a verbose narrative

Right now I'm in Fremont, California at my uncle's place. Before this, I spent a couple of days in Seattle, the description of which I will provide over here. The first day was entirely uneventful, and I spent the first part of it at the hotel, doing absolutely nothing while my dad was at work. At lunch we went to a Thai restaurant where my dad entertained his group as part of some goodbye lunch to commemorate the act of kicking them out of the group, the details of which are irrelevant. I was too busy trying to figure out how exactly to use those darned chopsticks to pay much attention to the conversation around me, which for the most part was related to technical stuff and in-jokes – basically stuff I wouldn’t have been able to understand if I tried. The lunch itself was too heavy for me to finish, especially since I didn’t want to become 10 pounds heavier when I left the restaurant. I sat there with quiet dignity as I negotiated my Phad Thai, paying no attention to the Russian (or whatever) dude sitting next to me, and the loud English dude in front. Occasionally a Thai waitress came around, crying, “Water, water!” and poured out generous amounts of the liquid for those who were nice enough to respond. Right after that we visited the Microsoft Store in Building 90 or something like that. My brother bought an Age of Empires game worth something but priced at something else, after the usual discount for Microsoft Employees was successfully calculated, and my dad bought two Windows 7 OS’s for two of the most useless doctors in the history of useless doctors in Hyderabad. It chagrined me to see how much money he was willing to spend on Dr. M1, the homeopath, who’s in reality a psychopath, and Dr. M2, the unscrupulous head of the Emergency Room at Apollo Hospital. The former is entirely useless, and the latter pretends not to be. M1 exerts a sort of hypnotic effect on his patients, which renders them incapable of seeing past his total incompetence, while he mixes little white pills with alcohol and deludes the patients into believing they’re homeopathic medicines. M2 has a passion for singing, and one might often find him singing old, forgotten Hindi songs in the ER while patients around him slowly wilt and die, happy to be escaping the ordeal. He sang once at our house, too. Apparently he can never find himself an audience (H’m… I wonder why), so he goes around, asking people to arrange concerts for him. After that day, I never went to another of his concerts. They’re life-threatening. So the question that arises at the end of all this is why would my dad, or anyone else, buy a Windows 7 OS for either of them? I’ll have to investigate and find out.

On the second day I visited the University of Washington after my counselor arranged for a tour. Before the tour, though, she suggested that I attend a computer science class (Computer Science 142) to find out what a class at UW was like. That I did. The instructor was a Chinese American grad student who had a tendency to crack jokes whenever he felt the program he was writing was just not right. That aside, he was actually pretty good. One of the programs he wrote used the given data to construct the map of the United States. The java part was easy to understand, since I was lucky enough to have learned most it in high school, even though our teacher wasn’t anything great, and even though after a year of not learning, I kind of lost touch. In US high schools I don’t think they teach java or anything of the sort, so when people reach college, they pretty much start at the basics. Luckily I hadn’t forgotten the basics, and the class was pretty fun. It took place in Room 210 of a building named Kane Hall. The UW buildings all have brick façades and renaissance-type architecture. As much as Ayn Rand seems to deprecate renaissance-type architecture (The Fountainhead), I think it looks great on a university building. It gives it that old scholarly air that colleges like Oxford are usually thought to exude. Suzzallo Library was practically gothic. It looked like a cathedral from the outside. I didn’t go in, but the picture on the brochure suggested that it looked like a cathedral on the inside, too.

So, right, feeling rather smug because of CS 142, I proceeded to where the tour of the campus began. A junior student was our guide. I kicked up a short-lived conversation with a Russian American kid as an excuse not to give anyone the impression that I was one of those incompetent douchebags who ran away from India to the United States because the education in the former country was too much for them to bear, and with the not so subtle self-assuredness that would suggest that America has gone to their heads, and who practically feel as if they were part of the natural environment of the place – as in, born to live there and stuff. I was forced to tell the crowd earlier that I was from India, since twisting facts and trying to turn fantasy into reality wouldn’t help much. There was no time to start on that whole “I’m an Indian American” speech and convince everyone that I wasn’t the stereotypical Indian who was visiting America with high hopes and everything and was soon to be crushed under the weight of their lifestyle. Some clarification, at least, was in order, and I would be giving the wrong impression if I said I hadn’t contrived to use my American accent to my advantage – I had. I mean, when everything else fails, it’s always the way in which you speak that should finally convince people that you are neither here, nor there – rather, here and there at the same time, right? I don’t want to sound elitist or anything, but I loathe being identified as an Indian. I have never even considered being identified as an American because I never would be (except maybe in India). Indian American sounds perfect.

Okay, I imagine I lost about 99% of my readers (if any) on that last paragraph. Too bad. As they say, don’t cry over spilt milk. Have I mentioned before that I find platitudes appealling? I digress. So as I was saying, after going around the campus and scrutinizing it with the keenest eye, and, of course, after learning all the facts, I concluded that UW wasn’t really one of those average universities. It’s consistently ranked among the top 20 colleges in the United States in many of its courses. The impression I got from the exodus-like thing my friends kicked up in Seattle when it came to colleges was that UW was one of those wannabe universities no better than a community college where people only go when they are rejected by Ivy League schools or the likes of Stanford and MIT. UW has a pretty strong reputation to its credit, and a very large student body. Maybe it’s not the best school there is, and maybe I would still prefer Stanford and UC Berkeley, but in the end if I ended up at UW, it wouldn’t be that bad. Also, I met my counselor at a Starbucks in a Barnes & Noble store. She was quite a bit older than I had expected. But the conversation went pretty well, and in the end she declared that I had rather a decent chance of being accepted into UW. If all else fails, I might attend UW. Not bad, of course. I’ve always liked Seattle… This Saturday I take the Stanford tour.