Telling a tale or two or a thousand

I have always been a veritable source of stories.  People often amaze at my ability to talk continuously for hours whipping up stories after stories. I switch track from one story to another while bleary eyed first timers, who are too polite to interrupt, watch with wonder as I trace my way back to the main story just about three hours later after the first story. People who know me are the people who dread the timeless void of my story barrel and firmly put their foot down while I dolefully let go of a fantastic anecdote.

Until I was about five years old, no one would understand what I talked. I spoke at the speed of a rambling express train. People knew I was definitely on to a great story as I would animatedly gesticulate, my eyes wide with expression. It would be like watching a movie at 4x speed. They took me to a doctor who said I tried to cram in a lifetime of stories, which was about five years then, in the two minutes people allotted for listening to five year olds. I had an anxiety even when I was that small, that my stories would go unheard. Then, I slowed down to my current speed as people were forced to listen to at least five minutes, out of politeness. Even now, I catch people with their eyes glazed partly in incomprehension and partly in horror.

 I also aspired to become a psychiatrist at some point in life. My father pointed out that my story telling ability would hinder my listening ability which is what psychiatrists generally get paid for.

I tell a lot of stories because I pretty much have an almost photographic memory of incidents. For example, I can perfectly recall the day in first grade, when Manopriya was given the "Class Leader" badge and how, in a gross abuse of power, she jumped up from  desk to desk wielding the wooden scale on the terrorized villagers.

 This is how it would start and I would talk about Manopriya's family and her Malayalam roots and how she would pray in the Race Course Mariyamman temple to get cent percent in first grade Math.

See what I did there?

Anyway, I read the following in Heavy Weather (Of the Blandings Castle series) by P.G.Wodehouse and I couldn't help smiling.

The Hon. Galahad had brightened. Like all confirmed raconteurs, he took on new life when the anecdotes started to come.

...................................................................................................................................................

Once more the Hon.Galahad smote the green cloth. ' You'll smash that table,' said Ronnie.

There flashed into the Hon. Galahad's mind the story of how old Beefy Muspratt, with some

assistance, actually had smashed a billiard-table in the year ninety-eight; and such is the urge to the

raconteur's ruling passion that he almost stopped to tell it. Then he recovered himself.

...................................................................................................................................................

Sometimes it is difficult to let go. In the recent days, I have mastered the art of summarizing the anecdote and somehow fitting it in the conversation under the ruse of letting it go. Again, I read this and just burst out laughing.

 'Well, I'm dashed! Hurts like sin, that sort of thing. I haven't heard of anybody having a girl's name

tattooed on him since the year ninety-nine, when Jack  Bellamy-Johnstone ...'

Ronnie held up a restraining hand.

'Not now, uncle, if you don't mind.' 

' Most amusing story,' said the Hon. Galahad, wistfully.

'Later on, what?' 

'Well, yes, perhaps you're right,' admitted the Hon.Galahad. 'I suppose you're

not in the mood for stories. It was simply that poor old Jack fell in love with a girl named Esmeralda

Parkinson-Willoughby and had the whole thing tattooed on his wishbone, and the wounds had scarcely healed when they quarrelled and he got engaged to another girl called May Todd. So if he had only waited ...

 I am what they call a "raconteur". In the grand scheme of everything else that I could be, I guess it isn't all that bad.

All I can say is that I have a best-seller in my hands.

Think Different

I just read about this teenager who figured out a simple and an ingenious idea to save a lot of money for the Federal government. Read about it here. Isn't this beautiful? We would have never thought about a typeface making a lot of difference and apparently it does, which is not entirely an inconceivable notion.

