Finding Balance

This is definitely the semester where I am trying to find balance. I try and remember that it is the experience, and not only the end. Also, what good would a grad school degree be if I couldn't enjoy at least parts of it. I'm trying a combination of factors, tweaking and adjusting. The first week is never very indicative of what the rest of the semester will be like. Assignments aren't due yet nor have group projects started. This week (and weekend) have gotten away from me as there are two student-group related tasks on a Friday night and Sunday afternoon. But both are things I am involved with out of will and I am glad to do them (they help provide services for the graduate student body). I do still want to find balance (or equilibrium as the economists would say :)). 

Steady As She Goes

Views from the bus stop

The first week of the semester usually always feels like a blur, a slightly anxious, rushed blur. I am not jet-lagged but not above using it as an excuse for my general lostness. Beginnings of the semester make me feel a bit fraud-like, my brain wails who let me in here, even though I know I am capable of functioning and occasionally flourishing. I have not been taking advantage of any happy hours and that has opened up vast tracts of time for activities such as cooking and reading. Copious amounts of both have happened. Roasted eggplant, pulao, curries are in the fridge while three Agatha Christie novels have been devoured in the last two days.

Spring 2015

Chicago airport, with
the sunlight streaming in.

I'm back and what a trip it was. My travels were pretty smooth. I even got a complimentary check-in for my carry-on suitcase, which at 15 kgs was going to be quite a challenge to leg around a trip with two stopovers and plenty of hours of layover. TSA does seem to have taken out my bottle of castor oil, and my hair is really upset, because it has been denied its rightful nourishment (much needed in the wake of recent streaking). I am suspended in disbelief, between two countries, in shock at the fact that my last semester of grad school starts tomorrow. It wouldn't be life if this week wasn't super intense and there are two major things about which I am super nervous. Fingers crossed, all will go well. For the moment, I am warm, I have food, and I am excited about what this semester will bring. I hope you are well too.

Pigeons at the Ahmedabad airport

My jazzy luggage (because there is a
sea of black suitcases out there)

Ahmedabad

View from Gandhi Ashram

My time in Ahmedabad has been far more intense and interesting than I imagined. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, especially considering I arrived at the start of an event that completely takes over the city with its sheer magnitude, in a week with important local and national holidays, and no meetings set up in advance. That being said, it has still been productive. Work-wise I have been able to learn new things, chat with some interesting people and get started on thinking in a particular direction.

Away

View from the hotel at night

By an interesting turn of fate, I am in Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar, for the Vibrant Gujarat event (and more). The professor I work for is a speaker her, and this led to me unexpectedly getting a pass to attend it, which seems to be quite the event. Really (I have done event planning in a former avatar and my heart quavered at the thought of all the coordination involved). Ahmedabad is a city where I lived as a child, where I have memories of a house outside the Army cantonment area, where I remember the rains that flooded the field behind our house, where I danced the garba with dandiya. I remember the house we lived in outside the cantt far more than the house to which we moved later. I remember taking my really young sister on a bike ride and crashing, the faint scars of which I still bear today.

Some of my favorite quotes

 “Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.”

― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

"A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."  ~ Francis Bacon

***

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. ~ L.P. Hartley

***

All the missing

I remember so much from my childhood. I remember the childhood I did not have. I remember the childhood I did have. The one that was, for all its warts and flaws, a childhood. I can see that clearly, from the lens of adulthood, closer to thirty than ever. A new year starting is always a place of reflection and remembrance.

Look no words

This is what my walks in the park look like in the middle 
of the day (January 1 was unusually warm) 

Delhi beset by winter rains. Everything became more
beautiful and colder.

Feet guiding you to different lines
of metro at the Delhi Metro.