Netherlands - Part 2

Hello everyone,

So it has been more then 4 months since i came to Wageningen. Life has been very interesting since then. I have met some really cool people in town and my job at MARIN is very challenging. So life has been good! I dont have a lot of time to write at the moment, so this blog post will be with lots of pictures instead ;)

• We celebrated Shankar Ji's birthday in style

Birthday celebration of Shankar ji :)

Us fulfilling the 'cake in your face' ritual :)

We had a picnic at the Rhine river before Birthday celebrations!

• We went to Texel island for a weekend

Brunch with the twins before catching the ferry

We biked almost 30 km that day on texel

Enjoying at  the beach!

Break from biking :)

With Kuppu (R) and Shankar (L) near the harbour

The Texel Gang!

• Me, John and Marta hosted a big Couchsurfing meeting @ my apartment

The CS crew

I love couchsurfing :)

Food @ Spicy potluck in wageningen!

Watching Holland-Denmark soccer game with the CS gang @ the doctor's pub

lol :)

The CS crew after the match @ Wageningen Center

• My legs in Holland!

The most precious thing i own in wageningen!

• Claire came to visit me in Wageningen from France and we went to see Perrine :)

Flowers and Claire :) 

• So one of the best Holi celebration of my life was in Holland! 

Holi 2012 @ Arnhem

• I traveled to Antwerp with Elske

Yes we are tourists :P

Belgian beers and me... mmmmm

Rock and Roll party at Antwerp

We time traveled to 50's that night :)

So that's all for the moment! I have few things lined up in coming weeks and i am very excited about them. I am going to Istanbul in July to meet Saima!!!! And then Ewa is coming to Wageningen for  2 weeks in the beginning of August :)

Good times!!! :)

Tot dan,
Karan

First post from The Netherlands :)

Hello dear readers,

First of all, i hope you all are having an amazing time in your life :) Second, i apologise for not updating my blog for so long. A lot has happened since my last post. I finished my masters at Memorial University in Canada, went for a 40 day vacation to India so that i can spend some time with my family and friends and on 31st of January, 2012, I came to a small city called Wageningen in The Netherlands to start my new job. I will be in Netherlands for atleast coming 2 years, as that is the duration of my present contract. I will be working as a project manager with a hydrodynamic consulting company called MARIN (http://www.marin.nl/). 

So first of all, let me highlight the fact that tough i am super excited about my coming 2 years in wageningen, i really really miss St. John's and the people i met there. I made some quality friends there and i consider them a part of my family now. Ewa, Cristy, Saima, Ranjeet, you all are very special to me. Ewa, you are special because you taught me how to care for somebody you love, cristy, you are special because you are the most freeking cheerful person ever :), saima, you are special because of your cooking skills :P (just kidding) and because you are an awesome sister, and ranjeet, man you are special because i have never met some one as true as you. These pictures are for all of you guys!. St. John's would not have been same without you. 3 cheers for all those cooking together nights, those sentimental moments, those long walks, those birthdays, those parties :) :)

The Gang :)

Cristy @ Holi :P

Ewa, the sexy bunny ;)

Ranjeet @ Signal Hill 

Saima, so happy on her birthday :)

In India, it was a whole another story! I was visiting home after almost 2.5 years. That was the longest i had stayed away from home and i was really looking forward to meet everyone. My parents came to pick me at Kolkata airport. 

Papa, mummy and bro @ our home terrace in Sitamarhi 

It was a bit awkward moment to say the truth. I just didn't knew how to react when i saw them. 2.5 years is way to long to stay away from home and I highly recommend any one who is living away from their parents to visit them atleast once a year. Anyways, things quickly became normal and i was in Sitamarhi in no time. It was clear to me that Bihar is not going to be the same in coming few years. The pace at which infrastructure is developing in Bihar is tremendous! It was good to be back home :) I was lucky that immediately after i reached home, many of my family members from different parts of India visited Sitamarhi for winter holidays. For few weeks, our home in  Sitamarhi was packed with people. It was such a blast. 

