My Appearance

"Oh my God! How different I looked back then!" exclaimed a friend while looking at a photo taken in 2008. "You, however, have hardly changed," she added.

I chuckled to myself. I knew it wasn't true. I have changed in appearance over the years as much as anybody else, mostly because my body puts on weight whenever I am looking the other way, but also because of changing hairstyles, spectacle frames and, er... facial hair (which I finally got out of the way in 2002). So this narcissistic blog post is about looking back at some of these old appearances of me, and feeling amused or jealous, as the case may be.

To be reasonable, I will exclude photos of childhood from this list. All of these photos depict me later than my late teens.

So let's get the unpleasant one out of the way first. This is a photo taken by my father sometime during my final years in school. My beard had started growing in the most ridiculous fashion, and I had not started shaving it yet. You can see the result. And those glasses! Oh, how can I forget those glasses? They were my first pair. These large carbon fibre frames were the rage in those days. Now looking at them almost kills me with embarrassment. Seriously, I looked like that?

When I started my engineering at IIIT Calcutta, the first thing to go was the beard. The moustache followed six months later, although both of them made cameo appearances from time to time before the semester exams. The large carbon fibre glasses made way for narrow metal frames. The third significant change in my appearance concerned my weight.

I have been slightly overweight since my high school days. I always loved food, but was never a voracious eater. So my weight could only be attributed to a lack of exercise. After coming to IIIT, I decided to do something about it. That something was a four mile walk every day and a reduction in food intake. The latter one was easier to implement as I was living away from home and my mother was not around to check the amount of food I was eating. As a result, I was soon about 10 kilograms lighter and I loved it.

Those were strange times - photos were still taken on film. I had a small auto-everything camera which my mother sometimes used and which I had taken to college with me. Neither that camera took good photos, nor were the scanners which I used to scan them later any good, which is a relief, actually. The few photos that I found of my first year are so grossly weird that I would rather die before publishing them online. I would have died after publishing them anyway, for my other friends who appear in those photos with me would have had me assassinated. So fast forward to my third year in college when two of my friends brought digital cameras to college (on separate days). It was an amazing thing, nothing short of magic. We fooled around with those cameras all day, clicking photos of everyone from the professors to the tea sellers outside the college. Oh those grainy photos in all their 2 megapixel glory are almost painful to my eyes now, but at the time they were the best photos of my college life.

Then came fourth year, along with six months of staying at home during my project at ISI and soon I was on my way to fatness once more. Here you can see me during this period. This was taken by my cousin in May 2005, shortly before I joined my first job using a 3 megapixel digital camera that my other cousin sent from the US. Here I am neither extremely thin nor excessively fat. Yes, my Blogger profile photo is cropped from this photo. So this is not really an unknown look for my readers and hence there is really no reason to select this photo in this collection, but you know, kittens can justify anything.

The next photo shows me a year and a half later, in February 2007. I was comfortably settled down in my job and almost halfway back to my old weight by virtue of sitting at one spot all day and hardly having any time to cook healthy food. By this time, I was a photographer, so this was taken with my own Sony point-and-shoot by my friend Bhavana. Also, "A Joyful Experience" was already a year old at the time. Another year and a half later, in August 2008 to be exact, I said goodbye to this job and flew to the United States to do my PhD. I was further fattened up at this time and also, I had my first haircut in USA on New Year's Day which meant I had annoyingly long hair by Thanksgiving break, when the next photo was taken. This photo was the one from which I have supposedly not changed. But as you will see next, I actually changed a lot in between and then returned to the same configuration.

It was only appropriate that I should lose weight during my second innings of college life like the first time. Only, this time it was far more difficult. Firstly, you don't simply walk for miles in the winter anywhere in America, and particularly not in Newark. Secondly, as a student with an embarrassingly low income, most of my eating out options were limited to McDonald's and the like. Thirdly, I was seven years older than last time, which made things difficult. However, I found New York City a very good place to spend the weekends, and I sometimes walked seven or eight miles on each visit. Usually I have seen people put on weight after coming to the US but I was an exception. I dropped another 10 kilograms (or 22 lbs as the Americans would put it) and became very thin indeed.

So here I am in spring of 2009.

And then here I am in summer of 2009.

In summer of 2010 in Boston. Note that the glasses have changed to rectangular half-rimmed ones.

 And in fall of 2010 in Chicago. As you can see, I had gained back most of my weight once more.

