Will be back soon!!!

Lately, I am little busy with my current project (for Merisant Inc) at work. Nothing much has happened/is happening these days. Will be back soon!!!!

Killing time

Today morning, as usual I called Yaseen to say that I had started from my apartment to pick him up for work and I got an answer from his wife that he gonna come to work along with David.

I had half-an-hour time in my hand before I land at my desk at work. So, I slowly taxied my car onto the famous Hardy Street. I thought I could kill sometime by passing through all the numerous traffic lights on Hardy. When I hit Hardy, to my surprise all the traffic lights were glowing in green (as Hardy has pretty much ups n downs, one can see all through the end).

On my way, I saw my favorite hangout place – Starbucks Coffee shop. Last night it rained like hell and it was drizzling in the morning and I thought I can enjoy a hot coffee @ starbucks. When I entered the parking lot, it was full to its space and there were around 6 cars waiting in the drive-thru path.

I pulled my car into one of the ‘just-vacated’ lot successfully and strolled inside. And I was 5th person in the lane to order the coffee. The girl at the counter was too artificial with her smile and I ordered for my all-time favorite ‘white chocolate mocha’. After paying for the coffee, it took ten minutes to grab my cup. I felt suffocated with so many people around near the counter and told myself – ‘Huh!! There are lots of guys who are just like me’.

I walked out towards my car and slowly rolled the wheels towards my work and I still had 15 minutes left and I reached my office at 7:50 AM (i.e., 10 minutes before the actual time).

Essence of the story is: It is hard for Rajasekhar (that’s me) to kill time.

Buying a car and "Do you speak Arabic?"

From past one week, one of my friends and colleague, Ravi Lobo is trying to purchase a used car from a local car dealer in Hattiesburg. The Sales manager and the Sales executive at the dealer's office recognize me as I bought my car from them.

Billy Miller, the manager at Ryan's Used Car Super Store is a perfect sales manager. He got such a good memory that he remembers your name even after 6 months (when I walked in he wished me with my name).

Justin Oury, the Sales executive is also a nice person to talk with. He is a no non-sense guy with a good sense of humor. But I think, he has a poor knowledge in Geography.

Out of the Americans whom I met in the last six months, at least 25% of them asked me the same question - "Do you speak Arabic?" . Initially, my answer used to be elaborative. When I tell them that I am an Indian, they again asked me the another common question - Are you into a profession where you guys do some magic with the computers?? Uh...I am scared to do anything with my computer, 'coz if I screw it up and call u guys, u gonna charge us like hell!!!. Justin is no exception.

When I met him six months back, I explained him where I am from and what I do. He remembers only one thing, that 'we' guys eat lot of spices, don't drink beer and we are good at cooking 'curry'. This time the questions are - "Do you speak Arabic?" , "What language you speak in India?" and "Where is India?".

It took five minutes for me to explain him and he regained his 'lost' knowledge of India and started saying that he is planning to visit Goa and have some fun.

I explained him where Saudi Arabia is and he thinks that I am a very intelligent and well learned person. Am I really?? ;)

Coming to my friend's car purchase - he couldn't finally found one of his choice and we returned empty hands.

People and punctuality!!!

It is six months since I landed in US and I could able to see that all the Indians, who are in US from a long time, are very punctual. But for some new comers, it is hard to adjust to this rule.

Most of the Indians, who are not punctual, attribute their quality as a quality of the nation. They try to make humor out of it by saying, IST – Indian Standard Time – always late. I wonder why they do not realize that they are defaming their country with their deeds. Some of them even go to a level saying that being punctual is “American” way of living but not ours (Indians). Hey guys, just look at where you are now?

I read an interesting article on Punctuality in the Wikipedia. Click here to see the article.

Introspection, perception, disappointment and GOD…..

Sometimes, when lost in a deep thought and sometimes when we introspect unintentionally, we live our life all over again without any hard labor. Everything flashes right in front of our eyes and passes away before we could blink our eye. And then we start realizing all our mistakes and also all our right decisions.

We learn to perceive different things at different levels at different modes of life. It is our perception that leads our life and the process of perceiving is never ending. At the end, one should be content with what one was left with.

Jumping to conclusions related to most important things in our life without feeding enough information to the neurons may end us in a very embarrassing and uncomfortable situation. Experience always counts.

Sometimes, our perceptions turn into our expectations and when these expectations do not meet the reality (harsh, most of the times) we feel depressed. In life, disappointments can come but not depression.

