A glass of eggnog

It is Friday, pretty cold even for the middle of November. We have fallen back from daylight savings, so in Seattle with the perpetually overcast skies, it seems to get dark at 2:30 in the afternoon. I came back home on a day like this and as I was going over my machine learning course, I poured myself a glass of eggnog for comfort. As I sprinkled some cinnamon powder and took a sip, the creamy sweetness filling me with goodness, I wondered from when did I start associating eggnog with this kind of comfort? I did not grow up relating eggnog to Christmas, or winter. The first time I had eggnog ten years back, I wanted to spit it out. It smelled disgusting, and the flavor of raw eggs in them brought me close to throwing up. The same happened with apple cider. Some of my other Indian friends and I were looking for places to spit it out and we finally emptied the cups down the drinking water fountain in our department.

I found telling a friend whose house we generally go for Thanksgiving, that I like it being dark and gloomy as we gather round the turkey. If it was sunny and warm outside it would be so incongruous. What happened in the time during the last ten years which has brought such changes in me? Things that I had no idea about are now normal facets of my life.

I think it is because I let myself absorb new things, and that I love talking to people, ask them details about how they spent the summer holidays, what are their memories of Christmas, and slowly get myself acquainted with the new culture, or cultures because as everyone knows, the US is a salad bowl of cultures around the world.

On the other hand, here's the chance to share mine. Last month, for the first time, I hosted a "Bijoya Sammelani" or get together after the Bengali festival of Durga Pujo. The fun part was other than one friend (just him, not his wife) was Bengali. The others were not Indians. They came to this gathering, asked a lot of questions about Durga Pujo, how we celebrate it, what we eat, how are we supposed to behave, and they ate all Bengali food. They even picked out bones of the treacherous fish ilish. There were fun conversations around, no gossiping, no uncomfortable jokes, just a lot of laughter over good food and good company.

It feels nothing different when you compare one day to the other, but when you look back a few years, you see stuff changing. The more new things we learn, the more new things we open our hearts and homes to, we just pave the way for a more enriched life.

On Machine Learning and my realizations thereof

I promised to myself that this will not become a technical blog, so I am not going to talk about the details of machine learning. Just to let people know the backstory, Artificial Intelligence is a subject that interests me and there was a time when I planned a career in academics and thought that is the subject I would pursue. But then things turned out differently and I went towards a career in software. However, Coursera has shown me time and again, that if I want to learn something, the Universe would help me do so. I took courses in Physics from there too. This year after listening to Dr. Fei-Fei Li's keynote speech at the Grace Hopper Conference, I decided to start studying machine learning. The course I found is from Dr. Andrew Ng and without any exaggeration it is so far the toughest course I have ever taken, physically or virtually!

The first week was overwhelming. After a whole day at work, in the evening I started the course and I felt like my brain would just explode. Without any fluff, he dived straight into math. Algebra had never been my strong point so I gasped when I saw a lot of linear algebra sitting there. And it just wasn't algebra. Literally all the math I had learned, including geometry, co-ordinate geometry (also 3D), trigonometry, and even probability and statistics are being used everyday in a matter of fact way. One thing I must admit, even though I did not realize it when I learned these in high school, I actually did spend a lot of time practicing these. My parents would still say I should have spent some more time studying, but now I know these stuff has got firmly etched in my brain somewhere that even though the surface may accumulate some "dust" over the years, they would not be forgotten. It has become like muscle memory :)

The second part of the problem is programming. Thing with math and programming both is unless you get it right, it won't work. You can yell at yourself, or at the code (or math) but it still won't work. (Cursing in Bengali doesn't help either, I have tried.) So when I had to solve equations and put them in MATLAB (a language I barely ever touched in undergrad, and then never after) I was initially in terrible shape. For a few days I just scratched my head and tried to remember why exactly I decided to take this course. But there is one thing I did not do. I did not give up. This is an unpaid online course which just takes one click to give up. I told myself if I cannot do anything by Sunday, then I will stop taking this class, but until then I will try. That Sunday morning, I had cold hands and I was frantically going over the mentor's notes to understand the problems. Slowly things got better, programs compiled, they showed expected values. Then I ran test cases on them. Those gave right answers as well. Then I submitted my work, and as science is supposed to work, I got full points!

Nobody saw my happy dance for five straight minutes after that!

From the next week, things got better. I understood approximately how much time I need to allot for the programming assignments. I also decided to tackle the problems each day rather than keeping everything for the end of the week.