I keep reading about these kids doing big things in high school. They develop complicated biomedical instruments, power saving contraptions and so on which always makes me think that their parents would have helped them with it (though I might be completely wrong, in which case it is remarkable). I suppose I am deeply suspicious of kids doing mind-blowingly awesome things in high school, by themselves, having been witness to many, many Tiger Moms. That is still not that big a deal in the bigger spectrum of things, but I know how it is for reporters to blow things out of proportion, call the kid the next Steve Jobs only to put inordinate pressure on the kid to perform later in life. I remember something similar happened with an Indian kid a few months before where he created a new operating system of sorts that made the Indian media go bonkers. There was this huge thread in Reddit where they myth busted the awesomeness of this operating system.


When I was in high school, one of the Tamil Magazines opened up an application to come up with the next big public policy idea to revolutionize India. The prize was a Compaq PC which was incredibly hot at that time. I remember spending days holed up with my mother trying to brainstorm and come up with the greatest idea ever. We never did. My mother was prone to sending out essay, stories and jokes to Tamil magazines in my name. Thankfully, most of them did not get published. Some of them did, but they were mostly restricted to the realm of kitchen tips in women's magazines. At one point I had middle aged women spotting me out in weddings and telling me how good my idea for scrubbing kitchen counters with pumice stone was, which is when I put my foot down on the state of affairs. My mother sullenly took up my grandmother's name for her future publishing endeavors. Now you can understand my natural skepticism for the limitless projected potential of high school students. When I was in eighth grade, this shady article appeared in a shadier magazine that was literally titled " Flower Bouquet " on how I plan to become an IAS officer. The readership of Flower Bouquet magazine was probably a sum total of fifty people which includes the publisher, the parents of the kids who write in the magazine and the relatives who get forced by these parents to read the "featured" articles. Despite the small damage the limited viewership can wreak on kids, I think it a very presumptuous thing for parents ghost for their children and then make the child take credit. Somehow it feels that they are setting dangerous precedent about taking credit for someone else's work without a twinge of remorse.

However, what makes me happy about this typeface idea is that it is so simple and fantastic without the usual frills of transistors or gene modification or cancer curing drug. It is definitely something that a high school student could have conceived and executed by himself without parental help, which to even to me, feels very convincing and weirdly, reassuring.

What if I am tricked?

One of my friends posted this video up on Facebook. It is about Assistant Professor Chao-Lin Kuo surprising Professor Andrei Linde at Stanford with evidence that supports cosmic inflation theory.

Now, I don't know anything about cosmic inflation theory. But this video made me smile so much at the professor's look of disbelief and wonder when his colleague says at the door "five sigma, as clear as a day, with a R of 0.2".

After a rather crappy day of trying to break the will of this obdurate block of data, I was deep down in the dumps. Seriously, there is nothing that sucks the morale out of someone like staring at Excel all day long without food.

This video added a little more perspective to why I signed up for this deal.

The professor goes on to say (after looking at the results, of course) "What if I am tricked", then looking lost, probably in the poignancy of the moment, slowly and deliberately adds "What if I want to believe in this just because it is beautiful?"

I guess being with people like this who "want" to believe in things just because the said things are beautiful, is what makes my own little world filled with vindictive and egregiously large p values, worth it - however academically unacceptable they may be.

Going forward

I really have to get going and hence will keep it short. Today also marks the first year of getting my admit in CMU. That is sort of all the birthday gifts (wrapped in one brief email) that I could have hoped for as a kid. It is a fitting tribute to this occasion that I have a test tomorrow and I ended up studying.

In the immortal words of Ron Swanson, birthdays were invented by Hallmark to sell cards. I concur. For most people, birthday is a time to stop, introspect and make an assessment. For someone who wanders about introspecting all the time and procrastinating everything worth assessing, birthday is one more day I expect the world to go out of its way and pamper me. Up until now, it has happened only once.


Yes, my days are along the lines of looking under rocks in the creek. And of course, I am happy doing that.

The title is a bad pun on my birthday - March Fourth. It sounds like an order - March forth. Right Ho!

On getting a job.

