossing people (even if they don't know each other).... maybe this is because I am in a campus and things might be different in a city ( I wd go crazy if in New York every passing person starts wishing me! )

The buses here have a unique feature.. they 'kneel' by lowering the 'steps side' of the bus, for people with disability, old people or any one requiring a lower platform bus. Not that this is 'rocket science' but this is very demonstrative of the respect given to every human. There are special areas in the bus for prams and handicap people... and the bus kneels for all of them. (although we in India do have a 'viklang' seat but I never saw a 'viklang' sitting on them... viklangs in India either don't get on to buses, or they stand with everyone)

At a bus stop (wherever there is one) you can find either a time table pasted, or an electronic status display for buses and when they are expected... Honestly, it is only here that I have been 'made' to be punctual, and I have started to expect the same from others :P

To sum it all up, I think the major difference I found between this place and mine is the respect given to human life, and the quality expected from everyone. For the diversity of cultures here (which is far more extreme than the one in India) people are a lot more tolerant, in fact even welcoming of people from across the world. You can (at least usually) trust the person in front of you. There is an amicable environment.. conducive for people to.. grow... maybe innovate, invent, and all that ... ( does the bigger picture come across now?). And the thing which kinda pinches is that most of these things don't require much money! just a culture... I wish we could copy these things from them rather than their fashion, music, slangs, accent ... I think they create value... Lets copy them there if we need to... or rather, using a popular sentence 'Do your own thing'!

Its been more than a month now in the US, and has been quite a ride since the start!

I have often been asked what is the difference between this country and mine...
My brother pops this question out every now and then...
well, in the time that I have been here and what I have observed, is probably best explained through the following experiences I had...

I entered the New Delhi airport after saying bye to mom, dad, bro, nani (granny), mama (uncle), mami (his wife), dada (elder cousin)... that moment I felt like being separated from my flesh and blood! I live with them and for them! is what I am going for something worth giving that all away?
I felt that the purpose of living your life is for your family... your people with whom you share your happiness, sorrows and all...

Inside the airport, when we lined up at our gate to enter the aircraft, all the passengers were asked to take their passports out... everyone took out their passports, there were many people and as many passports all around me... I looked around me and saw a group of French tourists take out their passports, then a Portuguese couple took out their, the Thailand boy took out his passport, the German traveler took out his, then the Spanish guy, the American ... passports were all flashing in front of me, and everyone was talking to their people in their own language... I felt like someone all alone with no one by my side... no one to look at with a sense of belonging... no one... my own... It was then when I looked at my passport, and as I read 'Republic Of India', I could feel the whole nation standing right with me... the echoes of thousands of people, just like in a stadium, all around me as if saying 'we are all right beside you my boy'... my passport was the only thing that gave me my identity in that moment. It was my belonging to a nation... my right to a land...

Reached Vienna.. my first stop... I had to take another flight to Chicago from here... This place was different.. majority of people (for the first time in my life) white, and there I was with another Indian by my side, standing in a sea of white people... we were walking in the airport, and we bump into a poster of Longiness watch which had Aishwarya Rai on it! India had arrived...

There on, I was not just Ankit, or the numerous nicknames that I had been know with.. I was an Indian. What ever I did, said would invariably be linked to me, my nation, my people... Had to be ready to shoulder that responsibility... its not as if u take it on you, it just comes... you have to stand up whether you like it or not...

To be continued...

Shoot to kill

I recently got myself a new camera and was trying to put in some stuff with it...
here are a few shots..
have a look and please comment on what do u think their captions should be..
I have put in my captions though...

messy music

time to kill? or just killing time !





jump in or cross over?




light at the end of the tunnel.. may be u

I wont wanna write much .. hope the pics speak for themselves :P

umm what??

Your Chances of Being a Multimillionaire: 60%

You have a decent shot at being a multimillionaire. Surprised? You're confident and a hard worker. Keep it up!

Will You Be a Multimillionaire?

yeah whatever...

Inhale… exhale… inhale… exhale…

Sounds familiar? heh… no if the thought was that of a yoga instructor, u r way away…

This is more like when u smell any random looking thing, and suddenly ur head swings and flashes a special person, moment or place that u had been associated with, and to make sure that it is a smell u have smelt before, u inhale.. exhale…. inhale…. exhale… I am trying to make relevant, the (rather boring) research done by scientists (and they won a Nobel Prize for it too) that tried to link the sense of smell and the memory that it links to…

It has happened a lot of times with me, but particularly when it comes to my ex- girlfriends… you see, I being me (and as testified in my orkut profile) have been a Dog and hence have had the liberty to go around with more than one members of the opposite sex at different periods of time… At that time (and in the heat of the moment, following my Doggy instincts) whichever female was with me, her smell did make a place somewhere in my head. I never cared about the names of those perfumes/deos/scents or whatever ‘Eau De Toilette’ (in simple words toilet water) they used, but now it seems it might have been a good idea if I had done so then, and here is why…

