Winter: Thou hath arrived

As the chilly winds relieved us of the humid North Indian heatwaves, this gave all the GoT fans to flood each other's FB Walls with the popular quote from the show/book series "Winter is Coming".

This also acted as free publicity for the franchise as frustrated non-followers gave in to the temptation to see what the fuss is all about and immersed themselves in the Song of Fire and Ice and going through the topsy-turvy turns and twists of the storyline.

Currently I am reading the 5th edition of the book series, "A Dance with Dragons". As the name suggests, this volume sheds light on the majestic creatures that came to life after centuries of extinction following the Doom of Valyria, the most prosperous city of its time.

It follows principally, the turn of events at and beyond the Wall, in Winterfell and in Easteros as the main characters narrate the story from their own point of views in each chapter.

Coming back from office in the evening, as the sky rise buildings and apartments fade away and the trees appear by the side of the road, chilly winds swoop in to shake me to the core of my spine. Even though the temperature is nowhere near the freezing point nor comparable to the ones in Canada or Siberia, for us Northerners (North Indians not North Westerosis), who are accustomed to a hot and humid climate, it does feel like we've suddenly gone beyond the wall, in a land known far far away from Frostfangs and the frozen lakes, known as the "Lands of the Always Winter", currently the abode of Brandon Stark and the Reeds.

Even in Winterfell, way south of the wall, the winter is quite unforgiving. From Theon Turncloak's POV, we see how Bolton and Stannis' men and animals alike, are dying each day buried in the snow.

Maybe because I am currently reading such accounts of how unrelenting the arrival of winter is and how this winter will last for decades on end, I am feeling the fangs of ice. 

If this is the case, the sequel, named the "Winds of Winter" will be even more freezing, both climatically and otherwise as the Others make their appearance and we get a more elaborate picture of their lives (We did see in one of the episodes of Season 4) how an Other touches a newborn child and converts him into an Other too.

Well, let's hope George R. R. Martin releases this book soon enough and we can spend more time, effort and money reading, watching, fantasising and living in the land that owes its existence to this not so young man.

This one's to Jenny

Viral fever put me on the bed over the weekend but fortunately, also in the front of the TV where Comedy Central was airing the reruns of Suits Season 1.

Suits as a show has come a long way since then but it was kinda nice going back to Harvey, Donna, Louis and Mike's old days. And that's where I saw Jenny again.

Jenny Griffith, the very so pretty, girl-next-door blonde who was Mike's friend Trevor's ex-girlfriend and later on, Mike's love interest.

In one of the episodes the show goes back further 5 years from season 1 to show how all the characters used to live back then.

I loved that episode because gave us some more background story and more importantly, that's the episode where Mike and Trevor meet Jenny and her friend for the first time.

Just 2 guys and 2 girls in a bar, the foursome hit it off quite well and it is evident that Mike likes Jenny. They have similar interests (both of them like die hard I guess) and Mike feels she is more his type than the other one.

Through tough turns and broken friendships and relationships, much to my liking (don't know how many others), Mike and Jenny finally become a thing.

They're living together, she knows his secret, helps him out by being a guest witness in a mock trial of his, delivers his suit to office when he'd just pulled an all-nighter and is giving him good advice when he's stuck.

All in all, they're great together.

Look at the chemistry Mike and Jenny have:

But the creators didn't really feel so.

Here entered Rachel Zane, a paralegal at Pearson Hardman who, not so surprisingly, becomes the reason for Jenny to leave Mike.

That is the very point where everyone starts comparing Rachel and Jenny.

I have never, ever, apart from only one friend, heard anyone liking Jenny more than Rachel.

Rachel's smart, driven, ambitious, sexy and daughter of a high profile herself but Jenny is is no way inferior.

Of course you don't focus on the boring law stuff all the time so how does it matter if the characters' love interests come from inside of outside of the same profession?

Please bring her back. :/

The "Phoren" train ride

En route DC – NYC, I originally penned down this post in a notebook as the moving train made it more and more difficult to write and even more difficult to read later on.

This makes the first time that I took a train outside of my home country and quite frankly, the experience is very different.

