This video pretty much sums up the life of an IITian. Of course, not everyone gets lucky enough to study with a girl. This made me really nostalgic, having spent most of my adult years at IIT. Enjoy

I know we haven’t been able to keep the site updated as often as we can. Life has been really busy for the past one year. The updates have slowed down to a trickle but we want to let everyone know that this site is a very important thing in our lives and we will try to keep this going as long as we are together. We want this site to be a proof that long distance relationships indeed work if you have the patience.

After nearly 4 years of staying apart and meeting once every year (for a few hours) perhaps, we have finally had the opportunity to spend a lot of time together in August of 2007. I finally came to US as a graduate student in Environmental Engg and the first thing I did was fly to Archana’s place. We had about 10 days to spend together and that was quite a long time. In those 10 days, we had gone shopping, visited places and cried ourselves to sleep but not for one moment did we feel like we did not belong together.

And I had to fly back to East coast to continue the purpose of my arrival in USA. Life as a graduate student is not easy. It is time consuming and you have not a moment to do anything but study. I was a really serious gamer before I came to USA. I would spend at least a couple of hours every day playing video games but not anymore. There is so much to this country but I would be lying if I said that I really love it here. But after an year’s time, I can safely say that this place is growing on me. I had several complaints from the taste of milk to the time of sunset. How expensive everything is when you convert everything to rupees. In spite of all the complaints, I really love the neatness and the organized traffic in this country. Driving in India after driving in these conditions is suicide. But that is the subject of another blog.

During the one year of my stay in USA, we have met twice already and spent more than a month’s time together. There were moments of true happiness, togetherness and also there were moments of angst and frustration. But even in all this, life felt good. We had a first hand experience of each other’s stubbornness and some issues are yet to be resolved and probably will take a while to be. It made me realize how much we care about each other and how much we are willing to sacrifice to be together. Like I said, life is good with Archana (so is her food ).

If there is one common thread that can connect all of humanity, it would be music. If you think about it, every culture has a form and expression of music that is distinct. Over the years, my taste in music has been varied, and as I’m exposed to more kinds, the more I tend to appreciate the art of creating music.You know how most couples have a “song”? It used to be that, a long time ago, Jagadish’s and mine was ‘How you remind me’ by Nickelback. Wherever I’d go-shopping, hair cut, grocery store, or even in my car, I’d hear it play around me all the time. It wasn’t really our “song” as such but just happened to be a coincidence of sorts.

More recently, however, we both fell in love with a song we heard over and over again on the car radio while driving around. More than anything else, it was the lyrics that really hit the spot for us. Especially as we know what it is to be in a long distance relationship; what it is to feel longing and loneliness; what it is to crave to be together and be merry.

This song not only reminds me of all the good memories we have, and the reason we so love each other, but it also reminds me that distance is but a word. The song I’m talking about is by Plain White T’s and is titled ‘Hey there, Delilah’. Here it is, from YouTube.  

Despite everything, I know we have something special, and I know, in my heart, it’s got to have all happened for a reason. Destiny. Just listening to this song makes me feel a whole lot better.

And just a little sad that we aren’t together right here, right now.

Someday, we will.

Well, in India at least, I can safely say cricket is a religion. And Sachin Tendulkar is, if not God, somewhere very close to it in this religion. I stayed up last night to watch India take on Australia in the first final of the CB series, and boy, was it worth it or what! I have been a perpetual fan of Sachin. The great ones always have many critics and Sachin, unfortunately, was no exception. Despite all that, and despite a groin niggle, last night he showed us just what he is capable of. When Sachin plays like that, the opposition and the world, both, can only watch! Wow, what a show that was.

Watching the match, however, reminded me of the importance of some common interests being present within a couple. It’s awesome that Jagadish enjoys watching cricket too, for example. When I get all excited about a match, or want to talk about our team’s composition, or, some particular individuals in the team (!), it’s good to have someone to share it with. Although it would be great to share a lot of other things with him (I’d curl up to a Hindi movie any day, and he’d rather not), sometimes, it’s good to be different and enjoy your own stuff. I’m reminded of this TV show ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ in which Raymond is the kind of guy who would rather play golf than do anything else in the world. Debra, his wife, thinks is a wonderful idea if she went along with him to play golf so that would give them some time together. Of course, that pretty much ruins golf for Raymond, but again, my point is that while you don’t need to enjoy everything together, it is still important to enjoy things that are close to your heart. It will make the whole experience so much more fun!  

The last few months have been particularly hard for both Jagadish and me. A number of issues had come up that we had to deal with. While most of them remained unresolved, Valentine’s Day showed up, bright and merry.

I thought I had, for once, surpassed myself and bought him a really outstanding gift that would surprise him, but he got me something that I was really almost craving. He’s always been into gaming, and I turned from someone being blissfully unaware of video games into a casual onlooker, getting (loads of) info from him about the latest and greatest games around. So when he made his way into the US, I bought him a Nintendo DS Lite, with one of the Final Fantasy games. He soon found other games for it and I was hooked onto BrainAge and WarioWare. I absolutely loved Mario Party! I played until the end of the game-with a little help from Jagadish of course.

