This is me in a nutshell...

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I was born on 19th of May which was co-incidentally a Friday, in the hustling and bustling city Srinagar, of the otherwise serene and picturesque valley of Kashmir, which beyond any controversy and doubt was touted 'The Paradise on Earth' by the otherwise controversial Mughal ruler Jahangir. While other (normal) kids whine away their intial hours of birth, I(abnormally) smiled as soon as my grandfather entered the maternity ward. 'Kyasa, asi chha pren zaan?'(Do we know each other before?) was what he asked. I went on, spending some spoiled chubby childhood in a blessed and a highly religious joint family, with my musketeers, baya and asiya, to join New Era public high school, which was a few yards away from my house, and which was the underdog school to the machinery(spelling mistake intended) schools - the Presentation Convent and Burn Hall. Apart from some minor hiccups, I was the class topper throughout my high school life(eh, big deal) and passing through some �nerdy boy� and �teachers favourite�, when it came to the boards, which according to kashmiri standards is still an achievement(matric ha baaya), I emerged as the 8th rank in the state. Now, was the real fire test, the +2 and the entrance exams. Spending a traumatic 12th (+2) class when lots of my friends died, I passed the +2�s being 2nd in the state and was head to head with the nemesis( at least that was what I was told it was) � the entrance examination. Well, the day of the result proved it was over-stated when I topped the whole state with all time high scores in the engineering entrance 1997 (my friends tell me my record of 182/210 pts. in the engineering entrance, is still intact) and at least gave my school something to chow at and the machinery schools a feel of their rusty machines(no spelling mistake). Physics was my first love, no doubt, but I joined Regional Engineering College, Bhopal (now National Institute of Tech.) for bachelors in computer science. Spending some eye-opening years in notoreity(at least the numeral 7 said so) I was offered a job by the software giant of India, Infosys Technologies Limited(Infy) in the beginning of my final year. After finishing my school after a year in May 2001 with a GPA of 3.9/4.0, I immediately joined Infy and after spending some sleepless nights during the hectic and rigorous 3.5 month training, I was declared the Best Trainee of the Batch amongst 165 people from IIT�s and REC�s. I joined a highly critical project for Infy and after working for sometime, I decided to go B2B(back to books) and came over to the USA for my graduate studies in Fall 2002. I joined State University of New York at Buffalo for PhD in CSE and am currently at it, working as a Research Assistant in CEDAR which is the best of breed research centers under a brilliant advisor. My Erdös number is 4. I have had the opportunity to be associated with the world's best computer science research labs, the IBM's T.J. Watson Research Labs. I have worked closely with them onsite as well as offsite (at UB) for the last four years on a variety of projects.....and the story goes on ............I have my kashmiri blog Laddishah, I am also part of a blog Kashmir Bloggers and Kashmir Education Initiative

faisal_farooq@rediffmail.com