It was 2:30 pm on the afternoon before the Thanksgiving break. Both my room mates were gone for the vacations. I was watching a movie on my computer, when all of a sudden my friend online sends me the message "did you hear...it is awful..." I had no idea whatsoever she was talking about and then "Mumbai is attacked". At the back of the mind, I immediately formed a picture about a medieval battle field (or at least the modern day representation of the medieval battlefield). I saw the news online and I was shocked to see the images and videos of the attack. Mumbai was literally attacked. The actual situation looked like a medieval battlefield with a group of militants firing openly on the civilians on the streets and in railway station. The images of the injured, bleeding hand of a youth as he is falling down dead is still fresh in my mind. The official death toll on cnn.com was 70 people. Slowly as the time passed the numbers rose, they rose as the count of minutes.
Mumbai is the financial capital of India, a major city with a huge population. Mumbai is the land of Bollywood, is the land of dreams and aspirations. 'He is in Mumbai now', so many parents across the country said with pride, as if that is the only thing they strived for throughout their lives. And now it is attacked...So many frantic phone calls to see if they were safe. I was one of those frantic callers, trying to find out if my father was there. Mixed feelings of joy and fear, when I heard he stayed the night before in the Taj but was now safe in Surat; joy that he had left and fearful at the thought of what could have happened.
Mumbai attack is the proof that in the past 60 years of independence we haven't moved anywhere. The British divided us so many years ago, the people responsible for the act are only in the history books but even today we stand at the same place, with no real progress towards harmony. Last ten years of effort to make peace with Pakistan after Kargil had been proved worthless, specially with the media blasting news against Pakistan. I don't know who is right or who is wrong. India is as big of a threat to the Pakistanis as they are to us, it was never a one sided war... but in this game of power between the two countries, it is the innocent people that get crushed in the deal. As a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I have the great pleasure to know many foreign nationals and as a matter of fact if our culture resembles with any country, then it is Pakistan. We share the similar food habits, speak similar languages, wear similar clothes, you can't really look at a person and pick on whether she is Indian or Pakistani...then why are we half the way across the world from our home lands being split in this deal?
The number of terrorist attacks and bombings in the past few months has made 'bomb' a common word for the Indians. They are no longer scared (or perhaps, they are perpetually scared, not that it matters either ways). Every major city has been bombed. Personally, almost all my close family members have been very close to at least one attack. I was in Surat when the Maruti car filled with bomb was found. My family was near Ahmedabad close to the time of attack there. My maternal uncle and grandparents live in Guwahati. And at this point I am not sure if I am scared of that or adjusted to and accepted that. There is no affirmative action that I am taking or I will take, because I am too scared...I will chicken out...but remember if we chicken out now, then it will be our children, our future generations, that will pay for this with more blood...
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
An evening with Julie Sussman
I met her through the McCormick alumni dinner on Friday. She graduated from MIT in the class of 1970. She was one the few women to have gone to MIT back then, they were called coeds. We saw her freshmen class book and the coeds were in four out of forty pages placed in the middle of the book. We had a 3-hr long talk with her about a myriad of topics ranging from how she met her husband to how incredible it is to have a black American President. It was an amazing experience.
Her husband, Gerald Sussman, is currently a course VI professor at MIT, also an MIT Alum, class of 1968. He has been involved with the AI research at MIT since 1964 (quoting wikipedia). He was the maker of 6.001, the first course VI class till the new curriculum, which started with the class of 2010. Julie Sussman was an integral part of editing and correcting the book. She also edited the 6.046 book. She wrote the instructor's manual for both these classes. Being a Mathematician and the lover of logic back in the days when computers were just starting, she spent some years being a programmer. And then she subsequently took up editing books as her primary task. She is still active in this feild, starting the next one in December.