This time, I was not able to shed the extra pounds, and I really don't know why. To make matters worse, I had seen most of New York City and the motivation for walking was gone. I had moved to a house next to the station which meant I didn't walk home also. So I started going to the gym. This resulted in my becoming slightly muscular, but without any loss of weight. So here I am in summer of 2011.

And then, in summer of 2012, as seen in the photo below, I was heavier than ever before. Clearly, something needed to be done urgently to reverse the trend, but I did not have time to do it as I was nearing the end of my PhD and was simply too busy with my dissertation and job applications. 

I kept getting fatter until winter, when I half-starved and half-exercised myself back to my fall 2008 proportions. So when I was travelling around the United States with my parents in summer 2013, getting hooded, and getting my photo taken all over the place, I had managed to look somewhat different again. I still look like that, except for the occasional hair cutting disaster. While this is still far heavier than what I would like to see myself, this is what I was like when I came to the US. So I have been worse, and I hope to get slimmer now that my new college/office has an area of 700 acres and I have to walk a mile to just go to the cafeteria and back.

Of course, what I do at the cafeteria once I'm there is important too for my appearance, but I think I have spoken far too long on the subject of myself, so I will make an abrupt stop here.

Polar Vortex

Just this New Year's Eve a little girl was asking me if I knew the way to the North Pole and whether I could take her there. When I said "Yes" to her, wondering what to say next, I had no way of knowing that the North Pole would soon be coming to her.

Now the whole world has been talking about the US polar vortex for the last couple of days, or that's what we in America would like to think. You may even have seen photos of the cold places. So here's a quick update for the readers of this blog about the weather here. It is also a post to remind me of these events next winter, when I feel it is too cold. So, just how cold is cold? A few points.

• All 50 states in the US registered temperatures below freezing on Tuesday, January 8.
• Chicago was actually colder than University of Chicago's research station in Antarctica
• The polar bear at the Chicago zoo had to be shifted indoors due to plummeting temperatures.
• Falls Church, the city where I live, registered a low of -16°C in the early hours of Tuesday. The windchill was -26°C at the time. Both these figures are officially the lowest temperatures I have seen in the US. Of course, Newark and New York were much colder on Tuesday.
• My own thermometer, which is kind of accurate, measured -10°C on my balcony. I did not try to turn boiling water into instant snow, but I am sure it would have worked. By the way, that thermometer also has a hygrometer and it measured the relative humidity as 16% both inside and outside which means I have to use a humidifier all the time to prevent nosebleed.

The heating of my apartment broke down on Sunday night, proving yet again that Murphy's Law never fails. Thankfully it was fixed on Monday morning. I had to venture out for half an hour on Tuesday without gloves, and my hands felt really painful. Besides, when the temperature remains sub-zero for a long time, one gets to see some weird effects, such as icicles hanging under the car. The worst part of living here in Virginia during this period is that there is no snowfall which means there is no reason for school to close. Who heard of schools closing because temperatures dropped too much on a sunny day? So I am trying to endure the cold weather to and from school, hoping for a snowstorm that would close everything for a day. That would at least be better than this icy-surfaces-in-the-sun thing.

In the meantime, Google automatically enhanced some of the photos that I have uploaded during the last few days by adding animation to them and decided to call it "Auto Awesome." While the effects are nothing short of cliched and tacky, somehow it goes with the holiday spirit, and helps me imagine what it would look like if it snowed. Here are the two that I liked the most.

Life in Virginia

Just like I kept telling everyone who would listen for the past five years that I was living in New York City, I tell people now that I live in Washington, D.C. But for the last five years, I was actually living in New Jersey and similarly now, the state that I am actually living in is Virginia.

The similarity pretty much ends there. Life in Falls Church, Virginia and Newark, New Jersey are as different as Washington D.C. and New York City. New York, as I mentioned earlier, is crowded, chaotic and full of towering glass skyscrapers. Washington, on the other hand is empty most of the time, with old European style large squat stone buildings. In New York the subway is complex and ugly, the D.C. Metro is simple and beautiful to look at. In New York the museums, zoo and botanical garden are huge and  they cost a lot to see. In D.C. the same things are compact and free, while housing almost similar-sized collections. In New York you would find it difficult to walk ten blocks away from the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree during the last week of the year. In D.C. you can park your car a block away from the National Christmas Tree on Christmas eve. Of course, the New York tree, as all things in New York are, is over twice as tall as the D.C. one. However, this post is not about comparing these two cities; we can do that another day. This post is about life in Falls Church and how it differs from life in Newark.

