Friday, April 03, 2015

Interview

Hello Everyone. Long time no see. :)
I have a news. I am interviewing on this Saturday. I will be interviewer not interviewee. If you haven't heard about 1947partitionarchive it is time to hear about it now. A bunch of students in California decided to digitally archive the experiences of folks who have witnessed the India-Pakistan partition back in 1947. Since the number of such folks is dwindling fast it is imperative that we do it now otherwise it will be never. I guess it was inspired by a similar project for Hiroshima & Nagasaki disaster. I am really glad that someone took the initiative to finally document this. I have read a lot of stuff about partition and always wondered what it would be like to go through those horrific times.

I will be video interviewing a 90 year old man who migrated from one country to another during that time. It is my chance to witness the horrific part of history first hand and help record it. I am glad that I got the chance but there are very mixed feeling of grief, heartbreak, anguish and finally disgust towards those responsible.

It took me a lot to actually prepare for this. I had no experience in either interviewing or documenting history or video production or anything like that. But I had a little (online) training and lot of reading to back me. I am strong in theory. I always have been, in most things. Lets see if I can practically execute it now. I feel confident enough. I invested a lot of myself in volunteering to be Citizen Historian as the Archive folks like to call it. It came at very busy time. I am wrapping up things to prepare for my India visit next week. I still have some shopping things left. I think I will skip the part where I decide what I wear in the wedding. I will let more capable people (my Mom) handle the difficult things. It is not the domain of Zuckerburg-ian fashion admirers.

I am applying for a 14 day intense training on large scale scientific computing using parallel clusters. It is highly competitive and I have very slim chance of getting in. Let me try. Trying to meet the deadline tomorrow so cheerios!

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