AD 2017

The department secretary sent out an e-mail today about the distribution of completion times in my doctoral program this year.
I quote:

"4 students completed in 5 years, 4 in 6 years, 3 in 7 years, and 1 each
in 8, 10, and 14 years."

So based on just this year's distribution, there is a 7% chance I will graduate in AD 2017. By that time:

a)I will be 37 years old
b)The 50th anniversary of the Superbowl will be observed (Superbowl LI)
c)Sealed government documents surrounding John F. Kennedy's assassination will be released.
d)There will be a human colony on the moon with its own university to which I can apply for a faculty position. (The government of China has announced it will start sending probes to the Moon in 2017, resulting in a manned Chinese landing on the moon in a few years.)
e)Events in Billy Joel's "Miami 2017/Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway" song will take place.

I am already looking forward to space travel. (All information, barring own age, courtesy Wikipedia.)

My father's map

Before I came away to Delhi at the end of the summer of 2001, my father gave me a book of maps of the city. It had one large map as a centrefold, to provide a bird’s eye view and other, smaller ones, on each page, giving details of each grid within the larger map. I took it from him without reflection and packed it into my suitcase, and for the two years I was at Delhi, it stood on the bookshelf at the foot of my bed. I took it down occasionally when there were friends to be visited, and monuments or theatre-halls or restaurants to be placed spatially so we could pay a fair price for the auto-rickshaw rides. Sometimes, on a Sunday afternoon, I would spread it out on my bed to study it. The periphery of Delhi plunged off at the edge of my small bed like a pre-Magellanic vision of a flat world; imagination was stretched thin at Rohini and Ghaziabad; taxis plummeted into a void once the Qutab Minar had disappeared into the southern horizon. And for two years, I planned weekend expeditions and weekday walks within the world of my bed-map, till the roads, gardens and tombs fictionalised on it became real with the flesh of memories and the blood of many rosy sunsets. Looking back, I feel thankful to the person whose small and thoughtful gesture charted for me a new world to discover and love.