The Big Apple

A Whirlwind tour of New York City!

I recently got a chance to visit New York City. It was sadly a short visit, but I think I managed to see a fair bit of the city in a very short time ... I was staying right in the center of that concrete jungle - Manhattan! ... It is really a jungle - you have narrow, dimly lit roads amid the foliage of concrete structures all around. I was awed by the look of the place: skyscrapers seemed to be there everywhere! ... so much that the traffic congestion didn't really bother me!

58th Street, New York City

I suddenly discovered that the US is actually populated. You see people everywhere in New York - running around to get to office, to catch their subway train, in great hurry all along .. For a while I felt like I was back in Mumbai ... pedestrians don't care for traffic lights; you can actually hail a cab and run halfway across Broadway Street to get into it while the cab driver stops amidst the traffic, and you have those creaky train stations (only subway) that people literally pour into!! ... Only its streets are cleaner and buildings taller :)

When you are on a short visit to New York, I guess the best place to visit would be the Empire State Building! ... The view from the 86th floor observatory is awesome and it'll be a chance to see everything else in New York as well :-) .. Here are a few pics from atop the Empire State Building ..




And equally stunning were these photos I chanced to take on the streets of New York ... I never imagined I'll see something like these in this country itself .. let alone in the heart of Manhattan!

"Cycle Cab": a rickshaw near Empire State Building

Street Side Shops in Manhattan! ... Never saw one till then in the US :-)

The Hello Post

I don't know why I created this blog. I really don't. Perhaps the free time on my hand. Or perhaps I needed a diversion from trying to decode how the hell my webcam driver manages to capture a video frame with such pathetic lighting .. Or perhaps inspiration from my roommate's use of his blog to share his ideas/feelings with the world. I thought .. let me create a page first, and then let me find a justification.

And so the trouble began - I created the page, chose templates, fonts, colors; filled in my favorite movies, debated about how ethical it would be to subject readers to ads on my blog .. and then waited for the ideas to come .. About 20 min passed - a lot of stuff crossed my mind: movies, technology, cricket, my frustration over the recession, MS-in-US-gyan, recipes (yes, you read correctly!) ... somehow, none of them seemed to be a good enough subject that I can impress my new readers without putting them off to sleep. So, I decided to do some research and see what people usually write on their first blog.

Well, my patience ran out pretty fast. Out of the N blogs I surveyed, 66.67% of the writers seem to be writing some sort of intro about themselves offer some deep justification as to why they named their blog XYZ, and mentally prepare their readers for what is going to assault them :p ... The rest started off with the assault itself! (And slightly off the topic, for those more interested in statistics, in 66.67% cases, the post I read was the only post on the blog) .... These observations disappointed me - neither way seemed to work, since I don't know what I want to throw at my readers, I can't throw it and I can't prepare them for it ... I just dint put that much thought into titling the blog either: I just did it in a fit of emotion - just wanted something positive at the top there, and this positive force of a spell from Harry Potter sounded pompous enough to be a title.

So I am back to square one. Should I change the blog's title? - What should it be now?: should be some intellectual buzzword?? ... something that makes me sound cool? A sober headline that confirms to IEEE standards??? ... I just cudn't decide - So I turned to my roommate for advice - he is a self-confessed guru of blog-titling and has apparently helped many people find their first steps in the world of blogging .. His advice was to keep it simple. write about anything I like ... no man -doesn't help! i don't know what i am supposed to write about.

And then, finally, I hit the solution! ... If you are this point, I must be having some talent in rambling and writing a story without really discussing anything ... I decided to cook up a rambling story of my efforts here and inform my reader(s) that further posts won't be like this "Hello post" and may have a little more purpose. So here's a warm Hello to my reader(s) and for the record, I'm Sandeep, a Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech!

And so - Here .. we .. go!