Love Conquers Everything
Some of my musings:
I'm British, but I was born in Guwahati, north-east India's largest city. Guwahati includes the township of Dispur, official capital of the state of Assam. Most tea lovers have certainly heard of if not relished, Assam tea, which forms eighty percent of India's tea export. If you have no idea of north-east India (most people abroad seem to know only about Punjab, Goa and Kerala), it'sworth finding out. This is a fascinating region where south Asian cultural traits meet south-east Asian. Racially, the region has been a fusing point of native peoples who identify themselves with one of Aryan or Mongoloid descent but most communities are often a mix in some proportion. Recent history of the region will reveal occurrences of several separatist movements demanding anything from a new district to total independence from India. But a foray into several centuries of history will show the region almost always enjoyed economic stability under a few kingdoms with tributary states in tow and communal harmony unmatched by most other regions of Asia. This was definitely the case since time immemorial when the region was not so linked with politics of the Indian mainland, till the 19th century when the British India's rulers came invading and integrated the region into British India. My family moved to Shillong when I was barely two months. Shillong, a sleepy town full of hills with pine trees is a three hour drive south from Guwahati. It used to be Assam's capital before Dispur. The British colonial rulers called it the Scotland of the East - a title much clichéed by local tourism promoters these days despite the massive deforestation and unplanned growth rendering the area to be anything but. In 1974, the region comprising of Khasi kingdoms, alongwith Garo and Jaintia communes were carved out of Assam into a separate state. In a show of strength to impose Sanskrit-based names on peoples whose languages arose from Mon, Khmer or Tibetan, the new state was named Meghalaya (Sanskrit: abode of the clouds). This is one of several examples of India's powerful central government muscling in to homogenise Indians to behave like a monolingual, monocultural lot, hiding cultural traits not perceived to conform to stereotypical Aryan culture. The formation of Meghalaya mooted Assam's state government to shift capital to Dispur a few years after. I started my primary schooling at St Peter's in Shillong, continued at St Mary's in Guwahati (we moved back to Guwahati in 1979), then enrolled into Don Bosco School in 1980 where I was for the next ten years. In June 1990, I was admitted to Cotton College for Higher Secondary studies (like A-levels in the UK). Two years after I entered the Visvesaraya Regional College of Engineering (VRCE) in Nagpur as a student of Electronics & Power Engineering. It was around this time that I teamed with my best friend of many years and organised a joint exhibition of our paintings at Guwahati's prestigious State Art Gallery: Assam's Directorate of Cultural Affairs sponsored our exhibition. We called it Experiments in Fantasy. That was November 1992, but doesn't seem that distant. I graduated from VRCE in 1997. The same year, through a campus interview selection, I joined Citi (Citigroup) as a software consultant. One of their assignments brought me to London in the winter of 1998. England struck me immediately as the place I wanted to belong; I felt at home here like no other place. I changed jobs twice in the next two years, as the economy was not too bright thanks to the bust of the Internet boom: the first firm I joined made me redundant in four months while the second visibly began going into the red so I left. As an Indian immigrant then, I had to undergo work permit application procedures under UK law for each job change. Applying for Work permits was nerve-racking. There was never an assurance a work permit would be approved regardless of how badly your prospective employer said they needed you, so a failed application would mean going back to India to starting afresh. This would mean prematurely cancelling all your tenancy and utility contracts here, losing sums of money in the process. But well, c'est la vie. Times became happier when I found a more stable employer in Sun Microsystems as a Systems Programmer. This was March 2001. I spent three years thereafter helping build better versions of Sun's flagship product - the Solaris operating system. If you are a computer science person, you'll understand my claim that my contributions found their way into Sun's Solaris 9 and 10 offerings. But there was the strain of commuting two hours each way and this began to slowly gain the better of my enthusiasm. So in July 2004, I joined Goldman Sachs as a Senior Analyst in the City (that's what we call London's central business district). I left them in February 2008 to join an electronic trading-solutions vendor who I still work for.
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