Not one of your usual "about me" pages. The fluctuant version perhaps? Just the facts?

Welcome to my little waste of space on the internet. I am currently a graduate student research assistant (PhD wanna-be) at the Computational Mechanics Laboratory under the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

This (obviously) wasn't always the case.

I was born many moons ago in a far off land known to many as India. As a child, I was way below average when it came to physical exertion. (Actually, that's true even today. I just added the reference to childhood for a theatrical chronological effect). That coupled with general laziness gave me more time than most active kids to sit back, relax and observe all the wondrous events occurring around me.

Being curious of course, I had a lot of "Why ?"s and "How ?"s popping up almost continually. Anyway, a few years later I joined school and completed my early schooling in a city called Muscat. The purpose of school was supposedly to answer all those questions that I had. School did help, a lot, but the more I got to know and understand, the more curious I got. (Just plain greedy I guess). Feeling education there was beginning to numb their sons mind, among other reasons, my parents decided to return to my place of birth, Madras, India.

That's where I got to complete my schooling over two schools. Those were fun times. Fun as in things were all slowly beginning to make sense. From quarks to supernovae... I finally felt I was beginning to figure it all out.

How naive can a person be?

It's a pity, like one of my teachers later, so eloquently put it, knowledge is infinite, and our time to grasp it all is finite. Actually, it sounded a lot cooler when he said it, but you get the idea.

I digress. Returning to the central theme of this little monologue, "me", my love of mechanics then led me to complete my under graduation in Mechanical Engineering at Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering under the University of Madras. (Why engineering and not just pure applied mechanics you ask? Well, let's just say the choices are far more limited where I'm from.)

When that portion of my educational life was completed, I was at cross roads. The choices I had at the time eventually boiled down to two - selecting between a research position at the Indian Institute of Science, and one here at the University of Michigan. I guess it's blatantly obvious as to what I chose. (Why? Let's just say I prefer theoretical solid mechanics to fluid mechanics. Yes, and this had something to do with it too.)

And here I am today.

If you're anything like me, you'd expect a page that boldly titles itself "about me" to have a lot of real info.

     Why I am
     My darkest secrets
     My deepest desires
     My fears and anxieties

I'd have to say you're in for a disappointment.

This is more like the "Chronological summary of the educational life (with no real relevant detail) of yet another student wanna-be scholar". I just figured "about me" is a more catchy title (not to mention far easier to type) than the more apt (and horribly verbose) "Chronological summary of the educational life (with no real relevant detail) of yet another student wanna-be scholar".

I would be lying if I claimed I am too complex a human being to be described in an "about me" page. So, I won't. I'll just say, it's hard. I am different things to different people (as I guess most people are). Anybody from DeathmaticiaN, the gamer, to wahgnube, yet another free software zealot, to... her-reesh.

But in the end, I am just another average geek hoping tomorrow the world around me will make more sense.