You are captivating

The thing is that I got my first Christmas gift...this is itself a very nice feeling. I always read in english books about Christmas gifts, but never got one. This year it was different. Receiving a gift always gives a nice feeling and more so if it is a surprise one, and if it is a book, and you know that someone chose that book having you in mind and if that someone is your friend!!! In my case, all the above points are true!!! So it is obvious that I am super happy :-)
The next part is more interesting. As started reading this book, I was astonished. It was as if I am standing in front of a mirror, looking at myself. The book is about "unveiling the mysteries of a woman's soul" and it is speaking to me, reminding me of my worth and my long-lost dreams.
Women in the 21st century have lost their feminism. The more feminist they become, the more they forget what their true worth is. There is nothing more silly than to imitate men. We are different and we should be proud of that. If man signifies power and strength, woman is for grace and beauty.
I would definitely lay stress on beauty, it is the inner as well as the outer one. Have you wondered why "Rupang dehi" is the first thing we pray for?? Why girls are so concerned about how they look?? Why is it that we feel great if the guy we love say that we look beautiful?? Because we love to be the Princess and we are waiting for our dashing Prince to come for us and love us with all his heart. I too feel that.
I was a tom-boy in my teenage days. I loved mechanical toys, I loved to play cricket, I still love many boyish things. But, somewhere in the deepest core of my heart I actually long to be the Princess of my dreams.
I feel good to think that woman is the crown of creation. The creation would be incomplete without us. And there is an awesome match between the dreams of a man and a woman. In the presence of a man, the femininity of a woman unfolds. She becomes more loving, caring and dependent on the man, which enables him to be protective and strong. A woman inspires the man to be a hero!!! This concept is beautiful beyond words....how we complement each other.
When I am bogged down with studies and chores and errands, when I juggle between video retrieval, egg-curry, walmart and PhD admissions, I take a moment's break. I put down my mop, shut down my laptop, leave everything for a minute and look out to the view from my balcony...to the Creation and tell myself..."the whole, vast world is incomplete without me. Creation reached it's zenith in me."
Someone said I am the "ezer kenegdo"... He said "You are captivating." Someone loves me very much...and that Someone is my Creator!!!

The Indian Ambassador

We are having something called the International Education Week at UAB now. Today it was about India, we had to tell people all about our homeland :-) I think if we really wanted to tell them everything from the Indus Valley Civilization to Chandrayaan, it would have taken ages, so we did it the grad-student way...putting up posters and explaining them (which we are very good at!!).
I love presenting stuff, be it a poster or a statistics problem. I dont know why, but I JUST love presentations!!! Perhaps it's because I get to talk a lot and there are people around me who listen, that makes me feel good :-) Surely I get importance, and that slowly has boosted up my confidence in public speaking and all good stuff...anyway, that's not my point... the thing is that we showed stuff about India today...
We have a group of Indian students, AIS and frankly speaking, I dont like most of my team-members there. I dont know how, but miraculously yesterday evening we got along so well, just too well, and we worked fast, liked what we did and ended up with some gorgeous and colorful posters and display boards. Seriously they were fantastic!!!
What did we put on them?? Haha!!! We had monuments, landscapes, science and technology, with Chandrayaan and our Agni, Prithvi, Pinaka, Brahmos, and Aryabhatta, INSAT...oooh the names themselves make me feel so proud. I almost fluff up!!! In Sci-Tech we had pics of Dr. Kalam, J.C.Bose, Sir C.V. Raman, Satyendra Nath Bose, Homi Bhabha and of course Rakesh Sharma!!!
The other posters were of weddings and dances. The center poster had our "Satyameva Jayate" (truth alone triumphs) with the Lion Capitol, our Tricolor and some of our statesmen. I obviously put some pics of Netaji, and I wore Mission Netaji badge also :-)
We showed artifacts...handmade stuff...nice things and did a glamorous rangoli outside with sidewalk chalk!!! Kathleen helped me a lot in that. She even helped me wear a saree :-) She's GREAT!!!
I wore a blue saree...and I know I looked good in that :-) Many people came, my professors Dr. Sprague and Dr. Bangalore, Marcie my project manager, my friends from all over the globe, my friendship partners...so many people... I love it!!! The people who serve food at the international cuisine are so sweet. They treated me like a princess!!! My friends were also asking me to advise them about what to eat. The butter chicken was good but I dont know why they colored it red!!! Rice was good, the veggies were also good. Sheekh kabob got a bit messed up. They were more like meatballs than kabobs. Anyway, they did a great job!!! Trent couldn't pronouce "sheekh kabob" properly, he was fumbling and saying some weird sounding things, when I said, "If I can pronounce CHEESEBURGER, you have to pronounce SHEEKH KABOB !!" and he got it right in the next try!!!
It felt so nice...sitting there wearing a saree, eating Indian food, the song "yeh jo des hai tera" playing in the background and sharing my culture with my non-Indian friends!!! There was a warmth, not only of the golden sunbeams streaming across the place but also of a promise of friendship and love that will last forever!!!