When I am somewhere with a gorgeous entity (otherwise why wd I be somewhere with them!) and by a quirk of fate, I don’t quite remember her name, and God forbid, if she is wearing a ‘Eau De Toilette’ that already exists in the associative array stored in my head (umm I am at a loss of words and had to use some software terminology. L ), the only name I would utter is the one that is already in my head!!!... Many times I have mixed keertana with surabhi, ruby with ramya… and … never mind…

So here lies the problem. Since some scientists enforced the link between what u smell and what u remember, not thinking that sometimes such links are best forgotten, I have to face the music and that too of a heavy metal rock band with a female lead singer whose name and voice are similar to the femme fatale standing next to me (which alluva sudden is the only name I forgot and now remember again, but its too late any ways), singing very emotional morose songs (Alanis Morissette style) and u r the main villain in it!!!

And on the other side, u r walking in a densely crowded market, having Gol Gappe, and suddenly ur head is hammered with the pictures of a person that u had tucked away somewhere in ur head. The side effects? The Gol Gappa gets stuck in ur esophagus, u gulp it down without relishing the taste, and have to pay for one more to guarantee satisfaction…

So the real problem, now I understand, is this. This smell linking actually encourages more spending, and is a threat to the Indian economy, because we end up saving less!

Mr. Chidambaram, are u listening???

Emotions … no this is not the name of a new perfume that I heard about, it is the good old English word that means what It means… yes it seems a lil awkward these days to me to talk about emotions (at least publicly as if it were a lingerie brand), but I think there is an emotional bulb in me that has been switched on somewhere in the recent past…

How or when or why, I dunno, but there is a latent feeling (another word relatively new in my usage) that has become dominant… I would like to call this phenomenon “My coming of age” :P

I am no dna tester or any kind of tester, in fact, being a software techie, I detest testers like hell! So I didn’t try and find out the bug here, but I know that there is a new functionality that has developed, or rather evolved… that of emotions, or simply put, I have started noticing that men are as emotional and paranoid about their feelings as their better halves!

For instance, we had a very old fiat car… maybe for around 20 years and by now it had almost become a dilapidated, antiquated, and almost defunct piece of metal. Kudos to my dad for having the perseverance to drive it as recently as 4 weeks back! Well but finally the time had come when we all knew that we would bid adieu to this family treasure and this beauty would have to go…

My brother and I went to the car, kissed it at all the dirty places (dirty as in full of grease and dirt NO PUN INTENDED), sat in it, cleaned it for one last time (when there was no use doing that) and then, took pictures of it from all possible angles… including its bottom, so that we do not forget the shaft, and the bonnet, to ensure that we have in our memories all the parts that we had replaced since buying it … totally, we might have taken around 30 pics of our car… and with a sorry heart, left for delhi…

Things would have been fine if that was all there was to it. The day the car was to be actually towed away, my dad started feeling the same way for the car, and took another set of pictures with the car... in fact, he got the car out, sat in it, and took a picture as if he were driving it!

I know my dad and I would probably never talk about our ‘feelings’ for our car the way we felt for the car that day, but it showed in the pics… or, maybe it was always around, and its only now that I have started to realize it… I have come of age :)

In dino dil mera mujhse hai keh raha .. tu khwab saja..
hai tujhe bhi ijazat, kar le tu bhi mohobbat..

listening to this song on my comp this morning
feeling sort of low,
in a vest and faded pajamas,
only the coarse side of me left to show..

didn’t go for tennis today!
Prolly didn’t feel like…
Not looking forward to a special moment today,
Maybe it doesn’t seem like…

Everything is working the way it should,
but there seems something amiss
Instead of getting ready for work,
I am writing a thing like this…

The world seems to have shut up,
Can’t hear anything!
The Purpose seems like it was never there
Can’t walk even an inch.

A poem i wrote loooong ago in one of my engg classes (ADA) and I won the first prize for it in a competition too ;) trying to show off :P


Think of the places you have been
Think of the people you might have seen
Were they the nights of a journey or a journey of nights?
The story of 'could haves' and all 'despites'...

When did it happen!
How could it be!
Does it happen to everyone or just to me!
Was it the fuel in my car or the last peg in the bar ?
Nevermind! the journeys I have made so far...

Was it outside in, or inside out?
All these questions and all those doubts
keep ringing in my head, all hollow from within...

A locket in my neck, and a prayer to Him,
or was it coming from somewhere within?
With my realisation or the realisation of me
again I think of places I could/should have been...

Never the less it's a beautiful world
where smaller the ring, the more it is curled
But is it me in the ocean or the ocean in me?
where the forces in my head, take my head to the moon.
But is it late ? or a lil too soon?

Just thinking of the places I have been...
thinking of the people I have seen...
maybe on the moon ...