And so… I received a brand-spankin’-new DS Lite in red for Valentine’s. Not only does it look gorgeous and evokes ‘wows’ from anyone who looks at it, but it is incredibly easy and sooo much fun to play on! We can even hook up to Nintendo’s WiFi connector thingy and play against each other. I can only say I’m getting better at Mario Kart, but I bet I’ll beat him at it some day very soon!

Besides all the excitement of getting this awesome gift, Valentine’s, as always, reminded me of how fortunate I am to have someone out there who cares about me as Jagadish does, and someone who I care about just as much. Indeed, it happens much too often when the person you love may not love you back as much. I hope everyone who is in love and is looking for love will remember that, always.

It has been a wonderful five years with him, despite the many hiccups we continue to face. Money, fame, success, and the highly ovverrated societal ‘respect’, although perhaps important in some regards, sometimes pale in comparison to having a happy and fulfilling life.

Let me begin by saying apologies to all the readers for lack of activity in the past couple of months. Life has been hectic and now that things are finally falling in place, you can expect posts every once in awhile. Now that I have gotten it out of the way, let me get to the crux of the post.

Cooking is an art and it is definitely not for the impatient. There is nothing like fast food just crappy food. With busy modern lives, instant food has become a favorite among many. Frankly, it doesn’t taste too bad but there is nothing like a good home-cooked meal. I have to say that I’m lucky that Archana belongs to the classic breed of girls who know how to cook the old fashioned way. I feel that good cooks are not only capable of cooking an awesome meal themselves but equally good at helping novices cook good food too.

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So after much dilly-dallying, we have finally moved to our own servers. The blog was hosted on a free server for awhile now and I was not very happy about it. It used to go down every once in awhile making it hard to blog when we wanted to. Its not like we’ve too many visitors every day or that we blog regularly. But we are hoping to blog a little more regularly in the next couple of weeks. So we wanted to be on a server which wouldn’t die on us.

But the moving hasn’t been entirely smooth. The export/import tool of Wordpress hasn’t been altogether successful. We lost some of our posts, which I was able to bring back from the backup but the comments were altogether lost. We apologize to all the people whose valuable comments we destroyed.

Even though the changes are not apparent, the loading times and the site’s functioning and up time should improve. Hope you enjoy your stay here and we also hope that you will take something home from our lives and maybe share a story or two about yourselves.

To me, love is a lot of comfort. It is comforting for me to know that, at the end of the day, I have a shoulder to rest on. Someone to spill everything out to. Someone I can count on to make me smile, even if I’m exhausted. Someone to simply make me feel better when I’m down, or feeling crummy for no reason at all. Someone who will understand that I need comforting, and solace, and someone who will unselfishly provide that, without asking or needing, or expecting anything in return.

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Reading Jagadish’s post reminded me of a poem I read when I was still in high school. My favorite English teacher, Edward Butscher, taught it to us. He, by the way, is a brilliant teacher. I believe he has even published some good books. He’s so funny and slightly eccentric. Smoked a lot-so much that you could smell it a few feet away. Ugghhh-cigarette smoke and smell still never fails to disgust me and cause me to go into a coughing fit. However, he favored me greatly (that always matters) and I graded the entire class instead of him (except myself; he graded me, of course). I remember how he kept saying how he missed times when students knew how to spell!

Moving on to the poem, the subject of this blog, it was by Edmund Spenser, called ‘Ice and Fire’, and I still remember it vaguely, which is really saying a lot (Jagadish would fervently agree).

Well, I looked it up and here it is for your reading pleasure:

My love is like to ice, and I to fire:
How comes it then that this her cold so great
Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,
But harder grows the more I her entreat?
Or how comes it that my exceeding heat
Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,
But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,
And feel my flames augmented manifold?
What more miraculous thing may be told,
That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,
And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold,
Should kindle fire by wonderful device?
Such is the power of love in gentle mind,
That it can alter all the course of kind.

For everyone who anguishes in love, desperately wanting to bare their hearts, and fearing cold wrath in response, this poem will strike some chords. The ‘fire’ is the man, and the ‘ice’ is the woman, and the poet is writing about how his warmth, desire and love do not ‘melt’ the woman’s heart. Despite this, her ‘coldness’ only spurs him on even more, ‘kindling’ the fire in him.

The play with the words of ice and fire, and the images they conjure up in one’s mind is really pretty amazing! This is really a beautiful analogy describing the power of love to bind even entire opposites. I love the last couple of lines especially. Love is really, truly very powerful, and those touched by this wonderful emotion will, I am sure, agree with me.

I am not really a person who loves poems mostly because I don’t understand them. Recently I saw a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a magazine and was really impressed. Even though the poem seems simple in its meaning, it seemed like there was a subliminal meaning hidden inside it. The way the poet exclaims in the end saying, “Ah, What then?” made me think a lot. Here is the poem:

What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?

– Samuel Taylor Coleridge