Jab we Met

GRE exam done, TOEFL results out, 3 admits in my hand, University finalized, VISA interview done and off I will be to USA.. A lot had happened in these past few days, a lot was going to happen in the coming days and I knew my life was going to change completely from now on.. From Amchi Mumbai I was going to go to Uncle Sam's country.. Will I like it there?? Will I be okay being on my own?? Will I be able to live away from home not being able to meet my folks every night?? Will i survive without my friends whom I meet almost every other day?? Will be fine knowing that i am very far away from Mumbai chowpati, Thane talopali, Bandra bandstand, Hill road, Colaba causeway, Worli?? A hell lot of questions were running through my mind.. Application procedure and things after getting admits had been exhaustive.. I was happy that it's all done.. Done?? No.. It all begins here.. The next big step that I was apprehensive about, 'Finding good room-mates.'

'You should look it up on 'orkut'. Join the community of the university that you are going to go to, and search for people going there this semester', someone had told me. Orkut??? Seriously?? How reliable will that be?? How will I know who is good and who is not?? 'Do I have a better plan of action than orkut??', I asked myself. Yes, I did.. The first thing that came to my mind was calling my cousin who was studying in the same university that I was to go to. It had been a long time since I had met him and I had never really spoken to him or known him well. But then he is really a great guy and I knew he would help a lot. So sure, why not? I called him up and told him that I am coming to the same university as he is in. I didn't know at that time if he would be happy about that or not. But talking to him had helped. He told me a lot of things about my Job, about pros and cons of living on-campus and off-campus (he had suggested that I live on-campus, and I had not taken his this suggestion very seriously). I told him about finding room-mates for me and he agreed to help. But I joined the orkut community of U of H anyways.. (We(I) are all so addicted to orkut that any new activity on orkut is always welcome).

While surfing through the community members I found a few girls from Mumbai going to Houston in the fall. It was here that I saw the profile of 'R'. (That's the letter that I am going to use to refer to my 1st room-mate). She seemed fine. I looked at her communities. She was a member of communities like 'Cooking-My passion', 'People who talk on the phone late-nights', 'I love chocolates', 'Harry Potter fans', 'I love reading' and 'SIES alumni'. Our interests matched. So I added her not sure if she will accept my invitation or not. Surprisingly (I would use the word 'surprisingly' because I am very skeptical about adding people I don't know) she accepted it. So I added her on yahoo. (These days with so many ways of communication, you would want to add the person on all possible social networks and all possible messengers because you never know who is active on which one of them). I used to keep signing in on yahoo hoping to bump into her being online sometime or the other. And finally one day it happened. She was online when I was online. I buzzed her and asked her about her plans for after going to the US. We exchanged phone numbers. So far so good. By now, I had no idea what my cousin was up to all this while, if he was looking for room-mates for me or not. But having options is always good so I was trying from my side too.

Then one day I called R and asked her if she had any room-mates and if she was looking for any. She said she was to move in with 'SN' (Room-mate#2) in a 1 bed apartment but she said she will talk to SN and see if SN is okay with me and then she said if thing go well, we can move into a 2 bed apartment. So R spoke to SN and SN was fine with it. So here we were 3 of us. Our next step, finding a 4th room-mate. R being the one most active on orkut met 'SM' (room-mate#3). R told us that SM is interested in moving in with us. So we wanted to know more about SM. R told us she is from Baroda, Gujarat. 'She is a Gujarati?? Aren't they like 'Veg'??? No ways we are moving in with her.' (No offense to any of my guju friends or any other guju people but I love eating Chicken and shrimps). After probing into the matter more we found that she is not veg coz she is a Bong ('Bong'-that's the slang for Bengalis, BTW did you know that Maharashtrians are 'ghatis' and Telugus are 'gultis', no I am not a racist at all, just updating your knowledge about the slangs ;) ) plus R was very keen on letting her move in with us coz SM was a good cook too and me and SN, we had declared to R in our first meeting itself (which was in C-one (Center One mall, Vashi for readers not from Mumbai) almost a month before we were to leave for USA) that we are not the cooking types (so she was scared that she might have to do all the cooking by herself i guess ;) ). So anyways, there we were, 4 room mates, M, R, SN and SM. 3 from Mumbai, 1 from Baroda, all eating non-veg, all going to the U of H, all wanting to live off-campus, all going by the same flight (Continental airways in case you wondering which one). And this is how it started.

Here we are today almost a year since we are living together. We have lots of experiences and memories already, be it running in random directions on Newark airport so that we don't miss our connecting flight, getting all scared and hyper during the hurricane 'Ike', getting all crazy and fascinated in the huge shops of the US, going grocery shopping, doing blunders all the time like getting 'clothes softener' by mistake instead of 'detergent' (and not realizing the mistake for a long time) to wash clothes and then wondering as to why the clothes are not getting washed properly, doing time-pass on the weekends, making fun of each other, helping each other, supporting each other, dancing on loud music every Friday and the list will just go on (There are a lot of other experiences we have had together, maybe I will write about them in one of my other posts :) ). People say that we are too snobbish to talk to others but do we really care too much about what others say? (After making this statement I think maybe I am a snob, or maybe not.. huh.. whatever.. ). It's an achievement that 4 girls can live together nicely without being too bitchy (LOL) and without fighting and actually being fond of each other.
(In case you are wondering what happened to my cousin looking for room-mates for me, he did find me a room-mate. She(now my mentor) was from my department itself but by then things had worked out between us (R, SN and SM) and it would have been too bad of me to ditch them now so I did not go ahead with that)

Good to know that you reached till here and did not give up reading half way through. (I am assuming that you read the entire article and haven't jumped directly to the end (if you have go back to where you were reading before)) Just for your knowledge this is my first proper attempt in writing something for everyone to read.. I hope you like it. Enjoy..

Everything has a beginning..

When I created this blog, I didn't have any particular theme in my mind.. Over time, what I want to pen down here kept changing.. So I have decided to have no particular theme for this blog.. I am just going to write what I feel like at that point of time.. So here is a blog just for sharing some of my thoughts, imaginations and experiences with you guys.. I am not a good writer but hopefully in the course of time I think I might get there.. Hope you all will enjoy reading this as much as I enjoy writing it..