Summer time reflections

From my third speech at ToastMasters

Coming from a tropical land, I didn’t really have any reason to celebrate summer. It reminds me of heat, sweat and power cuts and other than the occasional thunderstorms, it is a dreaded season in my memory. Also, I am not a person who can sit quietly or peacefully for a long time. Must be because of my over active brain, I always need to DO something. So my summers were never idyllic as such. In fact they were the only time when I could get a lot of things done. I was busy!

I see a summer holiday is a big thing here, no school for months, outdoor activities and all. We were not so lucky. After our finals were done in late March we had no school for around two months, including summer vacation, but we had loads of homework to do and regular study sessions. Sometimes we’d travel with families but they were never adventurous and very little exciting. However, I found things to amuse myself. My main attraction was my laboratory at home. It was a broken wooden bench on our open terrace where I had my beakers (empty jam bottles) full of muddy water which I filtered. I mixed water color and saw the sun rays gleaming through them with the airs of a professional chemist. I also measured rainfall in a glass jar. You might think that my teachers and elders should be really proud of my scientific attempts, but sadly that wasn’t really the case. Anything outside of school books were considered a waste of time, so even though I learned science, this was technically my play time.

After a few years, my experiments changed in form. I started getting interested in physics, especially the night sky and optics. As my knowledge of science increased, my experiments started succeeding as well. I bought a science encyclopedia with gift money and delved into the projects section of it. Funny enough, the book was printed in the US, so even though the materials they suggested I use are easily available here, getting them in India was next to impossible. Would you believe I couldn’t get a box of tissue papers, aluminum foil or play dough back home? But I found my work around. Many of my experiments failed but like everything else in life, the ones which succeed after so much effort put into them are the ones that stay etched in our memories. The optics light overlapping experiments never came out well, my water wheel splashed water everywhere and the paper wheel got soggy but my pin-hole camera was perfect, I could separate sodium and chlorine by electrolysis table salt. The smell of chlorine is not nice, but it really made me happy that day as I copper coated a paper clip. My most successful experiment was a sun dial. I worked round the unavailability of cardboard but I got stuck at the need of a compass. How would I know the exact north without a compass? I had to align my sun dial on the north-south line to mark the shadow cast every hour. Mind it, this was a time before Internet was widely available, so all I could do was brainstorm. Then like the ancient sailors, I turned to the night sky to guide me. I went up to the terrace at night with a bit of chalk and a ruler and found the big dipper shining brightly. Well, if there’s the dipper, I joined the first two stars in the scoop and traced down. Oh no! There is a huge hospital blocking most of the north sky. Well, ok I still know where Polaris is. I put a mark on the ground and drew a straight line pointing north-south. Next morning before the sun rose, I went to align my sun dial and mark the hours on it. And then the best thing in science happened – if you follow the right steps, you are bound to get the right results!

So you can see even with the discomfort of heat and humidity, summers were really quite nice. In my university days in the south, summers gave me the time to spend time with my friends and I really started cherishing this sunny season after moving to Seattle. I don’t have summer breaks any more, but I still get to do simple things that are very new in my life, like camping in Mt. Rainier or tending to my little kitchen and herb garden. This season has given me the chance to find myself. It’s not really a horrible season after all.

My guy friends

With Fathers' Day coming up tomorrow and the ongoing World Cup, guys seem to be getting some importance after all. So I decided to dedicate this article for my guy friends from the world over - everyone from the mischievous classmates from South Point to the fun co-workers in my professional life. They have been great, they have opened a whole new world which has enriched my life a lot.

Long before I got married and started living day in and day out with a guy, I was appalled at guys' manners. How they can comfortably wear one pair of jeans for a month, not wash their cooking utensils, drive nonchalantly seventeen miles over the speed limit and do many a weird thing that girls can't even think of. My jaw-drop moment was when a friend, on seeing his gym pants torn from the ankle to the knee immediately stapled three pins in there! Another one once told me that he used rubber bands to hold the sleeve of a torn shirt (which he tore during a school fight). Though I still have my "really??!!" moments after five years of marriage, I think my friends did help me in knowing guys well.

