(In a perennial stage of
evolution.
Pl. excuse faulty links, and unfinished drafts)
Hi!,
Personal Stuff
I grew up in a beautiful town, Roorkee, near the foothills of the Himalayas. It was a nice life. My father
is a professor at the university out there, and I grew up on the campus of University
of Roorkee(the
oldest engineering institute this side of the Nile). I guess that's where I caught the
academics bug. In '91 I went to college at Motilal
Nehru Regional Engineering College
at Allahbad. I graduated in Mechanical Engineering
from there. In '95 I went off to the Indian
Institute of Management, Ahmedabad to do an MBA. Joined my
first job as an advertising executive at Chaitra Leo
Burnett, Bombay in June '97. For a good part of the next one-year I was
busy, with moderate success, in trying to convince Indian housewives to wash
their dirty linen with Ariel, the P&G detergent for which I was making ads. Later I briefly joined
as faculty at the University of Roorkee's new b-school.
These days I’m pursuing my
doctoral studies at Wharton, and living in West Philadelphia. It’s a good life. For a
Fresh-off-the-Boat Indian, a good social life is pretty difficult in this
country. But living in a campus makes things much easier.There’s so much going on all the time ! You can’t get bored. And I’m studying some pretty
interesting courses as well. I bike to and from school everyday (except when
its snowing like nobody’s business – as it did in January), reside in this “rathole” cubicle in the office (and they say Wharton is
Rich.), eat exotic foods for lunch at one of the zillions of cheap food trucks
outside, read a lot of research papers (some are really nasty and loooong), cook dinner, listen to PBS, and sleep like a log.
On weekends, I see some movies with friends (plus beer and jalapeno pepper
pizza) or do the groceries at Thriftway. Weekends are
also reserved for these long biking trips on Kelly Drive, a beautiful stretch
of bike trails along the Schuylkill River, and Friday evenings are either for
the weekly Rangolihindi movie or Pool at Hill House with buddies. Lately I've
started spending a lot of time with this one special person - Sejal
. She is doing her post grad in Dental Medicine at UPenn.
Its been less than an year since we met, but seems
like we hit it off really well. We share a lot of interests -- traveling,
Ethiopian food :-) and talking mushy to each other. When she's in a realllly good mood, she even goes biking with me. Rest of
the time, we drive down to unknown destinations in our old Tercel.
I think I can live with that. We got married on 21st December
2000 at Bombay. These days we are busy transforming our
residence from a quasi-student dormitory into something resembling a proper
house.
