Sunday, January 23, 2005

Its been a couple weeks since i've posted on this and i've received a few requests to do so, mainly girish, so this one is for you man. So basically school has been back in full effect for like 2 weeks. I had a big interview at Manhattan District Attorney's office on Jan. 14th, it was a long interview about 40 min or so. It was a panel interview, 3 people and me. Normally, I'm a pretty good interviewee and thats because i can read people pretty well and react accordingly but for so reason I had a really hard time figuring out these interviewers, I think it was because i was a bit nervous, this is like the job that I really want. I don't know how i did, I really hope i didn't mess up my interview but who knows. I was gonna stay in NYC for the night but since a lot of my friends weren't there, i decided to come back to boston and went to a house party when i got back. So I think i've decided to take the NY Bar after graduation. On a more positive note, I just bought a 250 gigabyte external harddrive and i have most of it full of carnatic music. Its freaking amazing, i'm like a little kid in a candy store, every day is a brand spanking new experience for me because of the vast amount of quality music that i can now listen to. This past weekend I was sick due to the sudden weather changes basically from cold to nut sack turning blue cold. I just sat at home and watching 19 hour marathon of Fresh Price of Bel Air and then Spiderman 2 and then Shankarabaranam, one of the greatest movies ever. That movie captures my love of music and how music is viewed in traditional indian culture, music is divine and perfect, it is definite must see for anyone who even claims to have a love of music, which almost everyone does but sadly not many of these people know any music beyond what they hear on the radio and claim that to be good music. Yes it is fun to listen to and dance to and yes it possesses some aesthetic beauty but a lot of it is superficial. I can go on for hours about this but not right now, ask me later or in person if you want or better watch shankarabaranam with me and you'll understand. This coming weekend a huge group of us are going up to the mountains for some ski trip but i won't be skiing or snowboarding, i'll just be relaxing and chilling, prolly bring up some music and my ps2 with some games to chill. The following weekend I think we are going to NYC, or so I'm trying to make happen, i think it would be awesome.

Friday, January 07, 2005

I can't believe I'm about to say this but I can't wait till I get back to boston, yes I know, as a brown man these words should never exit my mouth. Boston, for a being such a big city and liberal, happens to be one of the most prejudiced and racist cities I've been to. Although I must admit I have yet to transverse across the Mason-Dixon Line and for some weird reason I think there might be a bit of racism down there but its just a hunch. I've had a few racial comments hurled at me while I've been in Boston in the past 2 1/2 years, probably as many as I have had hurled at me while living in Southern California for 21 years. Regardless, I am once again going off on a tangent, I have essentially for the past 2 1/2 years dreaded returning to boston, primarily because its not the life that I was used to. But now, its my life, i come back to Southern California and for the most part its as if I've never left. Most of my best friends are married, or engaged or in relationships that are gonna end up in marriage. They essentially live a very routine and static life, not that that is a bad thing, just not something I'm entirely ready for. I spend all day listening to music and catching up on tv and movies and I can't stand it. The highlight of my vacation has been my dog surya, a 150 lb alaskan malamute-artic wolf hybrid. It has been raining steadily for like 2 weeks here and Surya loves it. Normally he is a very nice and gentle dog, for a 150 lb dog. Once that water falls from the sky, a evil sparkle twinkles in his eye and immediately he runs out into the rain and proceeds to jump into the biggest hole that he has dug, which at this point is filling up with water, muddy brown water. He then continues to dig until his normally white and black coat is covered in brown wet mud. Then he waits till I have to come out to pet, feed or give him water then proceeds to shake all the mud on to me and then jump on me. Picture a dog who when standing up on his hind legs is about 6'1 or 6'2 and now picture him on me. Usually we let him in the house for a few hours a day but given his current state of being muddy for the past 2 weeks, he has remained in the garage in his place. Damn you Zeus, God of the Sky and damn your rain. I can deal with a couple of days of doing nothing but an entire 3 weeks, goddamn. Going back to Boston, is not the happy part, it is actually going back to my life, going back to a "place" in which my day and life is much more random and much more dynamic, especailly this semester, which will be our last in law school and hopefully the most memorable, or in otherwords I'll be making a lot of ass and ensuring that everyone has something to talk about. God bless alcohol and me when i'm full of it.

