Carthik Sharma

Third consecutive night of C programming, the report is due monday. Hope I finish it by then.

I talked to her on the phone today, she had this to say -

“You know, the reason why you cant write poems anymore is because you have lost touch with your world. You are just stuck on the internet. You have changed a lot, where is that nature-lover and where is the present you!, compulsively checking mail, and reading the LJ friends page. You keep reading what others have to say, and have done, no wonder you cant think of anything original to say. I hate this.”

Some time ago, I had written, “I am afraid this place is changing me, and that if I stay here long enough I will change enough to no longer be the person loved by the people I love.” or something to that effect.

She is right. I decided not to check my mail and my LJ friends page only twice daily. I need to get a life.

Maybe thats why I am unhappy. No amount of surfing can compensate for the lack of friends, and an active social life, and being close to nature. I hate America for the way even nature is commoditized. My environs, near home, and at school are carefully manicured, and the landscaping is artificial too. Not a tree or shrub out of place, or out of shape. I was amazed to see pine trees (lots of them) in a warm place like Florida. Later, a friend told me that Brad, a supervisor at the UCF Physical Plant, told him that all those pine trees dont belong to Florida, they were artificial transplanted here. Nature, as I see it, is free of artificiality, free of human interference. Seeing a rabbit or a mongoose at the zoo is not the same as seeing them in the wild.

The first time I went to Connecticut (a week after I came to the US), I told my cousin that America is very beautiful. He lives in a very beautiful community, surrounded by woods and lakes. He had this to say “Oh, I lost that feeling long ago, the day I went to office, and saw that the whole scenery had been changed over a week, by some landscaper, and we had a new pond too. Now, when I see a beautiful place here, I start wondering whether its natural or artificial.” Any one who has visited Orlando would have seen rows of palm trees by the roads, especially at places like Universal Studios. The palms are invariably supported by three or four wooden supports which prop it up vertically. Go to the same place after a couple of months and the palms might be missing, they might have been transplanted at someone’s convenience.

I will also never forget how cheated I felt when I found out that the beautiful plants in my advisor’s office turned out to be made of plastic.

I also generate PHENOMENAL amounts of trash after coming here. Everything comes covered in plastic, or paper, and nothing gets reused. I remember my grandmother, who used to collect Polythene bags, and plastic milk bags for using them later, or selling them by the kilo to the “kuppi-thakaram-paper” fellow who used to sell it to the recyclers.

Instead of finding efficient methods of disposing trash, I think the environmental engineers, and the citizens at large should try and find ways of using less material. I bought a pen and a box of floppies at the UCF bookstore, and the lady handed me a plastic bag! What makes people so thoughtlessly wasteful? I really dont know. Though the per-capita trash generation is India is so low, India is a lot dirtier than the US, which is surprising too, in a way.

So, where was I? Ah, yes, I hope I dont get withdrawal symptoms from not using the internet as much as I do now.

Filed by Carthik at 4:21 am under Livejournal

Other Articles on this Subject:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function related_posts() in /home/carthik/public_html/wp-content/themes/east_indian/single.php on line 31