Around this time last year

Around this time last year, I spent my New Years Eve alone, watching one of my all-time fav TV series - Chuck. I was content, just being all by myself in my small little world.

This time this year, I spent my New Years Eve all alone again. First was my flight from Philadelphia - it started to snow when I boarded the plane, so we just sat on the runway for almost an hour. Thank goodness I didn't miss my connection flight to London. During the last few crucial moments of this day, I was on the London underground tube with other passengers. Too many strangers - all unfamiliar faces, yet I was content. We had a countdown on the train itself, and when the clock struck 12, everyone yelled. These strangers turned around, hugged me, shook my hands and wished me a blessed year ahead.

Fireworks went off high up in the air as the tube zipped past the stations. Even without my loved ones around me, I'm still happy in my own little world.

Year 2009 was a fruitful year and I want to thank my loved ones who made this year a wonderful one. Year 2010, bring on the challenge! London, I'm ready for you :)

Last Day in the US

We had a siblings reunion on my last day in the US. Had sushi buffet and we stuffed ourselves with so much rice :) Feels good to see my bro after 2 years!

This plate (times 3). That's how much we had!

Mission accomplished.

Christmas 2009

Merry Christmas everyone!

I celebrated Christmas with some lovely people from the Philly House. This place has a special spot in my heart, because they are always the ones who would welcome me with an open heart :)

And my prediction about having a white christmas this year came true!

White Christmas in Philly?

I can't believe that there's a snowstorm in Philly right now! It's supposed to be the last day of final exams but the school texted us in the morning saying that exam is cancelled, and postponed until next semester because of the snow... Thank goodness I finished all my exams yesterday. I wouldn't want to come back and study for my tests again! Lol.

Perhaps if it continues to snow at this rate, we would get a White Christmas this year eh?

All I do at work is this...

Yes. This. The Bloomberg Terminal. I sit in front of this computer all day at work.

And I update the ticker boards, make sure all the cool, double-screened computers are in place and no one tries to steal them. Don't play play hor, the alarm system would go off if anyone tries to move anything in this room. Lol.

Yea, so mummy, this is my work place.... and I used to monitor the foreign exchange rates with the ticker boards :)

Food is the way to my heart

I used to like exams as a primary school kid because they allowed me to showoff my excellent academic skills as a child. How I yearn to have the kind of enthusiasm again! I dislike exams to the core as a college student now. Boooooooo. Two thumbs down for that because my life will get so disorientated with all the impending papers and last minute projects that are due. Like I told some people, I survived on pasta and noodles for 7 days in a row last week and I am so over maggi mee now!

So Betty, Qian, Matt and I decided to treat ourselves to a REAL chinese meal at Sang Kee on Thursday evening.

Good chinese food is the way to my heart. He Ye Fan, Seafood vegetables, Peking Duck, Xiao Long Bao basically just made my night.

With two beautiful friends at Sang Kee

Matt ate his rice with the big ladle which was given to us. He was that hungry.

Despite the cold weather (and I'm not even kidding, since the wind was howling and there's an impending snow storm coming tomorrow), we still decided to grab ice-cream from the shop next to Sang Kee instead of having proper, hot, warm dessert at the restaurant.

Clearly, we were out of our minds when we all came to a decision to eat our ice-creams out in the cold. It became too unbearable, so we all ran into Matt's car. Qian bought another ice-cream for her roomate but since we weren't leaving the place anytime soon, she opened the car door and left the ice cream out in the cold. Haha.

Too cold too cold! Ding mu shun!

My hair was basically eating Matt's ice-cream. Kudos to the static force!

