I love my life.

Spring break is here! I'm halfway through my 4th semester in college. I'm almost a junior. Wow! How did the time go by?
As I sit back and watch my friends turn 20, one by one, my 18 year old mind vicariously lives as a 20 year old. I wonder if the time will continue to fly and the next time I look back I'll be 30...
The teenage years are supposed to be the time of experimentation and excitement, somehow counterbalanced with the time to decide and plan out your adult life. Now that I am at the extreme end of the teenage spectrum, I wonder if these years have been all that they were supposed to have been.
1) Fall in love - Check
2) Find my passion - Check
3) Discover myself - Does that ever completely happen?
4) Try illegal substances - Check (Though they aren't completely illegal anymore - that takes a little bit of the fun out of it, doesn't it?)
5) Be independent, think independently - Check, for the most part
6) Make lifelong friends - Check, very successfully.
7) Get a drivers license - Fail, working on it though!
+ A few other things that I would like to keep private - Check
Overall, I would say my life has been satisfactory. Hell, it's been awesome. I love my life. I think sometimes, how there is barely anything that I would want to change in my life. I must be either a really lucky person or a really satisfied person, and knowing myself it must be the former.
I have it all, inshallah. Love, happiness, security, trust and forethought - what more could a person want?
I have always had all this handed to me, and the thought that my luck my run out and all of this may go away certainly worries me, but I do believe I have the ability to survive in the absence of these comforts and part of me wants to prove that I can.

Don't take life seriously!

I want the race to end. I want to be where I am - in the present. I want to believe that the future will somehow work out. I want to eat a slice of cake without thinking I have to run it off.
Well, the my last wish I already have. Or I almost already do, I don't really care about the pounds of unhealthy fattening food that I eat everyday, but my point is - I keep telling myself I should.
Why should I? Why should I constantly care about my midterm next week, getting into the honors program next year, getting a good GRE score, getting into graduate school, getting a job, getting married, having a family... You see? It never ends.
Even the little things - remembering to submit my time sheet tomorrow for work, to charge my phone before I sleep, remembering to turn in that English paper in the next hour... Life is about constantly figuring out what to do next, and next.
If I am watching a TV show, I remind myself in the 15th min that I only have 40 min to watch the 43 min show because I have to take a shower and get to class in 75 mins. I don't want to have to do that. I want to be where I am. I want to live in the present. Life is going to move along weather I plan for it to or not, then why must I make such an effort to ensure that every min is accounted for. Time is NOT money. Time should not be money. Money is money and time is time. Why can't we leave it that way?
My brother said something to me once about how everything we humans do in the time between our birth and death, apart from reproduction (which is a necessary biological process that we must engage in to propagate out species) is just entertainment. That's right, relationships, education, economics, health care and the rest of the 'vital' facets of human life are all dispensable. How does that make you feel?

Change certainly is inevitable.

Its been almost a semester since I last wrote....less than a month till I go back home for Ranjan's wedding. Its surprising how life surprises you, no matter how many times it happens I don't think I will ever get used to it.
Being a Sophomore has been great so far. It is so interesting how much I have changed. It is strange but I feel like when I turned 18, a switch turned on and turned me into a more responsible person. I suddenly care about my classes, so much that I have been late only once to a class all semester. Unbelievable, isn't it? Am I the same person who holds a record for being late from 1st std through 12th std? The same person who skipped too many Martin Baro classes my freshman year and was penalized a grade for it? I fret about my tests and papers and actually work really hard on them. I volunteer my time. But do you know what takes the cake? I wake up at 8:30 AM twice a week to go to a class that is a waste of time, just for the attendance.
I don't know what to think about this new me. Its stressful, always feeling like I have to do the right thing. Taking on other people's work just because I don't want someone else who was depending on them to suffer. Challenging myself instead of taking the easy way out. Being a happier, more involved person in all aspects of me life. All these sound like positive changes, and perhaps they are when viewed from the general societal perspective. I however, am not sure if being this way makes me happier that I used to be as an irresponsible kid. It certainly increases my feeling of self-respect and self-worth, but do I wish I could change it?
I don't know and perhaps I never will, but I am going to have to get used to this because I don't think this is ever going to go away.

Those swines, the media!

News updates flashing on every channel, running through everyone's mind, making my cellphone beep every 10 minutes - the swine flu is testing my patience. Yes, it has killed about a 1000 people out of the 6,706,993,152 people in the world, but how does that make it a pandemic?
The seasonal flu kills between 2.5 to 5 lakh(1 lakh=100,000) people each year, and it includes all the strains of influenza virus such as H3N2, H1N1, H5N1, etc.
Remember the avian flu? I do. I didn't eat chicken or eggs for almost 6 months! That wasn't a pandemic either, and yet that was 10x times more severe than the swine flu.
No, this post is not meant to be a source of information about swine flu. I don't see what information is there to give. The symptoms are same as the flu, which all of us have gotten. The treatment guarantees full recovery. Then why is it such a big deal? Why is the media prompting us to treat it any different from the regular flu?
I am not afraid to say that I am extremely cynical of the whole issue. I spent a whole month at USF listening to my friends cringe at the sound of a sneeze, reading e-mail updates about the effect of swine flu and watching people on buses and trains wear masks that matched their clothes! And now, 3 months later the hype has hit India. Barely 6 deaths and everybody is wondering where they can buy their triple layered mask. I may sound heartless, you may say 6 deaths is 6 precious lives but don't you see that SO many people die from the flu anyway, that is why this is called the flu season. Had the hype not been created about the swine flu, the ayurvedic doctor from pune and the 4 year old boy from chennai would never have been on the news. Their deaths would have still been a great loss, but all the schools in the neighbourhood wouldn't have shut down because one boy died of the flu. And people fail to notice that the boy was in and out of the hospital a lot, which is an indicator of his low immunity - making him a vulnerable target for any strain of influenza.
The swine flu is driving me crazy, I can't wait for it to fade away like all these pandemic scares always do.

