Valentine's weekend gateway

It was 3 AM. It was pitch dark. And it was breathtakingly beautiful.It had been a long day. We spend about 17 hours on the road. Two of my friends had come over from California the previous day, on Valentine's day. I took Monday off and we roamed the seas, forests and land of Florida for 3 days.

On the first day, we went to Daytona Beach, on the shores of the Northern Atlantic. Daytona Beach is very different from the umpteen beaches around Tampa I had visited previously. It was huge in length and breadth. I could not see any end either side. We could also drive the car on the beach itself.


As sunset approached, I got ready to soak in the breathtaking paraphernalia of colours that normally accompanies the setting sun. But surprise, surprise, there wasn't any sun over the sea! It so happens that Daytona Beach is on the east coast. So the sun was actually setting on the opposite side to the sea! But we did have a backup plan to catch the master painter at work.

The tallest lighthouse in Florida and the 2nd tallest in the nation, Ponce Inlet, was about 6 miles from there. We stepped on the gas, reached the lighthouse and climbed 203 steps just in time to watch an iridescent sunset.



Ponce (meaning mosquito) Inlet has been exquisitely maintained and is still functional. The original caretaker's house has also been restored and turned into a museum. Driving 150 miles back to Tampa, we reached home at around 11PM.

The next day was the most eventful. After eating brunch at about 11AM, we started for Miami. It was not a typical Florida weather. Cloudy, humid and morose. The beauty of Sunshine Skyway was dampened by the dank clouds. I checked the weather forecast: Thunderstorms expected at night. Now that would be fun to drive through. Anyway, after driving through the interstate highways I275 and I75 for about 4 hours, we reached the Everglades National Park. The only other forest/park I went to in Florida earlier was Weedon Island which is nothing but a large swamp. But everglades is actually a slow moving river (about quarter miles a day) and a huge forest. It is also teeming with wildlife.




There are various entrances to the park: Flamengo Visitor Center, Shark Valley Visitor Center and Gulf Coast Visitor Center. The Shark Valley center is closer to Miami (about 40 miles) so we took this one. Each visitor center also specializes in different guided tours. For instance, the Gulf Coast Center has a 2 hour boat tour and the Shark Valley center a 2 hour tram tour.
Since it was getting pretty late and we only had one choice, we asked the local people for their choice of any one. While the predominant opinion was that it's like comparing apples and oranges (kinda like IIM and ISB :P ) but one fellow tourist suggested we take the Tram ride as it takes us to the heart of the everglades and we can see a huge variety of birds and beasts.

As always, there was a catch. It was already 3 PM and the last tram ride leaves at 4. The shark valley center was still 20 miles away but we had to reach the center well in advance to reserve a seat and park as the tram ride is very popular. So I took the wheels and in a ride that would put James Bond to shame (and gave my friends a heart attack) made up the 20 miles in 15 minutes. Once we reached the Park, we were blown away by the flora and fauna. There were just so many birds and alligators all around. Check out this video of Mr Alligator taking a stroll across the street.

I was very surprised to see that the alligators openly roam around the park in such close proximity to people in general, and small children in particular. I wondered whether there had been any untoward incidents before. I got the answer during the tram ride when the guide (a sharp witted sweet old lady) explained that the alligators do not associate the humans with food. That's because the alligators are not fed by humans. The sign: Do not feed wildlife, suddenly made a lot of sense. Since human beings are larger in stature than alligators, humans also intimidate the alligators. So till date, there has never been any alligator attacks in the Everglades! Well there was a small incident wherein a brazilian boy actually fell over an alligator (while riding his bike) and the animal (not the Brazilian) took a nice bite at the offender but punches from the boy's mother cut the animal's snack short and the boy escaped with a few broken ribs! During the tram ride it started to rain, which eventually gave way to a beautiful rainbow.

After spending about 3 hours in the Park, we finally left for Miami. Miami has a North and a South Beach. We passed through the city, admiring the nigh skyline, and headed to the South Beach. We parked our car on the Ocean Drive right next to the sea. The beach was awesome and the city was alive even at night. The beach was lit up by the light emanating from nearby hotels (a lot of 'em) and clubs. We sampled the Miami night life and had dinner at an Italian restaurant called Casablanca. Choosing the restaurant was also an experience as each of the hotels had people standing outside with the menu stuck to their chest and were throwing freebies such as free wine (which we succumbed to eventually) and 15% off on dishes and so on. There was even an Indian restaurant among others. Our waitress at Casablanca was as beautiful as any Hollywood actress. I thought of saying "Here's looking at you kid" but then remembered the ending of Casablanca.

The beach was so gorgeous P and T wanted to stay over at Miami for the night and experience it in the morning. The sky high hotel charges put an end to our high hopes and we configured the GPS for our route back home. We intentionally timed our journey so that we could avoid the thunderstorms at Tampa but we couldn't escape the fog.

So here I was, driving at 90 miles/hour, in pitch dark fog at 3Am in the night with my friends and I singing old Hindi and Bengali songs. And I loved it. It was a thrilling ride back home. Eventually we reached home at about 4:30AM to bring an awesome day to an end.