I suddenly remembered the "placement season" at my undergrad for no reason. To the uninitiated, the placement season in Southern Indian engineering colleges are when software companies recruit engineering students en masse. This generally happens just before the start of the final year of engineering. This is the coming-of-age ritual that every engineering student undergoes.

After a nasty childish spat with a neighboring college (which I am sure readers of this blog will remember) I received more than one ugly note saying that how I would be dealt with during the pooled placement season that happens on their campus. I bring this up because, it is funny to think that they wanted to punish me with a job that I would miss out on for my (admittedly) bad behavior. One could sell anything to anyone if they attach a "placement" tag to it. Oh so much for campus placements, the petty issues, the mad race and the hacks. I am surprised that they don't sell powdered dragon claws as a performance boosters (or do they?) during the season. I remember ludicrous stories of how "cotton salwars" were the only accepted dress code and how guys would get rejected if the interviewers sniff out the fact that they had used a particularly misogynistic brand of deodorant. There were special classes to crack these mock tests for which people paid good deal of money.

In this fiasco, the placement coordinators (PCs) are the ones who truly deserve a lot of credit. The amount of bullshit they take during placement season, for the greater good of their peers (who are not particularly nice to them) is mind boggling. They have the nerve wrecking job of having to deal with some of the most narcissistic and egregious blokes who saunter into campus in the guise of interviewers and dangle placements, money and hope over these poor PCs. The PCs with their limitless patience are completely answerable to their peers and to their professors and are often the casualties of nasty college politics and get majorly footballed around during the season. The PCs would wait on the interviewers hand and foot and treat them like royalty. I remember hearing horror stories how some of these interviewers would send the PCs off at midnight on a mission to procure a particular brand of chicken or liquor and how the PCs would wordlessly comply.

I understand that people spend a lot of money on engineering colleges (excluding the state schools, of course) just because they can get a job. But the whole deal becomes futile if the sole focus is on getting a job than becoming employable which are two different things altogether. One cannot simply become good at something by dreaming about tantalizing notion of landing a lucrative job or by cheap hacks or doing things just to have a good resume. It shows up as glaring inadequacies in the first ten minutes of of an interview.

I recently overheard a CMU undergrad giving his phone interview to some company as I was lounging in the sunny corridors of Gates building. As he talked on, I was starting to feel awestruck at the things this guy knew. I was beginning to feel bad about the futility of my undergrad when this guy mentioned that he was in his first year (looks like he was pitching for an internship) and my jaw dropped. In my first year, I had given up on Electronics as a chosen career path after my first bungled tryst with Norton's and Thevenin's theorm and was moping around about how I had made a big, irreversible mistake. In contrast, here was a first year student who had built things that were clearly beyond my comprehension and apparently he had been building such things since eighth grade. Seriously, if we dream of competing in a global arena and think beyond the standard software placements, cramming up Agarwal's Quantitative aptitude or buttressing our engineering ability by reading "selections" of frequently asked questions, is NOT going to help. The "Group Discussion" rounds are such a farce. It makes me smile just think about how people believed that they can become proficient in topics worth having a group discussion about, by reading the newspaper for two days before the dreaded GD. Also, how on earth a person's analytical ability or his propensity to communicate and work in a team can come out in such a carefully constructed tableau?

I don't know if the status quo will change. I hope it does.

On a side note, in retrospect, it amuses me that I somehow always managed to wangle my way out of doing things that I didn't want to do - like never having to cram up the nuances of C such as linked lists & pointers or even think about attending pooled placements for dream companies (that I was cutely threatened with). My parents just let me take twenty days off and be at home during the placement season because I couldn't stand being on the campus what with the peer pressure driving me insane. Not everyone gets to watch reruns of House MD while grappling with an identity crisis, oblivious to the world outside. Somehow, my parents were more confident about my employability than I was and were just waiting around for me to sort out my issues (which anyway took me the next four years).

