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I haven’t written anything for almost a week now. I have started to spend serious time on preparing for GMAT. The math part is easier and thankfully I could recollect most of my memory, from the great school era, when I used to score a centum in virtually every math test (or feel terribly sorry for scoring one less). The verbal part, as I was suspecting all along, is truly testing my weakness. But I am determined to beat it over, atleast by learning the tricks. I doubt if I will have the patience to start on grammar now, though I think I should, I know I am not good. The crooked minds in ETS (which creates GMAT) have mastered the art of playing with our patience and ego through their worth-for-nothing-beyond-this-test questions. I am on the losing side so far on verbal sections, especially the Reading Comprehension, where almost all the time, after patiently reading the question, I feel like blowing up the writers brain!, but I am slowly learning to beat my emotions and the questions. So most of the weeknights and this weekend, is into prep work. I took a few minutes off one of those drill tests now.

We had a good time last night at my friend Suresh’s place, celeberating Sree’s(his daughter) first birthday. I will leave the detailed log to Harini. She is pretty good at it, in case you didnt know. Check out Harini’s Log

I showed up this morning in Greenwich Village to attend Stern Business School’s information sesion for fall admissions. Though I knew most of what they said, I was surprised to see the hall fill up with atleast 300+ prospective students. While its good to know that a lot of people are looking at Stern, It also makes me anxious for obvious reasons…I havent taken my GMAT yet, I havent written a single word for my essays(though I jogged down few great points and ideas this morning). I hope to make the best out of myself to pull this off, in the next few weeks.

If Harini finds a spot in FIT Designand myself in NYU, thats the best thing that could happen to us…though it will drain our wealth a LOT!. I have a feeling we will.

cant believe I end up writing so much out of literally nothing! not bad isnt it?

We live in a high raised (25 floors) building, Portside Towers, right on the south-west shores of the hudson river, overlooking the magnificient Manahattan Skyline. Our 9th floor apartment has gorgeous view of ‘Statue of Liberty’. If I try to measure the distance from our building to the statue, it would be less than 600 yards. The buillding is located on a corner with water on two sides. One of the sides also borders a huge parking lot for private yachts. Its a great view from our bedroom. In front of our building lies the Liberty State Park, a lush open greenery serving the joggers and kids. The view of downtown Manhattan, right on the edge of the park, is breathtaking. On a sunny morning, it feels like as if those buildings have come out rising from the water beneath. The wind is always little harsh around this place; we feel its true roar only when we try to open the windows a bit to let some fresh air.

Sudhar Harini Photos :: Our Home

Every day as I drive back home, I turn into warren street, greeted by the huge liberty statue, surprisingly huge and visibly close, right in the center of the street view ahead, between the buildings on either side of the street. As I drive closer to the water front leaving the other buildings behind, to my astonishment, the statue gets smaller and feels farther than I thought. It makes me wonder as to what kind of visual treat that would be.

This is the view from the window from where I am sitting now. Its really wonderful. On a sunny day, the yacht parking lot is empty and you can see them cruising into the hudson.

Yeah, It feels like my mind is empty when I sit and try to write a note. If I look away from the screen and gaze at the window and see the beautiful Liberty Harbour, a string of thoughts comes that says, lets write about the book iam reading now; lets describe my life after marriage; write about our life in USA; our vacation in new mexico; how it feels to live in new york city and the list continues…and I take a big breathe and stare back at the screen, the cursor eagerly waiting in the title box, waiting for me to type a title and i feel like everything is empty!

It was rightly named as ‘Writers Block’. I was happy when I read somewhere that even the greatest of writers encountered it often. That said, I also read that there should be nothing called a writer’s block for someone like me. Did I sit down to write the ‘Greatest novel ever written’…Damn no, Its just a daily note that means nothing to even myself, lest anyone else. So I guess, the fear that what i write isnt worth anything is a meaningless argument. Natalie Goldberg, in her book ‘Writing down the bones’ rightly said, If we try to filter our thoughts as right and wrong, we will be dead soon. Its just that we express it out only those things that we think may be right and just submit everything else. It is just impossible to only have good thoughts. It can only emerge for a cluster of good and bad and everything inbetween. It is the same for a good writing, it can only emerge from a pile of forbidden scribbles of every kind: good, bad, well-written, absurd, ridiculous, meaningless, thoughtful etc. Hence I am scribbling now, with a justification.

OK, enough of by blabber. Our weekend so far has been in-house. We didnt step outside the 700 Sq.fT land space even for a second. Harini with little fun, tied karadayan nombu kayaru last night. I was talking to appa yesterday and he was seriously asking me a question. He goes, ‘So, are you all celeberating karadayan nombu tomorrow?’ I thought, ‘What celeberate? Karadayan Nombu? here?…I exclaimed ‘Amam pa, we have a rally tomorrow in Times Square!’…Harin standing next to me bursted out laughing. Poor appa, didnt get me it so we evaded into something else. Harini also made delicious salted kozhukattai and sweet one too. I liked the salted one better so hijacked a few of them!

Oops! she is just reminding me that I promised to cook today! Its already little late for lunch…bye.

We uploaded some of the best works of harini. check out Harini Art Gallery. It has some cute soft toys and glass paintings. doggie, jumbo and dolphie…aren’t they adorable? Most of them are unfortunately were left back in India. We are in the process of collecting these pictures (thanks to her mom) to present her portfolio at FIT. There is quite a few that she generously gifted to friends that we missed to capture a digital shot.

The Jumbo is her hot new creation completed just about an hour ago and he looks as if he had done something fishy, begging for a hug.