Lovely Indian bureaucracy

23rd June 2009 -
I went to the Regional Passport Office, Chennai. I wandered around for a couple of hours trying to figure out where I was supposed to submit my passport application and finally found the queue that was to be my home for the next five hours. Now those of you who have been in an Indian government office know exactly what I mean by a queue, but for those of you who don't let me define the Indian queue - People pushing, poondh-ifying(cutting the line) and pinching which inevitability results in you being aggressive, alert and argumentative.
Right, so after a fabulous day combating the queue, I reached the window of the harassed passport officer who wanted his lunchtime biriyani more than anything else. He took one look at my application and said - The papers are wrongly arranged, affidavit 'I' is missing, three address proofs of parents are required. Now, in a sane situation my response would have been - Why are there no instructions on how EXACTLY the papers are meant to be arranged and what papers are required?
Anyway, my mom(who had to accompany me - who also started most of the fights with fellow queue-mates - since I was a minor) showed him her passport which clearly prints our address and the guy goes "No madam, we don't accept passport as address proof."
Yes, we verified your address ourselves before issuing your passport but we are too stupid to trust our own system. I mean, come on! Anyway, after trying to and failing to reason with him, we headed home in very bad moods.
The next day, June 24th, my father and I went with all the correct documents, ID proofs, xerox copies, originals and we were lucky enough to be at the front of the line. Our papers were stamped with nothing but a minor glitch - the order of the papers was wrong again - and we were out of there before 11 am! Oh the sweet feeling of success......never lasts long.
My passport application being filed under Tatkal(emergency) was supposed to reach me within 2 weeks. Alas! 2 weeks later my online passport status read :
Following objection has been raised on Your file
THERE ARE SOME DEFICIENCIES IN YOUR APPLICATION. PLEASE CONTACT P.R.O. OF THIS OFFICE
Seems a simple enough instruction? Think again. They never answer their phones, EVER. Their inbox is so full of all the complaint mails that my e-mail bounced back. They do not explain what or who the P.R.O is and how one goes about contacting him.
With no other option, I stepped back into the palatial Sastri Bhavan(Passport Office) with a very stressed mother in tow, on July 14th. Now I had to fly back to San Francisco barely a month later and again, for anyone who knows Indian govt. offices, a month is not necessarily as long a time period as it sounds. So we went into the passport office scoffing at the long line that extended all the way into the parking lot even before 9 AM(The office opens at 10:30 AM) which we assumed was the line for passport applications under the ordinary scheme(i.e not tatkal)
We went upstairs assuming that the P.R.O, whoever he was, had an office where he would meet with us and help satisfy our deficiency. Oh! How wrong we were. After much asking around and wasting precious time we ended up, that's right! in the long-ass queue that we had scoffed at earlier, which by the time we decided to join it, had doubled!
So we stood, and stood and stood. Finally after about a couple of hours we reached the counter where this guy with an old DOS computer asked me for my receipt number, he kindly informed me there is a discrepancy in my parents name - i have entered something different from what had been printed in my old passport. Right away, i felt like kicking myself. I remembered changing my dad's name on the application at the last minute because I figured that the travel agent who filled the application got my dad's name backwards. See, my dad's first name is Palaniappan and his last name is Ranganathan, which is his fathers name. The travel agent had filled Rangathanan Palaniappan, which I changed to Palaniappan Ranganathan before handing in the application. Now my old passport lists my dad simply as R. Palaniappan, which according to every government official in the state of TamilNadu, means my dads first name is indeed Ranganathan, so what if that is his father's name?
Anyway, so about 6 hours and many queue's later I reached the tatkal officer, one harried Mr. Bhoopathy, who nevertheless had the time and patience to explain to me Tamilnadu's system of nomenclature. "Paapa(child)", he said, "Until you get married your father's name will be your first name. Therefore, your name is Palaniappan Meenakshi. After you get married no, your husband's name will be your last name and Meenakshi will become your first name. This also you don't know va? What college level and all you are studying?"
I was too exhausted and afraid to argue, so all I apologized for my ignorance and moved on. He assured me that I would get my passport within 7 days. Once again, feeling triumphant, I walked out of and bid farewell to the passport office that I happily did not see myself coming back to until 2020, by which time I figured I could finally have Mr. Bhoopathy accept Meenakshi as my first name.
Call me superstitious, but I firmly believe that anyone who leaves the passport office without a trace of apprehension about not getting their passport will be made to return to that hell-hole again and again until they fear it. Yes, I did have to go back there today, July 30th, because 2 weeks after my last visit my status had not changed. As i approached the man with the MS-DOS computer, i felt like I was checking my board exam results and I held my breath. I held my breath until he told me that my passport was granted yesterday and will reach me in the next 3-4 days.
Yet, I live in fear.