Despite my incessant bitching about life, I think I should really be thankful for these small pleasures.

Out of chaos, comes order (and also a perfect cup of tea)

(This might be a repeated theme in this blog, but somehow I feel that today's deeds hit the high levels in the craziness meter)

It is not everyday I wholeheartedly set out to study. Today was the day to atone for watching an entire season of House of Cards in a record thirteen hours. As I watched House of Cards with my jaws slackened and devoid of any animation, I was already making elaborate plans on how to finish half semester worth of Math in eight hours of undivided attention. I was even prepared to use the art of meditation that people tried to force me into before my 12th board exams to zoom through two hundred pages of disquieting Matrix algebra. 

If nothing, I am all about super-human goal setting. 

Just ten pages through my book, I decided that I should be washing the dishes. As I was doing the dishes, I realized there were so many in the sink because I did not have space anywhere else in the kitchen and had been dumping things into the sink; and into the fridge. (It reminds me of this answer I read in Quora for the greatest software misuses on how people use recycle bin to store files) 

Suddenly the prospect of cleaning the fridge became quite appealing given the task I was currently up to, was rather slimy. I didn't quite calculate the odds of the next task being equally, if not more slimy. Whistling a merry tune, I abandoned the dishes and set off to clean the fridge, which is where I discovered the stuff I had been looking for months. I found empty plastic containers, which to my surprise were stacked neatly in the corner of the third row. I also found an entire loaf of bread in the vegetable tray. This was the elusive loaf that I had been looking for, every morning, in desperate need for breakfast, before scrambling to school in hunger. 

I kept a stiff upper lip and decided that I needed an organization strategy to deal with the situation. And so, I decided to clear out the pantry to make space for the things that had absolutely no need to be refrigerated but somehow had found their way into the fridge - like the empty glasses, the bag of potatoes, salt shaker and a couple of kitchen knifes stuck to apples in a rather threatening way. The fridge, meanwhile, lost all hope and went back to its melancholic whirring.

While cleaning the stuff off the pantry (or a "larder" like how Enid Blyton would call it), I disinterred a bag of cardamom and cloves that I had gotten from home. I was sniffing the bags for a good couple of minutes, taking in the heady aroma of these spices. This must have tripped some internal circuit in the old noodle as I suddenly started having an intense craving for a cup of Masala Chai. Now, there is this quaint little shop called "Arasan Sweets" in Madurai. Up until now, I have never had a cup of Masala chai that tasted better than the one they serve at Arasan Sweets. I have made it a point to visit Arasan Sweets every time I go back home and slurp the tea standing amidst the gang of Indian government bureaucrats who haunt this place for their notoriously long pre-lunch, post breakfast tea break. 

This gave me a new mission. I went online and fifteen odd clicks and ten websites later, I had a general idea of how go about making the Masala Chai. A dash of cloves and cardamom, a sprinkle of cinnamon, a smack of ginger and a generous dab of attention deficiency turned out to be the secret ingredients required to make the best cuppa Masala Chai. 

I hope to iterate through this crazy loop over and over until my homework, dishwashing, clearing-out-the fridge, cleaning the pantry, drinking more tea and incoherent-post-tea-rhapsodizing - all get done.

What is life without some optimized parallel processing, eh?

One more quora question

How do people feel when their names are mispronounced?

Ok, we from Tamil Nadu don't really have a surname. We just take our father's first names as surnames because the western world demands one. So, the first name is pretty important and I think my parents spent a whole lot of time in coming up with mine . It is quite unique even today and the only advantage is that I get the choicest of email ids. However, coming up with this name was a bad strategy in so many ways.

I don't know why, "Uttara" just freaks the heck out of Tamils. They simply can't handle the two ts. They say ta, instead of tha and perhaps while reeling from the initial shock, add a couple of 'a's for good measure and approximate it to nothing like how it is supposed to sound.