In this short encounter with her, I learnt how essential has love been in her life. She met 'Gerry' Sussman in the sophomore year at MIT and they have been inseparable ever since. He has been a constant source of support and inspiration for her, both personally and professionally. I wish someday, I could talk to someone in the same way she inspired me. Even though it was a Friday evening, she spent the whole evening with us, while Professor Sussman was waiting for her in his office, He was working as he was waiting. I absolutely admired the equilibrium as I reflected on the realtionship later.
She listened to all the hopes and aspirations I want from life and she had wonderful suggestions about what I could do in life. The best thing ever. Given my interest in so many things, different departments, in a broad spectrum of research. I don't think I will ever have enough of school, enough of learning. And she says, "It seems like you want to be a professor, with research in different fields like my husband." She asked me if I wanted to go back to India after I was done. Hearing my answer she said, "You should do your grad school here, maybe teach for sometime here, before you can go and join one of the universities there and create the faciliteis for yourself.' That is the difference that I want to create.
Afsah was also a part of this discussion. In the process we started talking about India-Pakistan relations. In this land far away from both India and Pakistan, you realise all of a sudden that we are much more similar than different in our culture. She is one of those few people I can talk to in a language other than english. I can find a comfort level with. I could not explain to myself till this day, why we were two different countries. And seriously, we would have also had the best cricket team together! Today India spends $25 billion on defence alone, majority of this being used in the western border. Pakistan spends around $18 billion on defence. On the other hand there are so many people in the two countries who don't get two square meals a day. This is such a huge loss to economies of both the countries, but then what is the alternative? I wish someday we would be a part of the same country ;).
Such were the depth of our discussions with Julie. She listened to us attentively. She was very informative and aware of the issues around the planet. We also discussed the election of Barack Obama into the president's office. She recalled, it wasn't 50 years ago when racism was at a peak in the US. Black people couldn't go to schools wthout fear. And today we have the first African-american President. She described it as an incredible feeling, parallel to the amazement as we would go through if we woke up one day to find India and Pakistan united.
This was one of the most inspirational and motivating evening of my life. Maybe some day I can be such an inspiration to someone else!
Her husband, Gerald Sussman, is currently a course VI professor at MIT, also an MIT Alum, class of 1968. He has been involved with the AI research at MIT since 1964 (quoting wikipedia). He was the maker of 6.001, the first course VI class till the new curriculum, which started with the class of 2010. Julie Sussman was an integral part of editing and correcting the book. She also edited the 6.046 book. She wrote the instructor's manual for both these classes. Being a Mathematician and the lover of logic back in the days when computers were just starting, she spent some years being a programmer. And then she subsequently took up editing books as her primary task. She is still active in this feild, starting the next one in December.
In this short encounter with her, I learnt how essential has love been in her life. She met 'Gerry' Sussman in the sophomore year at MIT and they have been inseparable ever since. He has been a constant source of support and inspiration for her, both personally and professionally. I wish someday, I could talk to someone in the same way she inspired me. Even though it was a Friday evening, she spent the whole evening with us, while Professor Sussman was waiting for her in his office, He was working as he was waiting. I absolutely admired the equilibrium as I reflected on the realtionship later.
She listened to all the hopes and aspirations I want from life and she had wonderful suggestions about what I could do in life. The best thing ever. Given my interest in so many things, different departments, in a broad spectrum of research. I don't think I will ever have enough of school, enough of learning. And she says, "It seems like you want to be a professor, with research in different fields like my husband." She asked me if I wanted to go back to India after I was done. Hearing my answer she said, "You should do your grad school here, maybe teach for sometime here, before you can go and join one of the universities there and create the faciliteis for yourself.' That is the difference that I want to create.
Afsah was also a part of this discussion. In the process we started talking about India-Pakistan relations. In this land far away from both India and Pakistan, you realise all of a sudden that we are much more similar than different in our culture. She is one of those few people I can talk to in a language other than english. I can find a comfort level with. I could not explain to myself till this day, why we were two different countries. And seriously, we would have also had the best cricket team together! Today India spends $25 billion on defence alone, majority of this being used in the western border. Pakistan spends around $18 billion on defence. On the other hand there are so many people in the two countries who don't get two square meals a day. This is such a huge loss to economies of both the countries, but then what is the alternative? I wish someday we would be a part of the same country ;).
