Places from Our Past

It was a hot, muggy day in August of 1993 when Prasad, my older brother, rented a Pontiac Grand Prix from Buffalo, N.Y. to drive me to State College, where I was to pursue my master's degree at the Pennsylvania State University. I was brand new to this country and immensely pleased to be here. As soon as we entered the city, he drove into the university to look at the campus. I had seen nothing like it ever before. In the campus, in addition to department buildings and library, there was the Beaver stadium that could seat close to 100,000 spectators for a football game, an ice cream shop called the Creamery and a museum of fine arts! There were more than forty thousand students in the campus with over three hundred just from India. I had no difficulty finding a couple of roommates and renting an apartment at the Heritage Oaks. Although I had a tough time adjusting to the rigorous academic routine at the campus, I enjoyed my stay and have some delightful memories from my time there.

A couple of weeks ago, exactly sixteen years after my first visit to the school with my older brother, I took my family to the Penn State in a minivan! We toured around the campus, stopped next to the Nittany Lion statue to take pictures, revisited the classrooms in the Hammond building, walked along the main street and later drove to the Heritage Oaks to look at my apartment. We immensely enjoyed this short trip to my life in the past as a college student.

Nearly eight years ago, my wife, Prema, and I took a long train journey from Chennai (India) to New Delhi and from there on to Roorkee, a small village at the foothills of Himalayas to visit my undergraduate college campus. There I showed her my hostel rooms, the main building, my engineering department and the recreation theater called the Hangar. Both of us loved the trip to Roorkee, and Prema was quite impressed by the beautiful campus.

From Roorkee, we traveled further up north, to the city of Mussoorie, to participate in the graduation ceremony for the Indian Administrative Service officers, where my younger brother, Jagan, had successfully completed his orientation course and was preparing to launch his career working for the Indian government. Mussoorie holds a special place in our family because my dad, and a couple of other uncles, had lived and studied there before beginning their careers with the government. In Mussoorie, I imagined my dad living in the hostel, eating at the mess, waking up early in the winter months for the mandatory exercise sessions or even playing chess and table tennis with his colleagues. The mere thought made me want to go back thirty years and be a part of his life then.

I am a sucker for nostalgia and have always enjoyed thinking about my days from the past. But there is something special about revisiting a place and also sharing that experience with your family and friends. During such visits, the mere sight of an ice cream shop or a bookstore can bring back fond memories and overwhelm us with a sense of joy.

Have you been to a place from your past lately? If not, I strongly recommend that you do.

Stress and the Daily Rut

I have this mild obsession with stress and its effects on health that I have found hard to explain. This article in the New York Times seems to explain why:

• Stress rewires the brain to think sinister thoughts that might not be real.
• In most animals, the calming effect overcomes the stress response of fight-or-flight once the danger has passed, but the overactive human mind extracts phantom threats and keeps us stressed longer than we need to be.
• Laboratory tests show that chronically stressed rats lose their cunning and instead fall into rote response.
• A goal-directed behavior, as opposed to habit-based living, is a sign of mentally healthy, stress-free life.
• Once in a rut, people default to habits that dig people deeper into rut.
• The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ.
• Thankfully, taking vacations and living in a stress-free state improves our ability to innovate.

For more, click on the link and explore: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18angier.html?em

The Calming Effect of Social Gatherings

Last weekend I had the opportunity to visit a small town in Illinois called Danville . I was there to attend the wedding reception of my wife's cousin. I felt a bit nervous and unsure about this trip because I was pretty sure that I would walk into a hall full of strangers and be forced to socialize and make small talk. Frankly, I was not in the mood to do that. Just two days before the trip we had had another round of layoff at work (third one this year) and been informed that there would be significant changes to our reporting structures. I was also contending with a rather complicated commercial settlement issue with one of our suppliers from China, which ran into several millions of dollars. I called up my boss during the drive to Danville (on a Saturday afternoon) and and talked to him for nearly an hour, just pouring my guts out, complaining about the stress that we are having to go through in this economy.

But the experience at the wedding reception did me a world of good. The bride's dad is a rich doctor who had invited his colleagues and other Indians that he had met during the course of his stay here in the United States. There were nearly 300 people in the reception, most of whom were retired or past their prime age and had seen their fair share of success and riches. They drove luxury cars and wore expensive jewelery, but mostly talked about religion, politics and the lives of their own children, who invariably lived very far away from them. They were liberal with compliments for my children. When we complained about how difficult it was to raise two children under five, they reassured us that things will get better and we have to enjoy this stage of our lives. After dinner, there was loud, fast paced Punjabi music that had the sixty-year-old grandpas and grandmas dancing with a devil-may-care attitude. I danced, too, and felt both tired and exhilarated. We all slept well in the hotel room that night.

The next day we visited the couple at the doctor's place, where we entered a world or riches and opulence. The house had tall cathedral ceiling and the curio cabinets in the living room were filled with hundreds of jade statues and expensive collectibles that they had acquired from their travels around the world. But the part that impressed me the most in that house was the three-season's room that had been converted into a puja room. The ceiling windows bathed the room in bright light and the pictures and statues of gods shone beautifully. It struck me that the doctor had built this room to withdraw from all the opulence that surrounded him and enter a haven where he could think and meditate on things that are not materialistic. In this, he was exactly like the other older folks that I had met the previous night. For them, years of hectic pace and anxiety had left an empty shell that they were trying to fill with thoughts and opinions that were well beyond the realm of their immediate life.

During my drive back, my wife and I talked at length about the people that we met there at the wedding reception. We told ourselves that such a life of withdrawal and otherworldly thoughts is in store for us as we get older. This thought was not scary, but somehow reassuring. It reassured me that all my anxiety about work and financial security is transitory and meaningless and will not mean much in another fifteen to twenty years. I had a very pleasant sense of calm overcome my stress and insecurity. Being a part of a social gathering has its own pleasure and we need to seek it actively, even if it causes nervousness and seems overwhelming at first.