Somehow, everyone outside Tamil Nadu pronounces it perfectly. It is just my kith and kin who stumble so much and have mangled it beyond recognition that I don't care anymore. Pretty much everyone, whom I used to correct in my younger days, which was pretty much everyone, stuck to the unthreatening version with their comforting "h" in the sight i.e, Uthra. I swear I have a certificate that says "Avtara" (from A.Uttara). I remember one of my teachers in middle school scrunching up her face in effort and say "Udderaa".

Nowadays, I am happy if I hear a "ta" & a "ra". Even a ballpark estimate would do. But definitely not "Andhera".

By the way, my "surname" that is not, is "Madurai Ananthakrishnan". Your turn, western world.

This is the story of Snownibal

My exposure to the western world began with Enid Blyton novels. Every Enid Blyton novel set in the winter, had children building snowmen. Sometimes these snowmen even had clues to solving mysteries involving stolen goods and fireworks meant for Guy Fawkes Day. When the children in these novels were not eating scones or stealing pies from the larders for their secret adventures, they were accessorizing the snowmen that they built with hats and scarfs. 

Despite vanquishing the bunny hill at a ski resort, this winter, my tryst with snow didn't feel complete without building a snowman. There was a gaping void in the list of activities I had meant to do the moment I set foot in this country. Making a snowman was that gaping void, for the lack of willing accomplices.

This Saturday, just when I was about to sit down with my Econometrics book, one of my friends suggested that we should build a snowman given the polar vortex seemed to be doing its second round and all that snow was going waste. So intrepid we were, that we trudged through -13 degree celsius to campus just because the snow would be much more pristine on the campus.

Our initial plan was to make this ginormous snowman that would be visible from the entrance of the campus. We hadn’t quite contemplated on prior research before embarking on this endeavor. After all, it was a dumb snowman, and we were two doctoral students with one being a real life brain scientist. Ten minutes in the snow, our flawed methodology and the years of growing up six degrees above the equator started showing up. Our hands were too frozen to consult YouTube from our phones. After multiple strategy sessions and scuttling back into the safety of indoors every 20 minutes, we figured that we could approximate a snowman out of this the huge mound of snow that we had created. Our art started looking more and more like a three layered frosted cake.

After we made the final spherical mass that was the head, we decided he looked snowmanly enough. But the deed wasn’t quite done. The stump of carrot that I had so carefully carried had turned soggy. Our amateur effort in giving the snowman his well deserved nose job, which was along the lines of poking a series of holes wherever possible, caused his face face to disintegrate as if he had been a victim of an acid attack (Life is all about violent imagery, isn't it?) . But a snowman isn't a snowman without the carrot. We finally managed to cement the darned carrot in ( we called it "fixing the deviated septum") and substituted some twigs for eyes.

The fun part about any project is the naming stage. In fact, I believe that the only good part about having pets or even kids is that one gets to name them. I should say that I am terrific with names. I once thought of a series of names for twins that a colleague at work had, that started with Ping and Pong to downright arcane characters from Greek & Indian mythology. After a while, he started taking a different route every time he saw me as I was spewing out names at a rate higher than he could take in, without visibly grimacing. My stuffed elephant is called Ashwathama after his elephantine counterpart in Mahabharata and my pink flamingo, with her frilly wispy skirt, is called "Azhagiya Laila" after the legendary Marilyn Monroesque scene that Ramba pulled off in Ullathai Allitha. My bike in India was called Karuthamma (Black beauty?). My friend calls her stuffed lion, "Singaram, the lion" and therefore a team like ours had a self-inflicted responsibility to come up with a name befitting our art-work.

We came up with three. The snowman was called Santhanagopalan. He also goes by Sheshadri. Since Santhanagopalan implies that he will be spelling his name forever at Starbucks, we decided to call him Snownibal as a salute to the sleepless nights of reading Hannibal Lecter books, though the logical abbreviation would have been Santa. Snownibal was also chosen for Hannibal because of the whole Crossing of the Alps bit and we were sure there must have been lot of snow while doing so. 