If you can dream...

Well, everyone knows that I am Princess Jasmine, so the title might make them think I'll be writing about some pink and silver princessy-stuff, but no. Though I love to be a princess and I love to have "magic carpet" rides, today I am thinking of something different...but it has got to do with dreams...dreaming of the past.

If I had a time machine, where in time would I love to go to?? This is a very difficult question for me to answer...I love Egypt during the Pharaohs, I love India during the Golden age...I even love late 19th century England...so I dont know where I'd want to go...hey wait!! I do know...I want to go back to my ancestral village...I want to be born in the same family but...but...but...250 years ago!!! That sounds weird...doesn't it?? Yeah...that's why I said you need to follow my dreams.

This thought came into my mind one evening when I was washing rice at the sink of my little kitchen of Denman Hall. Clad in "tinkerbell print" pyjamas and my hair tied in a pig-tail, I definitely had no resemblance to the girl from mid- 18th century Bengal. She was the youngest grand-daughter of a very wealthy landlord from the Ganga- deltaic lush green plains of eastern India.

There was a huge mansion beside a river in the place called Jessore (now in Bangladesh), and that belonged to the Ghosh family. They migrated there in like 1750s from the western part of Bengal. The mansion had orchards surrounding it and beyond the orchards were rice fields...and then the river. This girl is in my imagination, but I can see her whenever I want to. She's beautiful, with long black hair and large black eyes and the sarees she wore were light colored. In the summer evenings, she walked by the side of the lake...and you could hear her humming some tunes under her breath...the tunes filled the cool wind that blew from the southern seas and rustled among the leaves of the coconut and palm trees. Sometimes she just sat and thought...her mind wandered off to places she's never been to...
One day, she met a traveller...he was coming from some other part of the country and he was playing his flute...the girl could not stop herself from going and talking to the traveller though she was not permitted to do so. He told her stories of different places and the girl's dreamy eyes followed the traveller's tales...he'd been to Ceylon on a ship and had seen the raging waters...he's met different people from many places, merchants from many countries...he changed her world...she was fascinated.
But dreams are not forever...they dont last long...so the girl had to go back to her house among the other women, she couldn't live her life the way she wanted....the traveller went his own way... they never met again. He remained in her memories forever.
No, please...this is NOT a sad love story...this is the way our lives are...we meet some people and they fascinate us, but we are all travellers walking on our own tracks...sometimes our roads merge and we find some fellow companions...but they are not forever. We talk and feel good that someone is with us, but they will leave us sometime, and we are not supposed to leave our roads and go with others....cherish the moments you are happy and bring back the memories when you are lonely...and "if you can dream" you can always let your mind wander to nice places and in that way you can always feel happy...that's how we can enjoy life.

Musings of Princess Jasmine...

