Joy Dutta’s blog

Launched my first own yahoo group: Santiniketan-Students! An attempt to be in touch with alumnis of my junior and high schools, Patha Bhavan and Uttar Siksha Sadan. A discussion with Somashree led to this idea and I owe her a bunch of thanks for rekindling my enthu to this level.

After ten long years since graduating from Patha Bhavan it is a pleasure to get in touch with batchmates and seniors who I knew from those days. Even more fun to spot a few of them near me in a foreign land. The best part is talking in bengali, just like those days. Ah, how I miss the bengali addas, dahi-vada and kulchas at Bhalo-Mondo, and the ice-cream from Gopal-da ! Not to mention waiting endless hours like a monkey in front of the girls’ hostels Srisadan and later Goenkalaya to meet Priti.

Those days are gone and greatly missed, but a group like this has a good potential to rekindle a part of the lost emotions.

UPDATE (21-Dec-05): The growth of the group amazed me to no end. Within 7 days I have the following statistics:
41 New Members - 125 New Messages - 1 New Database - 49 New Photos - 2 New Files
Need I say more ?

Americans ! The more I come in touch with them and get to know about their families, the more it puzzles me. And most of the time, I get to know those people through the common passion - motorcycles.

Take the case of one guy, barely 5 years older than me, has a family tree that takes at least a few minutes to visualize for an average Indian like me. His wife’s dad and mom divorced and remarried. The fun part now is the two families are like the best friends, they go camping and partying with each other and dines together. The guy’s real dad separated from his real mom and lives 100 miles away. Real mom and step dad lives 30 miles away and takes care of the guy’s niece whose mom doesn’t look after her kid. The kid’s gradparents are adopting her and eventually the guy and his wife will take care of her. The kid’s mom is step dad’s daughter from his previous marriage, and might get a divorce from her alcoholic husband in near future.

Back home we just can’t imagine a family mesh like this. But this is a foreign land with a different cultural setup and one can’t say “mo betta”, because every societal system and their rules have advantages and pitfalls.

An evening worth celebrating the fulltime offer from the big G to my apartment mate, Dhyanesh. He has done an outstanding job of bagging fulltime offers from two of the biggest IT giants of today - Yahoo and Google.

We both had a pleasant summer internship at Yahoo Finance and I presume it will be a tough call for him to make a decision. He has not one but two offers from Yahoo, with one obviously from the finance group and another from SDS which is supposed to have a bunch of challenging problems to solve. Yeah, some good food for a guy who thinks nothing other than TopCoder and ACM programming problems. Right, Dhyanesh ?

All the best to this young genious for a great and ambitious career ahead. Did I mention his dream about a topless beemer in not-so-distant future, cruising across california’s highway-1 with a… a… ahem… oh well…

The story finally came out on Indiapost and Indian Express. The former is a print only edition (the website www.indiapost.com doesnt work), while the online content of the latter is:
https://www.iexpressusa.com/new/articles/display_news.php?newsid=2104&from=news

Feeling a little better now.

Just a while back I had a chat with a friend of mine who works with an Airline company. I now have a clearer notion of what might have triggered the incident.

Normally many passengers book tickets in advance and in cheap. In peak season, some passengers pay a hefty sum for seats at the last moment. Many airlines overbook from the last moment passengers and to accomodate them, make an announcement for Voluntary Denied Boarding (VDB) before departure, asking for people to give up their seats, usually with perks like free round trip tickets.

What happened for me was Involuntary Denied Boarding, as I clearly remember when two of us were thrown out from the plane, two other guys were let inside. The airlines people just had to find an excuse, and my “sweating” might have been just made up.

Now thats interesting, isnt it ?

End of a long summer internship at California. Myself and my friend Dhyanesh were all looking forward to the cozy life back in school. AA flight 16 at SFO airport, to depart at 12 noon, 27th August, for JFK. Both of us were unwinding at the isle seats and preparing for the next 5 hours 30 minutes of boredom.

The whole flight seemed full, but the window seat beside me was still vacant. I was waiting for someone to turn up at the last minute before I would buckle-up my seat belt. 10 minutes before departure, a middle aged lady showed up but instead of sitting, went back to the front. 5 minutes before departure, an AA staff came directly to me and ushered me to take my bags and follow her. To my bewilderment she took me just outside the aircraft and asked me to wait. Because Dhyanesh was with me, she called him out too.

What the hell ? I asked what was wrong with me. She said the lady to sit beside me complained I was sweating and she would not like to be seated by me !!! Of course I was sweating a bit. The A/C was not on seemingly and it was a little hot inside the plane. I had taken a refreshing morning shower, but then we had some insane amount of luggage to handle and came 40 miles to the airport. And what was this ? Being Thrown out of the commercial airliner because I was sweating ? What if I came running to the airport to catch it at the last moment ? Forbidden to sweat just because someone else wouldn’t feel at home ?

We were both aghast to imagine such things would happen in the US !!! The lady at the counter apologized. Did they think they could do just about anything and say “I am sorry, but…” to justify ?

We got our tickets on the next flight, a frustrating 10 hours away. We almost shrieked in anguish faced with the possibility of having to catch the next flight in the coming weekend. After all, we are both students and our primary purpose for being in the US is for studying, and we were at risk of missing classes at school, which start on Monday. And then of course there was the issue of our clothes, all of which were in the flight from which we had been ejected.

