Bonjour France!

Bonjour France!

If you’ve read my earlier blogs about South Korea and USA trips, you know how good my travelling events can get. I believe now it is customary for me to have some crazy thing happening during my travel to a new continent and Europe did not disappoint!

Heritage: Erasmus Mundus Partnership program provided me with an opportunity to study at Ecole Centrale de Nantes, Nantes, France as an exchange student for a period of six months. With inexplicable excitement, the time had come to big goodbye to Friends and Family and scratch off a few things from my checklist as the Euro trip was going to begin! After bidding goodbye to IIT Guwahati, I flew to Kuwait to visit my family after a really long time. Those 13 days with family passed faster than I could say “I wanna stay more”. It was a 15 day trip as such but as I said something interesting always needs to happen, I realized all international flights to Delhi were getting delayed or cancelled due to the Delhi fog and weather conditions. I was supposed to reach Delhi on 31^st Feb at 8:30 pm and catch my flight for Paris departing on 1^st Feb at 2 am from Delhi. It was a tight schedule and as concerned as family members always are, they told me change my tickets to reach Delhi 2 days earlier. With a lot of calls, calculations and friends help I finally got my tickets changed to the 29^th of January. It was going to be 2 nights and 3 days in Delhi alone. Frankly, the 2 nights in Delhi experience was nothing less than a 3 month internship experience abroad. Having heard so much about the capital it was surely intimidating to be there alone. However, the experience in Delhi was great! Sometimes we really underestimate the pleasure of being alone. I used to think travelling alone was depressing and lonely however it turned out to be great. It actually can be great everytime if you allow yourself to enjoy your own company now and then. Visiting the malls of Gurgaon and looking at various people, the way they were dressed and their way of life sure makes you ponder about a lot of things. It made me think about the diversity of India with beggars on one side and shopping malls on the other all being reflected in its justly called capital Delhi.

The Indira Gandhi International Airport has always been special! My first international trip (to Kuwait), my sophomore internship (to South Korea) and the latest, the exchange semester trip to France, all have been through the IGI airport. I had never flown through Air France before and I had got mixed reviews about this airline. I must say after flying with Qatar Airways, your expectations from the airlines really increases and it was but obvious that Air France was disappointing. It began with the luggage check-in. My check-in bag was exactly 23 kilos and there was absolutely no problem with that one. The Air France personnel was about to print my boarding card when suddenly a random person who was apparently their team leader tapped me on my shoulder from behind and told me to weight my laptop bag along with the hand bang. It was 2 kilos extra than allowance and god they pained me for that for 2 hrs! I mean who checks the handbags unless you are very unlucky! Thank god I had gone to the airport quite early. Had to throw away my dear food packets and reduce the weight before they allowed me to check in. I started hating Air France from that moment onwards. 2 kilos considering a student should have been allowed given that other flights allow an extra 10 kilos for etudiants.

In the 9 hour flight to Paris I thought I would sleep as the flight was from 2 am as such however, kids always ruin travel! One sweet looking kid showed his true colours as soon as the flight took off! The constant squeaky, cancerous, piercing sound of the kid’s cries royally screwed my sleep. With a bursting head I landed at Paris. Oh wait! Paris!! Who cares about the headache! I was in Europe!! It was too much to accept in that moment. The CdG Paris airport was huge! The way pAris was written was beautiful with the Eiffel Tower drawn in the “A” of Paris. It was raining outside and it was definitely cold! The excitement with which I removed my new winter wear clothes was like that of a kid removing the shiny wrapper of Kinder chocolate! The winter wear would be so exciting I had no clue. I am usually the ‘wear nothing but shorts’ kinda guy. Well that’s the reason I love summers more than winters however I was in love with winter wear like an infatuated teenager. With a few hours of wait I was on board for Nantes!

With just 45 minutes of flight and awesome chocolate cookies being served I became a little considerate to Air France finally. FYI It’s always the chocolates to change my mood :D I landed in Nantes and the ACCENTS (A Club of CEntrale Nantes for Travelling Students) member Audurey was there at the airport to pick me up with a tram ticket to travel to my accommodation. This is the most amazing club for social service I have seen. She gave me general information about Nantes and welcome kit with a bag of EC Nantes. Helped me with my luggage and I finally reached my accommodation. 59 Rue de Nancy, Nantes was going to be my abode for 6 months here.

