It has been quite a while since I wandered in here. An update since I last posted - quit my job, got a US F1 student visa to study management information systems. Spent the summer at Austin, tripped around, made awesome new friends, and pissed off some others. College life will never bore me. And I'm glad to be doing this for another year.
Find a job. Everyone tells me to do it. There's no dearth of advice floating around, and I love my life for that - so many well-wishers don't want me to take the wrong path and end up failing. But heck, the US has taught me to fail well. But I found happiness in so many things, and learned more about myself than I ever knew. There's some things you just can't get rid of, they become a part of you and don't let go no matter how much people around you disapprove.
Anyway, this post is more than a status update or random musing. I'd like to pick at one particular topic - learning a new language. I took zero-credit Beginner's Spanish classes without thinking. Four subjects apart from this, one TA class - I was effectively taking 6 subjects, not to mention look for a job and work on graduating safely. Of course, all this was before I decided to push graduation to next year. But it turned out to be the most instructive class ever. New grammar rules, new wording, present, past participle, "gerunds" - all of them take me back to school days when I used to love playing with English grammar, a love that I carried with me through college and work and left off abruptly after. Maybe it was a fear of being judged. This fear is not without cause - I know how much people talk about blogs that bore them more than those that entertain, which could be hard to find among one's immediate circle of acquaintances, and I'm sure this one must have bored more than one person at some point.
I digress. Why wouldn't I! It's what makes editing a sweet challenge - digressions. It's not eliminating them that makes it fun, it's following the train of thought that flows underneath the words that makes them special. Right now I'm just typing without making too many corrections except for spelling errors. It's just what's coming out of my brain and onto the keyboard in a very un-graphic way, probably fueled by a bright screen in a dark room and the gentle urges of a backlit keyboard. I'm so not going to edit this post!
So where was I then? Yes - Spanish. Spanish is a beautiful language - the musical sounds, the rolling 'r' that I sorely missed after a year of listening to people swallowing it, the ease of spelling out what was just said and being correct, unlike French, where reading out written French in a room full of French people would make you stick out like a sore thumb. In Spanish, all you need to do is remember that "j" is actually "h", "v" is actually "b" and "ll" is actually "y" and you're half-way there! Conversational Spanish is easy to pick up and native speakers are tolerant to errors and just get you as long as you get the verb right. Throw in the professor who is perennially affable - you've got yourself a nice cheesecake with whipped cream and cherry on top. Yeah yeah exaggeration - but I'm learning a new language! How often do people do that and really enjoy it?
I'm a big fan of the song "Bhaja Govindam" where Adi Shankaracharya advises a fool to stop nit-picking about grammar and start paying attention to the Almighty and attain various human virtues and calling God's name. Totally agree, but no harm in indulging in learning grammar and being the fool for a while. Not today when you can't really get away from a crocodile by making promises of giving up material pleasures tomorrow - they just don't understand when you're begging, all they really want is a square meal really. But no matter what part of the millenium, I sincerely believe that all humans owe it to themselves to live life to the fullest and never have regrets or fears, especially of things such as religion and other people, unless said people own guns of course.
The point? Go learn Spanish!
Here's a list of countries you would survive in, if you did it properly. Until next rant then!
Hasta luego!
