Thoughts

Two years ago, I missed a stark opportunity to visit Brno, Czech Republic, for a conference, Interspeech, a rather esteemed one for works related to speech processing. My paper got rejected despite the fact that we won a competition on diagnosing COVID-19 from cough sound recordings using deep learning. It was a special track of the conference. Anyway, that is not important.

I am on a bus from Budapest to Prague now, and it made a stop at Brno. It is not like I ever yearned to visit Brno, but I was just momentarily sad for not being able to come then, and I was quite excited by the possibility, because I had a good chance.

Well, here I am today. If I wanted to, I could just get off the bus.

This is one of many incidents that made me realize that things do fall into place over time. You somehow end up in places where you, at some point of your life wanted to go, albeit in totally unanticipated circumstances, and then you just chuckle at the twists of fate.