There has been another realization about the thing called impostor syndrome. As the society we grew up in is silent about achievements but vocal towards failures, we have been conditioned into thinking that failures are our direct responsibilities. Like, as students, if we did poorly on a test it was because we didn't study enough. But if we did well, it was received with a "that's ok, try to do better next time". So we still generally undermine ourselves. As this course is tough and it is from Stanford, to be honest, I initially felt very stupid. Then I felt that maybe the problems are not very tough, it is just taking me time to figure it out. Finally after submitting them, I looked at the Github repos of some mentors and saw that their solutions are less optimized than mine (it would take more time to run their programs than mine) and that they have not used the concepts like vectorization which was taught in class. That made me realize that I actually got the concepts, and I know better than some others! Being able to work in MATLAB also boosted my confidence that we don't really have to learn a new language now, we just need to learn the syntax.

Difficult challenges are a treat to the logical brain! Need to start reading about Neural Networks now... happy learning :) 

10!

On this day in 2007 I boarded a Lufthansa flight to come all across the Globe with two suitcases and a backpack. I had just enough money to sustain myself for one semester, and no experience on how to thrive in a foreign land where I practically knew no one. As you can tell, I spent a terrible birthday that year, and a very homesick Indian Independence Day. Alone at my dorm, I had asked myself "what am I doing here? Why did I come here?" when I didn't know what to eat, had to roam around the campus looking for a job, or didn't understand what the professor was saying in his heavy southern accent. Life was not easy. Now I look back and wonder what gave me, and hundreds of international students like me, the strength to continue. Perhaps because we have a habit of not giving up, or that we have been hardened by the extremely competitive academic situation in our home countries. Anyway, I survived.

And I survived happily.

My world, which was limited to an oversized family, some close friends and relatives, and mainly the Souther part of Calcutta suddenly exploded and encompassed people from all over the world. I realized what it meant to be a "people person" and to have leadership skills. By the next year, I had three celebrations for my birthday, including a midnight party, and on that Independence Day, I was the Secretary of the Association of Indian Students and I led everyone to sing the National Anthem.

At the completion of 10 years I am looking back and connecting the dots. What did I learn? What did I experience? I am getting amazed at what I found out.

The main thing I learned is independence. How to live alone. How to manage studies, work, grocery shopping, cleaning the place, file taxes, do everything a human being needs to do in order to live a decent life.

The second thing I learned is to appreciate people. In general I love being with people, but the different kinds of people I meet, I am realizing that we don't have to agree to everything to be friends. Even if I don't agree with some of their ideas, I found that they are basically good people. And at the end that is all that matters.

It is great to be exposed to new cultures, new foods, new places, new activities. Of the foods that top my most-favorite list, most of them are not stuff that I ate 10 years back. Activities like camping, hiking, or kayaking were almost unknown to me in India. On the other hand, my American friends now know the results of cricket matches that India plays, they hear bits and pieces about Indian politics, and we discuss international news. Having pets is another great experience for me which would be difficult in India (having three of them would be very difficult).

Travels to many places of the world has also been possible because of my wonderful husband. Not sure how this would have worked out in India, because I don't know if we would have met if we lived there :)

Simple joys like having my vegetable garden, walking with friends at downtown park, taking a comfortable bus ride to work, are things that I love too.

On top of everything, I'd say that fact that I can express myself, that I can be just what I am without trying to "fit in" to any expected role is what makes me feel this is truly "the land of the free".

PS: This is how I celebrated my "10th year in the country" with my international friends :) Yes, there were two celebrations!

Our girls

Like everything in life, writing takes practice. One of our famous Bengali movie directors, Ritwik Ghatak, once said that you need practice even to think. I agree with it. I have not been blogging for a few months, and then figured out that I need to get back to it. Probably because a lot of thoughts were bubbling inside me, and also because I need to keep up my practice.

Today I will write about something very close to my heart - girls who play cricket. Yesterday we watched a nail biting Women's World Cup final with India finally submitting to England at the "home of cricket". It was disappointing, very much so, losing by only 9 runs. A lack of experience showed, not enough maturity too, probably. The girls lost, yes. But I saw a different perspective too.