The moment one starts cursing oneself, they should realize that they are heading to depression or already in depression. Do not brood over the past. Just move on. Everything is a part of life and we never can tell how close we are to the success/good. We are not alone and God will ever abandon us. Whatever we are going through, God is not going to leave us alone. He knows more about our situation than we do. He began to work on His resolution for us before we even knew to ask.

Trip to Birmingham, Alabama!!

I was in a dilemma for couple of days as whether to honor David’s invitation to accompany him to Birmingham or not. Finally, I decided to go with him and Yaseen joined us. We started on Friday evening at around 5:30.

One of our colleagues, Meenakshi Venkateswaran was also visiting Birmingham to meet her fiancée. David drove Yaseen to Birmingham and I enjoyed the ride in Meenakshi’s car. It was a three and half hours journey to Birmingham from Hattiesburg, on I-59 North.

After a long time, I happened to listen to lots and lots of Old Hindi songs in her car. She got a pretty good collection of songs. She is a novice when it comes to car driving, but she never drove like one. Our journey was smooth. After two breaks in our journey we finally reached Birmingham. In our last break, I changed to David’s car so that she can directly drive to her destination.

David took us into his home from the car garage and his house is a real big one. His old room is packed with different electronics like TV, Music System, Computer, DVD players, Video Tape players etc. And he has a very good collection of movies and music.

He briefly introduced us to his mother and she received us warmly. His dad was already in a good sleep. After 5 minutes, we stepped out and headed to an Indian Restaurant called “Silver Coin – Indian Grill”. It is located in the Lorna Square of Hoover County. The owner and the staff were smiling from ear to ear. It is a large restaurant with lots of young Indians serving the customers. One of the girls, who were serving on that night, was really very pretty. She looked like a Guajarati. She is short and cute. There is a kind of childish look on her face.

Unfortunately, we were served by a guy :( , who is a student at UAB and his name is Parth.

I ordered for a Tomato soup and a Vegetable Biryani. Yaseen had couple of Butter Nans and David ordered Lamb. When we were in half way finishing, Steven Hong joined us. He is David’s close friend who is an Architect by profession. He has 7 years of experience in his field and he is a very energetic & friendly guy.

After finishing our dinner, we went to a pub and chit-chatted for about 2 hours and later we went to a high point in one of the costliest neighborhoods of Birmingham. The view from the point was really awesome. Later we went for a drive across the city till late in the morning. Finally, reached home and hit the bed.

Day 2:

David parents were in hurry and we made them stop for a couple of minutes for a brief photo session. After a warm water shower, we headed to UAB and I looked for a specific design tee-shirt in the University stores, but couldn’t find one.

Directly from the University we went to “Taj India”, an Indian restaurant. The food was very horrible and even the service. They took very long time to serve us even though it was not a peak hour. And the desi waitress was looking very sad as if she was offering us free food.

After such a horrible meal, we visited one of the tourist attractions of Birmingham, the Vulcan Center. It is a very beautiful place, in the heart of the city.

It symbolizes the achievement of the City of Birmingham in producing iron ore and being the highly productive and quality Iron during early 1900s. Apart from the huge “Mr. Vulcan” statue the Vulcan center also has a small but detailed museum that explains the origin and the growth of Birmingham. We paid $6 per head for the ticket to visit the museum, an art gallery and the statue. As we were not interested to visit the art gallery, we skipped it. I took couple of photos of the city from the tower that hosts an elevator to reach the pedestal of the statue. The wind was heavy on that day. According to David, one can watch almost 80% of the city from that tower.

From Vulcan center we went to “The Summit” mall and roamed around the shops and did some window shopping. And from there we went to another beautiful mall called “The Galleria Mall”. Every one of us was very tired with the day and headed home and slept for the next two hours.

Late in the evening, before leaving the city we again went to “Silver Coin” restaurant. I had Idli, and Masala Dosa as my dinner. We almost spent two hours in the restaurant and started to Hattiesburg at around 8 ‘O’ clock. After a tiresome 3 hour journey, we directly went to bed without any further discussions.

On a whole it was a memorable and pleasure filled trip.

All about Amar

After watching my roommate and friend “Amar” in action at New Orleans on last weekend, I decided to write something about him.

He hails from a town called “Jangaon” in the Warangal District. After his birth, his family moved to the glorious city of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh. So, now he is a habitant of Hyderabad. He speaks fluent Telangana (a famous dialect of Andhra Pradesh).

