another week

Its been one helluva busy week. After yes-no-maybe-no-yes tinteretto, Ajit (aka Q, my IIT friend, who will be referred to as Q in the rest of this post) , Q finally made it to Boston. No sooner had he sat down on the couch than he received a phone call conveying the saddest news we had heard in some time. Our dear friend Pondie, (Narasimha Rao) met with a fatal accident. It was a big group going in a Tempo traveller to some nearby place, when a lorry hit them. He was the only unlucky person. Others escaped with fractures and sutures. It just reminds us all that we should not take life for granted. Pondie was a real lively guy who always looked forward to a new day. Its very unfair that, of all people, he should meet with such a fate.

Well, our spirits were considerably dampened, but we realised that there was absolutely nothing useful that we could do sitting in this distant country to help matters. Thus we decided to keep this aside as best as we could. I showed Q around Harvard. All along, we had a really nice conversation, meeting as we were after one year. For those of you who dont know, Q Parande and I spent the whole of last summer together. Q and I worked on similar BTP's , both of us were Shaastra events cores in our respective final years and in general we get alog pretty well. Of course, there's a lot more to Q ! So we had plenty to talk about. We watched some street performance at harvard square, browsed through books at the harvard book store. I bombarded him with all the trivia I knew about Harvard. In the evening we went for dinner with some of Q's batchmates who live in the Boston area. We went to a Bengali restaurant where I ate aloo-postu ! We were up till the wee hours discussing various things, but still we got up pretty early on Sunday because we had a long list of things to do. First, we decided to take some snaps of Harvard - for both his sake and mine. I'll be putting them up somewhere, soon . Then, we left for downtown Boston. This was my first time in the city too. The city is quite spectacular. Its a very healthy mix of heritage and modernity. A 70 storied skyscraper stands right next to a 150 yr old town hall. Everywhere its like that. Q, who has seen most other US cities said that he really liked Boston . Since I really cant compare it with anything, I'll merely say that I am happy to be living in this city. We took the famous freedom trail, which a 3 km walk through the city's oldest areas. In the afternoon, we went for a musical play. Q is a big follower of this composer called Stephen Sondheim and this musical was written by Sondheim. Indeed Sondheim creates some lovely songs. After that we went to meet Q's MIT Media lab friend, Vijay. He showed s around the campus and then we went to an Algerian (!!) restaurant for dinner. The food was very different from anything I had eaten before, and it had a very typical taste to it. It was enjoyable. Overr dinner, we got talking about globalization, and its impacts. The discussion got extremely lively and we headed to Vijay's apartment to continue. We spent another couple of hours talking about societies, cultures, genes, insticts and what not. We finally came back home around mid night. Next morning Q had a flight at 8 am. These 2 days I got what I had missing for quite some time. The company of someone who is at the same wavelenght as I am. It had been a long time since I had had stimulating debates about issues. It had been a long time since I had gushed on the almost sensual pleasure of engineering. Long time since I used IIT lingo. It felt really good being Mammo for a couple of days, rather than Ankur.

A weekend of enjoyment implied a tortorous week ahead - and guess what - the week lived up to its expectations. There was one deadline on Wednesday, 2 on Thursday and 1 more on Friday and I was yet to start working on any of them. Thus I pushed myself as hard as I could and tried to tackle them. I was decently successful I think. It just meant not having a full peaceful night's sleep any of the nights. Not that I didnt sleep enough - only that lots of things were going on in my head even when I was sleeping. The only things worth mentioning are - a mini dbpc reunion I had with 2 other dbpc seniors here and my improving sambhar cooking skills.

This weekend I plan to go on a shopping spree and hopefully meet Sheila didi. Somehow we are never able to actually make it
thats all for now