January 2006

Walking across the Stony Brook University campus two years ago with P.H. Tuan, the Charles B. Wang Center architect, we came across a student taking photos of the Center from the Administration Building. The Wang Center calendar photo contest was underway so we chatted for a few minutes and exchanged contact info. A photo Joy took that day now graces the back of the 2006 Wang Center Photo Tribute Planner, and inside it are other wonderful photos by him.

Every once in awhile chance meetings with total strangers brings someone into your life who makes you see the world differently, gives you a better appreciation for many things, and becomes a friend. Joy is one of those people.

He was new to Stony Brook then and it was hard. An international graduate student from India, with no transportation so he was cloistered on campus, in a department notorious for being the most uncivil towards its students even while giving them the best financial support, before he left he talked about how depressing that first semester was. But as his new camera hobby grew he took photos for most of the campus media, the first grad student wedding in Wang and many performances there, became an officer of the SB Photo Club, people even began to request his services, and most importantly, he made friends.

And he got a motorcycle so that he could escape, even if just to go to a grocery store. For almost a year he never left Long Island because he did not have an American license. But when it finally came, just this past Fall semester, the first thing he did was to take off to see the mountains.

A graduate of India's elite IIT (their MIT), Joy's original intent was a Ph.D. in Computer Science. But after an internship last summer at Yahoo! he decided a Masters would do just fine and he would rather work for Yahoo instead. He returned to India in October to marry his high school sweetheart and in December got his degree.

And he decided to embark on an epic journey - to go from coast to coast on his motorcycle to get to his new job in California. At first we were going to write an ongoing series about Joy's trek - and requests to the wwwedu and CyberYenta listserves not only brought lots of suggestions for a map with red pins to show his trek, but introduced him to another Bengali rider. One suggestion was Google's red pin map process. Joy figured it out and in less than an hour had it online. Unfortunately a Microsoft glitch made it difficult for many to see so he disabled it. 

But in the end it didn't matter. He made it to the other side of the country so fast the next issue of the Zine had not even come out. And along the way he stayed with friends, some total strangers he had met online through motorcycling chats.

Doing a cross country motorcycle trip in the middle of winter is momentous enough. Doing it as a foreign student who had only been in the country for two years raised it to another level. But if you read Joy's blog and go through his website - there is one thing he never bothers to mention. When he was two years old he got the measles - and when it was over he was almost completely deaf.

But he never let it stop him. Perhaps a better way of saying it is that it made him try everything - to test his limits - to be able to say - "I can do anything." And he does!

He has a website with his photos and a blog for his thoughts. Both are well worth visiting. http://www.joydutta.com

And reading his trek blog taught me something I feel like an absolute fool not realizing. Joy's next to last night here I took him out for a farewell dinner. I work with undergrads and they love being taken out. It means good food and they can't afford it themselves. In Joy's trek blog he wrote how he had dinner for the first time with an American family and what an experience it was. How much easier, I thought, would it have been for me to bring him home to eat instead of cooking for my daughter and then going out to dinner with him. I thought about the itinerary the Zine had been sent for the kids from the hockey teams from Harbin and Qiqihar and all the restaurants they had been to too. Sometimes it is the simplest things we don't think to do.

Thank you Joy - for showing all of us how much more we could be if we just ventured forth and worried less about 'what if'.

JY