Ameet's blog

Thanks to Ananth , I started my day by lines from movie " Anand " :-) "Babu Moshai.....zindagi aur maut ooparwaale ke haath hai Jahaanpanaah, use na aap badal sakte hain aur na main. Hum sab to bas rangmanch ki kathputliyaan hain jinki Dor ooparwaale ke hathon bandhi hai. Kab Kaun Kaise uThega, ye koi nahin bataa saktaa...hahaha..." "Zindagi baDi honi chahiye, lambi nahin. Maut ek pal hai Babu Moshai. Maut ke Darr se zinda rehna chhoD doon to maut kise kehte hain? Jabh tak zinda hoon, tabh tak maraa nahin. Jabh mar gayaa saala main hi nahin, to phir Darr kis baat ka?"

Started today the tutoring at Preuss school near UCSD. The school & kids are amazing. The school is for children from lower income group, and is till 12th grade. I am planning to help in science fair projects and math tutoring. Met Lurisa, Lisa, Guam and Briana.. my tutees :-) They are in 12th grade, all on their way to college, and we were working on conics. It was refreshing to revise my knowledge, and help them along, and teach them how to think about the problem. My mind was drawn to my math teacher, Prof. N.M.Kulkarni who taught us in most interesting style. We literally used to sing formulaes in class :-) Anyway, I found I was able help them reasonably well when it came to solving the problem. But learnt an important lesson as well. When I was trying to emphasize to one of the girls, importance of learning completion of squares by heart, I stressed the point too much, and she took offense :-( So the lesson is, in teaching, it is very important to constantly gauge the mind of...

I tried brand new pages.google.com , and loved it. For lazy people like me, it is the best way to create aesthetic webpages, without the hassle of learning html. Thanks to it, I was shaken out of my inertia to create a webpage, that has passed the phase of "under construction" :-) It is ameet.deshpande.googlepages.com

Got introduced to Fareed Zakaria through daily show , and since then I have been his biggest fan. This person can see through the big picture of international affairs, and separate chaos from pattern, reason from rhetoric, and offer most insightful analysis and unbiased perspective. His TV show "Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria" has free streaming videos of all his shows. One excellent article by him in Newsweek. "Why they hate us" .

Counting days to return to India! It is a funny feeling.. Tossed & convoluted by jump functions in life, one stays at so many places, develops a routine, makes friends, 'settles' in a new life.. but there is always a place in mind to go back to.. The place, where so called 'roots' lay.. Roots.. funny word :-) Imagine them sprouting out of your toes, breaking the ground and cementing yourself on the spot! Though not a happy prospect, to some extent, we all are such 'tree people '. A generation ago in India, people didnt used to venture much far.. They would grow up, work, live & age in and around the same town.. some hated it.. some loved it.. but there was a sense of fatalistic reasoning in this.. "This is how it is supposed to be, and it is good in the long run" The 'roots' lay deep.. continuous with the land which connects all.. They sustained the happy life, fruitful work, familiarity, sometimes boredom.. Relations were strong, kinsh...

Am now in San Diego... suddenly at the opposite face of earth... Life has queer jump functions built into it! Am here to study control theory & (hopefully) do PhD in it.. am here for last 4 months... and am missing old days... Well... enough melancholy! hope to make best of it by studying hard, making friends, and keeping in touch with old friends. Plan to get back to India as soon as I finish it. All the professors I saw only on webpages are suddenly cubicle away, and dont look too overbearing :-) Am making ends meet while doing coursework & research.. Plan to write this more often, just for myself to keep track of my thoughts.. coz I am very forgetfull.. (if not memoryless;-) and some thoughts are uplifting in dark times.

I have been in Bangalore for 6 months now, and Lots of water of water has flown through Cauvery, (some of which went to Tamilnadu ;-) Had EEDP Goa trip recently. A course has been a bumpy ride so far. We are now counting days for it to finish. Meanwhile got a new project, this one definitely more interesting than the previous, causing my blues to fade a bit. Changed lab from AMT to EPST. Yup, thats about it.