That’s what I thought until I experienced the following. Even though I still think that the vast majority of ghost stories and supernatural occurrences have real-world explanations, I am willing to concede that there may be things out there that cannot be explained. Now on to my story.

This happened during the final semester of my senior year of college (seven years ago). I only had to take two easy classes. My schedule was messed up because I had enlisted in the National Guard two years prior and Basic Training and AIT messed up my school schedule (I had to drop a bunch of classes because I started late and I couldn’t catch up on all of them). I figured that my final semester would be really easy. But before the semester started, one of my favorite professors invited me to take his advanced assembly-programming class. This professor’s classes were the hardest classes in the CS department. But you learned a lot. His class was the one class I did not drop when I came back late from training. Despite being late I was able to get a B in that class; a major achievement and one of my proudest moments. Due to my performance, he invited me to be a grader and a TA for his class. I did this for a year. After that year was when my final semester started.

Because this professor liked my work and thought I was capable, he invited me to take his advanced assembly-programming class. Now this class was no joke. It was really, really hard and you had to put in long hours. I knew it would be difficult, but I did it anyway. As I expected I was putting in long hours. I would frequently stay up late in the lab, sometimes being the only one there.

The lab I worked in wasn’t old or anything. It was a new building, having been built within the last two or three years. Originally intended to be a shopping and business center, most of it stayed unoccupied because of the rather high rent, until the university bought it and made it part of the campus. The reason I mention it, is because the building was new, and it didn’t have a creepy past associated with it as far as I know. Towards the end of the semester, I was working on my final project. My teammate and I were the only ones in the lab. It was around 1:30 am when my teammate called it quits and decided to go home for the night. I was on a roll and so I decided to stay and work on the final project. We were pretty much done; I just had to run the code through a few more test cases and fix a few bugs before we turned it in the following day.

My teammate left and I was the only one in the lab. Like I mentioned before, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the lab. It was a stereotypical computer lab with benches and computers. The only “old” things in the room were processors that we worked on (Motorola 68k’s). I was sitting at the southern end of the lab. Behind me were glass windows (the ones that go all the way from the ceiling to the floor) and a door that opened into a balcony, that overlooked the street. The balcony ran along the outside of the building and had stairs that took you down to stores that were at the bottom of the building. There is a Borders bookstore there that I used to often buy hot-chocolate from while I worked on my projects (not a coffee person!). There was also another entrance to the lab, that was on the western side. It opened into a small lobby where there was a main door that opened out to an open-air area. From there, there were stairs that led down to the street.

I used to turn out most of the lights, except for the one in my corner because I didn’t want to waste energy. The darkness didn’t bother me. It was maybe a little after 2:30am or 3:00am when I was done with fixing the bugs in the code. I figured I would run through it one more time before heading back home. This is when things started getting… well, weird. I distinctly remember hearing a tap on the window behind me. To be honest, I was startled. Not scared, just startled, like when you hear something unexpected. I turned and looked around, not expecting to see anything really. Like I expected, nothing was there. It was just the glass window. There was nothing there. I shrugged and turned back; it was probably the cleaning crew or something. Either way, I didn’t give it much thought.

When asked about why the band has only four members (a vocalist, lead guitarist, bassist, and drummer) they replied:

We realized that only hipsters listen to indie bands until they get popular. Also, hipsters like anything that appears “ironic”. Hence, we only have four members and we also dress in baseball uniforms. Due to this ostentatious display of irony, we expect that we will have a lot of hipster fans until word of our existence spreads to the normal population. This way, we expect to slowly, but surely, grow our fan-base.

Six-man football: ...you can get silly again

This is fake. You can make your own album cover by following these instructions:

1. Get a random article from wikipedia. The title of this article is the name of your band.
2. Get the last four or five words, or the very last random quote on quotationspage.com.
3. Get the third picture on explore the last seven days from Flickr. This picture will be your album cover.
4. Use Photoshop, gimp, or pixlr.com to create your album cover.

Finally I asked him how many months I had left on the contract. He said 11 months. As it turned out it was cheaper to pay the cancellation fee than giving those douchebags about $30, every month for the next year. So I went ahead and cancelled. I’m pretty sure I won’t ever be going with them again.

Bear in mind that the pictures are somewhat large and take a little while to load (around 10 seconds unfortunately; my upstream speed is crap).

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Comments are appreciated

Ultimately, it serves as a way to make program code not just functional, but beautiful and artistic. Thus, we introduce a new criteria to programming. Your code must not only be elegant algorithmically, but must also be poetic and artistic (also, since program code consists of haikus, you need to represent your code in sets of 3 lines with the first and last lines having 5 syllables, and the second line 7. That is, conforming to haiku rules). CherryBlossom serves to blend the programmer and the poet into one entity (hopefully with amazing results).

Here is an example of “Hello World!” in CherryBlossom. I have opted to use a spruced up div tag instead of enclosing my beautiful poem in soulless sourcecode tags.

