Today Stanford sent me an email answering my query about admissions. It was the beginning to my pursuit of an overseas education. 
I feel like as middle class Indians, we undergo a contradiction. We travel in autos, drink th cheapest whiskey available, chat up our rickshaw vaalas. We smile at the boy who sells flowers on the road, develop certain friendships with panwadis in our localities, we eat ten rupee meals, we brag about how Sarojini Nagar makes us look good inside 500 rupees. But we come home to buffer the latest Mad men episode, we tune in the characters into our life (I wanna be Peggy, I want to work for/have sex with Don), we think about what pasta we want to eat for dinner. I often complain that the fettuccine my mother gets from the local market is too 'kneady', although I have never eaten a non-Indian fettuccine. We are in this world, and in that. We are as rooted as we are mobile. 


I have been looking at foreign universities for over two months, figuring out which ones are in my league. For the last year I have been dying to go to Stanford/Yale/Cambridge and throw my graduation hat(is it?) in the air in pride to know I have graduated from the best schools in the world. I have envisioned a life for myself that I didn't realize was completely alien. In my dreams I often see myself in a world where my cultural reality is miles away from my present one. As a middle class English literature almost graduate, I have seen my future in the West. The system that has been easy to me has been unavailable to others, who are like me, are Indians. I sail through my exams, not worrying if I will pass because I read enough C.S Lewis when I was a kid, But eventually I outgrew the system, I looked to Cambridge to give me space to exhaust my potential. My education has created dreams that are physically so distant that I have never seen them with my own eyes. The university system here has no clue what its doing. It is riddled with inefficiency and politics, but I had assumed that the department at Stanford is not. 
We never realize that one of the reasons for one of our despairs is that our cultural world is sometimes imaginary and the occasional interruptions of material reality then annoys us. I want to eat a good Ragu, and I want to be able to go to an Arctic monkeys concert, but how. 
I have almost graduated from college and I am sometimes excited and sometimes paralyzed with fear and sometimes both. 


One day Percy Shelley bought a boat and wanted to name her Ariel. But Byron, as a joke on his friend decided to paint 'Don Juan' all over the sail. Shelley died on that boat, and Byron never got to apologize to his friend. These great men sound uncannily like my friends. 


After studying for the year the inadequacies and biases of language, today my friend said to me that 'it was unbearable BEYOND WORDS'. Now I see it everywhere. 
And I also realized now the incredible revolutionary potential in a tasteless graffiti that said 'SEX POTTY' in Khan Market, the home to places named 'La Opera'. 


I become obsessed with one happy song during every set of exams. Sometimes it can be really bad stuff. About a year back, Justin Bieber had taken over my soul in a completely non sexual non romantic way.
 But this really awesome song, sent to me by the current bassist of the band (who would KILL me if he knew I just mentioned Bieber in the same paragraph) is so happy and I dance to it everyday even though I have almost no idea what she's saying. My uncle who is Irish was a pediatric nurse in a village near Bangalore and a favorite with the kids. I never understood how, but now I do. He was round and happy and his eyes twinkled everytime he said 'Ok?'. This song is like that.