News about home

Current home: Singapore college at IISc.

“The NUS [National University of Singapore] College in Bangalore opens up new opportunities for NUS students to work in Bangalore, the IT capital of India, while taking classes at the prestigious IISc for up to a year. This will be the first NUS overseas college for NUS graduate students,” said a spokesman of the NUS here. The NUS-IISc agreement was formalised here on Wednesday [1 February 2006] by President A P J Abdul Kalam on the NUS campus here [Singapore].

Here's some news from my home for almost six years (1985-91) as a graduate student: Pittsburgh Steelers are playing in the Super Bowl tomorrow. In a guest column Holly Brubach writes:

My own appreciation for Pittsburgh is relatively recent. Like a lot of natives, I grew up feeling apologetic that the city, with its smokestacks, factories and railroad trestles, wasn't picturesque (this was back in the days before "industrial" was an aesthetic); that, being closer to Ohio than to the Eastern seaboard, it wasn't more cosmopolitan; that it was a blunt, hard-charging, working-class town in an increasingly nuanced, executive world. When, beginning in 1975, the Steelers won four Super Bowls in six years, they earned us a respect we'd never had, not even for ourselves.

During those days, Pittsburghers used to take pride in the fact that it held the title of 'the most livable city in the US' for several years. Tomorrow's Super Bowl match sees the Steelers face a team from another city that held that title in the eighties: Seattle.

Yeah, I know, this is not an interesting piece of trivia about this Super Bowl ...