Little Bits Of Life

I am a student from India who has been oscillating betwixt Germany and France for over two years now, as part of my higher education. I am proud of my roots, the culture which I have inherited, the many customs and traditions that I’ve been exposed to as part of my growing years and the better sense of judgement that has come along with it, unknowingly.  Until one day, when I consciously made a decision to throw myself into a civilization that is far different from ours, both in terms of customs and social interaction. The first few months had been taxing; I noticed I was very observant and somehow critical of almost everything around me. I found people rude when I constantly heard them abhorring me for not speaking their ‘national’ language, the announcements on trains made no sense to me, grocery shopping felt like a dreadful task and so on. But one fine day, when my classes resumed I realized that almost all of us, including the students from the aforementioned countries wer...

It takes one 'teacher' to make you fall in love with a subject, to make you appreciate the techniques involved, to make you believe that it can be done, to make you see beyond the textbook, to make you follow that perhaps for the rest of your life OR make it extremely dreadful, difficult and boring for you till eternity. Ever since I had come here for my higher education, we have had to move a lot between semesters because my course demanded that from me. In the past 4 semesters I have been under 3 different Universities in 2 countries and had professors from a lot of different departments. While this has been a great learning opportunity, which has helped me discover more about the specific fields of study, there has been an absence of a ‘Mentor’ like figure. However, during my internship last year in Lyon, I happened to meet Professor LD who has since then been by my side, replying to my emails, even now when I am not working with him anymore. Although he doesn’t interf...

Each time you re-read a book, you realize that you relate to it differently. Simply because you have evolved as a person, shaped by the experiences you’ve had over the years. I have almost completely forgotten what part of Fahrenheit 451 I had felt most relatable to at first place. I must have read it around 10-11 years ago when my younger self was in school and it was one of the books you keep hearing from seniors or it was on that chain email list being circulated around “books you must read”. And I have absolutely no humiliation in saying that I would have even skimmed through a few pages back then without contemplating too much about what was written and what was being said. It is a dystopian novel; earphones, rooms with flat TV screens, mechanical dogs, all of this I did understand and I knew it back then that this was not something too absurd because I had seen the evolution of at least some of these things- from Walkman to fancy CD player, pagers to mobile phones and so on....