Thomas Monganne, my landlord is pretty cool for a 40 something French guy. Thin and tall like almost any French guy he was very welcoming and made me feel at home. His English was comprehensible and I realized there wouldn’t be a lot of communication gap. The house was beautiful 80 meter square apartment with four rooms on the top floor and the kitchen and bathroom below. Interestingly the other 3 rooms are occupied by French, Spanish and Russian girls!! My landlord left me with this information and a humorous wink.

Nantes is a beautiful city. The most beautiful aspect of this student university town was it’s helpful people. I was told otherwise about French being helpful to foreigners however the exceptional case is Nantes and I am glad I am here. The first instance of help began with my trip to LiDL: The supermarket. In Nantes here, and I assume in other parts of France and may be even Europe, the shopping carts need 1 Euro to be inserted which you get back after you park the cart. I never knew about the fact that we could get back the coin so just like any other student on budget I decided not to take the cart. I went inside the market and after idling away in the isles for quite some time I approached one guy to ask him about salt and pepper. Accompanied by the guy was an old lady, Michelle, who spoke English really well and these two people were the sweetest people I have met. They asked me about the cart and I explained my predicament. After a good laugh, she handed over to me a fake euro coin which could be used for the carts out of her purse. It was a very small gesture but it touched me greatly. After shopping for a while I was in the queue for the bill and she told me to save the 20 cents for the bag and removed a bag and gave it to me. I had shopped a lot and the stuff was heavy. The most surprising thing that happened was they walked me back till rue de Nancy with my stuff. The lady was definitely 60+ and her gesture had categorically helped me realize how Nantes as a place was going to be.

Trotting in Nantes has its own sweet pleasure. The seven degree temperature, light rains and wind could either annoy you or make you feel ecstatic depending upon which day of the week it is. On Fridays and weekends when you decide to aimlessly walk in downtown you feel elated with such a weather. On weekdays during college you will curse the same. The European culture and architecture was visible through the streets of Nantes. The small windowed houses and streets with intricate façade makes one feel Europe in it's true essence. The beautiful Cathedrals, Restaurants, Historical places and Museums deserve hours and hours to be spent on them. It’s breathtakingly beautiful. I have to still see the Elephant of Nantes and I guess it’s gonna be very soon.

Ecole Centrale de Nantes for a student from IIT Guwahati turned out to be very small. The university is small however the place is really happening. There are some other universities too juxtaposed with ECN and you can see only students around there. The good part is you can speak in English and find many who can respond well. One interesting aspect that I discovered for myself are the cheap vending machines in college with Moccachinos and Hot chocolate in just 40 cents which is not bad at all.

I met Antonio Manco, a fellow Heritage Erasmus Mundus student who is as crazy as me. Friday night in Nantes turned out to be awesome with him. Have made a good bunch of Italian and Spanish friends here. Hope to strengthen our bonds over time.

Antonio and me

New Italian Friends

I also got the opportunity to meet Prathamesh Joshi, a DD from IIT Bombay. Pretty cool guy, very quiet as compared to me but a fun guy to travel Nantes with. He stays close by to my location and I thank god for that. Will explain the accommodation issue with Heritage later. For me it's mostly with Prathamesh for cooking, travelling and bakaring etc. Chu says he has no enthu for taking pics! I told him if he is with me, there will be pics :P

and that's Prathamesh!

I am just waiting for my bank card to arrive after which I will finally get a cell phone connection and most importantly the Eurail Pass. Can’t wait to begin the travel! Hoping for the best, let’s see what these 6 months have in store. Hope to learn some French. Till then Au Revoir!