Booking at the very last minute, we had still gotten “business class” tickets for the Acela Express train from Union Station, Washington DC to Penn Station, NYC. I was too excited to experience this voyage, well, before I found out that there was only business class and first class on the train. No Coach/Economy class on the train ???

DC’s Union Station, as we entered, gave the air of an airport rather than a train station, with its souvenir shops, Starbucks & Dunkin Donuts (of course), a Victoria’s Secret store among other apparel shops and infinite number of eateries. And just like at an airport, we waited at a lounge, till about 15 minutes before the departure time.

At 6:15 PM, the gates swung open and we walked through a tunnel and set our eyes on the majestic 2124 Amtrak Acela Express Train waiting for us.

With a Starbucks Cappuccino in my hand, I climbed up the 6 coach machine and started looking around for seat numbers.

Just like the movie theatres over here, there is no concept of reserving specific seats for passengers. Everyone has made peace with the First Come First Serve system and are quite civil about it.

We found 2 vacant “business class” seats and stowed away our luggage in the overhead compartments.

As the train embarked upon its journey, making its way through the states of Maryland and New Jersey, I pulled open the front table and started scribbling.

Frankly, I feel like an idiot sitting with a pen and paper because everyone, and I mean literally everyone around me, is Apple branded.

My cousin sitting in the window seat has an iPhone 5S, the pretty girl on my right, (mid - twenties, has a pretty cool job) is working on a Macbook Air and an iPad mini. I’m quite sure she has an iPhone in her bag.

The middle aged couple in the front have apple tablets and even the train conductor is scanning the barcodes printed on our tickets with an app on his iPhone. 

Me on the other hand, have a pen, a notebook, 2 magazines and a sucky BlackBerry Curve which doesn’t even catch the train’s Wi-Fi signals.

The 2h45m ride passes by in a jiffy as we pick up our luggage and get out into Manhattan’s cold and damp air.

Until the next flashback …

Oh my Boston.

Recently, I got a chance to visit Boston, the capital and largest city in the New England state of Massachusetts and the dream of every prospective business school & engineering student.

Boston is quite a different city if you compare it with other business & education hubs. New York often comes up in comparisons and while NYC is one of the cultural, financial and fashion capitals of the world, Boston trumps it easily when it comes to the best cities for students.

I will not compare these 2 cities here and rather narrate my short 20 hour visit to the home of the Red Sox.

The Delta shuttle flight from NYC to Boston took under 1 hour to reach the Logan International Airport (all the flights, domestic and international, arrive and depart from the same airport, this is so simple than having 2 or even 3 airports) from where, we checked into our room at the adjoining Boston Logan Hilton, which is in such close proximity of the airport that we walked through the shared passageway between the two structures and reached the Hotel Lobby in under 2 minutes.

Post some rest and a hot shower, we took the hotel shuttle to the Airport station on the Blue Line.

An average metro car comprises of people from different age groups but what I witnessed in Boston was rather different.

Everywhere I looked, I saw students. Clad in overcoats, books in hand and earphones in ears, I saw groups of boys and girls in their late teens, twenties and some maybe in their early thirties. Also, being in the States, you would expect majority of the people speaking in English, or perhaps, the second language - Spanish but here again, a rather strange surprise.

The train coaches were bustling with tongues from various different continents. A trio sitting in front of me were chatting in french, who, when exited, were replaced by 4 teenagers gossiping in Spanish. To my left were two guys talking in Japanese and near the door, stood a young adult on a call, conversing in German.

This truly explains what a students' hub looks like. One of the top 3 cities in the world for college goers, it houses some of the biggest names in the stream of education. Harvard, MIT, Berklee College of Music, Boston University,  Boston College, Emerson College and many many and yet many more.

In about 20 minutes we reached our rendez-vous point of Hynes Convention Centre, in Boston's Back Bay area where a friend, who goes to in the Berklee College, showed us around. 

We took a short tour of Berklee, including a quick sneak peak into the classrooms and practice rooms, where, even at 11pm on a Saturday night, students were quite determinedly practicing their musical instrument of choice while the others sat back and listened to the masterpieces in the making.

