The story of my undergraduate life

To all the Hammondeers (residents of my city), goodbye. I am leaving to see the edge of the world, and maybe I will come back.

The past four years of my life have been astounding. I have met you all and each one of you is a great person, just like me. You’re a person who sees like me, who feels like me, and although our circumstances, choices in life and even our fears have been different, you are still a person who still lives like me, going through the phases of life oscillating with the ups and downs along with joys and sorrows. I must say that I am very fortunate to have met you; that is why I am writing these words as a token of gratitude to our meeting. I want to share with you a little bit about myself and my experience here in our beautiful town.

The first few months

I came to Southeastern Louisiana University in Fall 2016 with about 30 other freshmen from Nepal. I was picked up by two Nepali seniors from the New Orleans airport who were generous in taking me to their apartment and letting me stay for about a month. They also let about 10 other freshmen stay; so about 15 students were staying in a single apartment unit until our apartments were ready. When mine was ready, I shared the new apartment with 4 other freshmen. Coming to Southeastern had never been my choice; my college choices ranged from MIT to Ivys to Denison and Dickinson (I was fucked by the universities of my choice, however. Two times). I have been extremely lucky to have my brother obligate me to complete an application at Southeastern or otherwise I would never have found a school here in the States. During the transition, I was also temporarily enrolled in Kathmandu University to study Applied Physics, but I dropped out due to my hate of the tyranny of unqualified student teachers as well as the complete lack of interest towards physics of anyone in the college besides me. Once I arrived at this free country, I knew in my soul that I was ready to discover new lands and new horizons. Yet, for some unknown reason, even after being here for a month did not make me feel like this was my city. As a result, everything started to go downwards: my friendships both here and back home, finances, and so on. It was clear that I had to transfer out, to at least a choice of my university. Here, I was empty and alone.

Freshman Year — Spring ‘17

I got an internship at a local company next semester, and now that I could afford it, so I decided to live by myself starting the Spring. I was super engaged in my application, but it turned out then that life had a few plans for me, but not leaving Hammond. I discovered circumstances changed drastically as I joined interesting combinatorics research, got an internship, and time passed away quickly which led to nothing fruitful by the next summer. I had a private room in a two-story house which I shared with three other international music majors: an opera singer, a flutist, and a cellloist. Learning about their culture and world view used to go well if not for the few terrible nights when more musicians would join them for all-day rehearsal sessions followed by all-night parties. Despite their friendliness, I was unable to share my pain or build trust with them. I felt even more alone and would weep many nights, thinking about my friends, my girlfriend, and my parents and my relatives back home. I remembered how I decided to leave everything in Nepal to start a new life. I had always been terrible with social interactions, but now that I stopped having social interactions, I started to fall in the pit of darkness. My decision to come to the States had left me isolated in this dark room with myself to ample time to color my thoughts dark. However, isolation and depression, despite how their terrible impact, did leave a positive note: I could easily focus on my classes. I decided to push myself through the limit, taking 26 credit hours, which consisted of one English Honors class, two departmental examinations for statistics (MATH 380) and Calculus III (MATH 312), a 3-credit research with a math professor on Langford pairings. Oh and while this was going on, I was able to land a part-time internship at a yet another software company during the annual Tech Connect event.

Freshman Year — Summer ‘17

The Spring semester went by very quickly, and so did the following summer. I was working full-time at my internship while being enrolled in general college classes. I must say that I had a much luxurious summer compared with the other Nepali freshmen, most of who worked incredible hours during those three months while being paid much lower than what they deserved. I have been most fortunate to have a head start with coding. However, I do not know if the feeling of isolation was limited to just myself or also my peers, as the only person I talked to like this was myself with a glass of Jack Daniels. I was dehydrated without life, yet I waited and waited for the happy days to come. The thought of transferring out had already settled due to my involvement in the research (since I was about to publish a paper), but I had not realized that by the passage of this summer, my life was about to reveal hidden depths.

Sophomore and Junior years

A year had gone by, quickly, and my freshman days were over. For the Fall, I moved to a new apartment due to severe bedbug infestation in order to start living with a Nepalese roommate the next Fall. We shared the same culture, story friend circle, and background, yet I was treating him more like a business partner than a friend or a roommate. Life was going as usual, may be a bit better due to improved relationships with coworkers. I had also discovered a few friends due to our mutual attraction of my intelligence and my love for teacher-disciple relationships. This semester, many more Nepali freshman had filled the increased quota for international students. I thought I might be able to make new friends. Maybe find a girlfriend on this side of the world as well (I had tried online dating too, but I was unable to kick with my poor English language and dark sense of humor. I also had little interest with people who did not share my culture). I had started to aggressively pursue new channels of social interactions with these people, like attending Thanksgiving dinner at a local Church. And I was able to strengthen connections. It was around this time that I thought my depression would go off. I was hanging out with others, enjoying beers and showing off my terrible skills with confidence. I even started teaching coding classes to make sure that these newfound friends would take it seriously and learn something before summer, and make their life much easier. It feels great to admit that I was happy back then. It was also the time that I fell deeply in love with one of them.