Trust me, this does print out “Hello World!”! You might think I’m crazy, but I’m not! Either tomorrow or day after, I’ll add a new page to the Projects menu and you’ll see how CherryBlossom works and you will also have access to the interpreter!

Earlier I pointed out that the needs of the individual do not come first. This is not such a big deal for people from my parents’ generation. Joint families were common in India even fifty years ago. However, people of my generation have grown up in nuclear families. While we still maintain our family ties and bonds, and while they are very strong, our view of the world is a little different. For us, our individual likes and needs are very important. I do not mean that we are selfish. It’s just that for us, priorities are a little different. We want our prospective mate to be someone we consider attractive, and whose personality that we like. Their family details are important, but not as much to a degree as their personal details. For parents, family background, religion, and caste are the most important. Though they do want their future daughter or son-in-law to be someone that their child likes, the family details are what comes first. This is the disconnect between Indian parents and their children, when it comes to searching for a boy or a girl to marry. This is also the disconnect between sites like shaadi.com and their users.

Matrimonial sites tout the ease with which one can find their soul-mate. They highlight the numerous success stories and the large number of profiles that are visible. All of this is true. There are many people who have found their soul-mates and there are a large number of profiles. But the problem inherent to all these sites is that they are not built for individuals. These sites are exclusively geared towards families (of boys and girls) looking to connect with families (of boys and girls). Yes, you can make a profile that makes it look like it comes from you, personally, but these profiles will have a hard time attracting attention. In fact, I had a huge argument with my parents when they put up my profile. I wanted to list it as coming from myself, while they wanted to list it as coming from the parents. I couldn’t understand their reasoning. I was the one looking for someone, therefore the profile had to come from me. Apparently not. It’s more “respectable” for it to come from a family, and it is the family that initiates the alliance. So there it is once again: the individual vs. the family. There are many other reasons why the site simply doesn’t work for people like me. Take the issue of photographs. India is a very conservative country, and families are extremely reluctant to put pictures of their daughters on a website. Couple that with the general ignorance regarding the working of the internet (they probably think anyone, anywhere on the internet can see pictures of their precious little princess), and you have a recipe for extreme paranoia. Therefore you will see a lot of profiles that simply don’t have any pictures, or where you have to request pictures, or where pictures are protected. Before I am accused of being too superficial, I think people are naïve if they think that looks don’t play a part. Perhaps there are people who don’t really care, and I salute you. But I will admit that I am not one of them; I need to find someone physically attractive. Anyway, that’s another argument. The other major issue is the issue of horoscopes. Indian families are usually very religious and can also be superstitious. Horoscopes play a huge part in the lives of many Indians; from starting on a journey, or looking for a job, all the way to getting married. Horoscopes are related to the Zodiac. I don’t want to go into the specific details, but it’s based on the theory that the arrangement of stars and planets at one’s birth has a significant influence on their life. So when you are looking for a spouse, you need to make sure that the “horoscopes match”. In many profiles you will see the following comment “Horoscope match is a must”. Some families won’t even consider your profile if your horoscope doesn’t match with their child’s horoscope. Being somewhat of a skeptic and also not being a fan of a deterministic future I find the whole thing funny, stupid, annoying, and bizarre at the same time. To be fair, not all Indian families think that horoscopes are important (my family doesn’t), but a lot of them do.

In addition to the two main points I brought up above, there are other little ones. Each profile has a host of different attributes about the family. Such as financial status (Lower-middle class, middle-class, rich, very rich, I’ve got my own fucking jet fool!), family values (conservative, moderately conservative, liberal, very liberal) and bunch of other stuff. Oh, yes, and as far as Nairs (the caste that I belong to) are concerned, some people also write what tharavad (ancestral homestead/family) they’re from. So the emerging pictures is this, and I reiterate: shaadi.com is not for a person looking for a another person. It’s for a family, looking for another family; it’s a problem for me, and I’m willing to wager that it’s a problem for a lot of people like me (as far as how we were brought up, i.e., outside India).

Although I find the whole situation ridiculous and frustrating, I don’t think there is a difference between what I want, and what my parents want. We both want the same thing: a good girl, with a stable family, who can be a part of our family. The difference is how we want to go about it, and the compromises we are willing to make. I know that it is unreasonable to expect to meet someone who is perfect in every way, but we want someone that is at least reasonably close. For my parents, the family is most important, and so they think it’s alright to compromise a little bit as far as the girl is concerned (You don’t like the way she looks? Looks aren’t everything you know!). But for me, it’s the girl first and the family second. I don’t see this situation changing any time soon (for me, or for the many others in my situation). I’m hopeful that eventually I’ll find someone who I’m happy with and who my family is happy with. Although I will say this: going through what I’m going now, I’m pretty sure that I don’t want my children dealing with the same thing. So maybe, hopefully, things will be different within the next twenty to thirty years…