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Sohrab Fracis

Well, I dunno.  Old African American saying - it's all good.  In other words, "subh theek hai".  That's one step better than "chalta hai", I guess.  All of that meaningless procrastination is to say I have no idea where to start.  At least one knows where to end: just get to the present and that's that.  But it took such a long fucking time and so many twists and turns to get here. I admire and envy all the guys who've managed to have such great normal lives, stayed with the program, got steady jobs, settled down, and raised wonderful families.  Wasn't in my cards.  The online debate over Cathedral vs. Campion reminded me of how I used to wish in college that Campion had been a co-ed school; then maybe I wouldn't have been such a gauche and ham-handed schmuck with the women in college.  No sooner did I get my jaw up off the floor from just gawking at the babes in Elphie’s cafetaria and failing the Inter Science prelims than I was off to IIT, Kharagpur, which was like being condemned to the ultimate shortage of babes for five years.  Great fun, though, otherwise.  And then, instead of getting back to Bombay and capitalizing on my supposed techie status, it was off to the U. of Delaware (herd mentality: everyone else in my wing was applying abroad) and back to the bottom of the learning curve (didn't really have a long way to fall), dealing with women (and competing with guys) who at my age were ten times more experienced. Anyway, have to admit it got better after that: had a reasonable measure of screwing around in both countries, got engaged and disengaged a couple of times, developed an unhealthy fear of commitment, and ended up the classic wary bachelor.  Love?  With the help of hindsight to sift illusion from reality: once, maybe twice, but like I said, I dunno.  Kids?  Love my nieces and cousins in India and been sponsoring a few kids in India and the Dominican Republic on a monthly basis, through Children International, for the past fifteen years.  That's satisfying enough.  Sometimes I feel that watching my friends'’and neighbors' kids grow up is more unconditionally fun than if as a parent I had to discipline them and so on. If you think my personal life was pretty messed up, wait till you hear about my career.  Make that careers.  Those seven years I invested in getting civil engineering degrees?  Took me just three or four weeks on construction site (somewhere in Thana, I think, mental block right now) with my father's and grandfather's company (that's right, third-generation civil engineer) to realize I wanted out.  How to do that without hurting their feelings?  I told my dad that the computer work I'd done for my thesis had made me really interested in computers and programming (big lie).  So I applied to Tata Burroughs, which trained me as a business applications programmer-analyst.  Hasta la vista, seven years of engineering ed.  Now, I was probably the only guy who ever joined TBL without either knowing that they sent guys abroad or even wanting to be sent.  So after about a year of in-house work that I requested at SEEPZ (long commute to Andheri), I was packed off back to the States on contract in Iowa.  This time around, I ended up staying. Got my green card while on contract at Ford in Detroit, realized I was sick of northern winters, and moved down to Florida for the next contract.  Another realization that had been brewing in me was that I was one of those strange fish who just didn't enjoy the techie stuff.  I wanted to do something I did enjoy, so I went back to my childhood love of reading and started to try my hand at writing.  I got the crazy idea that I could just up and be an author, ha ha, so I began work on a novel and, when my contract finally ended, went back to college at the U. of North Florida for an M.A. with an emphasis in Creative Writing.  Hasta la vista, about six years’experience as a systems consultant.  You get the picture.  Can we say unstable? Anyway, I’ll keep it short after that (if you wanna read more: www.fracis.com).  Only about a decade later (of mostly teaching at UNF and scrounging for time and energy to write), I finally managed to break through with my first book, Ticket to Minto (that's in Patna), a collection of stories, half of them in India and half in America, back and forth (the first one's about Campionites at a scout camp).  It even brought me some awards and recognition, and that felt really good.  So needless to say, hasta la vista teaching and hello writing.  Have to admit it's been a strangely consistent and interesting life so far, and looks like it might stay that way.  And there you are - back to the present.  Cheers!