Hill Station? Nah... College Station

This was made when I first came into TAMU, and my opinions have since changed, 'facts' have been corrected and in general the picture I will be cutting now is entirely different.. Neverthless, I reproduce it here without editing any text, just to show how does a fresher look at things....Things that I have changed views on, are now in colour :)) ... n the rest black n white ;). The narrative is like, the 'fresher' Kaushik talks and the 'senior' Kaushik records his comments in colour for a fair picture to the audience ! ;)

The morning of 31^st July 2005, was my first in the small village of College Station. And, I don’t know how many more mornings do I have to see here. But believe me, the experience is not too rosey as it seemed from back home.

The village of College Station (which the Texans call a “CITY”) is built around the Texas A&M University. With around 6,000 acres campus(the third biggest in the US after Stanford ,I forgot the second!) you can imagine how big the town will seem to be. TAMU(that’s how everyone calls Texas A&M University) takes about 47,000 students at per semester. And most of them are not housed in the college. So, majorly, the town consists of leased accommodations. Small, two floored apartments. The tallest structure here seems to be the town water tower!

We get 4 channels with an antenna. And believe me, seeing them is a huge pain. There is no proper reception anywhere. We have to keep adjusting our TV antenna per channel!(can u imagine that?! In India itself, it was only in my mom’s home town, I had to do it last when I was in my 6^th standard!!).Apart from Fox and KAMU(TAMU's own station) no other channel has a proper reception. Of course there is cable television, but that costs 30$ per month. Hey, I forgot to mention this, we got our TV for free. And guess from where? TRASH BIN! Here desis get most of their things from the trash bin.(Should have been unfunded fresher desis actually :D) Mostly, Amrus trash their stuff which work perfectly fine but are too old for them at the trash, and we can pick it up from there. So, we got our sofa set and TV from the trash bin. Another roomie got his mattress (typically it costs around 40 $) from there too. Radio however is a different story. There are more than half dozen FM channels blaring the same loud English music all through! And for a guy with taste of Indian music???? Man, the plight is worst. Here, they still live prehistorically. People still watch home videos in cassettes!!! VCD players are still expensive. Most audio players don’t play MP3s.(Err.. I have since seen that it is only OUR player that dosent :D) And guess what? I brought my entire collection in MP3 cds!!! So, I guess its going to take quite sometime for me before I can start listening to my music!( The situation is still the same... only I now play my music in my computer at the office)
Texans are hugely patriotic. Wherever you go, you will find Texas and US flags hanging around, and slogans such as “Don’t Mess with Texas” !! Guess what, Texas is one of the few states where pedestrians are the kings.(Again, since I knew only about Texas then, its like Texas is US for me..... I now realize that Texas IS NOT US... its a whole diferent world out there)Come what may, pedestrians are treated with utmost respect. Even if the signal turns green, and someone is walking on the zebra corssing, all the cars wait for us to get to the foot path!

About the town?! Well, we do have Wal Mart, HEB, Target… n other giant supermarkets…(all pale in comparison with the big towns :) )And one more thing. In case I didn’t mention this before, College Station is a twin city with another town called Bryan. So, its more like Hyderabad, Secundrabad style. I mean its like postal address says it’s a different town, but for all practial purposes they are the same. So, like the malls are 2 each. Wal mart for instance has 2 stores for College Station and Bryan!!!

Believe me man, this store called Wal Mart is huge!!!! (hehehehhe..... this guy is crazy!)If this is what he could build for this village, I was wondering how big it must have been in proper cities like Houston, Chicago and all of them. Desis, have a car pool system. Public transport here sucks big time. In fact, here at College Station, I would say its next to zero. For instance, I cannot get to Houston (which is 90 miles from here) without begging for a lift. Of course there is a bus that runs once a day! So, getting to Wal Mart which is on the other end of the town is also ruled out. The first thing that funded PhD students buy is a car! And immediately, they become friends for everyone!!! People from 4-5 apartments squeeze into the single car and buy stuff sufficient for a month….

About the campus. Man its so spread about. Unlike IIT which has lots of trees between its buildings, here, the space between the two buildings is made into a garden! So, this adds to the heat. I mean, we don’t have a nice shelter where you can rest.We have a golf course, an airport and a nuclear reactor within the campus! The reactor though is used only for experiments! George Bush Sr. has a huge Presidential Library here. It is said that 36% of the Texas Tax Payer’s money is brought into this University alone. An interesting fact is that TAMU’s first citizen is a bitch. No, seriously, it is a female dog! Legend has it that when the TAMU football team was getting back from Arlington after losing its 10^th match consecutively, and their truck broke down, they found this dog and it seems it protected them or something like that. Since then, it had become the TAMU team’s lucky mascot. They have never lost a match after that, and now millions is spent on that dog. It travels only in airplanes! Guess what? It is free to roam around the campus, and if it enters a class and barks, then that class is left for the day!!!! Crazy people isn’t it?!