Peopled!

I meet/see/observe different kinds of people every single day and it is so interesting that some of them are extremely interesting, some are so weird, and many are just plain fun to observe!I just love observing people, imagining how they lead their lives and what they are thinking while they are walking past me. I just wonder if any of these random people are ever going to come into my life! I have many good experiences and some not that good. I link myself to each person whom I see or meet and try to learn something from his/her behavior.

There is one person I don't want to be linked with or ever want to meet again: my Computer Science TA (teaching assistant) who I respected and thought highly of him because he helped me a lot in understanding C++. I took his class a year back. Recently, I met him in a cafe and I was very excited to see him. I was talking to him and told him about how I switched to Communication because I was not interested in Engineering. He smiled and said "well, girls are better at such soft arts and should not take up CS". The respect I had for him just vanished. He has no clue about the capabilities of a girl/women. First of all, girls are very intelligent and second of all every field is equally important and challenging. Passion is the key to success. I was not interested in Engineering which made me unhappy. Though I was uninterested and did not put any effort I did pretty well as a Computer Science student. I chose a different career path because I don't want to curse myself in the future for not following my passion and be a miserable rat forever. Today, when I am actually following my passion, I feel that this field is equally challenging and requires a different set of skills altogether. The difference is I love my major and want to make a career out of this course of study. It wasn't that I was not intelligent enough to pursue engineering, it was just that I was more concerned about my happiness and interest. So neither engineering nor any other 'soft field' is superior nor inferior. Every course, every field, every subject is equally important and equally challenging. Stereotyping is one of the worst things ever. So I decided to show people like him that we girls are intelligent and that stereotyping is just a way to make snap judgements about people which are wrong and plain rude. I do not hate him or anything, I just feel sad for him because he is clearly backward in his thoughts. This is the 21st century, where girls/women are succeeding in all fields including the male dominated fields. Such people just need to fast forward their minds to the current situation and realize that they are way behind. Anyway, I just needed to put that out because such people do exist and that we girls should not be put off by them.

There are others who just have so much life in them that I feel so happy just by seeing them. I just love people who have a zest for life. Whenever I come across such people, I think to myself; life hands you all kinds of things, so instead of cribbing about life, it is so much fun to think about the brighter side of everything. After a series of incidents, I realized one thing : "If you love life, life will love you back" So I decided that I am going to be a happy soul and try to always think about the positive experiences and also see the bright side in the negative experiences. Happiness is contagious. I observed that whenever I am full of joy and smiling, people around me are also happy and look at me with such warmth and joy. We just don't realize that if one person is happy, all the people surrounding that person are also happy.

Each new experience prepares us to handle life better. There are different kinds of people out there and each kind teaches us a new lesson. I am a changed person now and I feel that I have changed for the better. People changed me , experiences with different people changed me .