Four Years

Before MIT (Infinite Corridor, CPW '07)

After MIT (Killian Court, Commencement '11)

One journey ends and another begins... To all those I've met along the way, thanks for being a part of it. You'll be in my heart; take care and I hope some of our paths cross again. To Mom and Dad, thank you for your love and support.

Love,
Arkajit

A Year in the Life

Since I didn't blog much over the last year, I thought I'd just share the highlights of what happened:

• Last fall, I joined MIT's ballroom dance team. Over the past few months, I've had a blast learning 19 new dances ranging from Standard-style dances like Waltz to Latin-style dances like Rumba.
• I learned how to cook. The first thing I learned how to make was an omelet. Over the past few months, I've actually gotten fairly good at making several breakfast foods like omelets, french toast, and pancakes. And I've also experimented with several types of pastas and stir-frys. But I've only just begun my culinary explorations and hope to try out more dishes soon!
• I learned how to bike. The last time I had tried to bike, when I was about five years old, I never quite got past the training wheels. What was different this time around? Google has free bikes all around campus :) By now, I'm actually good enough to partially bike to work.
• I finished all the requirements for Course VI at MIT.  My favorite classes of the year were 6.003/6.011: Signals & Systems and 6.828: Operating Systems.
• I went to New York City for the first time. Thrice. Once for Ballroom. Once for my Google interview. Once with The Tech. The city is amazing and I'd love to go back there again.

--Arkajit

Transitions

It seems that I'm always blogging during moments of transition. Start of a semester, let's blog it. End of a school year, let's blog it. Start of a summer job, let's blog it.

My theory -- or at least the one I like to tell myself -- is that I'm too engrossed in the day-to-day act of living at other times to actually bring myself to step back and blog about it. Transitions offer that natural break in the flow of life that encourages reflection and pondering. The rest of life is seemingly relegated to a stream of tweets. (Though, I don't tweet that frequently either.)

Still besides obvious transitions, aren't there any major life events to chronicle? Or does one week just bleed into the next? It often feels like that during the school year. But with the start of another summer, I'm hoping that I'll be able to blog more often and really capture those moments in-between transitions. That's the plan at least. Let's see how it goes :)

--Arkajit

Harry Potter Politics

So that was a looong hiatus, and I'm going to try to start blogging more regularly again. For most of the past year, most of my writing has been in the form of hard news stories for The Tech or the occasional essay for a HASS class. While I did have a lot of fun with that, I also feel the need for some more free-form writing as well, if for no other reason than for my own sanity.

To start things off, here's my first (of hopefully more) non-news piece for The Tech: Potter Politics.

--Arkajit

First Day of School!

Following excerpt of Finding Nemo is from IMSDb.

NEMO
First day of school! First day of school! Wake up, wake up! C'mon,
first day of school!
MARLIN
I don't wanna go to school. Five more minutes.
NEMO
Not you, dad. Me!
MARLIN
Okay...huh?

NEMO
Get up, get up! It's time for school! It's time for school!
It's time for school! It's time for school! Oh boy! Oh boy!

MARLIN
All right, I'm up.

NEMO
Oh boy--whoa!

MARLIN
Nemo!

NEMO
First day of school!

MARLIN
[gasps] Nemo, don't move! Don't move! You'll never get out of there yourself.
I'll do it. All right, where's the break? You feel a break?

NEMO
No.

MARLIN
Sometimes you can't tell 'cause fluid is rushing to the area. Now, any rushing
fluids?

NEMO
No.

MARLIN
Are you woozy?

NEMO
No.

MARLIN
How many stripes do I have?

NEMO
I'm fine.

MARLIN
Answer the stripe question!

NEMO
Three.

MARLIN
No! See, something's wrong with you. I have one, two, three--that's all I have? Oh, you're okay. How's the lucky fin? 

NEMO
Lucky.

MARLIN
Let's see.

MARLIN
Are you sure you wanna go to school this year? 'Cause there's no problem if
you don't. You can wait 5 or 6 years.

NEMO
Come on, dad. It's time for school.

MARLIN
Ah-ah-ah! Forgot to brush.

NEMO
Ohh...

MARLIN
Do you want this anemone to sting you?

NEMO
Yes.

MARLIN
Brush.

NEMO
Okay, I'm done.

MARLIN
You missed a spot.

NEMO
Where?

MARLIN
There. Ha ha! Right there. And here and here and here!

MARLIN
All right, we're excited. First day of school, here we go. We're ready to learn, to get some knowledge. Now, what's the one thing we have to remember
about the ocean? 

NEMO
It's not safe.

MARLIN
That's my boy. So, first we check to see that the coast is clear. We go out and back in. And then we go out, and back in. And then one more time--out and
back in. And sometimes, if you wanna do it four times-- 

NEMO
Dad..

MARLIN
All right. Come on, boy.

