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I went to high school for 4 terrible terrible years and all I got was an email. abii @ stanford . edu

So, I shall break the rule of not writing about intensely personal stuff with the hope that what follows will be useful to a future generation of slackers.

All thanks to Mr. Junot Diaz (his awesomeness now questions makes me regret my laziness which resulted in not being bothered to apply to MIT) whose style I ripped off. I had just finished his book. I sent him a thank you note. Perhaps, without the vulgarities.

I have to thank Mr. Junot Diaz whose uber-awesomeness makes me regret my laziness in not applying to MIT and whose style (sadly, minus the cursing) I completely ripped off for this first essay. When I wrote it, I had just read his AMAZING book Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and I was completely fucking inspired by it. In fact, I did thank Junot Diaz with an appropriately vulgar email.

Virtually all of Stanford’s undergraduates live on campus.  What would you want your freshman year roommate to know about you? Tell us something about you that will help your roommate and us know you better. [250 words]

Dear Future Roommate,

I am Abi and I am not a girl. Unfortunately, a lot of people mistake Abi for Abby or Abigail. But, let me tell you about what I am – an Indian geek who’s terrible at being either.

I’m the most ungeeky geek you ever met. Sure, I can write code all night. But guess what? There’s nothing I hate more than a good comic-book. I don’t speak Klingon or Elvish fluently either. I only watched The Dark Knight after a light saber-carrying Jedi friend of mine coerced me into it. In fact, Juno and Little Miss Sunshine are my favorite movies. Bluntly put, that’s like Arnold Schwarzenegger (or your favorite macho man) loving The Princess Dairies 2: Royal Engagement.

And for someone born in India, I’m less Indian than Obama (which technically isn’t a fair comparison since he isn’t Indian but even he can cook Indian food). The last Bollywood film I watched was 5 years back when I was stuck in my grandma’s house with nothing but a TV and a single VCD. My iTunes library has 2942 English songs, 3 Turkish songs and 1 almost-Punjabi song (it features Snoop Dogg). But while the origins of my un-geekiness may be mysterious, my un-Indianness can be explained easily. Everyday, for 10 years, I woke up to the sound of “Allahu Akbar” from an Indonesian mosque. In short, I grew up in the world (if the world only comprised of Indonesia, Singapore with brief trips to Thailand, Malaysia and Australia). However, I do prove my worth to my patria in one way. I love cricket and you must admit there’s something undeniably Indian about that English sport.

Now that I’ve written all this, I realize that I’m just like most people. Just another jumbled mess who’s hard to stereotype or define in a few sentences. I hope you are just as messed up.

Cheers,

Abi (with a soft “a”)

Now, you’re probably thinking “He got into Stanford with this shitty essay?!” Yeah, I know, it’s not supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and the language is admittedly rubbish (I didn’t have much time to edit on December 31st). But it’s as funny as funny can be in a college essay, considering that I fail completely at PG-rated humor. And I was adviced (several times) by my college counselor to not use certain words even though these words are so thoroughly embedded in our vernacular that some emotions cannot be expressed without them (example: fuck, shit, damn; can we please move on? everyone knows that in most sentences, fuck does not mean having sexual intercourse). On the whole, I actually think the essay’s pretty different, at the very least in the context of my school (where the majority of the populace is still writing shit like “I want to become a doctor because I want to help people blah blah blah”).

Here’s the second essay I will share, which might also help you answer the question “Why the fuck is this on Planet Mozilla?” since it’s (slightly) about Ubiquity which I happened to be working on at that time. Phrases within [] have been added post-submission.

Stanford students are widely known to possess a sense of intellectual vitality.  Tell us about an idea or an experience you have had that you find intellectually engaging. [250 words]

Ubiquity is a beautiful piece of software. With constant use, it becomes part of you. All the world’s knowledge resides in your fingers. It’s the extension of a man’s mind, the slow but inevitable fusion of the brain and the computer.

But, sitting on a soft couch at a Starbucks in central Singapore, my visions of technology are not so romantic, at least not at the moment. An “Exception: Ubquity.translate() is undefined” annoys me. As I sip the hot chocolate and ignore the constant chattering, I try not to be consumed by this error. For two years, I have written this same program but each time, I have failed by forgetting the bigger picture, by getting bogged down into the details. But it’s not that details are bad. Had Da Vinci spent all his time on the smile, would the Mona Lisa be as enigmatic? The folds of her clothing may seem insignificant but they sum up to create the overall harmony. In the same way, every line of code must be perfect.

But, right now, I just need to get past “Exception: Ubquity.translate() is undefined”. Engrossed in the screen, I look through 100s of lines of code trying to fix this issue. Is the software architecture completely faulty? Or is it just the parser module? Maybe, it’s just an undiscovered bug in the language itself. As these thoughts engulf my consciousness, I buy another cup of delicious Frapucinno.

I scratch the table in frustration.

I call my mom.

I take a toilet break.

I reply to a few emails.

And then, a couple of mind-numbing hours later, I realize that “Ubquity” is actually spelled “Ubiquity”.

How. [Fucking.] Trivial.

At exasperating times like this, I feel like screaming out loud. I absolutely hate coding. I will never program again. But even in these moments, deep down, I know that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.

Clarifications: When I say I’ve been working on this same program, I mean Devo of course, which for me just continued perfectly into Ubiquity. Also, geeks, please forgive my rather liberal use of words like “module” and “software architecture”. Know your audience, right?

Let me know if you really got tricked by this one. It worked fairly well for the small sample I tested it on.

However, these are not my best essays. The best one was the one sent to Cornell. Although it’s hardly political, I shall not post it just to be safe.It was merely a retelling of the story of Iwuchukwu Amara Tochi which is an extraordinary case that brought the peculiar intricacies of the Singaporean legal system to the forefont. First, to be judged guilty, there is no requirement for proof of mens rea (guilty intent). In this case, the judge noted that “There was no direct evidence that [Amara Tochi] knew the capsules contained diamorphine. There was nothing to suggest that Smith had told him they contained diamorphine, or that he had found that out of his own.” and yet the very same judge convicted him! The second inconsistency (with respect to most other legal systems and the international legal standard) in Singaporean law is mandatory sentencing which means that even if the judge thinks your degree of guilt is low (arguably, no guilt in Tochi’s case but still, in the judge’s view, it had to be a very small degree of guilt) and he wants to give you just a jail term, he cannot because the death sentence is mandatory. This is downright scary. Say you bought apples overseas and unknown to you, they had been  injected with diamorphine. From my understanding of the law,  when you bring those apples into Singapore, you’ll definitely be hanged even though you had no idea you were carrying drugs in the first place. Yeah, like I said, crazy!

But that’s that. What surprises me is that Cornell would reject me during early decision (worst mistake I ever made was to apply ED there). I have a much better application (very objectively, in fact) than the majority of people who apply there. Moreover, this is self-selecting pool of people who definitely want to go to Cornell. And Cornell ED has a acceptance rate of >35% while Stanford RD has an acceptance rate of 7.5%.

It boggles the mind but it also happened to be the best thing to ever happen ever. So, being the arrogant bastard that I am, I sent the admissions office some flowers with a note that read “Thank you for not admitting me. Your loss.”

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