Be it Another brick in the wall or smells like teen spirit or sometimes even
fade to black, even if it is a compulsive hearing because of my brother's continous
blurting of the same, I have always been surrounded by a lot of good quality music
. of course! when u have loads of 'tera tera tera surooor' and 'where's the party tonight'
pouring out of the radio channels in one form or the other that even 3 different channels dedicated to good Indian music have scored a good deal of -ve points with me... so much so that I some time start to wonder if there is any art left indian music, or everything has been turned into Pepsi/Coke: good to taste, but full of harmful pesticides (and we still drink it! after all Amir Khan asks us to).

Mr Qutubuddin Aibak (he who? he is the dude who made that roundish bulding in delhi that we occasionally see on post cards/maps of delhi... )kinda came to my rescue and took me to a place long forgotten by me and my friend(we meet most weekends ,sit in a mall sip coffee in barista/cafe coffee day and discuss the world and how monotonous has it become). It was the less popular The Hindu (TOI is most read) that ran an ad for some thing called the Qutub Festival. Organised by the Govt of Delhi, this festival even offered Bus rides from a point near by! So job less is this festival that to woo the crowds
, they have to offer rides! and btw, the festival was free for all. Since we were anyhow pretty balse about the the music we wd hear at a coffee shop/ Mall (they know nothing more than Kenny G or if its good luck then Pt SHiv Kumar Sharma's son) we went to the fest, trying to be late coz it wdnt anyhow start at 630 u know(IST), we reached there by 745 i guess and saw that they had laid the path to the festival's performance area with good old fashioned diyas! the path looked like sprinkled with tiny stars! the idea was a very welcome change from the neon lights/ trees loaded with electric bulbs that show u the path(and the stones u watch out for) ever so lifelessly.

On the stage were some quawwals that i thought had long died and maybe they have been called here to bid farewell to this form of music. It would have been best if Some Himesh Reshamia would have felicitated them for their long innings. what started after that was out simply a period full of intense rousing music that engrossed us totally. theirs was a music that had the madness of a fanatic, intensity far greater than of any bollywood movie I have ever watched, so much so that before I knew, I was head banging to a music that was miles apart from Rock to which head banging is usually associated to. what was common for both, was quality. Maybe we need to run that extra mile to the village and taste the raw material before it is manufactured into a one taste liked by all cuisine. maybe lets get out of the wall as all in all we are nothing but bricks in that wall...

i found this written in my bro's folder... His name is anshit, prolly aka Anshwa :D

a great piece ...

ANSHWAs BANIYAN

Long Back on IGT,
Wen i was new,
Frienz as such,
I had few.

I found a friend,
Who was igt send,
He used to be alwayz on,
His name was anshphenomenon.

What do i say about him,
he s as cool as an ice cream,
Poor innocent fella,
I think hes behind Miss.Angela. (( no offences towards angela dear ))

So i took to the album,
To have his glance,
Omigosh ! whts he wearing?
I laughed till off-baalance.

He insists its a shirt,
A white one except sleeves,
I think thts a baniyan,
He must ve worn wen he brought it new.

Till date im confused,
AS to what hes wearing on,
But, i think thats a baniyaan,
Whats your opi-ni-on???


(( this ones for u ansh....dear frnd.....))

Of trains and cruel mathematical series

28 f 54
54 f 56
72 f 36
10 m 33
25 m 48
13 m 24 ....


it is not tough for a guy to decode the above series... this happens with all us middle class males so bereft of quality companionship in trains... the series above is a testimony of what I call the great divide of India...

If u still havent understood what the above thing is, well, lemme elaborate on the plight that eats on us like an earthworm feeding on a leaf. It is a very slow and painfull slaughter of our hope to spend some 'quality' time with members of the opposite sex at a place where there are no parents or relatives(their company is fine till we dont grow our batch of pubic hair) ...
The series above is what we see when we gaze at the reservation chart of the train that the station guy puts up so nonchalantly... Seat no. 28 F 54 years, Seat no. 54 F 56(pfff),Seat no. 72 F 36(oh c'mon!),Seat no. 10 M 33(what the hell!), Seat no. 25 M 48(whatever.. it's always this way..),Seat no. 13 M 24 (Yeah thats me ...)

You see, India is a huge country and when u have to travel to the other side of it, u end up spending close to 20 hrs in the train... U see so much in the journey and are so overwhelmed with it that u have to have someone to share ur feelings with (umm did i actually write what i just wrote? now i know y am single and eager to mingle even at this age...) .

Coming back to the series. I am right there at the end with the unlucky seat no. And it is called the great indian divide coz all the pretty faces and beautiful bodies travel in the AC coaches! for somehow the fathers of hot and attractive young women are always wealthy enough to keep their daughters away from their potential mates! and we are left with 28 f 54 's
, 72 f 36's to learn about their nephews(mostly) and sons(irritatingly) working in great MNCs and almost always a passout of II(Ts/Ms) ... phew...

I am taking a Deccan airways next time. I am told the the great Indian divide narrows there. Long live liberalzation. posted by anksphenomenon @ 10:12 AM

sonu nigam sings a song
and Delhi police takes bribe
freedom fighters fought for long
India's plight to describe