Cricket has been so far the first thing to show me gender inequality. As a teenager, I yearned to play cricket (I still do), but it wasn't really possible formally. I did not see girls at the cricket coaching institutes, in school too girls were not interested in cricket. Even our sports teachers did not show much interest in teaching the girls how to play cricket, or rather any sport as such. Also, like I have mentioned many times before, academics were of the utmost and only priority. The boys could at least spend some time outside, as girls that was also not much possible. I remember having diary entries where I mentioned how my life would have been if I were a boy. Luckily, gender identity was not a thing at that time in India, so being a tomboy was ok. Something amusing maybe, to others, but nothing to be worried about. Anyway, I missed my chance at playing cricket. An elderly uncle once mentioned if I could try to play at least club level cricket. But with my school leaving and engineering entrance exam round the corner, I did not have the guts to justify the need for playing to my parents. I had to be content with playing in the neighborhood a little, some more in school and college, that too if the boys let me play with them. Maybe if I knew the things I know now, about letting someone be, or if I had the capacity to reason, I would have done something different.

Here's my article for those girls who have to swim against the current. Those ones with scraped knees, grass stained clothes, and cropped disheveled hair. Those girls who are just "one of the boys". they have to play with the boys because other girls won't want to play such rough and tumble games. They don't care how they look as long as they are comfortable. I saw some of them in the Indian team over the last few weeks. The young ones, still in their early twenties, who are representing their countries. They had to challenge a lot of long standing rules. Coming from working class families in the suburbs, I wonder how strong their will is to succeed. They were not coached to make them cricketers, most of them were "sent to play" with their brothers because it would give them something to do. One used to play with the neighborhood boys before she was spotted for the local team.

Compared to the teams of England, Australia, or New Zealand, our girls don't have a strong background. They have to fight poverty, lack of infrastructure, lack of coaching to finally make it to the World Cup. And it is not just India, but the rest of the sub-continent too. Many of them have to fight religious orders too, besides the idea of "but you are a girl".

From the World Cup final at Eden Gardens twenty years back, when nobody really cared about women's cricket to yesterday when the whole country (and Indians abroad) was glued to their TV sets, these girls have come a long way. Yes, the win would have been historical, but even in defeat they have started a new era of inspiring young girls to pick up the willow and leather. Hopefully, cricket coaching centers would accept girls now, and no teenager would have to write "I could have played cricket if I were a boy" because the girls team would be a great place to belong.

At work

I like busy people. At around 9, when a particular bus from Seattle comes to Bellevue Transit Center and a bunch of people cross the street to get to work they radiate some kind of positivity. The same when they grab a cup of coffee from the local Starbucks, the baristas working like bees, or when at lunch people go out to eat with their co-workers, the whole place hums with a sense of purpose, of belonging.

Being an ENFJ, I love people and I get energy by being with people. Coming to work has its own set of positivity for me. To say that I love working would be an understatement. I am one of those people who feel charged after a relaxing weekend to get to work on Mondays. It is not that I don't like weekends, but I love Mondays as well, because I have things to look forward to, challenges to meet, problems to solve and people I love spending time with.

Other than providing an income, and giving a practical way to use the knowledge I acquired from school, there are a lot of things I learned about myself at work. I found out that I have leadership skills. Throughout my entire life in India I have been told to hold back. I was getting into too much trouble, I had (well, I still have) strong opinions and airing them was not a smart thing. Here. I am encouraged to speak up. I am learning how to lead properly, that is utilize the natural tendency but to sharpen that as well. I have understood that my level of enthusiasm is above the national average, and instead of yelling at others for their lack of energy, I am learning how to get people to feel more interested and take part in activities.

Problem solving, especially in the STEM field is a.. how do I put it... it is probably the only thing which can give you something close to superpowers! In the software world, we mainly deal with things intangible. You can see a computer, but you can't feel the lines of code that does most of the work. We see the life in those lines of code, and get unnecessarily attached to them. Just the idea of someone using tab versus spacebar can cause religious wars in the software industry. We are a bunch of crazy people, but we love our weirdness. NOTE: not all software engineers are introverts.

There is a comfort in knowing that in science there is the concept of absolute truth. What I mean is, like when you add two and two, the answer would always be four. Similarly, if your friend has guessed a random number between 1 and 100, and you want to find out what is it, math tells us you only need (at most) 7 tries. And that is true! If you do it right, you won't go beyond 7 tries. That's what binary search is about. If you need more tries, you can be absolutely certain that you are doing it wrong. There have been times when my code didn't run as expected and I started cursing it, or pulling my hair. However much I may do either of those, it does't help because the computer, unluckily is a non-thinking, non-feeling weird thing. It doesn't care. Of course I found out there is stuff I missed, or wrote wrong. Once that is fixed, the code runs. There is no gray area in between!