This girl was very special. She was the queen of the bees. She was the Pink Floyd of the bands, and she was of the George R.R. Martin kind. She was also a spoiled brat, maybe the misfit in her high school class. She claimed to be carefree and bold. She claimed to know them stars and the Gods of heavens, but when I tried to test her she deflected to other things. She continued to become reckless and talk about the SpaceX Dragon like she was in control of the mission, and man, I had never seen a woman like her! No, I had never met a person like her. No one I knew had her passion, with that drive to know them stars. We had spat some jargon at the aforementioned Thanksgiving dinner but not much of a meaningful talk had happened. This and a few other hangout sessions were to begin a new chemistry cycle in me, and within a week, I were to drown in love with this woman and her passions, particularly with the stars. I had been in love with the heavens for as long as I can remember but I had completely lost the passion. Now I rediscovered what it meant to live, and I could not live a new day without following them stars.

Telescoping

I had almost maxed out my credit cards yet I borrowed a telescope through Amazon (since it provides free returns). Many nights, I started to look down on the eyepiece of the telescope to look at our moon and neighboring planets. Within these heavens, I discovered a new dimension of life. Saturn to me was astoundingly charming; it was very clear through the eyepiece that this little ping pong ball was floating in the sky, with a ring attached to it like none other. It was eventually my telescoping hobby which led me to understand that the universe was vast and I was nowhere in our Creator’s mind when he devised a plan for existence. I started to ponder at the very nature of space and time and consciousness and the universe. Who am I? It was a year after me falling in love, and as soon as the feeling of love started sink, a new life was emerging inside me. It started with an existential crisis, but as I combined it with a trip to Nepal, marijuana, and meditation, my telescoping hobby turned out to shape how I want to live my life.

Vipassana meditation

Vipassana is a 10-day guided-meditation course following the principles of Gautama Buddha. During the course period, you surrender your electronic devices, your speech and as much of yourself as possible to silence (they follow a strict no-communication rule). They also offer nutrient-rich vegetarian meals. People go to Vipassana for many reasons, but I go to Vipassana because 1) it is a place where I can forget everything of my current life in order to look at myself as a part of the universe, and 2) it is also a place where I get ample time to think and remember what I had forgotten about myself. I have attended three Vipassana 10-day sessions so far, and it has become a kind of vacation place for me. It is also the place where I had looked at the palm of my hand and questioned for the first time why I had exactly five fingers. It was the place where I saw atoms moving to create my thoughts. It was the place where I saw myself in a tree in front of me inasmuch as myself. It was also the place where I realized that “I” comes back in another’s body after this one perishes. The truth about the world is, that there is only one. All are the atoms moving and we are simply products of the atoms. Our thoughts are the results of atomic interactions and our fight between determinism and free will is merely an intellectual play. That is because the atoms do what they always do, guaranteed. I had my mind exploding with great ideas.

Questions

It was here in Hammond that I discovered the vast nature of our universe. It was the beginning of the completion of my transformation. Many of you might have already known but I started meditating a few years ago before I came to the States, by learning it at the Art of Living foundation through the light of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. When I took the first meditation course, I was 15; and that’s when I realized that this software developer at Google, which was my career plan, was just too little of a plan for my majestic life. When I went to Vipassana my second time last Summer, I finally realized the mystery of reincarnation. That I was born before this life, and that I will be born afterwards, was a big of a realization for me. (Understanding reincarnation starts with realizing who “you” truly are: are you your body, your mind, or you soul? What is soul?) Likewise, through meditation, I came to realize what God actually means. No, I do not mean the four handed statue in temples, but the ones that the ancient rishis imagines when they decided upon symbolisms established using these statues. God is everywhere. What is bigger than me, is Him. I also got a glimpse of time and space as they are (Mahakaal and Mahashiva), and I was even able to converse with the “I” within me as a second person.

Senior year

Senior year was paradise and also the inferno.

While my transformation was going on, I was starting to get worried about job security. After leaving my internship, I had started to work for the department of English as a software consultant. I had applied to a few companies, but for some reason, each and every one of them were rejecting me. I did not understand what was going wrong with my application. I wanted to add a project on my resume (thinking maybe that would be impressive). So I brainstormed ideas on what I could build. One of the simplest was a campus app for my university.

I started making the campus app during May of 2019. After I returned back from my second Vipassana back then, I had a lot of energy to utilize, and therefore, I was able to launch the project, recruit and manage almost 15 people, and schedule a demo in front of senior executives of my university. I was able to push through there as well, and I was able to build momentum in my university. I then ran a fundraiser through my Nepalese friends and alumni to start a company, and I am glad to have raised over two grand in less than a week. They have been extremely supportive of my idea. However, my incentive to contribute started to come down as the executives in our university decided not to provide financial support for any of our times on the app.

A few books from my library

I usually kickstart my Vipassana experience by reading a few great books, such as Socrates’ Apology which took me just two hours to finish the entire essay. It was the defense of the famous philosopher Socrates before his death sentence. I will also never forget the detailed insights of Yuval Noah Harrari in his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harrari himself is a Vipassana meditator for the past 15+ years). But the most fundamental book I have read, and also the most intellectually challenging, is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus. It was the book that showed me the inherent flaws and limitations of logic, about how experience is more true than understanding. A few other books that I have discovered are Walden (written by Henry Thoreau after living 28 months in a jungle all by himself), How to Win Friends and Influence People (a book also recommended by Warren Buffett), Patanjali Yoga Sutra (an advanced book on the discipline of Yoga by Swami Vivekananda), Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and so on