Wait for more to come, this is just the beginning…

This is how I look now. Back in my who-cares pre-marriage days, I always tend not to shave on weekends and remain in a mushy look. In today’s after marriage life, she cares more for my looks, not so much as how Ireally look, but as how we look when we go out and so I happen to look clean shaved every other day. This weekend I stayed against her wish. I really couldnt remember when I saw myself so sick the last time!

The quality of the picture sucks, please bear with it. This is from our new digital handycam ( not a camera ). The still picture resolution is very low and this is the best it could do at night light. I am hoping there is a magic that we could do to it so the still pictures are better instead of buying another $200 gadget, that will add to my already short list of hardly used electronic items.

You also see I have grown so much hair. The last time I remember when I went for a hair cut is past september. It doesnt look that bad in this picture, but looks horrible when I get off from my bed early in the morning. I know everyone at work has been giving this bizzaire look sometimes, when I get into the office on a windy day. you dont know why? how would you look when a part of your hair is turning up and while another part turning down on the left side and another on front and right side, bizzaire look is perhaps an understatement. But I am unmoved with determination to make it even worse!

The weekend went past without much of entertainment. We did some shopping for crafts yesterday in staten island. We visited the Ranganathar Temple in pomona today and had lunch and visa/hari’s place. It was so god-damn difficult to stay awake after the neck-full meal, I took a quick nap for little over an hour before harini pulled me out. We drove back for two hours to reach home. We had interesting conversations about my career and possibly her future career. After reaching home, I placed a request with harini to kindly give me some time for myself to roam around the web for any interesting read and she unwillingly obliged.

I am just overwhelmed by the world of blogs. Every tom dick and harry like me writes and the bitter truth everything is pretty interesting to read. I came across one of those yet another nice indian blog, http://techrose.org/.

This made me think, where do i stand? There is so much out there, is my blog good enough to spend someones time to read? well, should I care? probably not. I realized I write for myself and it makes no sense to even try to compare. I can only try harder. I am atleast acknowledging the fact that I am not good, but atleast I try. My mind really works like junk sometimes, I talk for and against any damn topic. May be I need to be more creative about what I am writing. If thats true, I am not sure how I came up with the idea of writing about my new hair style earlier.

harini is just bugging me as I type this to have dinner. She has made ‘aval uppma’, and as always I am the scape goat. So she is waiting for me to taste it before she does. She will slice my head off for saying that. I happily admit to be a scape goat, when she has spent the past hour cooking it, while I was enjoying my time here. ok, let me go. GN

I came across this hilarious blog written by an indian guy. Its too good and I couldnt resist myself from reading the entire thing.

http://theindian.blogspot.com/

I wish I could write such funny things from our silly actions in real life.

Soon after I joined my current job, I volunteered to contribute for an IT newsletter. It is intended primarily to be circulated via email within the entire IT workforce, about 700 of them in US. I was enthusiastic that this was a great oppurtunity for me to try something different. I was disappointed after I spoke to the editing team that the newsletter carried only news and articles about internal IT systems and very little outside of it. I thought I could write interesting articles about new technologies, but there was no room for it. I am too new to the group to introduce any change yet.

As a part of this group, we had the regular review meeting today for our march newsletter to review the draft version. I was excited when I read the headline for an article, the read something like ‘from burger and salads to chutneys and samosas – a 5000 mile trip to India’. A interesting headline indeed. My boss’s boss, a vice president, had made a trip to India to visit our offshore partners. I rushed to read the details. As expected there were moments of continious surprises for him all along his trip, right from stray children pestering for a dollar in mumbai airport to free roaming cows in chennai. They covered an impressive three cities, mumbai, chennai, pune in just 4 days. They didnt miss anything and encountered every thing inbetween awful and awesome. They were natuarally bewildered by the ‘World Famous’ Indian traffic, Temples, Bullock Carts, folks in lungis climbing wooden scaffolds trying to build a mass transit rail system! and a whole lot of fascinating India.

They summed up with the usual statement, ‘India manages well between eastern and western cultures, poor and rich, educated and illeterate’. I closed the newsletter with mixed feelings. After all, India would have retained all the riches she ever needed, if not for the western civilizations bleeding thirst for supremacy. It was like a tornado sucking up everything it sees on its way to ruining !

I know susi, one (and the only!) of our vivid visitors, will find it very interesting and provoking http://www.shift.com/content/9.3/71/1.html. Its a good read, though its a bit lenghty. For the rest of us, it could throw some light on things we dont care. This article won the Canadian National Award.

As always, I started to feel little stressed out on the job and ventured to go out on the damn world wide web. I jumped to my usual stop, a great writng help site http://ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/vocabulary.htm and from there I crawled the web to Mother Jones magazine http://www.motherjones.com/about/edit/magazine.html and soon I was in an interesting page at Magazine Awards http://www.nmaf.net/27th/english/25th_winners01.html and in no time I moved on to Shift Magazine http://www.shift.com/content/web/450/1.html and encountered the Lomo Phenomenon!

Enjoy the new findings

Its been a while since I have bothered to write a daily note. Harini had a mini shopping spree today at Newport mall, roaming around by herself, poor soul, was terribly bored at home. She decided to buy me a couple of books, though they are not something i would be able to read and keep it aside in a day or two. she has got a Crack the GMAT! and the message is clear.

Our new handycam also arrived incidentally today. I came home to look at harini’s books and the cam. I decided to spend the rest of the evening, as you anyone could guess, with canon z70 cam. Its pretty cool and literally handy fitting into my palm and very slick, except that the still image resolutions are only upto 1024/768 and the still pictures arent very good. I thought I could live with not having to buy a separate digital camera, not sure if thats true.

Life otherwise has been pretty good since my last note. Good Night