Taking The Long Way Around

First off, let me explain myself for the massive revamp that I've done to my blog. People change, I changed, and I feel that the things that represent me should change as well. I'm no longer the big girl that I used to want to be. Let's face it, I'm getting old, but I will stay young at heart for as long as I can :)

Friends and cousins around me are getting married, moving houses and starting up a family. I can't keep up, I can't follow. I hit the roads when I was really young and lived like a gypsy (just one with way better living conditions =p), and I'm a long time gone away from home. One day, I will settle down, but right now, all I know is that I've always found my way somehow. One day, I will settle down, but right now, I choose to take the long way around. I will keep going, because it was in a stranger that I met myself.

I will take the long way around, until I finally reach my destination :)

Food for thought

I need to get real food NOW! Surviving on noodles and pasta for the past few days doesn't feel good at all. My tummy is getting real mad. Grrrrrrrrrr.

Finals week sucks. Blah.

London in 20 days!

Got my UK visa today. UK embassy is super efficient! Only took them 1 day to process it :) :) :)

Wee, London in 20 days! But right now still must pia for my finals =p

Do you know that feeling?

It feels really weird.

Do you know what I mean by that?

Weird.

Never Have I Ever....???

Never have I ever... cooked? Yeah, damn right! Nate has never ever shown us his true cooking abilities. So when we planned for a last dinner together with the boys before finals week, Nate picked to make one of his master recipes (stolen from his grandma), and made us Broccoli and Cheese Casserole.

It was so much fun just watching Nate cut his broccoli, stalk by stalk, and then he tackled his onions afterwards as well. I will miss his cute face when I leave next semester!

Gathering all his ingredients so that he could walk over to Karl's kitchen to work on his masterpiece. Like I said, he is super cute! When I cook, I estimate my ingredients. Nate measures them to get exactly what he needs. LOL. oh boys.

While Nate was cooking, I secretly snuck up to him and took a picture. Well, I wasn't that discrete, since Nate was a little freaked out. This boy has issues with distance with human beings. Nate: Why is Vi so close to me? HAHA.

Never have I ever seen a real turkey being served.... Now this turkey isn't burned, it's the brown sugar, which made it really delicious! I was supposed to be the one who was in charged of cooking it, but honestly, I wasn't gonna poison everyone since I haven't really touched a turkey before and I was gonna cook it like I cook any other chicken. Bad idea. Turkeys take days to defrost and need to sit in the oven for at least 4 hrs. Thank god we had Joe, who goes to a culinary school at downtown Philly and he offered to take over. Joe, you are my saviour!

Never have I seen so much food being served at the boys place before! We laid out the food and got ready to do some serious eating with mashed potatoes, fried rice, turkey, broccoli and cheese casserole, stuffing and of course brownies and cookies!
Asian time! Note to self: I shouldn't get into the habit of doing the V sign, especially in UK =p
Everyone's trying to get onto Nate. Joe looks like he's falling off the chair, JoAnn looks like she was gonna do a split and the others are just grinning from ear to ear.
Poor Migs can't eat while we were snapping pictures together with him. Never have I ever talked to Leo in Chinese. He's my Cantonese buddy :)
Leo's face is just priceless here... Boys... Fight fight!
Karl, just chilling on the floor after cooking up a storm in the kitchen.
Articulate your thoughts with Articulate!
Never have I ever seen this.... Longest thumb war ever. It lasted for a good 5 minutes.
I just wanna say, I miss hanging out with the boys. They are lovely. My friends are lovely, and we said our goodbyes yesterday, I wanted to cry so badly because I won't be seeing them for 8 months until next September! WHAT IS THIS?!?! But you know what, I am gonna have a ball of my time at London, and I am going to come back with sweet memories to share with everyone! :)

Goodbye Merion Boys. Goodbye SJU. Final exams, here I come. And then it will be London and Spain time!

Go Kiss The World by Subroto Bagchi

Thank you mummy for sharing this wonderful speech with me!

__________________________________________________________________

I was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest memory of my father is as that of a District Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was, and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled. My father used to get transferred every year. The family belongings fit into the back of a jeep - so the family moved from place to place and without any trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a matriculate when she married my Father.

My parents set the foundation of my life and the value system, which makes me what I am today and largely, defines what success means to me today.