The promise of constancy

Promises! We make it and we break it. This New Year too began with a lot of hopes and a lot of a promises which are already breaking faster than they were even made. 2013 was a year full of memories. Some of these memories were outrageously fantastic and a few were ridiculously heart breaking. The period beginning with the 2013 New Year celebrations to Alcheringa 2013 is a time that passes swiftly with a new semester to begin with. With the acceptance of the US visa, followed by a crazy 36 hours delayed journey to the States it was exciting all the way. I am glad to have listened to my senior’s advice and finished off my GRE and TOEFL in the summers of 2013 itself. With the US joy ride over and done and a PhD offer in hand I was ready for the pseudo-penultimate semester to begin. I call it pseudo because to my surprise I got through the Heritage Erasmus Mundus Exchange program for Ecole Centrale de Nantes in France. The penultimate semester turned out to be my last semester at IIT Guwahati. After getting the news it was as though I went through those great phases of realization as stated in various scriptures. Firstly, I had to sink in the feeling of being accepted to the program. Secondly it was to calm myself down after being titillated every other second thinking about Europe. I then realized it was my last semester in college and then it was the phase of convincing myself that I wanted to accept it. Phew! What a joy ride it had been! I thought I was all done and then there was the whole duolingo experience of learning French and oh! It is fun to learn a foreign language. The Kolkata French consulate experience was also amazing where being an Erasmus mundus scholar was nothing less than being from MIT. Finally I was set to go back to Pune having consumed half of December in the paper work and formalities to be out of college! On a bittersweet note I landed to Pune only in a few days to realize it was a 9.91 spi this time. Damn! I could never be a perfect 10 in college! Had it in my checklist. Was terribly upset but well it was my all-time highest so that was a consolation. Also, moti always says the best of the things unexpectedly. I was as usual cribbing about my spi and she told me “there is much more to you than being a 10 pointer!” I don’t know if she said it casually or what but there was so much weight in it. I convinced myself of what an ass I am and I got back to normalcy :P I then got to attend the Indo-US conference organized by TCS on ICME thanks to my Purdue Prof. It was a great experience too. New Year’s Eve has been the most special and I don’t think it will ever be this special again. As this year proceeds a lot of relations will fade away and a whole lot more are gonna spring up. Amidst all of these there are a few bonds which I dearly wish, hope and expect are for life and won’t break ever. I wish the promise of constancy remains. With the Schengen visa, an accommodation after a lot of pain and a ticket to France I am all set to experience the European way of life! Before that, a small trip to Kuwait where after 2 long years I will meet dad and bro. A lot of surprises in store for me for sure, hoping for the best. Alvida India, Assalawalekum Kuwait!!

ICME Indo-US workshop

It’s always an edifying experience to be a part of something which you know is way above your level. The same was the case with the Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) Indo-US conference cum workshop organized by TCS in Pune. The professors and delegates from the US and India are the gurus of their respective fields and to see them give their presentations and seminars about their work in their field activates and improves your gray matter like the eclectic combinations of metals forming enhanced alloys. Although mostly esoteric, I tried my level best to keep up with the seminars. Topics ranging from ICME protocols to material properties and discussions about durability and sustainability to databases and computational design, it was an intriguing and exciting experience. Being the only undergraduate present there with most of the people at least double my age, I was just trying not be stupid. I am not sure if I am supposed to reveal the details of the conference so I shall stay shut about the discussions.

The interesting part was I did not fail to live up to the stereotypical expectations from an undergraduate student. There was free and fast Wi-Fi which helped me update my windows 8 to 8.1 after clearing my proxy settings with help from some smart juniors [“netsh winhttp reset proxy” in cmd prompt in case if anyone is as stupid as me]. There were 20 varieties of dishes for lunch ending with fruit pudding, ice cream and chocolate mousse [which I did not pronounce as mouse like I usually do]. The buffet table was endless and there was no line at all. Delegates were more interested in the research discussions and I had to take the responsibility of keeping the buffet alive. I did not disappoint the Hyatt hotel butlers. 

I was completely at sea as to how to begin discussions with such awesome people and realizing my vacant expressions my professor was kind enough to introduce me to everyone and that too very grandly. I sheepishly just asked them about their current research because there was nothing else that I could have contributed. I hate being stupid.

I have taken all the brochures and schedules with the list of the delegates who had attended the conference for my reference and now I shall get back to reading papers of some interesting people I met there. Au revoir! 

Life @ IITG

I can’t believe I am sitting and writing a concluding blog for my IITG life. These days have passed so swiftly that it has left me bewildered like the elderly who try to cope up the rapidly transforming technology. Phew! Treading down the memory lane just broadens my smile ear to ear. What an undergraduate life it has been!

In my freshmen year I had to deal with a wide range of labels. Spanning from a ghissu to a dassu I am just very glad that I truly did not give any weightage to any of it. I know most of the college guys reading this will give an eye roll in the most ludicrous manner possible but the truth is that people do not like to listen to a lecture. No matter how true it might be it’s sometimes better to be quiet. My incessant questions about aims and ambitions and goals and future life and so on and so forth were straight away dismissed without the slightest of thought or consideration. This was the case with the masses however then there were a couple of people who were ready to talk. Talk about all the topics they really wanted to and it was obvious that I got really close to them.

