Friendship Day

Tommorow August 3 is Friendship Day and I have already received emails for the same. So celebrating it, I will share some interesting news/stories of some of my close friends here and in India.

First, as of next week, August 8th is the begining of the Beijing Olympics' 2008 - and one of my close friends from school Malav Shroff is going to represent India as a port stopover manager (news clipping) for the Indian sailing team. He is a former olympian at Athens 2004 in the 49'er class.

Secondly I met a very close friend whom I know from childhood, Amrish Shah, after 16 years, last week when he was traveling the States. Spent three nostalgic evenings with him remembering the good old childhood days. He being interested in Acting/Dramatics, quit school in 9th to pursue his dream. Struggled for few years with Channel V and then Star TV. He has turned producer director and is now co writing a movie for a sequels sequel - Don 3 with Farhan Akhtar.

And now something about my roommates, the first friends I made when I came to the US to study. We were six of us were sharing a house. One day we decided to go to Exhange Place along the Hudson river to get a great view of the two World Trade Center towers. This was our first visit. After the initial first five minutes of "Oh Ahh What a great View", one of the guys had a brilliant idea. He put forth a question to the rest of us.
"What will be the force and trajectory required to hurl a ball from top of WTC so that it reaches across to where we were standing on the pier in Exhange Place"
See the diagram below.

Image Courtesy Google earth plus photoshop overlays

I am not going to discuss the technical aspects of the discussion that ensued with detailed calculations, theories and assumptions. The point is that we all learnt "How to spoil a perfectly good evening trying to figure out something that is irrelevant and of no use to anyone"

This is what happens when you have three roommates who are IIT'ians and doing reasearch here, another two from BVP Pune, one doing research and the other studying management and me an architect.

But these are the friends who stood by in every difficult situation and become part of an extended family. For each of us WE were the support system through out little journey away from home studying here. So this post is dedicated to them.

Also wishing all the bloggies who visit here - as they are my new set of E-friends.

Happy Friendship Day!