The ones who believe in the American motto of work hard and party harder, were lined up in queues outside taverns and bars enjoying the warmer than usual weekend (warmer as it hadn't snowed in the past week; me and my friends were shivering in 4 layers of clothing as some girls passed us by wearing minis).

The most common sight in Boston was the turf war between Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts who've conquered every corner of every street of every block of the city, serving coffee aficionados who relaxed on comfortable armchairs with eyes glued to their fired up MacBooks.

The next sight was of the very enthralling Boston Common, the oldest city park in the US. All covered up in snow, I am quite sure this park, right in the centre of the city, with its frozen lake and snowed in gardens, could've played the part of the ice forest in the Narnia chronicles.

The bridge inside the park gave us a great vantage point to look at the tallest buildings in Boston, the John Hancock Tower and the Prudential Tower, the bustling streets underneath and the adjacent Chinatown, where we headed next.

I have been to the Chinatown in NYC and seen it tons of times on TV but the one in Boston gave me quite the scare.

It was quite odd to see it mostly deserted on a Saturday night as we roamed the streets around the various mani-pedi shops and restaurants of Chinese, Vietnamese and other Asian cuisines, looking for a place which had food on its menu that we'd actually heard of.

On our way back, we took in the beauty of the city, with its young crowd, chilly winds, hoards of snow at the sides of the road and disco buses (a hop-on hop-off bus running up and down the streets with people dancing to loud music, disco lights and a stripper pole in the centre).

Day 2 was all about visiting Harvard and MIT in the adjoining Cambridge area. 

From Hynes, a bus dropped us at Massachusetts Avenue, from where we walked to the Harvard Business School. Mostly deserted on a Sunday morning, we still got to gaze at the architecture of the oldest University in the States, its Memorial Church, the John Harvard statue in the Harvard Yard, its athletics arena, the Harvard stadium and nearby memorabilia shops run by Harvard students, selling Harvard apparel.

While we couldn't get a backstage pass into Harvard, we were extremely lucky when it came to MIT. Another friend, who is studying there, used her access card to smuggle us in and out of the Arts, Earthly Sciences and various other buildings, including the best of them all, and the most relevant to me, the Sloan Business School. 

Also doubling as our guide, this friend informed how this new building, with quite a different taste of architecture from other MIT buildings, just completed construction in 2010. The location of the building is truly justified as you enter the hallway and gaze upon the view overlooking the Charles river and the city's skyline. 

Vowing to be back for more, for a much longer time period to better explore the city when we actually apply for these schools, we packed our bags and headed back, dreaming of that hopeful day in the not-so-distant future.

Quite a bit different.

So this is the first time I am writing a blog post on my new laptop and it is the first time I am writing in ages.

It feels a bit different.

I am back in Washington DC after half a decade to attend a marriage ceremony and it feels quite a bit different.

The furniture in my room is the same, the people I met here are all the same but some of the things are quite a bit different.

The city is white instead of green (last time I visited was in the summer of ‘09 and it’s the winters right now), a few paintings have been moved or changed, there are some new carpets, the room clocks are now Apple iHome docks, the kitchen has a Keurig Coffee Brewer, anyone and everyone but me has an iPhone. I can go on and on.

These are all the changes on the outside. Within my small micro-life itself, everything feels changed, as if I have evolved somehow.

From June 2009 to now, I have graduated from college and have a good job, I know a foreign language (English being listed under my mother tongue), the money I got from home to shop over here has been withdrawn from my bank account and not asked for from my dad, I have a BlackBerry and not a Nokia (I want an iPhone too now … The iHome docks are so cool. I can’t play music on it unless I have an “I” device).

In those 5 years I didn’t really look back and took stock of how things have changed. But right now, like a memory stamp, I can actually think backwards and compare what I had right then when I was here and what I possess right now.

Not only that, I can also compare what I wanted then and what I yearn at this very moment.

The wish to move out of my home country is still there and my dream destination still rests in North America, it’s just that it has moved quite a bit north.

