4 January 2026

New year. New adventure. New country…

The first time I had heard about this country was when I was in third grade. My father had brought home the very first issue of “Anandamela” (a Bengali publication for kids). A few issues later, there was this whole article about the FIFA Soccer Cup.

I had learnt that the very first FIFA Cup was held in this country. And the host country became the champions that year, beating their next-door neighbor in the finals. [As an aside, believe it or not, the USA came third! This is in 1930!]

That is pretty much all I ever learned about the country.

That problem should be fixed by tomorrow morning!!

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22 November 2025

My annual pilgrimage

The weekend preceding Thanksgiving is always spent driving Natasha and Tuey down from New York to Atlanta. Then Natasha goes back to NYC and back again to Atlanta before Christmas. Post-Christmas, I take the reverse trip to get them back. This year, Rohan joined us, too. It was a good thing that I did not have to do the nearly 850 miles of driving all by myself.

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10 November 2025

Whoa! I was not expecting that!

We were driving back from Los Angeles. It was a bit of a drive. Made longer by the infamous LA traffic snarls. We were very close to Riverside when I casually looked up to the mountains and was immediately hit by a very unfamiliar sight. There seemed to be an elephant on the edge of the hill!

Go figure!!

After some internet research, I realized that it is a giant, 30-foot-tall statue of a mammoth made of rusted iron. It was installed there in 2003 as a billboard for the Jurupa Mountains Discovery Center.

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