Not many people have siblings these days, so they might not get the chance to grow up with a brother. Those classmates were the boys I first interacted with in a regular basis. I saw what sports fanatics they were and how they tirelessly played cricket and football even if they got a ten minute break between classes. They did not spend time gossiping like the girls, they were busy. The college friends were into rock bands too besides sports. They would play the guitar, they introduced me to "the summer of '69" explaining that it has the best guitar played ever by any human. It was clearly apparent that they were budding engineers as well. During my birthday, I remember three friends crowded in front of the TV, trying to find out how to display recently captured pictures of the party on the TV, which cables to connect to which port. This comes effortlessly to boys, technical or not. I remember them as my team mates in the quiz club, my partner as the class monitor, my companions on the tram rides to and from school, my IT guy when I needed software, music or games, my competitor during NFS car races and in general people who would bug me, drive me nuts, call me at 11:30 in the evening to ask me if the grades are out but the ones I still enjoyed spending time with.

University introduced me to guy friends the world over. They differed in looks but not in behavior. I accompanied them to some "adventures" where I probably wouldn't have gone alone or with girls. They explained that scrambling over prickly bushes was fun, climbing walls to see what's inside a deserted home was "cool" and scaring people on narrow hiking trails, pushing them in swimming pools were all totally ok stuff to do to friends. Those are the friends who taught me to ride a bike, they were the ones I played badminton with on Saturdays. They were crazy but when it came to accompany us back to the dorm after evening or give a ride they were the ones who stepped up. There was a whole new responsibility that showed up in them during those times. They knew how to take care.

Co-workers can't really be friends, but when you spend more than eight hours everyday with some people, you are bound to get close. As it is common in our field to have very few girls we really have no other option but to be with a bunch of guys in our teams. Here, they are mostly not in the same age group as me, but that did never stop them from being my buddies. Talks of cars, beer, football, the latest smartphone crowd the team lunches. Activities like skate boarding competitions, gun ranges and dirt biking get talked about, Wikipedia articles on guns are read and discussed. If Sounders lose, there might be an ambiance of mourning around, weird jokes and out-of-the-world crazy things like Uni-baby (reference: http://axecop.com/characters/) are discussed with deep interest. That's a world very different from the one I grew up in, that's the world my guy friends have shown me.

These guys have made me laugh, come out of my comfort zone, look at things from a different perspective and have made me feel special. Guy friends are the ones who make us understand our future husbands in a better way and I wish more girls had the chance to grow up with fun boys like I did.

Creative engineer - the non-oxymoron

What comes to your mind when you think of the word "creative"? I invariably think of colors. Splashes and strokes of colors on a canvas. Colors like the ones in "holi", too much of them. You might think of authors or musicians, artists or even chefs.

Now what comes to your mins when you think of the word "engineer"? I visualize two things - either a factory like the Boeing one in Everett - conveyor belts, people wearing hard hats and overalls, or I see code. Plain simple programs running on command prompt. Black and white and dull.

Where is the connection between these two words? Creative and engineer? Is that an oxymoron? People would think so. I mean why not? The left brained analytical nerds don't come close to the right brained colorful people. How can they be related?

Here's how.... what do you exactly mean by being creative? Wikipedia says creativity is the way in which something valuable is created, ok? Now think of the valuable things mankind has produced. While I agree that art and literature has been extremely valuable to humans, but think of the more practical things you know like the house you live in, the street where you drive your car, yes the car itself, your smartphone, computer, the Internet... who created them? Engineers! The boring blueprints, pencil marks on butter paper, T-square, etchings on a screwhead... no they are not as pretty as an oil painting, but they are the base. Scientists show the way on which engineers build a highway, they scale it up, make it possible to bear load and also to maintain it for generations. Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose told us what radio waves are, but it took an engineer to create a smartphone out of it. An artist will cherish the view of a waterfall, a poet may write a lyrical poetry describing it and an engineer will conceive a way to harness that power and set up a hydroelectric power plant to supply electricity to an entire city.