Apart from all the fun with family at home, the another major thing that was going on (and is still going on back in Sitamarhi) was construction of papa's clinic. I was there for a lot of time just to over see the construction workers. The ground floor will be ready soon and papa will start practicing there after a big pooja (religious ceremony) which is planed sometime in coming April end. 

Papa's new clinic

After staying for a while at home, I had to make a trip to Delhi to apply for my Dutch visa. In the same time, I and a bunch my friends made a quick trip to Ranthambore National Park, a famous tiger reserve in India. It was great to meet everyone after so long!

Me, yogi, steel, havas, gangwal and madam @ Ranthambore fort

And the best things about travelling in India? The mighty Indian Railways and the sense of freedom it gives:

     

Onboard some train from Delhi to Muzaffarpur

The soulful music that you find in every corner:

Rajasthani musicians playing at out hotel in Ranthambore

And the unlimited variety of street food!!

en-route from Muzaffarpur to Sitamarhi, we took a stop for some street food, literally :P (in the pic is upender ji, our driver, eating some sugar cane) 

Well, eventually my trip to India came to an end. I took my flight from Delhi, landed in Amsterdam and came to Wageningen by train on 31st Jan 2012. I found a nice apartment here which i am sharing with a Belgian post doc student of Wageningen University (one of the best in the world for life sciences). 

My apartments living room

Don't be fooled by the blueness. It is a clever dutch trick. The sky is always grey here :P 

New city, new friends :)

So lets see how life unfolds in Wageningen. Apart from work, I am learning Dutch and Salsa and I have started playing Squash. That keeps me busy at the moment and intellectually simulated as well. So I hope i gave all of you a brief account of my past few months :) As i explore the city and the country and have new experiences, i promise to keep you all updated. 

I will sign off now as its already 1:00 am here and i have to wake up tomorrow at 7 to get ready for work.

Peace and Proost :)

Karan

I just wanted to share a poem that is very close to my heart ...

The poem is called "I Said To The Wanting-Creature Inside Me" and it's written by famous Indian poet Kabir. 
.................................................................................
I said to the wanting-creature inside me:
What is this river you want to cross?
There are no travelers on the river-road, and no road.
Do you see anyone moving about on that bank, or nesting?

There is no river at all, and no boat, and no boatman.
There is no tow rope either, and no one to pull it.
There is no ground, no sky, no time, no bank, no ford!

And there is no body, and no mind!
Do you believe there is some place that will make the
soul less thirsty?
In that great absence you will find nothing.

Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
there you have a solid place for your feet.
Think about it carefully!
Don't go off somewhere else!

Kabir says this: just throw away all thoughts of
imaginary things,
and stand firm in that which you are.
.................................................................................
Whenever my mind sway here and there and i feel restless, i read this poem. It helps me to be in the present. I hope you all like it too.

Peace,
Karan

Oh Newfoundland, I love you!

It was someday in March 2009. I was sitting in my cubical in a shipyard in Nantong, China. My company in India had sent me here for a 3 months industrial training. It was winter and temperature outside was negative 8 degree Celsius. I was sipping my favorite green tea from Hangzhou and chitchatting with my other Chinese colleagues. Suddenly my phone rung, my parents were trying to reach me from India. My life was about to change for next 2 year! 

They informed me that they have just received a letter from MUN and it has accepted my application and has granted me funding for my masters. I obviously became very excited and this news was on Facebook within few minutes (Yes, there are ways to access Facebook in China!). I took my time to digest this news, half heartedly finished my leftover training, returned to India, quit my job, spent 2 months with my family and then came to Newfoundland.  

As an international student from India, first thing I noticed about this place is it’s extremely low population density. In the first few days, the silence of the landscape was almost haunting. The population density of Mumbai is estimated to be about 22000 persons per square kilometer and for St. John’s, it is about 225 persons per square kilometer. So imagine almost 100 people in place of every single person you see in St. John’s and that is how Mumbai looks like! It took me a lot of time to adjust to this general quietness of St. John’s and only recently I have started appreciating it. Newfoundland took time to grow on me but when it did, it made me it’s own.