Though we worked in the same building and for the same company we never met each other when we were in India. I met him for the first time when I came to know that he will be one of the guys whom I have to stay with in US for the next one year.



He addressed me with his trademark ‘shy smile’. My other roommate Srinivasulu was sitting next to Amar and I extended my regards to him too. After our rush for the documents at our travel agent’s desk, we took a break and celebrated our onsite opportunity at “Seventh Heaven” restaurant. Amar paid the money and we (Srinivasulu and I) still owe him that money.

After we landed in US, he paid the cab charges ($200) from Jackson to Hattiesburg and he is now happy as that amount was finally reimbursed by my company.

Amar basically is a complete family man. Both his strength and weakness is his family. Even on his busiest day, he allocates at least 2 hours to chat with his family in India. But at the same time he never stops enjoying by passing some ‘strong’ comments on girls we see on our way to office/home. He is a silent killer. He analyzes peoples ‘attitudes’ with great enthusiasm. Of course, sometimes his analysis about couple of persons failed.

One more interesting fact about him is his smoking habit. He needs a max of two cigarettes per day. And as any other smoker, even he thinks that cigarette relieves him from his stress.

He is habituated to count money in Indian Rupees only. He never thinks that he is earning a $1; instead he thinks and treats it as INR 43. He is very calculative and meticulous person.

He looks like a very common man from India, but his brain is very uncommon. It is full of wide variety of ideas ranging from hair pin to aero plane. He is the most popular guy in BearingPoint’s .NET team at Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Lot of youngsters in his team respects his problem solving skills. They love his presence in the team and they never leave a chance to say good things about him in team meetings or conference calls. He is well appreciated.

As his roommate, I see a totally different Amar at home. The moment he steps out of the office he removes his disguise and turns into a very romantic guy. In fact, we realized this fact long back and affirmed this on our trip to New Orleans for the New Year and for the “Mardi Gras”.

Coming to his food habits, he adjusts his diet as per the menu. And he supports this by remembering all the hardships he had went through during his younger days.

These days, by God’s grace he is doing well in all aspects of life and he was blessed with a baby girl (see her in the above picture - Sankeerthana is her name) in last year. He is missing his daughter more than his wife and we can see that special ‘glow’ on his face whenever he speaks about her.

One interesting thing about his family is that there are two “IIM” graduates in his family. I will write more later after identifying more interesting things about this amazing guy.

Allons.......Mardi Gras...........New Orleans

All of my friends eagerly waited for the Mardi Gras at New Orleans.

As planned we started in Raj Kiran's car at around 12 in the noon and reached New Orleans after 2 hours drive. The drive was quite comfortable in his new Mazda6. Raj Kiran is another desi guy, who joined recently in BearingPoint as a sub-contractor. He was graduated from University of New Orleans in the year 2004. So, he is aware of all the roads and routes in New Orleans.

After meeting Raj's friend, Siva Reddy at University of New Orleans, we went to Lake Pontchartain. After a brief photo session, we started to "International Bazaar" where we shopped for more than an hour. Almost every month we purchase our groceries (mostly Indian stuff) at IB.

Once we were done with our shopping every one realized that they are starving (nobody had anything in the morning as they got up from their beds at around 11 AM). Raj wheeled us to a Indian Restaurant called "Salt-n-Peppers" in the downtown.

After a long time, everyone had revitalized their taste buds with some spicy Indian food. I had couple of Aloo Parathas with Chana Masala as the side dish. Yaseen Bhai and Raj had the Hyderabadi special, "Goat Biryani". We had enough food for the next two days.

We headed to Bourbon Street and was lucky to find a parking place for our car. After parking the car we took 15 mins to identify the important things to carry on the Bourbon Street. We parked our car in the public car parking lot right behind the "Jax Brewery" Building. We were happy that we found some space to park our car. It is next to impossible to find a parking place during a Mardi Gras weekend in the downtown.

We finally entered Bourbon Street and saw the "flow" of crowd moving in all directions. We saw people in different and weird dresses through out the street. Most of them are decorated with lots of "beads". Those beads are very colorful and are in different sizes. The whole street was resonating with different flavors of music. People dressed themselves in the most weirdest way possible.

We stepped into the most famous club on the Bourbon street, "Razzoos". They charged $5 per head and stamped some letters on our left palm. We really had fun for the next one hour with the best Hip Hop music I ever heard. The most funniest part of our visit to the club is that one big fat white lady started rubbing her back on my back and I slowly moved away and let Amar (my friend) step into my place and he enjoyed it more than anything on that day ;).