I just wrote about 2017; then started thinking about my graduation from Pitt.

I want to try for my masterwork in tangents. Not the trigonometry kind.

So graduation. There’s a fun story behind the day and the circumstances surrounding it.

For starters I didn’t want to attend. I’ve been to enough long ceremonies to find them tedious. Junior year I lived across the various libraries and study spaces on campus. Senior year it was the windowless networking lab. Needless to say, I cherished my memories with my classmates, but nothing excited me more than the idea of spending my last night in Oakland by myself and finally getting to focus on the Witcher 3 before flying off to Shantikunj. Still haven’t made it to Skellige. But as usual, the gap between my last summer class and the ceremony had to be filled.

My mother had other plans. She insisted I would regret not attending (read, not having photos is poor optics). I was able to negotiate only attending the smaller Computer Science ceremony because the big one would take up the entire day. And I knew that skipping it to spend an extra day in Haridwar with Ba was a winning argument. Good thing she’s been slowly dying (aging) and insisting on pilgrimages.

So a compromise was struck.

My father had his own plans. His logic was sound. Gurudev’s mission is to spread yagya. The friendly cardiologist with multiple fellowships in Moon Township moved his organization’s goals forward. My silly little graduation did not. So he scheduled one for the same day.

Bizarre set of ideas in that head. His name is on patents that form the foundational technology for how servers in data centers communicate over fiber. He also believes in yagyopathy, for those that don’t know, yagyas as alternative medicine. Not enough time to talk about the irony here.

And so after arriving to doctorji’s home, he called my mother to let us know he’d miss the event. Of course I then took the phone and yelled at him. After which I drove to the house and met one of the kids I’d teach in a couple months.

An overly stressful day for an event I did not care to attend. All because social convention is that I celebrate the fancy piece of paper that has always been the expectation.

Speaking of special parchment. Patents.

It’s interesting. My father. Ph.D, highly accomplished in his field. Multiple patents that help form the infrastructure of our modern web. Much of my entire craft depends on the cornerstone that is networking. Yet I’ve heard the late Masaru Emoto and William Tiller referenced way too often in my life. Why did he have to watch what the bleep do we know.

Even more peculiar is another uncle I know. President-uncle. Another friendly and humble old man, not sure what he’s up to nowadays. But at one point he was the president of VHPA. The first memory with him that I remember was that he was at the Annual Day event for the Hindu Temple Society in Lehigh Valley. Because it was my graduating one and we took a picture on my phone, I think it was Samsung Eternity. But anyways, he’s a Fellow at Nokia Bell Labs. His name’s on many of the patents that formed the basis of network based communication. Ironically most of the time I’ve known him, he carried a flip phone. More ironically, has also made many nuclear-Mahabharata-adjacent statements.

It’s kinda baffling. People who have domain expertise worthy of all the praise and recognition, and also have some of the wildest beliefs on what happened in Ancient Bharat.