Well, first let me wish you the SPOOKIEST FA-BOO-LOUS HALLOWEEN EVER!!!
Though this was my second halloween in USA, I didn't really celebrate the day last time. I was feeling homesick then and didn't want to dress up. Which, I should admit is very unusual of me.
This time it was different!!! I prepared for halloween from...well, more than a month in advance...I was to be Princess Jasmine, because she's the Disney Princess I like most and my wheatish complexion and black hair would definitely match hers. One of my friends commented that if I dress up like Jasmine, I wouldn't really be dressing up because I WAS Jasmine already...but I think that's too much of a complement :-)
I love the concept of dressing up...it's not just fun but for one day you can be what you want to...you can wear a princessy gown, or can be the devil if you like...
My friends in UAB are the craziest bunch of people I've ever met and what I like about them is the seriousness with which they do the comic things. One of which was dressing up for this party :-)
There were so many different kinds of costumes and characters. There was Jennifer, dressed up as Cinderella. She's blonde, and was looking perfectly like Cinderella and there was a brunette girl in Belle's costume. We three took a picture together and I think the "Disney Princesses" were looking real nice. Someone was a Greek Goddess and some other was a peacock. Shuwen was a Chinese Ghost, she insisted on being called a Ghost but she was looking like a Chinese Princess. So was Mikoku, she wore a Japanese kimono kind of thing and was looking so pretty :-) Naomi was a fortune-teller, Iris was a girl-pirate, Anna was Audrey Hepburn from the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and she was looking so gorgeous!! There were angels as well, Manisha was the dark one and there was a white one too, and devils, and red-riding hood and French maids...everyone looked so cute :-)
Of the guys, Joker was the "in-thing" I guess, because I saw 2 guys dressed up like that. Junsong was a karate master, Trent was Osama bin Laden with my long white scarf wrapped round his head as a turban and a weird looking flowing grey beard!! But he was looking real nice :-) There was Su, dressed as Caesar but he called himself "Su-sar" which I think is a smart way of concatenating the names ;-) There was a tall guy dressed up as an Arab Sheikh and George was I think a Globe-trotter, Saurabh was the ghost from "Scream" and he looked real scary....
The decoration of the hall was also nice, with graveyard wallpaper and ghosts popping out from cauldrons. There were spiderwebs and bats hanging from the ceiling, but what I liked very much were the cute looking spooks that were made by hanging white tablecover on balloons and then drawing eyes and mouth on the covers!!! Candles put in paper bags served as lanterns and of course there were the sweet looking pumpkins put all around :-)
My roomie Kathryn was however, the heroine of the event, for she cooked for 200 people and helped in the decoration and cleaning!!! She didn't dress up but she always looks cute and it's fun when she's around :-)
A day of spooks and a day of fun!!! I will always remember my first halloween celebration at UAB....these happy moments will remain in my memories and later, when I look back to these days, I will see a golden gleam lighting up my past, the golden gleam that comes from the satisfaction that you have nice friends to share your happy moments with.
I love UAB!!!

the stars in the night sky...

There I was, sitting on a bench, on a wooden deck by the side of a lake. It is the middle of October and fall has started setting in Alabama. As I sat there, looking straight ahead where the sunset had left some golden aura in the cloudless sky, slowly the planets started shining. It was the exact but large-scale projection of my dear ol' planetarium in Calcutta. The smoky skies of Calcutta was never a nice place for watching stars and from my dorm patio, though you can have a great view of dazzling Birmingham, finding stars in the sky is a real ordeal. So when, I looked up to the clear sky over Lake Martin, I gave a gasp as I found the constellations taking shape...In Calcutta, a huge hospital guarded the view of the northern sky from my home. So I have never really seen the Pole Star. Yesterday, I found it shining above the branches of some distant trees. The North Star.... how nice it feels to look at it...some point that is fixed, and the stars revolve round it all through the year. Near the North Star were the constellations of Lyra, Cygnus and Aquila, forming the Summer Triangle. Vega always reminds me of Carl Sagan's story Contact, more so because recently I was reading it once more. There were Andromeda and Cassiopea, the lady on the chair and some more northern star patterns. In the south, Venus and Jupiter traced the cetestial equator on which one could see the amazing zodiac constellations.
It is not just the science, not the nuclear physics or the astrophysics that is important, but the stars, the presence of them fills me with awe and wonder. I feel so small in front of them...so tiny that my wordly feelings seem to just vanish. But, on the other hand I feel so special that I have got a chance to experience all these...Someone made me like this, with a unique identity and that is what I can feel when I am alone amidst the stars... as our poet said, I feel awestruck at the thought that I have been born as a human in this world full of different varieties of life and the Universe full of stars...and yesterday, the world seemed to be sleeping, not a sound could be heard apart from the soft lapping of water on the beach...I was there alone...facing my Creator...I felt a deep sense of happiness and fullness from within.

I remember, I remember

....the house where I was born.

125, Sarat Bose Road...the address of perfect happiness for me. It is a three storied building on a strong foundation and lots of light and air. But, there is a magic in that yellow house in Calcutta, a magic of family bonding that is there for 82 years and handed down for four generations.

Well, when my great grandfather Sarat Chandra Ghosh built the house in 1926 he said that his decendants would live there. Little did he imagine what that house would mean to his decendants. It gave shelter to his large family as well as many people from his and his wife's ancestral villages. There was not a single day when there was not any relatives staying there at the house.

Though now, in the days of nuclear families it is not possible to have so many people under the same roof, we still maintain the old tradition of a joint family. Growing up in a house with so many people around, uncles and aunts and cousins to pamper you and care for you is a wonderful feeling (and specially if you are the youngest of the lot)!!!