Santhanagopalan Andrew Carnegie Sundaram Iyengar (as a hat-tip to all the schools we both attended/attend) would have been perfect but it was too cold to goof around more. In retrospect, it actually abbreviates to SACSI- Sexy indeed, the effect that we were going for.

I can now proudly say that I finally built a snowman. He is quirky and wears his hat at a jaunty angle.

One of those days (aka Dear Diary post)

Today was one of those days when everything went according to the plan. It is amazing how rarely these days occur. I went to a lecture three minutes ahead of time;  hit the gym; did not binge eat; did the dishes down to the last spoon; walked into the frozen yogurt shop and then walked right outside without buying anything; drank only two cups of coffee - boy, I am so proud of myself.

I am so proud that I wanted to make a note about this once in a blue moon day. The problem with self-control is that, by default, mine is on a road to perdition. I calculate the probability of my going above and beyond to stick to a routine and then give up just by the thought.

Like everything that is not good for a person, doing things impromptu, feels good. Historically it has worked well too. I get so much work done when I capitalize on my prime productivity zones that probably occurs once a week at inconvenient, god-forsaken times, and then go about the rest of the week, in what Calvin would call, a complete forfeiture of experience. The problem with this approach to life is that it is extremely difficult to induce these happy zones, on demand, especially when there is homework to be done and reports to write.

Digressions apart, today was perfect- except the time I tried to study and fell asleep for a rather embarrassingly long period of time. Oh, so much for perfection.

I am just going to try holding on to this meek attempt to live a normal life and see how it goes.

They said I would hate winter

Summer is for outdoorsmen- The people who play cricket when it is 45 deg C outside; The ones who talk about Madurai weather with such fondness in their eyes while their shirts get soaked in sweat minutes after they come out of the air-conditioning that they have to scurry back in for their fourth shower of the day.

Back at home, the summers were typically 45 deg Celsius (110-115 deg F). We didn't have air conditioning until after I was in college. Not that it made any difference because we always had (and still have) six hours of power cuts everyday during summers. I remember lying hours together on the floor with my face pressed to the cool marble floor of my home and settling for buckets of lemonade or buttermilk instead of Rasna as it was "unhealthy". Arun ice-cream had a monopoly in Tamil Nadu and the sticks of orange or grape icies were rare treats. In the evenings, my parents and I would splash a lot of water on the clay floored terrace and sit down on "easy chairs" to read, while the gnarled teak leaves fell down and the coconut tree's leaves swayed very gently. By 8 or 9 PM after it turned unbearably humid and hot, I would go down, shower for what would be the third time that day and swathe myself in layers of Nycil (and Dermicool later on). I always prayed that the power shouldn't go off at 4 AM so that I won't wake up in a pool of sweat. Cotton, thin, soft, non-scratchy clothes were the order of the day. My parents and I would shudder at anyone who wore a full sleeve. I remember my mother writing a rather scathing letter to my principal saying how stupid it was to make us wear shoes and socks in Madurai's horrendous climate which was one of her few actually valid reasons to write a scathing letter to the principal.

A room without a fan was a nightmare and my undergrad classrooms didn't have fans while we all fanned ourselves with the thinnest of our engineering books. Imagine being in labs poring over faulty circuit-boards with the hair sticking to the back of your neck for three hours and coming back to the hostel to find that there is no water or power. My roommate and I would hang up towels soaked in water over the windows so that it would cool the room. The laptops would get so hot on the bed that I had to work from a desk. The horror.

God, I hate heat with a vehemence that comes from the twenty three summers of longing for a cooler tomorrow.

Thank goodness for the snow and this list.

