Crazy India trip

The flip side of living away from the motherland is the infrequent trip to the motherland. An India trip always has an irresistible pull.

Usually, an India trip is the farthest from a vacation and routinely I need a break after returning form an India trip. And this is from the experience of the past India trips. I am leaving for an India trip in 5 days. From the looks of it, this trip makes the past India trips look like a breeze. I will be attending two weddings and two receptions! One of the weddings is my brother's and I will be quite busy with affairs relating to this. I will be visiting Hyderabad, Goa, Mangalore, Bangalore (twice), and Chennai, all in 30 packed days. I will be spending time with some really wonderful friends and some very close relatives, which I am looking forward eagerly to.

The flip side of the trip is that by the time I return a few of my close friends would have left Champaign for their internships or other commitments. By the time they return, I would have left Champaign in search of greener pastures. So, I have to bid these lovely friends good-bye prematurely. And I have to do this in under 5 days!

Yes, leaving friends, going to a new place and making new friends is inevitable. I have successfully done this many times over. Will I pull off a Houdini act this time also?

Mandarin Wok

Some time ago, a friend recommended a Chinese restaurant Mandarin Wok and added "This is the best Chinese place in town, believe me." I was skeptical of that claim. For me, Chinese cuisine was synonymous with kung pao tofu from Empire Chinese Restaurant. I decide to give this new place a try anyway. This place was fantastic. The variety of vegetarian dishes was mind-boggling and most of the dishes were tops. (Except for kung pao tofu, which was better at Empire's. The problem with Empire's was that they had only one vegetarian dishes, making frequent trips or a group outing difficult.)

At any rate, this place got intertwined in my life here as my crowd was crazy about this place and this was the preferred destination for any occasion. The place was run by an old Chinese couple and their daughter, Tina. Life went on normally till one day we heard that Tina and her parents were selling off the business and moving out. We were distraught. A new management took over. Tina and her parents signed a non-compete clause which insisted that they do not open another place with similar dishes in the vicinity. At any rate, Tina's parents wanted to retire and lead a quiet life.

We continued going to Mandarin Wok (under the new management) and told ourselves that we had no other go.

Till we found out that Tina's parents decided that they needed to get to work and had opened a new Chinese place. However, thanks in part to the non-compete clause, they could open the place only at Mahomet, a place 10 miles away. We found out about this new restaurant, thanks to a friend.

One fine day (yesterday), S, A and I decided to try out this new place. We hopped into S's car and off we drove to Mahomet. Tina recognized us and it was apparent she was very happy. She said that not many vegetarians frequented the place and they were out of eggplant (This is what brinjal is called in US.) and she could not offer eggplant in garlic sauce, a perennial favorite. As it turns out S does not like eggplant but to play the role of a good guest, she pretended to be disappointed. For the order, we asked Tina to just get us something good.

Tina got our food and with a flourish placed the eggplant dish and said that she did find some eggplant indeed. It was hilarious to see S's genuine disappointment now. But then Tina immediately followed it with other dishes which looked fabulous. At the end, Tina insisted, despite our vehement protests, that our dinner was on the house!

Good memories are made up of incidents like these! Only after the dinner there, did I realize how much I had missed the original Wok's food. The Wok of today serves good fare, alright, but not as good as the original's.

Mirror-man?

Imitation, it is said, is the best form of flattery.

I remember long ago when I was a person who got ahead in life more by rote and trial-and-error and a lot of luck rather than understanding. All that changed when I joined IIT and encountered a couple of friends who, it seemed, always had the correct approach to all academic problems! They did that, I thought incredulously, by actually understanding the underlying concepts. I was thoroughly impressed by their approaches and decided that this was the right approach. And, as you must have guessed by now, I went about imitating their approach and by due course of time started understanding complicated concepts and evolved my own flavor of understanding. This took me a long way academically.

Then I met several socially inclined people who used to help out orphanages and other distressed people in need. From these people, I learnt the value of being socially aware and contributing back to the society. I became environmentally conscious and now I try my best to do the least harm to mother nature.

I was quite content that I learnt a lot of good things. Until, I realized that I was also imitating people in a subtle and, unfortunately, in an unhealthy way. I would be friendly to people who were friendly to me. I would be nice to people who were nice to me. The story did not end here. I was being mean to people who were mean to me. I was being impolite to people who were impolite to me. I was being impatient with people who were impatient with me. I realized that I had become the mirror-man!

Thankfully realization dawned on me and by imitating the negative traits, I was not doing anyone any good, particularly myself! After a difficult situation, I would feel bad about my behavior if I had contributed in the escalation of the situation. I unilaterally decided to go back to my usual cheerful, polite, and friendly self even when people are not in their best behavior. This entire transformation is a process in progress, which has been so far extremely gratifying with outstanding results. If people are impolite without any apparent reason, I know that the fault lies in them. I am happy that I do not reciprocate.

Now, I make a conscious effort to learn only positive traits from others.

Job search

As I mentioned in my earlier post, the job search phase was quite stressful. I had to learn a lot of things - basic interview skills, stress management techniques, a lot of technical concepts and good presentation skills.

Each interview routinely is a full day affair. Most of the interviews began at 9:30 with a presentation which was followed up by many one on one interviews, including a lunch interview. Clearly, this required stamina and a keen presence of mind. These are possible only if one is rested the previous day and had a good night's sleep.

I learnt most of my basic interview skills from this excellent resource. There is one additional tip I would like to share. I made it a point to never allow silence to creep in during a conversation with the interviewer. Many a times, the interviewer would ask me to take my time to think about a problem. On every such occasion, I offered to think out loud and involved the interviewer in the conversation.

Stress management is very essential. Usually after an interview, the company would take at least a week to get back. In the meantime you might have to focus on other upcoming interviews. (In my case, I had 3 interviews over a span of 10 days, allowing for the cross-country travel I had to undertake. A bad idea!) My brother and a few friends were very helpful in this regard. It is usually good to have a few people you can trust and people you can rant to. It is best to acknowledge the stress one is going through and to ask for help.

Technical skills are very specific to the type of jobs I was interviewing for and it would not be of much help to list the books I read, I guess.

The upshot of the entire interview process is that I landed up with a job in addition to the experience.

Back in action

It has been ages since I wrote a post. In fact, I was so surprised on reading my last post. I am now so surprised that I wanted to do so many things in such a short time. I was REALLY ambitious.

I managed to find a job after a lot of effort (There will be a blog entry about this soon!). I am trying to keep body and soul together, while finishing my thesis and sneaking a trip to India in the meantime.

In the previous post, I quote Shantideva: If it can be remedied, there is no need to be unhappy. If it can't be remedied, what is the use of being unhappy?

My reaction to it now: Shantideva's quote, my ass. Try telling Shantideva's quote to yourself when you are under stress and make a list of obscenities you want to throw at Shantideva. That, my friend, will make you feel better. :-)