A trip down the memory lane....on second thoughts, lets not take the trip!

A little eleven year old girl, sitting at home on a bright Saturday afternoon, eating icecream and watching cartoons, she seems happy...and now lets move into the little girl's head and see what she is thinking - Radha Lakshmi and Kanchana, her best friends since Kindergarten, playing with her, sharing silly stories, her old Tamil school teacher praising her for her beautiful handwriting, her old dance School, Kalakshetra, her dance teacher proudly telling her mom "Your daughter is the youngest in our class, but she is my best student"...and then we see tear drops fall from the little girl's eyes...she wants to go back to Madras, she wants her old life back...

Fifteen years pass and that little girl is me, her thoughts have become more mature, she wants different things in life now, but deep down, she is still the little girl and she still wants to go back to Madras...

I read a blog today that actually inspired me to write this one. Do you know the two words I hate (no, one of them is not "ointment" and I am not Will or Grace) - Reminiscing and Yearning - I realized not too long ago that I am born with an incurable habit - To not live in the present (metaphorically, of course). To reminisce and yearn, to live in the past or to always struggle to be somewhere in the future, believe me, it is an annoying and unsettling feeling that drains you completely and leaves you feeling dis-oriented and dis-satisfied with what you have.

When I was in High School, I dreamed of joining Bits, I obsessed over it day and night, I really wanted to go to this University that was a world of its own - a fortress standing all alone guarding a whole new world inside it, a world of friendships and heartbreaks, freedom and happiness and I would be lost in this make-believe world...

I did get into Bits and yes, it was the world that I had imagined it to be...but, I was too busy to notice it. I was struggling to achieve that magic grade that would enable me to join the elite, Computer Science gang. I thought day and night of the fun Computer Science students have, discussing cryptic codes, tricky viruses, black boxes and white boxes, so much so that I sat in Computer Science classes, in rapt attention, absorbing every word the lecturer said, while two corridors away, the Marketing Professor was busy discussing the importance of the customer (Marketing, being my core course at Bits!)

Anyway, I graduated and had a job offer from Infosys, a software company and you would think, I would be thanking my lucky stars. hah! I was on to my next worry-venture - I came to US to do a Masters in Computer Science - a dream come true. Was I s a t i s f i e d? Nah...I was busy worrying about my next deadline, my next assignment and how happy I was at Bits and thus, two years passed...

I am now with IBM working on what I have always wanted to work on, and now, you ask me, am I happy? Well, I now sit here, wondering why I had not decided to stay back in India - to argue with my parents - daily, to be blissfully unaware of who a racist is, to take Tamil movies and Tamil movie theatres for granted, to eat hot South-Indian parotha and Sathukudi juice at Saravana Bhavan ...oh, there are a million things that I would rather be doing and I bet if am in India now, doing all these things, I would be thinking "Why did I not decide to go to the United States?".

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