Such were the depth of our discussions with Julie. She listened to us attentively. She was very informative and aware of the issues around the planet. We also discussed the election of Barack Obama into the president's office. She recalled, it wasn't 50 years ago when racism was at a peak in the US. Black people couldn't go to schools wthout fear. And today we have the first African-american President. She described it as an incredible feeling, parallel to the amazement as we would go through if we woke up one day to find India and Pakistan united.
This was one of the most inspirational and motivating evening of my life. Maybe some day I can be such an inspiration to someone else!
My First post
The purpose of this blog is to lay bare all those random thoughts that clog up my brain...a range of thoughts varying from academics to my social life to the state of rural India and so on...
Yesterday I had a 6.002 test. I expected it to be very difficult too, but then as I started doing the problems, things seemed to be working out pretty well...till i reached the last question, which blew me off completely. Unfortunately, I have a very competitive mind set, but I don't compete with others. I compete with myself. And this test definitely blew my confidence away. It is a different feeling to know the answers and not do them, because of the lack of time and to not know what the heck is going on in that problem even if you have an hour left...and I personally detest the latter kind. Worse still, when I get back to my dorm room and realise..."Darn, I should have tried 'that' approach. It works!"
A talkative person as I am, I really wanted to talk to someone to relieve myself of the stress. I find myself surrounded by people who were more desperate than I was. My IM lists looked dismally empty (they are filled when I have no time to talk to people). I tried calling my family but everybody just decided to be busy. In despair, I looked up to my Problem sets in the other classes for comfort...and guess what, it worked. Just that it was a little over 4:30 am in the morning when I finished it. I am still not sure if I was happy or sad when I was done.
I woke up this morning to realise that I slept through two classes, a feeling I hate specially when I plan to attend those. My first afternoon class decided to give the test grades back (a test we took a week and half before, of which I remembered nothing at all). With mixed feelings I go to my second class and guess what, they decide to hand another test back.
In the evening, I had dinner with an alumni, class of '70. She was awesome. I will describe more about the conversation in my next blog, it deserved its own special place.
Later in the night, I watched the movie, Before the Rains, with literally no idea of what it was about. I was hoping till the end that Sajani should be alive. She was dead and things never sorted out. I guess I was not prepared for such a close representation of life when I watch a movie. I was weeping when my room mate came back after watching Dark Night in LSC. And she went, "You and that thing (referring to my laptop), you guys need to be separated at times!"
And that was the end of the day, I fell asleep without realising it.
A talkative person as I am, I really wanted to talk to someone to relieve myself of the stress. I find myself surrounded by people who were more desperate than I was. My IM lists looked dismally empty (they are filled when I have no time to talk to people). I tried calling my family but everybody just decided to be busy. In despair, I looked up to my Problem sets in the other classes for comfort...and guess what, it worked. Just that it was a little over 4:30 am in the morning when I finished it. I am still not sure if I was happy or sad when I was done.
I woke up this morning to realise that I slept through two classes, a feeling I hate specially when I plan to attend those. My first afternoon class decided to give the test grades back (a test we took a week and half before, of which I remembered nothing at all). With mixed feelings I go to my second class and guess what, they decide to hand another test back.
In the evening, I had dinner with an alumni, class of '70. She was awesome. I will describe more about the conversation in my next blog, it deserved its own special place.
Later in the night, I watched the movie, Before the Rains, with literally no idea of what it was about. I was hoping till the end that Sajani should be alive. She was dead and things never sorted out. I guess I was not prepared for such a close representation of life when I watch a movie. I was weeping when my room mate came back after watching Dark Night in LSC. And she went, "You and that thing (referring to my laptop), you guys need to be separated at times!"
And that was the end of the day, I fell asleep without realising it.
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