The National Christmas Tree. Now compare it to this.

The biggest difference between Newark and pretty much any other place is, to put it simply, that the other place is not Newark. What it means is you can venture out alone at night without the certainty of getting robbed, you can keep your car anywhere with valuable stuff in it without the certainty of it being broken into, and you can drive in the relaxed mode without the certainty of being honked at.

Although I lived in a relatively empty part of Newark, the New York metropolitan area is mostly crowded. Also, the buildings are mostly old, and the roads (except the major ones) are narrow with one or two lanes in most places. Virginia is relatively empty, with a lot of new construction and many roads having three to five lanes. At least that's what I see in the places that I go to most of the time. The most pleasant surprise was the ease of driving to Washington from Falls Church as opposed to driving to New York from Newark. Although I did not drive either of these routes myself, I have been in the car, and the drive to New York from Newark is a nightmare of traffic jams and tolls while the drive to Washington is just a half hour pleasant drive. Without any toll.

It would be unfair to say Newark was all bad, of course. The thing that I miss most here is the absence of the light rail system right up to my house or university, and the lack of any shops to speak of within easy walking distance. For the last five years, I had avoided driving completely because I hardly ever needed it. Here I would not survive a week without a car. I have to drive to work every morning, drive to get my groceries, to get my phone fixed, to go to the mall, to the DMV, to see a movie, to Walmart or IKEA, and to go to pretty much anybody's house. People living in the US for some time won't find this unusual at all, but for me, this is a somewhat new experience.

Which brings me to the issue of driving.

Some readers of this blog may be unaware of the fact that I bought a car earlier this year, though it is unlikely considering that each of the four readers were informed of this bit of news by other channels of communication. Actually around this time last year, I started learning to drive which resulted in me finally getting a driving license in March. I immediately started looking for a car so that I would not forget how to drive. I wanted a car good enough to drive my parents around when they arrived in May, yet cheap enough that I would not mind reselling at a throw away price if I had to relocate to the other side of the country in a hurry. What I found was an old Toyota Camry whose age in hours was slightly more than its price in cents and significantly more than the number of miles it had run. I have been driving it around ever since, and hopefully getting better at driving with time. I drove it to Virginia from New Jersey last month, and I use it to go to work everyday. The reason I brought this up is because this is the most significant change in my life after coming to Virginia. Not only do I have to drive whenever I am going out, but also I am often the most aggressive driver on the road which is completely opposite of what used to happen in New Jersey. That does not mean I drive carelessly. I am just saying that when the light goes from red to green, usually I am the first person to move forward even after waiting for a second or two. In New Jersey you wait a second extra and you'll get honked at.

Finally, the apartment that I moved into has wall-to-wall carpeting. Again, this is no big deal for most people living in the US, but I have been living on hardwood flooring since 2008 and so I am now terrified of spilling liquids on the carpet. This means I have to devote quite some time to housecleaning every weekend which was very easy earlier. On the plus side, carpeting also means I can sleep on the living room floor occasionally when I am watching a movie on the living room desktop late in the night. I also have a balcony which is too cold these days but I assume it will be pleasant sitting there during the summer.

I am waiting for the summer because I want to go exploring all over Washington like I did with New York, and these days it is too cold for that. Besides, I have never had to clean snow and ice off the car in the previous winters. I had to do it twice this year, and I can already say I don't like the experience.

The Thing About New York

A few days ago, my cousin asked me whether there is one scene, a single image, that describes USA to me. He asked the question because one of his friends had said that the scene that comes to his mind when he thinks of America is a row of car lights on the highway, red on one side and white on the other. Something like this:

Disclaimer: I was not driving the truck from which this photo was taken. 

I wasn't so sure of the answer at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I converged on the single image that describes America to me. Not cars on the highway, not trees covered with orange leaves or snow covered houses. Not even Niagara or the Grand Canyon. It is the sight that took my breath away five years ago.

The Manhattan skyline.

Again, this photo was not taken while driving on Route 1

And as I was entering US Route 1 while driving to Virginia last Sunday, and the skyline loomed up in front of my windshield, I suddenly realized that I would not be seeing this sight regularly anymore. It is a sight which people from across the world come to see, a sight which I have become so used to during the last five years that I don't even notice it all the time. From now on when I see that sight, it will be as a visitor, not as a person who can call New York his own city.