Life is not fair. But we dont realize it till shit hits in the face. We did get to settle down a bit at a airport hotel at the expense of American Airlines, but with the terrible anguish of having to contend with 10 hours of lost time, the ignominy of being asked to leave a flight for no specific reason and the worry of not being with our clothes. The flight we finally caught was also not without its share of incidents. But thankfully, we did not have to leave it and we did manage to sleep well.

Will I fly AA again ? Maybe not unless someone from AA apologises for the injustice done.

——————
I thought I would write a little bit about what happened in the second flight, AA 18 departing SFO at 10pm. From the evening I was being a little too paranoid and already taken not one but two consecutive showers. All the while I watched TV at the hotel, while Dhyanesh spent the whole time playing Warcraft.

I was praying that we do not have any more repeats of the incidents of the morning, but it had to happen! There were a couple of ladies in front of us, and before long to my horror one of them started acting funny, as if some smell-gas-shell had been dropped on her head. She profusely covered her nose and fanned her face with the boarding pass. Everyone else looking normal. They were seated next to the toilet so I thought maybe, maybe it is the toilet. I peeked ahead and tried to pick up the slightest scent, but all I got was the perfumes of the air hostesses who were all busy with that frantic lady. It turned out that something was wrong with two people who sat in front of the lady, and thankfully not with me.

Those two persons were asked to sit in some empty first class seat. And the head airhostess asked us to move in at that place, surging my adrenaline up like I was taking a bungee jump. But it was with good intention, for the new seat was better, though not of first class, but with leg-rest and leg space. We had a good night’s sleep thanks to the leg room.

I still think, why ? What exactly happened ? Let the readers imagine.

I found her at the biker chat room. I just got my bike then, first one in the USA. The excitement was overflowing in pursuit of fellow bikers both on and off-line. She was 33, from Wichita, Kansas and a mom of a beautiful 5-yr old girl. Recently separated from husband and a newbie on a honda magna 250.

We used to chat every now and then, talking about many things from bikes to the American way of life. Learnt a lot about the latter. Till she met a guy and moved in with him. She was no longer online but in the meantime I was introduced to her younger sister and used to chat with her sometimes.

I used to get her news once a while through her sister. They were a happy couple as far as I could understand. Till the shocking news came by. The couple got into an argument and the guy shot her in the stomach. The shock was hard enough. She survived through a couple surgeries and a few days in coma but the end came before long. A tragedy, true. Even worse to have lost a biker soul.

Reminded me a similar incident that had me dumbfounded. Met a guy online who owned the same bike as mine. He was a young police officer, around my age. After the first few minutes of bike-talk he had to go on a duty call and told me to wait an hour to resume the chat. An hour and half later, his mom came online and told me he was shot dead while handling a bank robbery case. I had nothing to say to comfort her. It was just too much to handle.

Such is life. Tragedies happen just in front of us. But life goes on.

A really big day in my life. Never thought I could see my all time hero. Not only did I click him on my D70, I was lucky enough to have a handshake with him !!! I am still like “wow! I cant believe this!”

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger came to Yahoo! headquarters here at Sunnyvale for a lecture as part of the “influential speaker series” event. It was an exciting one hour of listening to and capturing his expressions.

Arnold has been my all time hero, since the day I watched Predator and Commando. He never failed to amaze me with those action filled movies. I still cant believe I shook the same hands that carried those weapons at the hollywood studios !!!

Pictures: Arnold @ Yahoo!

SFO airport. Going to chicago to meet parents after 1 long year. T-mobile hotspot day pass at $10 for 24 hours of unlimited mobile internet. AC power terminal right next to my seat beside gate 47. Nothing else is necessary on the eve of this long weekend.

Bought a usb wireless card sometime back keeping this weekend’s trip in mind, but somehow it would not work on my linux-only laptop. At the last moment the PCMCIA card of dhyanesh’s laptop worked on mine and we exchanged the cards.

It is just one hell of fun for me. Never used wireless like this, let alone from as exciting location as this.

I am going to make full use of this… gotta see if I can use it from the flight too…
There is still two more hours to kill but it will now seem less than two minutes to me…

Long live wireless.

Needed to buy a digital SLR very soon. No vehicle to move around, found from Ritz camera website that the closest store is one mile away. Even a walk-hater like me had to go out with the GPS to find the shortest way through the residential lanes.

Unfortunately the store didnt have a Nikon D70 that I was looking for and it made the whole walk seem like a waste. Suddenly I noticed a vietnamese restaurant “Pho-Nam”. Remembered from a BMW motorcycle tourer’s article that while in vietnam, the pho soup is a must have. A little wary of the taste and cooked condition of beef and steak, I ordered chicken pho soup, small size for $4.55. It was beautiful, served with cilantro, green pepper and lemon on a side dish. Great ambience of vietnamese people. Totally like the place and food, would go there again soon.

On the way back, I stumbled across a street fair and a big crowd. The scorching sun, the people, the stalls, and the smoke from the chicken teriyaki corner made me feel very much home.

There were some amazing nature photographs for sale - by photographer John Gavrilis. I personally met him and was totally impressed knowing that he only uses a Large Format (LF) film equipment - the legendary Linhof Master Technika. His site www.gavrilisphotography.com is a must-see for all nature photo enthusiasts.