I need to get famous by the end of this week

Due to the unequivocal absurdity of the title of the blog and its timing, this entry will be in the form of Q/A.

Okay.

That is not even a question. But yes, I see how dissatisfied you must be. Here's the thing, I don't find blogger as nice anymore. To me, it seems like a toned down kiddish version of Medium (have I jumped on the bandwagon yet? Soon). Meh.

So, even I were to update this blog anymore, it'd have to do something with me being in America. Meh.

What are you upto?

Thank you for being nicer this time. I've been busy. Very busy. At the time of writing this article (or blog entry, whatever), I'm interning at a company called NextCapital. Apart from working on a few personal projects and exploring the city, I'm in a mad preparation phase for the upcoming full-time job interview season. Also, school starts in a month. Sigh.

Why?

You're back to single word snappy questions. Oh boy. 

So I'm penning this <article? 'article' : 'blog entry'> because I want to tell you that I'm starting to write again. 

No, not here anymore, sorry (although if time and my recent disapproval of the platform permits, I might get back on here with an insightful adventure from the country of Amreeka). Where then? Not completely sure, but possibly on Medium. Or, my own personal website (the designing will be pain and let's not even talk about supporting comments)

Personal Website?

He he, was that not subtle enough? Blah, I'm just going to explicitly tell you. I finally got around designing my own website! I still have a ton of content to add to it, but it still looks pretty dank right now.

Go check it out yourself! http://an5rag.me

Side story. This blog, believe it or not, is the 2nd result on Google if you look for my name and append to that any sort of a relevant tag ('uiuc', 'illinois', 'computer science'). Also, this website is run by Google. So the bots love this place for crawling and indexing new stuff. So I wouldn't leave that chance, right? Please, I'm trying not to feel guilty about the self-promotion. At least I'm not doing this on reddit.

Anyway.

I'll talk soon. Somewhere else though. Thank you for reading and pushing this blog at the top of search results to my own name. No, I don't hate you. One link click = one prayer.

Fine. So?

Whatever.

I'm a Terrible Blogger

Yes yes yes, I know. I did a miserable job at updating my blog. Maybe my life wasn’t interesting enough. Or that’s what you think.

But here’s the thing.

I always wanted to make my blog a story (yes, sadly enough), and give this flow (read: chronology) to the events. So everytime I would have this really interesting idea, I would be like, “I need to write about that first, before I write about this.” Or, I would just find writing a waste of time (“I better get that grade than write on my blog”). And it would go on.

I’m tired of Facebook.

What a random thing to say.

But yes.

I’m tired of my phone, of social networks, of deleting junk mail.

I’m tired of scrolling through page posts and unfunny videos. (Duuuuude, those effing click-baits)

I’m tired of the buggy Facebook browser.

I’m tired of cuddling inside my blanket and stare at my phone till my brain stops responding and I drop dead.

But it’s impossible.

Sometimes I end up on Facebook when I pick up my phone to set an alarm. Because muscle memory.

But then, this is what happens.

It’s some kind of an escapist, uncontrolled tendency that we just can’t avoid.

Well yes, I do have better things to do. But I would, most likely, still reach for that one connection to the world I left behind (what a hyperbolic unnecessary buttload of emotion that I just couldn't not put in). Also, it’s the most updated feed for news and cricket scores (if only there were less posts about/leveraging feminism and some sort of country shaming).

Boredom levels would get excruciatingly high: (

Yes, I'm texting my Indian number.
Nevertheless.

So back to where I started from. I just can’t make promises about how regularly I’ll be updating this blog. The transition has been interesting and I can’t wait to talk about it. And so I will.

This post is for my readers for coming back expecting to see more posts only to get disappointed. This is for everyone who thinks I have a story in me, waiting to be told.

Till I write again, here’s a random post about depression which pretty much got me into illustrative blogging.



Cheers and a small bit of xoxo (What's this?)

Or whatever.

The Long-Ass Flight Journey

Go back to the main article by clicking here.

(Do you see what I did there in the title?)

My flight itinerary looked something like this:

A total of 18 hours and 5 minutes of travel time (plus 3 hours and 30 minutes of lay-over). For someone who had never  traveled on an international flight before, the whole flight journey was worse than sitting in the mid-school history class twenty times over (at least you get to wiggle around plus bonus points if the teacher is hot).

And this:

It was as if we were racing time (and thus, the Sun <straight face>). It’s not even funny, when one pesky passenger opens the window pane and everyone is blinded. Like literally.

My miseries didn’t just end there. As hard as I would try, I would just not able to find a good position to sleep. My ass hurt all the time and I would take frequent pee breaks to just calm myself down. I drank more juice than water and somehow ate the odd-timed seemingly-tasty-but-definitely-not-healthy flight food.

The in-flight system was exceedingly overrated. I was tired of the unresponsive low-res screen in less than an hour and would only fire it up to know how far we are into our path (it did have a pretty cool visual insight). Plus the remote they provided was strangely difficult to handle, especially with the old trackball and odd placement of arrow buttons. Movies looked pathetic (if you could actually successfully load up the movie you wanted to see) on the small screen and the subtitles usually covered half of it. I tried listening to music, but it would frequently be interrupted by the pilot giving us information we didn’t care about in an accent we didn’t understand at a volume that was barely audible.