You have to come from a far away land to fully appreciate Newfoundland. Recently I visited Upper Amherst Cove, a small coastal community of around 25 people located approximately 3.5 hr drive from St. John’s. A friend of mine who grew up there told me that in summer, sometimes the whales in ocean next to her house would make so much noise that they would look outside the window and swear at them. Most of the houses in this community are occupied by artists who go there looking for inspiration and solitude. How romantic is the idea of living this kind of lifestyle?

In a place as remotely located as St. John’s, I am thankful that there is a thriving international student community, food is available to suit all tastes and people are remarkably nice and warm (especially locals). I am thankful to George Street for being the ultimate “Rue de la soif”, I am thankful to Signal Hill for providing the ultimate beautiful view within a walking distance from my home and I am thankful to MUN for providing cheapest good quality education in Canada.  

   

These days I do not get surprised when I meet a random person in a bar and realize that we have mutual friends, I take full pleasure in cursing the weather and I obsessively worry about vitamin D deficiency. And when I run into a friend downtown, I say “Whadd'ya at b’y?”. 

Oh Newfoundland, I love you!

………………..

Karan Bhawsinka

North American Culture

Dear Readers,

Hope you all are doing great in your respective lives. I am doing good too. Life is moving ahead as i contemplate it ...

This time i am going to write about something different. This time i am going to write something about North American (NA) culture. Yes, all you folks outside North America heard it right ... North America does have culture and in this post, i will make an honest attempt to describe it.

Few months ago i decided that i will grow my beards. I did that because i realised that i have never ever in my whole life experimented even a little with my looks. North America has an air of freshness and freedom that somehow gives you courage to experiment. So, I ended up growing my beards for a month. Then an interesting incident happened. While i was walking through the university campus one day, one of my friends from India asked me that why i am growing my beards and is Osama bin Laden my motivation to do so?!! Now off-course this friend of mine was joking but this incident left me thinking. I wondered why an Indian person was the first and the only one till now to ask this question and why none of my North American friends have raised this point yet??

I decided to do an experiment. I decided to grow my beards even longer and note how people from different countries react to it. Now i should accept that being in a Canadian university gave me a great opportunity to do such an experiments because of large international student community here. I grew my beards for almost 8 weeks after which it became unbearable to handle. So i had to shave, but my observations were really interesting. 

Out of everyone who saw my beards, my parents reacted in most extreme fashion. I usually make video calls with them on skype so that we can see each other. They saw my beards and almost tripped ... My dad even went as far as saying that police will jail me as i look like a terrorist! (by the way, he also asked if all my professors here have beards and if they are my motivation for having big beards :P) ... My mom also became very concerned ... she said that i look like a Muslim man and that i should change my looks and shave immediately. I couldn't reply anything on this and changed the topic of discussion. 

At university, all the people who made comments or gave a strange look at my beards were either from Indian Subcontinent or from Africa.

None, not even a single North American said anything like that. A male NA friend said that a hat will look great with my beards and a female NA friend said that beards look good on me and that i should always keep them. My beards became topic of discussion at one of the parties i went to with my NA friends. Everyone treated it just like a beard, nothing else ... nobody attached any images with it. 

And this concept of individuality i think is one of the major pillars of North American culture. In India, we divide on every single thing possible ... religion, colour, caste, province, language ..... list goes on ... One of my relatives in my hometown in India are living from past 40 years in a house which shares a common wall with a mosque ... but they have never once visited it! Here in North America, people from all over the world come .. with their different religions, languages, castes, colours, food habits, cultures, beliefs ... they all live equally, they all excel and prosper and make a better life for themselves.

Now i am not saying that everything is rosy here, there are off-course individual cases. But in general, i find, that the ability of North Americans to see every human being on planet with equal eye is very very impressive. 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." - This sentence has been called "one of the best-known sentences in the English language" and "the most potent and consequential words in American history".

When i go back home, this is a quality, a culture, which i would like to take back with me from North America.  

Peace...

Karan

Thinking in new'fun'land ...

Holla,

me, from past few years atleast :)

Long time no see huh? Sorry, but it seems that i get motivation to write only when i am on road. Life seems meaningless and aimless otherwise which is not a very good mindset to write blogs i guess. But anyways, I recently moved to a new house and from past few days i am hanging out with a new bunch of awesome friends. It’s a much needed change in my life and i am happy at the moment :) (Wow!).

