Change of Status

I started this blog in 2006 as an antidote to boredom when I was sitting idle on the "bench" at my first job in Hyderabad. Since then, I have written about all sorts of topics under the sun, from movie reviews to reminiscences, from travelogues to frustrated rants, from recipes for making mummies to translations of Bengali poems. However, this blog has strangely fallen silent for many of the biggest events in my life, such as my preparing for GRE and getting admission in PhD in 2008, my getting robbed on the street in 2009 and 2010, my PhD funding stopping in 2012 and my near disastrous car accident in August this year. Some of these events were good, while most were bad, but all had something in common - I did not want to tell the world about it when it was happening. I am somewhat of an introvert and shy away from discussing my present private life too much on this blog. In some cases, the matter had to be kept a secret from certain people - my employers in case of the PhD admission, my parents in case of the robberies - and were later written about here when the need for secrecy disappeared. Besides, a series of unfortunate incidents has made me a perpetual pessimist and somewhat superstitious. I believe if I talk about it too much beforehand, it may not work out in the end.

That situation has arisen again. I have not been updating my readers with events going on in my private life for quite some time now, writing on a variety of nonsense such as fall foliage and movie reviews while most of my time and my thought has been occupied by only one thing - preparations for an impending event that could prove to be the biggest life changer for me, and also for somebody else. But this time, I have decided to announce it here before it happens, so here it goes.

I'm getting married tomorrow, and although I started by comparing it with my getting robbed on the street, I really hope it will be a much better experience.

The start of my journey at Washington Dulles airport on Friday.

So I landed in Kolkata on the 7th of this month after a month or more of hectic shopping, packing and six months of heavy dieting, followed by a safe but unpleasantly eventful plane journey. I could write about how pathetic Jet Airways' customer service is, but I'll save that for later. For the last four days, life has been a hectic collage of attending my cousin's wedding, last minute preparations for mine, commuting to Kolkata multiple times for renewing my US visa, and playing with my seven month old niece while battling severe jet-lag. And by the looks of it, the next few days will only be busier.

Hopefully, when I write the next post on this blog, I will have entered a different phase of my life. Or, as they say on Facebook, my "relationship status" will have changed. Till then, goodbye!