I guess every college student will have a story of their own with the basic elements more or less the same. These elements include an awesome hostel, the world’s best lobby, a lot of acquaintances, a few good friends, a crush or two and one or two closest buddies on whom you can count on anytime and anywhere. My college life included all of this too. In the end I am glad to have at least three names that spontaneously come to my mind when I think about true friends and I am grateful that I was able to find them.

IIT Guwahati is an eclectic combination of peers. You will find here every kind of student (or professor for that matter) that you can imagine. You need to be strong headed. You need to know what you are getting into and be consciously aware of all the actions and their implications. Well frankly this task is easy for most of us. Being aware. The problem is to be aware and to act on it. Most of the people I observed in this college were very talented and extremely smart. The problem with most of them was their laziness coupled with the college stigma of being a ghissu. People just did not want to be associated with an obvious label. As for me, I hardly cared about stereotypes or demeaning lingos which were just a cheap attempt by losers to anchor down the flying spirits reaching towards their goals.

Frankly, in the first half of my freshmen year I was nothing but ungrateful. I was whining and cribbing about the place, the peers, my not so awesome JEE rank, the fact that I was away from two of my closest friends and most importantly whining because I was not happy with myself. I had categorically decided that there is nothing that I will learn or take away from this place. Having thought about IIT Bombay as the archetype of the undergraduate engineering college since the beginning of JEE preparation, being in IIT Guwahati did not really boost my confidence.

So what did I take away from this place? Now when I look back and connect the dots, I realize that IIT Guwahati has silently helped me turn into a person that I could not have expected to become if I was in that dream college. With deep introspection I thought about this question and I had to just look at myself and realize that the answer was very simple. The answer was me. IIT Guwahati gave me an identity. An identity of an awesome (machau ) senior for a really average and relatively okay person like me. That which I know would not have been possible in Bombay. With every other person there getting admits and internships in the dream universities, a KAIST intern would have been hardly counted as an achievement. I am not comparing anyone or anything, neither am I talking about mediocrity. I just know it for a fact that I would have developed an inferiority complex which is the last thing I would have wanted in my undergraduate life. The kind of boost and energy (positive and negative) you receive from peers in IITG is life changing. You just need to be with the right people at the right time and I am glad I was able to do that wisely. All these external factors strengthened my internal desire of being associated with academia and slowly I transformed into someone who became self-sufficient in developing enough confidence and surplus enthusiasm while pursuing various tasks and really doing what I like and vice versa. This interwoven fabric of many reasons ultimately supports my decision of pursuing graduate school as well.

Getting through the Heritage Erasmus Mundus Exchange Program was totally unexpected. I definitely wanted it and that is the reason that I had applied as well but I felt as if I would not get it. I was probably just trying to be real. Getting to know the results brought a wave of joy followed by the tides of realization. I wish I could have been a part of the final semester or the finale season as some call it but I guess I have to come to terms with the current situation. It’s like playing the role of the supporting actor who gets killed a season before and the actor can just hope that the character is dearly missed.

I would conclude by mentioning that IIT Guwahati gave me a thousand reasons to hate it but then it also gave me a few overpowering reasons vetoing in its favour. It made me realize the fact that everyone is fucked up in some way or the other in life, but who is cribbing and who is happy is decided by what matters to them and what they choose to act on. I am glad I acted well.

Here is the link to a song I made about my College life

End of college life...

As it’s time to bid goodbye,

I look back and see the result;

Four years it took for me to grow,

From a teen to an adult;

Never thought that I would feel this way,

Such repertoire of emotions;

I don’t even have “next sem” to say,

That hypothetical cushion;

The things I learnt, the world I shared,

With the best and brightest peers;

Will stay with me for eternity,

This place has been so dear;

It’s not that it’s the end of life,

But an end of phase it is;

That phase where we, explored ourselves,

Where we tried all of it;

The shit we did, the shit we spoke,

Makes me chuckle every time;

Crazy we are, with logics bizarre,

We set a new paradigm;

I know we won’t meet often now,

But whenever we do;

We know our eyes will dwell deep in past,

Remembering how it was with you;

I will miss this place, I will miss this world,

But I will miss you the most;

With wet eyes and a shivering smile,

To you I raise a toast;

Call it fate may be or destiny,

But I pay my gratitude;

To this place and to you my friend,

I am sure gonna miss you!