Clearly, research leaves me with a lot of free time

But was New York ever my city? Strictly speaking, the answer is "No." I was a resident of Newark, New Jersey. New York City does not feature anywhere in the list of cities where I have ever lived. In fact, Newark is as much my city as Kolkata is. But in the last five years, with the law & order situation in Newark far from satisfactory, I have spent a lot more time walking around New York City than I have spent in Newark. Be it the Broadway, or Wall Street, or Brooklyn Bridge, or Central Park, I have really come to know a lot of Manhattan like the back of my hand. This familiarity, of course, came at a price. In my mind, New York City (or simply "the city" as we call it) became something like the sun or the moon or the tree in my backyard. Something that exists there, but something that I don't usually think about. Need to develop some film? Just drop into B&H. Some fresh fish at budget rates? Chinatown has the answer. Need crayons for my sister? Go spend a few hours in Pearl Paint. And then there was always the Borders or B&N stores to spend a lazy day at, if the weather was bad. One could also go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the Americal Museum of Natural History. I even came to know the locations of specific exhibits in these museums by heart. Lunch? No problem! I know the best carts and a store where you can get an amazing Chinese lunch for $5. And if the weather is good, there is the Central Park. Take your camera, or take a book, or an mp3 player, and for a few hours you can forget that you are in the middle of one of the largest cities in the world. I did all these activities all the time, and yet, I felt surprised when some friend from outside expressed envy at my geographic location, or the fact that I left college early to go buy some fish in New York. I felt puzzled when someone wanted to visit New York twice just to "see it," because living next to New York almost made me forget that it is one of the top tourist destinations in the world.

People at the Grand Central Terminal. Some people are busy and some are not.

I have no idea what was going on here

So what is the city like? I have been asked to write a blog on NYC several times, and I never did it, though I wrote blog posts about DC, Boston, Chicago and Las Vegas. At first sight, New York is not pleasant at all. A concrete jungle with sun-deprived alleyways perpetually in the shadow of skyscrapers, overcrowded, expensive and dirty (as my American-born nephew put it, "It smells like India"). People have no time for each other, they are always running. Cars jump stop signs, people jaywalk blatantly. In short, utterly chaotic. But then, as you get to know the back alleys of Brooklyn and the Bronx, the Egyptian Temple at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the people, the food carts, the parks, the quaint little coffee shops, the ceiling of the Grand Central Terminal, you see the real New York City. The city where seemingly busy people will still stop and pose for a photo, the city where in the middle of a thousand glaring neon signs you suddenly see a small banner saying "টাইমস স্কোয়্যারে স্বাগতম", the city where on certain days, traffic comes to a standstill due to photographers shooting the sunset. A city where you take a photo of a bird's nest, only to have a group of elderly birdwatchers swoop down upon you with all kinds of information about that bird species.

Seen in Central Park

Nothing can match the energy and grandeur of Kolkata during Durga Puja, but New York puts up a brave attempt during the Christmas week. The crowd around the huge Christmas trees at Bryant Park and Rockefeller Center is something that you rarely come across in this country. And on New Year's Eve, thousands brave sub-zero temperatures and bone-chilling winds to see the ball drop at Times Square. I haven't been part of the last mentioned madness, but when I see the rest of it, something somewhere, reminds me of Kolkata, where crowds gather for the smallest of reasons.

Wall Street on a winter day

Sometime, in these five years, unknowingly, New York City became my city. Kuntala calls New York a nest of lunatics. I feel at home among its multitudes of lunatics, because I know there is a fair bit of craziness inside me. I bristle when someone criticizes the city or its people. I have served as a NYC tourist guide for scores of friends, relatives and ultimately my parents, and showed them New York with the same pride that one associates with one's hometown. I would take them to the best viewpoints, at the best times, and then, when they were drinking in the visual treat in front of them, I would derive the ultimate joy from their awestruck expressions.

Sunset behind Liberty

Which brings us to the biggest reason why I loved New York City so much. Even after these five years, even after so much familiarity, New York City still surprises me on every visit. Each time I visit the city, I come across something --- a public art installation, a little shop that I had not seen before, a person dressed like a wizard, a gentleman walking a goat on a leash, a sign written in Bengali, a frozen fountain --- that surprises me. During my initial visits, the phenomenon was understandable, but it never stopped when the places became old and known to me, and I started stepping beyond the usual tourist traps. In fact, on my very first visit to the city I saw the aforementioned Bengali sign and on my very last visit I saw some amazing things inside the public library that I didn't know were there. New York has been throwing these surprises at me for the last five years, and I hope it won't stop.

