Yelläks /ˈyæl•eks/

First of all, I did not want to go to India, I never had the idea to go there. When I started to gather information about my next stay abroad, I wanted to go to Malaysia. Malaysia? Why Malaysia? Well, it’s all about girls, isn’t it? But that was not the only reason: Before that time I have never been to an Asian country. The German definition of an Asian country excludes countries like India. So when we talk about Asia, it is clear that we mean countries like China, Japan, or Korea.

So I went to the Office of International Affairs of my university, which helped me a lot during my first stay in the US, and I explained my wishes to them. Unfortunately they had no contract university in Malaysia. A contract university would have made the things a lot easier and most of the times it is based on an exchange of resources and also students. They suggested me (because of my wishes to visit an Asian country) to gather informations about the IIT in India and I got in contact with some research groups developing software for speech recognition. I am not really interested in that field and I discussed my poor experiences with my colleagues while the lecture was going on. The professor heard what I said and he asked me to come by after class. He told me that he knows somebody, who lives in India and most likely can help me out. But unfortunately they lost contact to each other and the only thing I had was his name and his probable location: Chennai. So I started to do a little bit of reasearch on that (Google is your friend) and I found him finally. So I wrote him an email introducing myself and asking him, if he knows my professor. Directly with his positive answer he asked me in what field of reasearch I am interested in and he forwarded my email to the appropriate professors, who organised and fixed my stay in India.

So basically it was pure fortune and coincidence that I went to India. But at the end, it was the best thing I have ever done.