Tuesday, December 28, 2004

Well its been a few weeks since i've written here but i've been a bit busy with finals and finally coming home for winter break. Home is great but it is also not. It has become more apparent to me that I can't live at home again, I can stay at home for a bit but not live there. Its my comfort zone, the place where I am secure and thereby lazy. It is the place I just simply accept and go along with rather than take any real intiative. I've been home for over a week now and honestly, its a bit boring. I don't have much to do. The Christmas weekend was pretty interesting, I must say. The pressure of marriage and all that comes with it, is clearly growing, not for me but for all the girls who are of marriagable age, which is slowly including both my sisters. We went to three family-friend related parties this weekend and each of them devolved or snowballed into "Oh my god, what are we going to do about getting our girls married." I tend to free float between the parents and the kids, meaning I tend to hang out with each of them. The way these parties work is that the parents take one side of the house and the kids the other. The parents further divide themselves up into all the husbands on one side and the wives on the other, it is like a grade school dance. I tend to just move about from one group to the next, so i hear all the various conversations that are going on. The kids, who of course range from 20-30 are all talking gossip or playing some card game. The fathers just pretty much sit around and talk about news or politics or the next non-personal thing that comes to their minds and the mothers all talk about marriage and how tough their kids are to deal with. It is rather weird to see how much the cultural and religious issues affect our parents and how much more real it gets as time passes by. The more I have listened to it and thought about it, the more it becomes apparent to me that the indian mind and cultural ethos is so very different from the western ethos and mind. I spent the better part of the weekend listening and talking to the parents, not just mine but our family friends, about these things. I was trying to explain to them what it means to be an indo-american of our generation in this country and society, how tough it is for us to try and balance our two very different cultures. Indian culture places vital importance on the wishes of the parents and this leads to us trying to live our lives in a manner to make our parents happy and live up to their expectations. Essentially, in our parent's happiness lies our own happiness. To a large part, I think I have come to understand this and even accept this, in these past few years. At the same time, we living in this country and being raised with many american and western values, become conflicted. American culture places strong ideas of independence, individuality and self-happiness. Meaning, we should do what makes us happy as an individual. Furthermore, we are informally taught that marriage begins with love and romance but in the indian culture marriage fosters love and romance. Western = love first then marriage; Indian = Marriage then love. Clearly, the dilemma for us can be seen. The weekend was spent me explaining this in much more detail to the parents. It was rather interesting and helped me to see much more clearly where I stand, which in this case is a amalgam of both cultures. I know for the most part now, that my happiness lies in my parents happiness and now that lets me have a foundation on how to proceed with the more confusing areas of my life.

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Right now, my entire life is in limbo. I'm not sure where i'm gonna go or where i want to go or need to go. I'm not just referring to my career or where i will be next year, i'm talking about life in general. I'm trying to figure what the next chaper of my life needs to be. So it suffices to say i'm in some state of confusion. Man, since I started law school the confusion has gotten more and more intense and kinda hitting the ultima soon. The past few years have taken me down a path that i don't think i would have saw myself following 7 years ago. I'm not entirely sure that I like who I had become and so I'm trying to change myself. I've lost sight of who I was raised to be, I know I have to become my own person but its not entirely that simple. Yes I do have to become my own person but the debts I owe to my parents must also be repaid. I've done things that maybe they wouldn't be so proud of and feel its about to make some changes. This weekend put some things into perspective for me. Maybe I don't know people that well, and maybe i expect too much from people, especially those close to me. In other respects, this weekend helped me to figure out somethings about myself and what i want in the long term. I've come full circle in many respects. I'm trying to reach back to my roots and trying to find my spiritual grounding again. Its tough, given that the past few years have taken its toll on my beliefs and some ways made me a skeptic. Music has really helped me change this, i'm attempting to get past the technical aspect of it and back into the devotion and emotions of it. Writing is also my other outlet and its helped me a lot too to trace my thoughts over the past few years. Maybe i'll put some of it up here but we'll see.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

This weekend i was in New York City, the Big Apple, still for the life of me don't know why its called that. It was a good weekend, my sister came up to NYC to visit her friends and so i decided to go hang out with her, that was lets say a fun and even more frustrating experience but live and learn. I also met up with some other people and I had a really good time there. It just dawned on me recently, that i'm at a crossroads in my life. My law school experience is drawing to a close in May and then i have to enter into the real world, whatever that is, i guess the life i've been living now is fake and imaginary. I'm not entirely sure where i'm going to be or what i'll be doing, right now i'm trying to figure out between nyc, dc, la or sf. NYC seems like the most fun and best overall experience, DC is the heart of this country and that would be interesting but i don't know that many people over there and not sure if i wanna start off from scratch again, LA is too close to home right now and i need a few more years before I head there and settle, SF seems like a great place its not too far from home and yet its far enough and a big city. So i'm not sure what I want or need to be. A really sad event transpired yesterday. On December 11, 2004 the world and especially Carnatic Music World lost a great person, M.S. Subbhalakshmi, one of the greatest musicians of our or any time. She was the first female to break down all the gender and caste barriers in Carnatic Classical Music. Her voice is famous all over the world to all Hindus, hers is the voice of the suprabatham in the morning. Temples all over india play her music in the morning to awaken the deities and usher in the new sunrise. She was an humanatarian who has donated millions of dollars to charities through her concerts. The love and devotion in her voice could bring any person to their knees in tears, music was just music for her, it was her very life breath, her soul and her soul touched all those who have heard her. I remember her voice as a young kid, she was the first voice i heard almost every morning as my parents played her songs after they took a shower and begun to pray. She taught me the vishnu sahasaranamam and shankaraacharya's bhaja govindam and she revived my love for music in the song ranga puravihara. The bhava (emotion) and bhakti (devotion) in her live and voice will never be matched. Her soul now has merged into the Universal Being and found the bliss that she has sung so often about.