Happy Deepavali 2019
This was the year of anticipation for us
-- we all worked hard for future rewards. Swati will be off to college next
year. We started the tradition of celebrating Diwali when Swati was born to
introduce our kids and their friends to the Indian culture, so they don’t feel
isolated. Now they are getting ready to fly the coop -- how time flies.
Swati’s hard work over high school
started to bear results this year. It started out with her research paper (with
Wikimedia) being accepted at an academic workshop. She then got an opportunity
to direct a play at Mountain View Performing Arts followed by an incredible opportunity to
student direct her Gunn HS musical “In the Heights”. She also made it to the Platinum level at the
USACO coding competition and spent the summer at the RSI program doing research
on fake news. There were also lots of downs and the way she fought through them
also inspired Ruchi and Ashish to work hard and rediscover grit and a love for
learning.
Agastya has settled nicely into middle
school. He finally got his first electric guitar as a birthday gift and is
putting it to good use by playing some fun Hindi songs for his mom. He has
promised to give us a performance next Diwali. He still enjoys theatre, choir, and band, but is also seriously getting into math and coding. He has a
fantastic group of friends and it is such a pleasure to see them all grow and
mature. We are excited, but also a little apprehensive since they will all be
teenagers next year, with all that comes with it!
Ruchi joined Accenture as an MD earlier
this year and did her first M&A. She is building skills in new areas and
still enjoys doing product, engineering, and people management. Ashish’s
research is going well, and he is really enjoying geeky discussions with Swati
and Agastya. He passed his next level of pilot training (flying solely by
instruments) and is always looking for a company to fly with, so do reach out to
him if interested.
We took a few short trips this year to
explore colleges for Swati starting with LA and also visited Harry Potter at
Universal. As a family, we took a short trip to Kauai in December. We went to
see the super bloom north of LA in the spring, and it was an out of this world
experience to see mile-long patches of the desert ablaze in red and orange. We
(minus Swati) also took a week-long trip to Sweden and Norway and enjoyed a lot
of great hikes in the fjords.
We are thankful for 2019 and looking
forward to the next year.
-Agastya, Swati, Ruchi, & Ashish.