The next day, we headed to an all familiar destination (for me anyway): Clearwater Beach. The beach derives its name from the transparent quality of the water. The weather that day was awesome: bright, sunny and warm.

However the water was freezing cold. Taking a bath in the freezing sea was another awesome experience. P and T's flight was at 6:25 PM so we somehow dragged ourselves out of the water just in time for them to catch the flight back.

After dropping them off at the airport, I felt really sad that the whirlwind vacation came to an end so soon. I wished it could go on a bit more. It left me with a sweet but sad feeling quite like the feeling after watching Casablanca.
No matter what the future brings, As time goes by...
...I must remember this

Current affairs

It is hard to concentrate on work when you are just dying to leave everything. It's even harder when you are outside your home country since there's no support base around you. Work has been crazy lately: attending late night phone calls, managing ~5 projects, negotiating with multiple groups for more funds, applying for educational loans (well that's personal, but work nonetheless) and so on. During recessionary times, the work tends to get crazier since people want to cling on to their existing jobs by doing their best and making themselves indispensable. The manager (whose chair is equally shaky) in turn exerts that much more pressure, explicitly or otherwise.

I bumped into a colleague (well, a client technically) yesterday. I was shocked to see that he had bloodshot eyes. On inquiring I found that he has been working day and night for 48 hours now. This is very rare in US especially in my office which values personal time like very few other companies do. Flexible Fridays, work from home, complementary day-offs, firm sponsored community work what not. But in hard times, perks go for a stroll in the park. Personally, the current scenario doesn't affect me since I'm gonna leave it all soon. But seeing the tension around does affect one's state of mind. People say that 2009 is only going to get worse. Seeing the placement figures of top universities around the world, I must admit, I have been having some teeny weeny doubts about leaving a cushy job in this market. Who knows whether I'll get a decent job after passing out? Who knows whether I'll get a job at all?

"Dude, stop it! You are making me depressed", exclaimed "A" fellow ISB R1 admit, on getting bombarded by my not-so-rosy projections. That drilled some brains into my head! Now, I'm an eternal optimist. I've learnt over the years that if you believe you can, you can.

My personal philosophy is: if it ain't broken, why not improve it. And that's the reason I'm doing an MBA. I know nothing is broken in my life, there's really no overwhelming reason to change anything. I can stay in US, earn some $s and generally continue to have a good time. But what about the career goals and why MBA question I had answered in my ISB interview? Were they just meaningless words I read from a script? My goals, my career, and the general tendency to push myself beyond my comfort zone that pulled me through the MBA app journey weren't just meaningless blabber. I believed in them. And I still do.

I realized that I can't possibly make someone depressed - something must've been broken in my thinking. To fix that, I thought some more! Finally, an incident I read about long ago and line from my favourite song came to my mind.


The incident:

Richard Feynman, a Nobel Prize winning physicist and one of the protagonists in the Manhattan Project, once faced a great lull in his career. Now, Feynman was an extremely popular figure and his sense of humour is legendary. However, he was rather unproductive as a physicist in the period from 1961 to 1967. Had Feynman just run out of ideas, or had something just gone wrong?

Quoting from the book:

Feynman had got to know [biologist James] Watson during the sabbatical year that Dick had spent as a 'graduate student' in biology. He had an opportunity to renew the acquaintance when he visited Chicago early in 1967, and when they met Watson gave Feynman a copy of the typescript of what was to become his famous book The Double Helix, about his discovery, together with Francis Crick, of the structure of DNA. Feynman read the book straight through, the same day. He had been accompanied on that trip by David Goodstein, then a young physicist just completing his PhD at Caltech, and late that night Feynman collared Goodstein and told him that he had to read Watson's book -- immediately. Goodstein did as he was told, reading through the night while Feynman paced up and down, or sat doodling on a pad of paper. Some time towards dawn, Goodstein looked up and commented to Feynman that the surprising thing was that Watson had been involved in making such a fundamental advance in science, and yet he had been completely out of touch with what everybody else in his field was doing.

Feynman held up the pad he had been doodling on. In the middle, surrounded by all kinds of scribble, was one word, in capitals: DISREGARD. That, he told Goodstein, was the whole point. That was what he had forgotten, and why he had been making so little progress. The way for researchers like himself and Watson to make a breakthrough was to be ignorant of what everybody else was doing and plough their own furrow. [pp. 185-186]

I read this a long time back. But suddenly the message came back to me. DISREGARD. There's too much importance given to others and external circumstances.


The song:

Tagore, a Nobel winning (the first Asian) Bengali poet once wrote: If they answer not to thy call walk alone.

The above 2 messages definitely hold a lot of meaning when held in synthesis.
Well, definitely there's a chance I might not land a job post-MBA. But at least I have a shot at my dream job. There's no way I can make that transition in my career without an MBA. And just because some others are afraid, some others have faced problems and extraneous circumstances are bad, doesn't mean that I have to be bogged down by it all. May be I'll be in a similar problem, but I gotta have faith. And I ardently believe that we shall overcome the crisis someday soon (sooner than Feb 13, 2010). Amen.