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Days like these!


It always takes a certain amount of motivation and a constant sense of guilt, two contradictory emotions that your friends perfectly manage to provide you with in right amount and remind you about your long lost blog post. Not that I don’t write or not that they don’t know about the trivial yet fascinating things that I encounter on daily basis in this unknown land with an unknown language. There would always be a difference between how a thing is narrated and how it is written.

For the past month or so, I have been freer in the sense that I no longer have lectures or I do not have to roam around the city through different departments or have gatherings during weekends. A remarkable difference although is the interaction I have with my mentor these days. I realized I have not really had had a chance to interact with Professors for the past 1 year or so.
I have interacted, but just like a normal student would. Chances are high that they would not recall my name and I certainly have forgotten the names of a few of them from 1
st sem. So it’s a kind of mutual process :P

Internships can be fun. You should have a good mentor, bearable work and few colleagues (order is utmost important). Internships are certainly more fun when you have a really pleasant mentor whose eyes twinkle even when you show them your destroyed samples, when you still have bearable work (which you would eventually figure out how to proceed with) and colleagues who love to chatter especially on a friday afternoon.

Some events to support my claim~

I was supposed to have a ‘Security formation’ as the French call it or in simpler terms I was waiting to learn how to use an instrument to obtain and analyse data. As I entered the lab, I saw my mentor happily engaged to a chamber which he has been building for quite sometime now. He was so engrossed in the work that he didn’t hear me opening the door or walking inside or even wishing him Bonjour. I kept my notebooks aside and right went next to him to say, “ Good afternoon Professor, ça va?”
“Aaaah, Aastha!
ça va. ça va bien” and winked.
He is okay, I concluded.
Seeing that he was still busy with his metal rods, screws and wooden panel I decided not to disturb him further and so I moved past him to the next table and wait for my other mentor to come when he said from his state of meditation, “ I think I will build this by today, I am positive. What do you think?”
“Yes, you will. In fact you are quite neat or precise with your work and I have a feeling that you are somehow more happy when you build things than when you use them once they are given to you in terms of a built software.”
“Oh, yes yes! You are correct. Let me tell you, I am a mechanical engineer”
I am sure I must have given him the blank look with a question mark on my face because he decided to explain more even before I asked him to, saying the same but with using words.
“I have what you call a diplôme in mechanical engineering and then I did my masters in Material science but I moved slowly to biomaterials and … and now I am here. I have always loved to build things myself, it gives me happiness” , he said with a content in his voice.
“Wow! That is quite a transition… Umm...do you like what you do now?”
“Yes yes. But Aastha, one must not be very rigid. You should always learn new things because we have very little time to learn new things...But we must also not give up on things we like”
I nodded my head as he looked at me to see if he made sense. He did. He made far more sense to me than what he thought he did. We talked a bit more about how I am finding it here, how Chandigarh looks like and calling me a French Daughter when I told him that Le Corbusier planned my city. It was then he dropped a screw and in order to help him find that I decided to join him on all fours and crawl through the lab when my other mentor entered and remarked, “quite a training here?”
We all laughed but as if it was not enough the first mentor said in a way of explaining, “ yes, It is important to know every inch of tile in this lab, you see I am familiarizing her with the workspace.” Hearing this the 2
nd one thought it was disrespectful to stand and he joined us too. And then we were three, all on our fours looking for 1 tiny screw XDD
Sometime later in the office which I share with 4 other people my age~

“I am tired, I have no desire to do anything” L said.
“I have no work and hence I am tired of sitting at my desk, I hate to sit here. I would rather go the lab and do something” I said.
S walks over and said, “ look, I have holes in my head.”
I looked at her and burst out laughing, knowing that things just got lost in translation. But just to enjoy a bit more I decided I will let her talk more.
comment dites-vous ???and pointed desperately to her head and then to my head to show that she had lost hair.
“Aah, you mean tiny patch of head where there is less hair?”
“oui, oui!! it is serious guys, I am afraid.
We discussed a bit about it when she again declares “I am Ungry”
Now, if you are familiar with the french accent, you would surely know their inability to say H,A and pretty much all the sounds we have in english. So now the task is entirely onto yourself to decide if a person is angry or hungry or angry because he is hungry or whatever…

It is not just one day, my days are filled with such priceless talks which I am sure would continue for the next few months as well

~until next time

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