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"The person you will spend most of the rest of your life with is yourself. Therefore, you owe it to yourself to become as interesting as possible. Think Princeton."
- written on the cover of Princeton University application form.

Princeton was exactly what I expected it to be. Pretty and green, just the way I love any campus (S.V.C.E inclusive). But what my imagination failed to deliver was just how vivid the place would be. The intelligentsia saunter down the stoned pavements argufy over how a fellow professor was unworthy of the Nobel Prize. Tobacco-smoking, nose-pierced sophomore consumed by the tenets of Darwinian theory takes notes in his Republican father's old letterpad. I observe a John Kerry badge stuck on his shoulder. His other hand was caressing his girlfriend's skin. Another group of girls
sophomores clad in poplin skirts window shop as they sip skim-decaf white chocolate mocha grande. I was told it was a low end store and although there was a "sale" sticker on the door, not too many people actually went inside. It was GAP. As I walked down the road there were more stores selling shoes, clothes, perfumes, even lingere, galore. This was the stuff Fifth Avenue was made of. Hell I couldn't afford a nail polish remover here even if it were on sale!

Then there were the buildings. The courtyards. The dorms. Inside of these, people were making decisions. Serious decisions. Who would be the President of the Liberal Society? How many Nobel prizes were expected this year? How many prodigies would take courses in this neighbourhood? And most importantly, who would be setting my GRE questions?!

The architecture was Victorian. The stone walls of the buildings are as intricately carved as chapels. Some are as small as a shed. Some are as big a fortress. The roofs were Gothic in style. There were curious statues, some contemporary, some dated and some even ugly! Ivies climb over the windows of dorm rooms. Squirrels and Chinese graduate students scurry down the sidewalks into their respective homes: treetops and laboratories. Some trees are as old as Princeton. The lab buildings might be primeval, the books even. But that's when time halts for technology to pass over.

The popular car on road is the mini-cooper, as fashionable as a Beemer. Wild parties, wilder scandals and eccentric geniuses, live in the same era. Duty during the day and a druggie in the night. After all they have to "discover themselves".

Princeton is a beautiful campus. Less intimidating than Harvard and more retro in its Gothic style. But like everything else in life, this is all just the screen saver. Princeton has an exclusive feel to it. This is not just regard to the stores and the cars that people drive around here. It has been told that this is a place which has an over-population of White American Anglo-Saxon Protestant (derogatorily termed as WASP) New England blue-bloods. But that is the same for all Ivy Leagues. And like any other University in America, it stretches its admissions to several cultures and races to add what is called "campus diversity". And why should they? It's private campus in the heart of an area whose zipcode people pay millions to get in their address. And people will continue to want to come here for as long as the quality of education is consistent. But "education" here, unlike in India is determine by how broad your outlook is and how liberal you have been in your course of study. Taking a course in exotic Egyptian dance and in Power Engineering Analysis during the same semester is not mutually exclusive. Making friends with a South American student in the class is as demanding an exercise as reading Thoreau or listening to Mahler. There are no course credits for that. And whether it broadens one's panorama is debatable. What is also debatable is whether campus diversity is offered because of a University's ethical policy or if the funds from private sources are political in nature.