A blank canvas and a blank notebook has been talked over a lot for expressing thoughts and inspiring creativity. Blank programming IDEs can do that and much more too. One day you take a fresh clean Eclipse IDE without a single line of code on it and you create a software program that automatically sends requests to servers and gathers the responses. Like a robot, it reads the responses and lets you know if your product is ok or not without you having to do anything. That's a very small scale engineering, but none the less it can empower humans to sit on the same seat as the Creator if there is one :)

Who is a Bengali?

Last year just before Durga Pujo I bought my first saree and my first designer saree. I am not a fan of designer wear. Actually, if I like the shape and color of an apparel and it fits me then I don't care if it is coming from the sidewalk vendors in Calcutta, from Walmart, Macy's or someplace fancier. I bought this saree because it struck me as something very creative - Bengali calendar print in black and white with a solid red border. It has something very Bengali in it with just the right amount of color and an out of the box creativity. So I went for it. Recently I was looking at a few more sarees designed by the same lady Paromita Banerjee. Almost all of them have this right balance of color and a uniqueness which tells me about the refined taste of the designer. With the very limited exposure I have in fashion, I think she concentrates on just one thing in a saree. For the calendar one, her main focus of course was on the Bengali print, so she kept it at two colors. She didn't keep on adding more accents or flashy stuff. In another one, the off white body and golden border has bright red pleats in the center. That's it. No more color, no more decorations...just one thing. I very much appreciate her taste. Before this article becomes one on fashion, let me come to the main point. I so liked Paromita's concepts that I looked her up online to see more of her designer clothes and her professional profile, etc. I found she writes a blog and her topics along with her command of the English language gave me an idea of her - a well educated and cultured Bengali girl. "Cultured" is the thing I am coming to, that is the kind of people I used to know Bengalis as.

Most probably due to the Bengal Renaissance of the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Bengalis evolved as a race who could think. They were conscious of the political situation of the country, the reformed the society and they questioned and rebelled rather than accepting something as "tradition". A bright band of stalwarts like Raja Rammohan Roy, Vidyasagar, Swamiji, Rabindranath, Acharjya J. C. Bose, Acharya P. C. Roy, Netaji, Sarat Chandra, Nazrul trailed till Satyajit Ray in all fields from politics to religion, science, arts, literature, music, sports lit up the cultural field of Calcutta, a city which was the jewel in the crown, the city of joy.

I was not as lucky to be born at that time, but I at least was born in the city and had the opportunity to grow up learning about these people and as a book lover, reading stories of these people and their own writings. I always say that for a person who reads (he/she most likely thinks as well) the world becomes a single nest spanning both space AND time. These people imbibed in me and to those people who fit my definition of a Bengali some cultural values which are not easily shaken off.

I see in Facebook - 15 reasons why you should date a Bengali girl, well they are funny when read with a light spirit but that is not all. There are much more stuff in there besides the ability to sing Rabindrasangeet or having a cute nickname. To me Bengali culture is not limited to going to coffee house or sounding intellectual, it is about realizing the things our beloved and revered stalwarts taught us and following their paths. It is about rebelling like Derozio by breaking all chains of dead habit, about loving the most downtrodden countrymen as our our brothers like Swamiji, finding solace in Rabindranath, feeling the deepest sorrow of the poor villagers like Sarat Chandra, on being the firebrand that Nazrul was, making the impossible possible like Netaji, cherishing the children in us like Sukumar Ray, finding our ways in the dark with the help of knowledge like Jagadish Bose...with that comes a race of people who value knowledge and education above everything else. A refined taste in music, arts that also reflects in clothes and dresses. A sharp intellect that gives rise to wit. Creativity that shows up in various places from food to baby names. A questioning spirit that made us liberals who might believe in god, but would not become vegetarians just because some people interpret Hinduism like that.

In Satyajit Ray's famous movie "Agantuk" (the stranger) Utpal Dutta, a character who was interested in anthropology and spent many years among different tribes of the world was saying that before he left home, all the works of the most famous literary people of both English and Bengali were instilled in him. That is what I feel too. In all my steps and my behavior, if the teachings and ideas of these people shine through then I would be able to become a true follower of all these people whom I so dearly love.