From Virginia with love!

I know this has been late...it's been quite a while since I scribbled something here. I do owe an apology to some of my friends who have been repeatedly pestering me for updates since I landed here in Virginia.

And so..this is my first post from Virginia - a beautiful green state on the east coast of the United States of America about 90 miles south of Washington DC...DC as it is called here. East coast - supposedly the most developed region in the US, boasts of biggies like New York, NJ , Boston...can keep on naming them... Richmond lies somewhere in the middle , geographically and economically. Glen Allen - where I live, is a surrounding town about 10 miles north east of Richmond downtown. (Downtown is the US jargon for what one would call "city" in India).

The only other city that I had seen by then was Dallas,TX - the land of cowboys. It was more like one built in the middle of a dessert as somebody had rightly told me before. Plano an adjacent town is the IT corridor- a budding silicon valley. Companies that once suffered badly during the economic recession of 2001 had decided to expand out of Silicon Valley to low cost areas and from then on it has been hey days for Dallas - courtesy: the Russian lady I met on the flight. She says that there is a pretty good indian presence in Dallas. And a whole lot of Indian restaurants also...

One fact that I have learnt from valuable sources is that politeness and courtesy of people vary indirectly with the population and degree of development of a city. Well...coming from India, this was not new to me..but yet again experiences here ascertain the universality of the rule. And so, my point is people in Glen Allen are quite nice. Generally its the American way that even guys whom you see for the first time would pass a "Hi" or "How 'u doin?" at you. It can be a bit strange initially… but gradually one would get equipped with answers - "I am doing good, How about ya?", "doing great", "excellent"....."I appreciate that.." and you would be ready enough to throw these at any alien. (Foreign nationals are called aliens here... first time I saw this, I was wondering which planet I came from :-( )

Tho bechara ye alien landed here at Richmond International Airport..in a United Airlines flight from Chicago. I bet Air Deccan has a better aircraft ...boy that was one hell of a journey...! I felt like I was traveling in a bus...and they had my seat allocated to one girl also. Though everything turned out to be fine in the end, I despised America for the first time then...I later realized that Lufthansa had pampered me enough and my expectations for a local flight was too high. "Hmm..things can go haywire even in America..."

Now as I write this piece stretching on an ergonomically designed plush chair in my cubicle, I am pretty much settled physically and mentally. For when I landed here, I felt like singing "Swargathilo njan swaptnathilo...". The excitement of that order is slowly dying down...but America is always America....truly, madly & deeply....!

"Saadhanam kayyil onde...."