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.