When we reached Chicago, I was heavily sleep deprived, had an upset tummy, was uneasily claustrophobic and had no clue where my specs, socks, laptop sleeve, shoes, earphones, flight ticket and phone charger lied. Getting out of the plane felt like:

We quickly switched on our phones to make that frantic skype call to our parents, check our mail and whatsapp, but the airport Wifi was such a fail. (even after it made us go through all the steps to log in)

What followed was a painful hour-long wait in the immigration line and a mess-up of sorts with the luggage – things too saddening to elaborate. We managed to stuff ourselves inside the university bus and then travelled for another 2 hours towards Urbana-Champaign. It was the first time I was sleeping in over 30 hours and thus, barely have anything to talk about. 

First 50 days in a nutshell (or maybe not)

So okay, I know how some (if not all) of you lost all hope in me. There could have been four possible scenarios (or at least 4 scenarios you would have figured if you put any thought to it) for the long overdue post:

1. I forgot about the blog and decided there are better things to use my time in.
2. I was silently observing and planning on writing one BIG chunk of an essay.
3. The first one month (and a half, alright) was a tad too overwhelming and I was mostly sitting in a corner, creeping the crap out of others.
4. I didn’t get any time to sleep, eat or bathe, let alone write a post about it.

Turns out, it was a mix of all 4 of them. A concoction so depressingly intense, that I must have thought about giving up altogether at least 4,197 times. But things aren’t that forlorn, and are definitely getting better.  My friend count just did a count++ (a miserable computer science joke). My grades are on the better side of the curve and I’m finally sleeping for more than 5 hours.

Writing posts can be terribly tedious (especially one with silly illustrations scattered around) and every time I would sit with it, I would face the inevitable heat of procrastination. It was only this weekend, that I finally found some time outside of a world beset with homeworks, quizes and deadlines.

So, to make navigability easier (and do a postcount++), I have decided to post short sections of the whole experience over the course of two days. Here’s a tentative index of the sections and I’ll update the list as I post. Here you go:

1. The Long-ass Flight Journey
2. The Very First day – Big and Bigger
3. The Very Second day - Counting Dollars
4. The University and its Big-ass campus
5. The Socially Awkward
6. The Big City - Chicago
7. The Coursework and other Miseries (including the Career Fairs)
8. Wrapping up – Looking forward

So go ahead, click on the link you find most interesting (or maybe, just maybe READ IN ORDER).

And if you find anything freakishly similar (or anything even remotely interesting), make sure you comment/share/send-me-free-stuff.

We could be friends, you know. 

About the writer and his wannabe blog

There are hundreds of books and even more blogs about how the typical Indian guy goes through a dramatic culture shock setting foot on the country always attacked first by incoming aliens. While most of them begin with immense emphasis on how unbelievably cruel it is to have nothing but just toilet paper in the American lavatories, some of them go on further to give a candid, unexaggerated description of how difficult yet amusing it becomes to adapt to the carefree and liberal culture. So what makes this blog different, if not cooler?

Nothing, really.

  

At the point I’m writing this post, I’m yet to begin with my journey; so, I’m not entirely sure about things shall turn up. Being one of those people who procrastinate in the absence of compulsion, I can only hope my sudden willingness to document the next two years on blog endures my incredible laziness and retrospective detachment issues.

I suppose this blog shall hardly serve the purpose of enlightening a petrified Indian kid who plans to study at the States about what he should expect. I would rather have this blog be an honest insight (peppered with credulous narcissism) into the life of the typical desi dude who watches more TV shows than lecture videos and doesn’t assert his Child Protection Rights if his mum hurls abuses at him for forgetting to drink his milk the previous night or spending more money on his girlfriend than food.

I can’t seem to fathom how people write furtive personal journals which shall only be discovered by an unsuspecting house-help or three generations later. Through Amreeka Calling, I seek to talk about the two-year-long trip at America which unfolds in less than a fortnight and fight the unnerving boredom that I have to deal with every sluggish day.

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A total of all the expressions I can make

Anurag Choudhary, all of 20 years and 9 months as on August 2014, is studying Undergraduate Computer Science Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He completed his first two years of engineering at International Centre of Applied Sciences (ICAS), Manipal University and later transferred to UIUC in Fall 2014.

He likes to think of himself as funny and witty and uses a thesaurus to sound cooler. His only international experience prior to going to USA was to Nepal in the womb of his pregnant mother. He likes reading books and criticizing Indian authors for their inability to think beyond love affairs at engineering colleges or about mundane stuff we couldn’t care less about.

He thinks predictive text is a necessary evil since he frequently misspells ‘embarrassing’ and ‘convenient’ but uses plenty of cuss words due to the lack of better adverbs. He likes to write but usually ends up using the flair in writing long text messages. Apart from all that, he likes making music and is saddened by how a certain Honey Singh is the main reason behind the plummeting Indian music scene.

You can know more about him at:

www.facebook.com/an5rag

www.souncloud.com/an5rag
www.youtube.com/an5ragc

Email: anurag.choudhary93@gmail.com