guilty

I am realizing that I am making my friends do things the way I like things to be done by making soft suggestions... sometimes I seem to be the puppet master. I am apparently trying to push/prod them in the direction where I want them to go.

I don't want to be like this. I stand guilty since I am a strong proponent of each person being his own master, he/she should be completely responsible for his actions but I see myself doing something that I would despise if I was at the receiving end :(

I shall try my best not to force my friends to do things that they wont like. As lavanya says "So Help me GOD"!!!

a little bit of courtesy please

Come on guys.. if you are dropping in on my blog..would it hurt you to leave a small comment.
Atleast I will know that someone read it and understood it ...it kinda reassures me that I am not spewing BS all over the web ;-)

well school starts in less than a month.. my goals :
Find a job
Find an assistantship
Help some of my friends find a job and
SPEND as much time as I can with my friends in school. I don't want to miss this last opportunity of being together with such a diverse set of people.

ciao.

queries to ponder on

Ever since my childhood I had been prodded into thinking bout the next step i.e. moving onto the next stage so that my life would be better.
-Like when in middle school people started asking me what I would do in high school and made me feel that if I did well in high school my life would be better.

- Then in high school the push was about under grad ..i.e. if I complete a good undergrad degree my life is supposed to be better

- In undergrad I am supposed to decide between higher studies or a job either of which would make improve my life

- Even at work the society was such that we had to think of doing another grad degree or settle down with a family.

- After the grad degree there is nudge towards getting married

- & then after marriage the next logical step according to Indian society is to have children (I do love children but dont u think the desire to start a family should not be due to societal pressure)

I dunno what is the next step after becoming a parent.. but if u still dont get my drift; here is the short version : people around us make us think that moving to the next stage is the best thing for us and somehow we follow this pre determined path and end up god knows where.

All these thoughts started after I went on a family picnic on the July 4th weekend. We were a bunch of south Indians going out and when we stopped at a rest area to start on a picnic lunch with solid south Indian food a thought suddenly struck me: Is this what I will end up doing too .. i.e. marry a wonderful Indian girl (thru the arranged marriage system), bring her to the USA and make friends with local Indian families and end up having Indian potlucks with the Indian community !!!

so the question is : IS THIS WHAT I WANT IN LIFE?

I guess u will notice that I complain about and question the whole arranged marriage system, this is because a lot of my peers have been getting married and I am feeling the pressure to move into the next stage in life. I am just plain scared of getting married thru an arranged marriage thats all ;-) I guess the girl wud also have similar thoughts ...& still arranged marriages work in India !! Isn't that amazing!!

What would happen if I fall in love with a foreign girl? How will my family react.. how will I take care of my parents if I had to settle down permanently in a foreign country? Will my parents be happy to live with me ? ...dangit I hate to think of such things...

job fairs & international students

The Business school does give us an opportunity to attend several job fairs and I guess out of all the ones I had attended for my internship, I got back 2 interview calls. This is probably 2 out of say 50 employers that I talked to in total (yes this may actually sound less).

But the biggest thing is u have to go and talk to each company rep with the same intensity and eagerness that it really drains me after talking to 4 firms.

In this one year I have been lucky to get a lot of good friends who are from Taiwan. I tried pushing them to attend the job fairs for the summer internships but most of them were not ready to face the pressure of talking with the company reps. It is sad that they are unable to overcome this mental block because they are each very unique individuals and I am certain they can survive in any job.

This next year there will be some major job fairs for full time offers and I will be attending them.. of course it is not guaranteed that I will get a job... but hell I am still trying. I am going to try again to push my Taiwanese friends to go to these job fairs but they must learn to be confident to converse easily with the reps.

I have noticed in school that the different groups kind of settle down into a comfort spot by hanging out with people from their own country.. I really question this kind of an approach.. because my reason to be studying in the US is to get an international exposure ..if I had wanted to stick to my Indian group I might as well have joined IIM Kozhikode (unfortunatey I cudnt get into the big 3). But u see these little groups spring up soon after school starts.. infact here they refer to these groups as mafias.. so there is a Korean mafia, an indian mafia and a chinese mafia.

AllI can say is if u reallllly want to work in the USA you will have to be comfortable talking to the american people ..talk bout sports talk bout the weather hell talk bout any damn thing ..just as long as u r able to strike a rapport with the guy who might be ur future interviewer ;)