My home is some place where I feel I am safe and secure. When I enter that building, it seems all my cares have been taken away and I can rest in ultimate peace and happiness. Home doesnt really mean the building, but it means the people who stay there as well. I can never imagine being lonely there or not having someone to talk to. My uncles are the people who pampered me (or spoilt me), they listened to all my requests, took me anywhere I wanted to go, encouraged me in all crazy stuff and they are my best friends. My cousins, though I never think they are my cousins and NOT my brother and sister, are the closest persons in my life. Specially my sister. Even if we are lightyears apart, we would still be as close as before. I never miss her, because I know she is always, always at the back of my mind.

My parents are surely the best in the world. They have an uncanny capacity of understanding me, though I felt that after leaving home!! My mom knows me through and through. When I refer to some book or incident, if I just say, "you remember that incident in the Agatha Christie book..." she understands both the incident I am referring to and what book I wanted to say without having to explicitly mention either of them. She is my idol. I want to be like her. She literally "knows" stuff and she reads a lot. I am so proud that I have inherited her reading habit. My Dad is my source of strength. Without him, I would not be 10% of what I am today. My career, my life, my thoughts all follow him. He is my sole motivator. He pushed me to pursue a masters in USA, and he tells me everyday and every moment to reach to my full potential.

Though I am far away from home, I always feel that I'm covered with blessings and care from my family. My ancestors are looking after me for sure. I am so proud of my home and family. They are the BEST!!!

It's a small world after all

My life has changed a whole lot in the past one year. So much so that I feel I am a new person altogether, perhaps something like a coccoon transforming to a butterfly and spreading its wings to fly off.
I have been brought up as a very sheltered child who never did anything except studying and spending time with family and friends. I had freedom, but coming from a traditional household, that was limited too. 23 years of my life was spent like this...in one house with very less exposure to the outside world.
August of 2007 brought a sea change in me as I crossed the Atlantic Ocean. The first thing I felt was "the world is so GREAT!!!" I felt alone, yes I did but the experiences I started gaining was so wonderful that I understood why people from early days used to leave home to find the unknown...
wanderlust they call it. I feel that...
There are thousands of international students who come every year to the US for their higher studies and I am no exception. I am an FOB (Fresh off Board) who came to the US with high hopes. But I dont want to be just a masters student who wants to gain a high career, my aim is not just reaching the end point of the road but to cherish the sights and sounds I get to experience while I walk down that road of life.
And life has given me all wonderful things!!! I was so excited when I saw the Moon over the North Pole while on the flight from New Delhi to Chicago... it is wonderful and I am so lucky that I get to appreciate these facets of life.
Don't I feel homesick like the other internationals?? Yeah, surely I do. But I have another home here too. My friends from so many countries, Bangladesh to Brazil and Spain to Philippines make me feel so special and I understand that people from different countries, having different cultures, speaking different languages can be so similar to one another. It feels awesome to think that the people I spend time with now were literally spread out all over the world just a year back. Someone grew up in the deserted land of Libya, someone was in a bustling city of China and someone was a boy from the farmlands of Illinois!!! But they are my friends now and they make my life the way it is.
Not just my friends, but my advisor and my project manager are two people who have made my life a lot easier. When it comes to motivating a student, look up to my advisor. She understands the feelings of an international student and knows exactly well how much to push a student. Somehow, she has never forgotten her own grad-student life and NEVER pressurizes me to do something which is way too difficult for me. My project manager is kind of my guardian angel...from showing me how to write a check and to taking me for shopping, she is always there!!!
My birthday is always THE DAY for me. I love to get all the attention of people (I am quite a "demanding princess" to quote one of my friends!!!) I was rather doubtful how my birthday party would be this year. But, it seems people really love me, for not only did my friends prepare for a blast, one of them sang Happy Birthday in Chinese and my roomie prepared noodles for me as is a custom in her country!!! I was so moved!!!
Believe me, there are only two kinds of people in the world-- good and bad. And there are many many more good people than bad ones. The world is such a nice place to live in...and it becomes nicer when you have sweet people to share it with.
I love my life in USA so much... I now know the taste of hot dogs and sweet tea....I celebrated 4th of July with a cookout...I know football teams get 6 points when they score a touchdown... and today when a group of high school students were singing the American National Anthem, I felt that though this is not my original home, I love this country a lot because of the wonderful experiences I am having here...!!! I thank my parents for not just letting me come here but understanding that this would be the best thing for me.
I hope to have many more nice experiences here as I want to blend the east and west in myself and in people I am close to so that we get a next generation of world citizens who are rich in humanity and love for the humankind.