-- Arkajit

The Dorm Key with a Thousand and One Uses

You know that golden-colored key they give you when you check into your dorm? The one that's supposed to open your door? Well that's not all that it's useful for. Here are just a few of the things I can think of using it as:

1. Scissors: great for cutting through tape to open packages.
2. Screw-driver: doesn't work too well, but can be an ok replacement when you don't have one.
3. Nail-filer: does a pretty good job
4. Pendulum Bob: performance improves if placed on end of a lanyard
5. Fake Wand: same comment as above
   
6. Playing Darts
7. Playing Horseshoes
8. Playing Spoons
9. A Musical Instrument
10. Bottle/Can Opener
11. More...

So that's not quite a 1001 uses, but I'm sure you can think of some more. =)

-- Arkajit

CPW Day 3 & Pictures

Ok, so I was going to wrap-up Saturday. But then I realized that it was mostly centered around dorm surfing. So I settled for a picture-oriented entry instead with pictures from the entire weekend.
I guess I had a bit of an obsession with the abstract sculpture and architecture at MIT :) I also had fun trying to find cool new angles and places to take pictures of buildings from. The rest of these pictures are in my facebook photo album.

And then there was Battle of the Bands on Saturday evening which was pretty awesome. I was right up in the front during Ben and Marilee's performance. So that means I had the speakers blaring about two feet away from me. During the "You Can't Get What You Want" song, I joined in the crowd with singing the chorus and swaying my hands from side to side. It was lucky that they chose that Rolling Stones song, since the only other song by them that I had heard was Satisfaction. The only bummer was that Tim the Beaver did not go crowd surfing and I did not have my camera on me :(

Oh also, Matt proposed finding anagrams of the name of Ben's band, The Red Decade. So the best I could come up on my own was "The Cared Deed". And then I ran it through an anagram machine like Ben suggested. Nothing too much better except for "Dated Cheered" which was pretty good. Another one that actually made sense was "The Dead Creed"; that one has more possible interpretations which I shall leave as an exercise for the reader. The full list of anagrams is here.

Sunday was the departure day, so there was only really time to do some breakfast-hopping through several of the dorms and spend the last of my TechCash at LaVerde's. I also swung by the Coop to get one of those drawstring backpacks :)

Well, ok, I think that wraps up CPW!

CPW Day 2

I guess the day-by-day blogging thing kind of stopped after day 1 :) So this will have to be a recap. Ok, the weather was definitely MUCH better on Friday (and esp. on Saturday)! Nice cool, breezy winds, partly cloudy, sun would peek through at times. (I did not mean to just sound like a weather reporter.)

First, let me fill in a few of the gaps in Thursday that I was too tired at the time to write about. After meeting up with my host at tEp in the morning, he showed me his room which was very cool. He showed me the laser light show in his room, playing it to the song "Such Great Heights" by the Postal Service. There was also a hanging couch and beds hanging from the ceiling. The people were amazingly friendly too :)

Ok, in the afternoon, I hopped through a tour of the Stata Center, grabbed a pizza from the cafe there, then swung through a panel on housing and dining. The gaps and interstices of time were filled with meeting and talking with people :) Then I had dinner at McCormick dining hall while being serenaded by the MIT/Wellesley Toons. There was a math mixer that disintegrated into hangman and math joke session when a group of us ended up in the wrong room.

The main event was the icebreaker and cpw fair at night. Half-way through the intro, the Logs storm the stage and start singing like I said in my last post. During one of the songs, a couple of them were rotating their hands like a windmill and I've since been trying to replicate that with partial success :)

Friday started with a morning trek down the Harvard bridge from tEp back to campus, minus the hail this time :) The day was spent mostly in the anticipation of the meet the bloggers event in the evening. But I still got in another panel, a couple of open houses, a class, and watching a pick-up game of ultimate. This is around the time when my cell phone batteries finally gave up the ghost and I had to recharge. And then to meeting all the awesome bloggers and having some ice cream to top :) A couple of them were a bit unrecognizable from their pictures, but it was nice to finally talk with them in person.

Then the night ended with tangerine tours which unfortunately got aborted before the final destination. But not before climbing several hundred stairs (hands to the outside! aye, aye Jack!), crawling into unimaginably small recesses, and going through 'hell', i.e. the underground steam chambers.

Ok, Saturday next!

CPW Day 1: Or Bloody Hail!

Wow! Walking all across Cambridge and Boston in often severe rain and sometimes sleet/hail = interesting , shocking experience!

First casualty is when I'm walking back across the Harvard Bridge over the Charles River and I get caught in a hail storm (or at least it felt pretty bad too me, though others assure me its worse in the winter). My umbrella is useless in the fierce wind and it is promptly destroyed. For the rest of the trek, I'm peppered with surprisingly sharp little bits of hail :( Second casualty is when I buy a replacement umbrella. After several battles in which I try to prevent it from being dismantled by the wind as well, I acquire several more nicks and cuts - from the umbrella this time. At this time, I decide umbrellas are clearly not working. So eventually I get a raincoat. Lesson Learned: Raincoat (w/ hood) > Umbrella given fierce winds.

The weather glitch aside, a pretty fun day, running around, going on tours, watching panel discussions, fairs and so on. The Logs sang a few (awesome!) songs for us. And the highlight of the fair was re-enacting the lightsaber duel from Episode I: A Phantom Menace with duct-tape swords! But my sword movements were completely Empire Strikes Back Luke Skywalker :) Oh, and apparently I have some skill with throwing a soccer ball through a high target :)

Some picture(s) from when I actually remembered I have a camera:

The famous police-car in its new residence in Bldg. 32:


Well certainly an exciting day, but more to come yet! And somehow I'm not yet sleepy, but I'll try to get a few hours now.

-- Arkajit