Happy New Year 2005!

I wish you all a very Happy and Wonderful New Year 2005. I hope this year brings success, peace and happiness in your lives. I want to keep my tradition of analyzing the past year and being hopeful for the New Year and here is a brief summary of my experiences.

Good Bye to 2004:
With all of your blessings, this year has been a pleasant journey in my life, except for the year-end tsunami effects. Even though there are many important moments in this year for me, I will describe some of the key things I have gone through in this year. Firstly the HoldingHands project (which most of you know, this project has won us the third prize in Microsoft's Imagine Cup competition) helped me both personally by providing an opportunity to work with a wonderful bunch of team mates and professionally in terms of meeting several successful personalities in the industry. I finally got to taste some of the flavors of industry through my summer internship at Humana Inc. which I enjoyed very much with a wonderful team and in a beautiful city. I managed some progress in my research, as our poster got accepted at a good conference, and we submitted another paper towards the end of year. This paper ate out all my resources to the fullest extent and tested my limits. And I also had some fun in the year in terms of writing a skit (inspired by another skit we did at previous year's Sai retreat) and participating in it as part of Ugadi celebrations. I also completed the vicious circle by taking all the courses offered by my favorite professor at ASU (which are actually not required for my program of study) and managed to perform decently. Overall, the year 2004 has seen some of the best in me and hopefully helped me to make some progress in my spiritual journey.

Welcome to 2005:
Looking forward to the year 2005 and continuing my journey at ASU, I am hopeful that this year would be as good for me as the previous one. Some of the important things I will be dealing with in this year are my PhD Proposal Defense which may be either at the end of Spring semester or at the end of Fall semester, summer internship which hopefully be in one of the research institutes, and finally finding a life partner :). With the blessings from all of you, I hope to achieve a little bit of success in each of these things and discover new heights.

Love,
Sree.

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Recipe for a Happy New Year. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anonymous

Take twelve fine, full-grown months; see that these are thoroughly free from old memories of bitterness, rancor and hate, cleanse them completely from every clinging spite; pick off all specks of pettiness and littleness; in short, see that these months are freed from all the past-have them fresh and clean as when they first came from the great storehouse of Time. Cut these months into thirty or thirty-one equal parts. Do not attempt to make up the whole batch at one time (so many persons spoil the entire lot this way) but prepare one day at a time.

Into each day put equal parts of faith, patience, courage, work (some people omit this ingredient and so spoil the flavor of the rest), hope, fidelity, liberality, kindness, rest (leaving this out is like leaving the oil out of the salad dressing- don't do it), prayer, meditation, and one well-selected resolution. Put in about one teaspoonful of good spirits, a dash of fun, a pinch of folly, a sprinkling of play, and a heaping cupful of good humor.
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