I finished my second semester few days ago and all my required courses are done. I have like 16 months to myself now for my research and thesis. This thought is scary for me, to keep myself motivated for so long to work on some random naval architecture stuff. But i guess i knew before hand that i will have to go through all this and hence i have been mentally preparing myself. Do i sound like an utterly unmotivated person? Voila, you got me right!

I think engineering as an organized profession is just a result of rat race of the world and universities churning millions of engineers everywhere are just factories fueling the industrial economy. Where are the days where people used to do things because they were really really interested in them?? This is something i see as a side-effect of globalization. An Indian is supposed to work hard because an American or a Chinese is working hard … what a bullshit! I don’t understand this but at the same time i do not have a better system to propose. It just seems to me that this is the natural way of life and somehow it makes me believe in the ancient Indian philosophy that everything is predecided. In a way it also makes me feel very very small in front of i don’t know what. I ask all humans who consider themselves as most superior of all a very simple question. Come up with a global governance system where there is no war and no inequality. Have we ever done it in past 5000 years? Can anybody do it in future?? I don’t think so. You see what i mean now? We are all just part of something random, prisoners of our own image.

And this realization sucks, believe me it does. It has made me a sad person in general. Whenever i do anything which can be considered hedonistic in a smallest possible way, i feel bad. If i drink, or eat good food or party, i feel bad. I feel bad for someone who has no access to all this and i feel bad for my helplessness in helping them. I feel bad when i waste time because i think i should work hard, but then i think work hard in what?? How is naval architecture supposed to create a world with no war and no inequalities?? Shouldn’t we put our time and resources in solving this question then in our blind quest of never-ending materialism! Sometimes i think those humans in ancient India who spent all their life in seclusion thinking about life must have pondered over this question. Weren’t they the most modern human beings who ever walked the earth, the only human beings who were real and free from the prison of their own images?? Hats off ...

At the moment, i neither have a solution to propose to this world, nor do i have balls to lead a secluded life like many of my ancestors did. And it makes me sad.

Conclusion: It’s bad for you to think a lot when you don’t have enough will power to do things that you think are right. (Huh, even the conclusion is a catch 22)

Anyways, i hope i have depressed you enough by now, or maybe you just think i am crazy. Whatever it is, I would love to hear from all of you on this. Till then, chao chao.

For a better world...
Karan

My sms conversation with a girl :)

Hi everyone,

It will soon be 6 months of my living in newfoundland. Life has been good till now. I just wanted to share some interesting sms/text exchanges i had with a girl few nights ago.
...........................................................
Me: U Blond!

She: You black … (not politically correct nay?) I refer to your hair too but now I sound racist :’(

Me: Racism is history so evolve; you are a mystery I wanna solve ;)

She: Oh dear god don’t even go there! This disease aint one you wants near!!

Me: You are not a disease but a remedy, without which my life is a comedy (H)

She: Comedy is such that one desires in the cold cruel world of Expires!

Me: World is cold and cruel when you are alone, in lonely nights you moan, let me take your pain, let us walk the tropical rain!

She: Agreed the world is a dungeon. Too bad the monsters are within. Only way is to be born again. Tho with u ive been locked in.

Me: It’s not clear to me what you said, ‘was it no?’ I dread … All I need is a chance, my heart dances at your glance :$

She: Do they dance or jive, I ask? The light flickers behind your mask. I fear the blood that runs thru yer veins is clotted and on my shirt you will stain <:/>

Me: People always complain, but it is not love if it doesn’t leaves a stain! No one is perfect give it a try, let the fucking stain dry …

She: That’s a sure problem given the stains have bled through. Now my hearts out drying and im through waiting on a cue

Me: I know you need your time, the truth is sublime. Love is the only cure for broken heart, as they say when they are high!

She: Id love nothing more now than to drown myself in a high..To be rendered totally inoccupiable for just a while by
.......................................................................

I am expecting a dinner date with her sometime soon :D

Peace!
Karan