I need to conclude this article with the people part. Arnab once asked me if I go to work to work or to have a social life because he only heard plans for coffee, lunch, or walks. It is true, because socializing is a big part of my existence and my friends at work help that. We have almost a dozen people to eat lunch with, they are all crazy in their own ways. If you see us then, you'd think we are a bunch of high school or college kids who know each other for many many years. They are those people who know my deepest evil wishes, on whose white sofa I can totally put my dirty feet on, and they can also tell me to my face that I need to stop wasting money.

It is very clear that I have found the right place where I belong.

My kind of meditation

Nowadays meditation is well known in the world, both in the east and west. People do yoga and meditation a lot. There are even apps for guided meditation (some of them are really well). Meditation is definitely a very good thing to calm our minds, get rid of anxiety and bad thoughts, but it is not easy for me. I have tried it, and I am still trying it, but I have to put a lot of effort in just sitting still. Introspection doesn't come to me easily, I get distracted and charmed by the whole wide world around me that is filled with sights, sounds, smells, and of course people!

I have found my calm place in the water of the swimming pool. That is a place where I am mostly alone in my swim lane, and there is just water and me. With my swim cap covering my ears, and my glasses taken off to wear goggles, I am actually cut off from the entire world around me. Its just my arms and legs moving in a rhythm, and my head turning for breaths in a cyclical motion. The gentle lapping of water beside me, the bubbles in front of me, and the surface of the water as I see from below surround me in a world of calm. There is nothing I can do about anything in the world at that time, other than just swim. The black line below is a constant reminder of discipline and balance. You can actually translate that to a life lesson too.

Swimming has amazing health benefits, we all know that. It is the only one exercise that works on all our muscles at the same time, especially the hard to work on - core. It is immensely helpful for cardio, and our lungs. For kids who are still growing, it helps in bone development. I have been forever known to be a scrawny thing that eats very little (especially here in the US where portion sizes almost match my weight), but recently my appetite has increased and it has been catching the attention of people. "You want that too along with your lunch?" I have had friends ask me.

I knew about these physical benefits, but it is the mental ones have amazed me more. Just like they say in guided meditation, that with every exhale let the bad thoughts go away and with every inhale let the good thoughts come in, the same happens in swimming. You can imagine the cool water washing off all your anxieties and worries that you exhale, and with each inhale you get a fresh breath of life. Once you are in water, you don't have to really think of anything other that getting enough air. You can't see anyone else, and nobody can see you. Everyone looks weird in their swim caps and goggles, so looks don't matter there anyway. The stretch of blue-green water in front consists only of the good vibes that envelop us.

Floppy

People talk about Karma a lot these days, it has entered regular conversation, but I have actually seen good Karma in action once. That is when I got Floppy.

As a six-year-old girl I should say I was pretty well behaved. When I came to San Fransisco to visit my uncle and aunt in mid 1991, my dad specifically told me not to buy too many stuffed animals because I had quite a lot of them at home. Now, I doubt if I would have listened to that, but as a well behaved six year old, I did. There were tons of them around me at Disneyland, Sea World, The Universal Studios, they all had their fair share of stuffed animals being sold as souvenirs. I could have asked for them and I believe, if I was polite, I would be given a few too. But I didn't. I even remember picking up a penguin that had rolled off the rack and putting it back in its right place. It was not a minor temptation, because in the early 90s, stuffed animals were not found in abundance in India, and the good ones were very, very expensive.

That is when Karma watched me and decided to reward my good behavior. One day before we were coming back to India, my uncle's friends came and they brought a big stuffed animal for me. That was Floppy. He is one of the biggest stuffed animals I have got. Something like a cross between a teddy and a rabbit, he has the chubbiest face, big ears, and big feet. To say that I adore him would be an understatement. He is like my brother.

He has been beside me, quite literally for almost all moments of my life. He has held my hand with his fat paws when I was in school and my academics were not very pleasant. He has been patiently waiting when I left for the US, and then came back again to take him with me. He has stayed up at night when I was sick. Now, he is there when Arnab goes on business trips. He also keeps me company if I have to work till late night anytime.

Those fat paws and big ears give me a sense of assurance that Floppy is there with me through all good and bad days.