Because although I have bid farewell to New York and moved to Virginia, which is in the suburb of Washington DC, I plan to keep visiting NYC whenever I get a chance. I really love surprises.

A Confused Birthday

You know you are growing old when you miss your own birthday by four days before you can write a post on growing old to mark the occasion. And as everyone knows, old age brings forgetfulness, confusion and each passing day makes the world a weirder place to live.

The weekend had gone well. Two days of festivities, with attending Durga Puja in the mornings and wonderful dinners followed by cultural programme in the evenings. I spent the nights at my cousin's house in Edison, since driving all the way to Newark from Plainfield seemed too much of a hassle. Then on Monday morning, I packed my things in my car and finally headed home. About an hour later, as I was nearing my house, I had this sudden urge to touch my phone.

A certain explanation is needed at this point about this urge. People who travel in crowded buses and trains in Kolkata know very well that unless they verify the existence of their valuables in their pockets every few minutes, the valuables are likely to vanish under their noses. This concern gives rise to the strange habit of feeling one's pockets every few minutes. Although some researchers suggest that this very habit helps in pointing out the locations of valuables on the victim's body to the pickpockets, I have always found it helpful. Even five years after I stopped commuting in Kolkata public transport, I still get these sudden urges to touch my wallet or my phone, and like all urges, they often come at a time when satisfying that urge is inconvenient.

On this day, this urge hit me as I was negotiating mid-day traffic on Route 21, and whatever feeling I could do without taking my eyes off the road told me that the phone was not with me. Since I had used the phone that morning, I had clearly left it behind in Edison. I focused on driving, fighting an urge to make a u-turn and head for Edison again. A quick calculation showed the cheapest way to get the phone back was to ask my cousin to bring it to office the next day where I could collect it from him. My heart screamed I could never live without my phone for a day, but my brain was able to convince me that it was just twenty-four hours, and I would still have the Internet on my laptop to communicate with the world.

So the first thing that I did on reaching home was mailing my sister-in-law to ask about the phone. She found it (in a walk-in-closet, if you must know) and switched it off as per my request. The next thing was explaining to the outside world this sudden loss of my phone, because although I would miss it for just twenty-four hours, they were not any twenty-four hours. It was Bijoya Dashami, the day when Bengalis all over the world call and visit each other to convey their regards and greetings. My parents would be expecting my call. And then, when the clock ticked past midnight, a bunch of friends would try to call me to say happy birthday. To complicate matters even more, half my friends were in India, so I would not have to wait till midnight to expect calls. So I sent a mail to my parents and sister explaining the situation and saying I would not be calling that night. I also put up a post on Facebook apologizing to everyone who tried to call me that day.

That night, I set up an appointment with my cousin about where I would meet him. I planned to meet the train he would be on, in Newark, and ride the same train into New York City. If I did not find him in the train, I would attempt to meet him at New York Penn Station. "Where should we meet each other? Do you have some landmark in mind?" he asked. I suggested in front of the Amtrak waiting room but he said it was too big. Then he suggested Dunkin Donuts, but I was opposed to that idea since there were several Dunkin Donuts stores in the station. Finally he decided on a store called Houlihan's. I agreed, because although I had not heard the name before, it would be easy to find since the name was unusual.

I was to remember this logic the next day when I was running around in New York Penn Station. For one full hour, I explored all three floors of the huge complex, discovered things that I didn't know were there for the last five years, and managed to make more than one policeman suspicious. I asked policemen, shopkeepers and janitors, but no one had heard of Houlihan's.

When the last gentleman I asked started asking around on my behalf whether anybody had heard of "Holy Sense," I decided it was time to change plans. So I gave up searching for Houlihan's and started looking for ways to call my cousin. Now, as the reader might recall, I had no phone, which was the reason for all this trouble. So naturally I had to look for public telephones. And finding a public telephone that works is another task that is really harder than it looks. After trying and rejecting four different telephones, the fifth one let me call my cousin for a dollar, though the writing on it clearly asked for half. When my cousin answered the call, the reason for all the confusion became clear.

"Actually, I made a mistake," he said sheepishly. "Houlihan's has closed down and has been replaced by T.G.I. Friday's. I didn't know that. So I waited for some time in front of that store and then came to the office."

The rest was easy. I went to his office and collected my cell phone, which allowed me to get in touch with the world once more. The battery, of course, didn't last the rest of the day, and since I was roaming around Central Park and Times Square until that evening, there was no scope for charging. That led to more confusions and communication problems towards the afternoon and evening, but this post is already too long and too late and too confusing to include that.