• The crunchy nice new snow every morning
• Wading through the new snow just because it is so powdery and soft
• Making the first footprints on fresh snow
• Short days  warm bed, just being at home
• My hands getting cold as I type
• Going around my house reciting Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening with no one to stop me or roll their eyes at me
• Struggling to say "Wet cappuccino" at the coffee shop with the frozen lips and tongue and getting "Venti  cappuccino" instead

Ha, and they told me I would hate winter.

Year end post

I don't really remember too much of 2013 as it whooshed past by. While 2012 was all about indulgence, 2013 was all about backbreaking work. I realized this as I was scrubbing out six months of cooking from my stovetop. The first five months were all about my letting the goblins in my head take over and crank up the crazy just a wee bit more to wreak havoc. But I have talked more than enough to anyone who would listen (or really, be in the same room as I am) about this, and so I am going to selectively remember the few good stuff. My official admit came on my 24th birthday. My shoes and coats came to Pittsburgh three days after my admit and then I managed to bring 4x23 KGs of luggage here. I am taking a moment to savor the shopping that happened between March and July. Really, that's all the good stuff in the first part of the year.

2013 was the year I realized how hard it is to fend for one self. I have never realized how terrible and how hard it is to keep up a house. All along, I have waltzed past the concept of living alone armed with maids at my beck and call, who cleaned my house, did my laundry, folded my clothes and took care of me for a paltry salary equal to ten days worth of coffee at Starbucks. I fondly remember the days I used to groan just at the thought of getting up from my bed and letting the maids in to my apartment. 

My background in housekeeping is almost non-existent. In twenty-four years, I have never once taken out the trash. It was something grown ups did and when I had to, it felt so repugnant. At the first attempt, I held on to one corner of the trash bag testily, squealed all the way to the trash room and back. This was just the tip of the household iceberg.

Dishes piled themselves in the sink. I painfully realized that things turn greener and gruesome after a few days of lingering around in moisture and goo. Then came the mystery of missing spoons. I had gotten about three dozen on my first gleeful trip to Walmart and somehow there was never one around when I most needed a spoon. I didn't know that spoons have the propensity to wiggle their way into the bottom of the sink, and create a pyramid of quivering dishes resting on a base made of spoons. Of course, I never make it to the bottom whenever I valiantly set out to do the dishes.  The worst moment of this year was the first time I did reach to the bottom of the pile and realized the ghastliness that my First In Last Out approach was. Decay, squalor and all things slimy and shady characterized my first attempt at truly living alone in 2013.

My peerless house keeping skills resulted in a neatly traced out path from the door to my bed. I have been called as a threat to myself as if it is news, after people almost broke their necks stumbling on innocuous heaps of clothes, which camouflaged deadly heels. I tell them that they just need practice. I bought a sofa as a treat for doing great in an exam. When I wanted to flaunt the wonder that my sofa is to a friend, he looked blankly at the general direction I was waving at. It took him a whole minute to comprehend the presence of a sofa from under the pile of clothes. Personalized robots that can fold clothes and organize boots cannot get here sooner. 

2013 was a year of feeling erudite befitting my latest stint in the academia. Sometimes, I step back from the whiteboards filled with squiggly integrals feeling quite proud of myself. I am exceeding my own expectations just by nudging myself out of my comfort zones. For once, R seems to be easier to handle than Excel, which indicates great personal improvement and less blaspheming (years may pass but spinning beach ball of death in Mac's Excel will never cease).

This year, I have learned the importance of being earnest and of sanity, a pat on the back, a kind word, a genuine grin, a good night's sleep and oh-so-lovely work. I don't think I get to complain about anything. After all, who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. If by mild yoke, a roof caving in, so be it. I shall take the hazing and the assorted cosmic character building endeavors like the manned up, Zen Guru that I am.

Last but not the least, this bit about "a little help from my friends". What would you do if I sing out of tune, would you stand up and walk out on me? Apparently, yes.

Here is to 2014 and as Calvin says, the world owes me happiness, fulfillment and success. I am just here to cash in.