i am from IIT Delhi 1992-96 batch. MS from UC Irvine. just when i was leaving delhi to come to US, one neighbour’s daughter came to ask funde about applying to US univs and aid etc. i was never social and my being ordinary looking (ugly rather) hadn’t helped either. i had never had any kind of conversation with girls so i felt i was in heaven. spending hours with her helping her find univs and preparing etc. i had finished studies so had nothing better to do anyways.

khair, to i landed here and continued to support over emails. i was so naive to think that this could go somewhere. or maybe i didnt think like this. it was just that it felt to go out of the way to help her. she used to go to a friend’s house for doing the email and search (this is 1996, VSNL student-account zindabad). a few times her friend, gunjan, would type her questions and read out my replies to her. slowly, i started addressing my emails to gunjan she was reading/typing them. and as you can guess, we got talking. gunjan was curious to know more about US and i used to write lengthy emails. learnt that my neighbour had a steady boyfriend and for some reason never felt bad.

over a couple of months, exchanged a lot of emails and then in feb 1997 i visited delhi for 6 days for my sister’s marriage. i had told her that i would be coming and that we could meet. i wasnt sure whether i should have said it or why would we meet or what would i say etc. anyway, after 2 days i called her, and she started off on why i didnt call any earlier?? couldnt understand but met her for coffee. i kept shivering all the time and had funny feeling in the stomach. this was my first date. she was telling me about her college friends (gunjan is a year junior to me) and her boyfriend etc
and i felt ki kaash kabhi meri bhi koi girlfriend hoti types. i was busy with marriage stuff at home and so called her only the day-after. she was furious. and when we met sometime later (i used to lie to my parents about going to buy stuff for wedding) she told me about what we would do when i went back to US and that she couldn’t sleep the previous night. i laugh at my stupidity that i really didnt understand for first 5-10 minutes what she meant. then when it did dawn upon
me, i didnt accept it.

the post is getting long, so to cut it short, she told me that she liked me and i more or less said that i too even if i didnt know exactly. i came back to US, and could hardly study. the flight journey was teh worst 22 hours of my life since i had nothing to do and no way to communicate with her. i used to be online all the time, dont know how many of you have used, but there used to be ytalk/talk program on unix. i taught her to do telnet to my univ’s m/c and do yalk. it was pretty cool. over the next couple of months i was so madly
in love with her that i had nothing else on my mind. it was gunjan and more gunjan.

she didnt get admission into MBA the year she passed
because she was spending too much time on the net. this
was mid-1997. i dropped 1 course each semester and decided to leave my PhD. i returned to india in april 1998 after endless conversation with friends on-campus and elsewhere. everyone thought that i was paagal.

went back and got a job with IBM in delhi and had a real real tough time introducing her to my parents. btw, in the meantime my neighbour had reached the US and got settled with a friend etc. and as luck would have it, ibm was sending me to japan for 3 months and i just couldnt say no. gunjan had got admission into XLRI this year and would be gone to jamshedpur by the time i return to delhi. after almost 10-days of sleepless nights practising what to say and how to say, i told my mother. she didnt take it nicely at all and we both cried that night. finally she started accepting it. didnt really talk to me for a few days saying ki humne kya-kya soch rakha tha and tu to ussi ke liye india waapis
aaya hai, not for your parents.

i went away to tokyo and ran up a phone bill of close to 1 lakh rupees. i paid most of it but then my manager there took the last bill since i had a good job :-) i came back to delhi and told my parents that i am going for a weekend to calcutta where my friends are doing IIM. got tickets for calcutta but got down at jamshedpur. spent 2 nights with her in her ladies hostel. it was just like any movie. sneaked in. her roomie would make sure no one is there and she of course stayed in another room. luckily no one came to know.

i used to do whatever my parents wanted and help them with
everything, cook at home, get stuff for home, visit relatives with them and so forth so that they dont refuse whenever i say that i want to marry her. she finished her MBA in march 2000 and returned to delhi. i couldnt wait any longer and asked my mother. she was wild. abhi do-din pehle aaye hai aur shaadi karni hai?? i said yes, gunjan has got a job in which she will travel for 1 year so we want to marry now.

after lot of drama, we got married on april 19, 2000 on a hot humid delhi summer day. and if all the separation and emails weren’t enough, gunjan went for 1 year of training to 8 different locations in india. of course, i tried and visited her at almost all of these. mumbai, chennai, agra, orai and so forth.

she got a permanent job in bangalore and i changed my job in july 2001 and we finally started living together after having had an internet relationship for close to 5 years. we had a baby in 2003 and then in jan 2005, i took my employer’s offer to relocate to US for 2 years. so here i am in the US on a comcast broadband network looking for mp3 songs to listen in my car while driving to work… and if we hadn’t had our share of long-distance relationship, we if any of you is interested, i would love to share more, especially the last 1-2 years when our son has been the sole focus of our lives.

We are not married yet, but hopefully by early 2005. We hope to be engaged by this December.

So don’t worry — you are not late. That’s why I haven’t really updated the story yet, will do it after December.

Good info Chetan! The problem lied in either in the Abhishek or Fav. Songs post because the minute I moved it to the second page, everything was fine.

I do see the horizontal scrollbar, but there’s no overlap. To test better, you’ll have to delete your cache and then load the page otherwise the saved css file in cache is rendered thus still showing it wrong (even though it may have been corrected).

Same problem… it’s all because of resolution…

Apun ko BAHUT mazza aayi itne saare comments ke saath. Keep it coming

[Manpreeu] site theek hui re?