As District Employment Officer, my father was given a jeep by the government. There was no garage in the Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the government- he reiterated to us that it was not ”his jeep” but the government’s jeep. Insisting that he would use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to his office on normal days. He also made sure that we never sat in the government jeep - we could sit in it only when it was stationary.

That was our early childhood lesson in governance - a lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way, some never do.

The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to any other member of my Father’s office. As small children, we were taught not to call him by his name. We had to use the suffix ‘dada’ whenever we were to refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was appointed - I repeated the lesson to my two small daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call Raju, ‘Raju Uncle’ - very different from many of their friends who refer to their family driver, as ‘my driver’. When I hear that term from a school- or college-going person, I cringe.

To me, the lesson was significant - you treat small people with more respect than how you treat big people. It is more important to respect your subordinates than your superiors.

Our day used to start with the family huddling around my Mother’s chulha - an earthen fire place she would build at each place of posting where she would cook for the family. There was neither gas, nor electrical stoves.The morning routine started with tea. As the brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the editorial page of The Statesman’s ‘muffosil’ edition - delivered one day late. We did not understand much of what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us to know that the world was larger than Koraput district and the English I speak today, despite having studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple lesson.

He used to say, “You should leave your newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find it”. That lesson was about showing consideration to others. Business begins and ends with that simple precept.

Being small children, we were always enamored with advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios - we did not have one. We saw other people having radios in their homes and each time there was an advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my Father would reply that we did not need one because he already had five radios - alluding to his five sons.

We also did not have a house of our own and would occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we would live in our own house. He would give a similar reply,” We do not need a house of our own. I already own five houses”. His replies did not gladden our hearts in that instant.

Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to measure personal success and sense of well being through material possessions.

Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and I collected twigs and built a small fence. After lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the earth and we planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At that time, my father’s transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother why she was taking so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only benefit the next occupant. My mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited”.

That was my first lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my brothers got a teaching job at the University in Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to move too. For the first time in my life I saw electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It was around 1965 and the country was going to war with Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was to read her the local newspaper - end to end. That created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger world. I began taking interest in many different things. While reading out news about the war, I felt that I was fighting the war myself. She and I discussed the daily news and built a bond with the larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger reality. Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness. Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime Minster, coined the term “Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan” and galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no clue about how I could be part of the action. So, after reading her the newspaper, every day I would land up near the University’s water tank, which served the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining that there could be spies who would come to poison the water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream about catching one and how the next day, I would be featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked my imagination.

Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, my mother’s eyesight dimmed but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with which I continue to see the world and, I sense, through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the first time, she was astonished. She said, “Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair”. I remain mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees darkness. She replied, “No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed”. Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and washed her own clothes.

To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied, joined the industry and began to carve my life’s own journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government office, went on to become a Management Trainee with the DCM group and eventually found my life’s calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. Life took me places - I worked with outstanding people, challenging assignments and traveled all over the world.

In 1992, while I was posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a third degree burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst. One morning, while attending to my Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to her, “Why have you not gone home yet?” Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at his stoic self.

There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what the limit of inclusion is you can create.

My father died the next day. He was a man whose success was defined by his principles, his frugality, his universalism and his sense of inclusion.

Above all, he taught me that success is your ability to rise above your discomfort, whatever may be your current state. You can, if you want, raise your consciousness above your immediate surroundings. Success is not about building material comforts - the transistor that he never could buy or the house that he never owned. His success was about the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his ideals that grew beyond the smallness of a ill-paid, unrecognized government servant’s world.

My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj. He sincerely doubted the capability of the post-independence Indian political parties to govern the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite. When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl, garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an underground movement that trained her in using daggers and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity in the political outlook of the two. On major issues concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had differing opinions.

In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking.

Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said,

“Why are you kissing me, go kiss the world.” Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity was telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and God’s speed. Go! kiss the world.