My dream B-School is still HBS and the timeline in which I would want to reach there is still similar but the latest plan has a small detour in between, where I get a Master’s before I go to Boston, MA.

Most of my songs are the same and I still have the same habit of trimming down the playlist and adding a few good tunes every now and then. However, my most played songs are now by Coldplay and not by Eminem or Akon.

My close friend circle is still the same. A Mallu-Christian, a short-heighted short-hair Punjabi and some distant others but I have made new ones and plan to meet my decade old pack of boarding school buddies soon.

Is this how the life evolves ?? Is this how it changes, twists and turns and shapes itself into what we want or what we receive ??

I have no idea, no clue at all. From what I have heard from my Uncle, who has a whopping 46 year work-experience (I don’t even have a 46 month experience at this point), life for him has had its ups and downs … But it is as it was, 5 5 winters back when I saw him and promises that it’s gonna stay the same when I see him the next time.

But to me, it’s a little bit different.

I'll be 23.

I felt for sure tonight

After I said goodbye

No one else will know these dreams
No one will ever see those selfish things

No one else will know this part of me

I'm still driving away

And I'm thinking every day

I won't always love these selfish things

I won't always live

I'm not stopping

Its my turn to decide

I know this is my time

No one else will know me, only you

No one else will see me like you do

I'll think of this forever

I'll wait for the right time

What am I hoping for?

I'm here.. I'm now.. I'm ready..

Holding on tight

Don't give away the end

The one thing that stays mine

I won't always love what I'll never have

I won't always live in my regrets

I'm still driving away

I'll think of this everyday

Amazing still it seems

I'll be 23

The Beautiful Song: James Blunt v/s Pete Murray

Every time I write something about songs, an IAS stops talking to me. Hope this time is different.

Remember that phase of your life when you actually like listening to those tacky, cheesy, “Aashiqui 2” type senti songs?

Then comes the R&B songs and if no-one helps you out and you are in the final grips of depression, the heavy death metal blasts (You agree PINTS?).

Though, there are some songs that stay with you forever … The Classics !! The "Summers of 69s" and the "We will Rock Yous".

Two such songs that I’m writing about are:

-       “You’re Beautiful” by James Blunt

                          and

-       “So Beautiful” by Pete Murray

Before you make any pre-emptive judgements, know, that except the names, none other aspect of these two songs are similar, in any way.

You’re Beautiful, by our very own James Blunt, is an old El Classico which I guess everyone must have listened to, in their adolescent life.

You know she’s beautiful, she’s an angel and your love for her is pure. (All that crap)

On the other hand, you have “So Beautiful”, by Pete Murray.

This guy may be no legend, but this song sure would've earned him a rapport with his ex’s friends, the way he feels about her in this song.

Everyone knows how Taylor Swift & Adele rip off their ex after they’re dumped. They’ll actually seem like little girls in middle school after you hear how this guy blasted her ex to pieces, in all its subtlety.

While James Blunt reminds you of that first girlfriend you broke up with or that one girl that got away whom you definitely know, IS THE ONE,

Pete Murray reminds you of that one irritating ex-girlfriend whom you wish, had actually gotten away.

(Ironically, I might have both of those girls in my life reading this blog post)

To write this post further, I am actually listening to these songs and while James Blunt strikes a chord deep down, waking up that long buried nostalgia, Pete Murray makes my fingers roll up into fists thinking of those crazy anger and frustration filled days.

In both of the songs, the guy is thinking about a girl but while one has his girl portrayed as an angel on a heavenly pedestal, the other one ridicules her dressing sense, how that fool thinks so high of herself, her hair color and how he wishes he could bring her down and plant her feet back on the ground.

You do feel pity for both of the guys though.

James Blunt loves his girl so very much and wants nothing but to be at her side but can’t and Pete Murray spent those awful moments with his Ex and how his fingers actually seem to burn when he even as much as thinks of touching her hair.

Is it just me, the boring, all the time in front of my laptop/book geek with a non-existent social life (You termed that, BAGAI) or do you think this is normal and you actually like Murray’s version of Beautiful over Blunt’s?