Given half a chance, Kaushik would be a hobo, but his parents had different ideas about his life. Fourteen years of schooling under Catholic missionaries (two years of kindergarten, and then twelve years of elementary and high school) had left him mostly dysfunctional. While short stints each summer at his dad's village -- milking cows, driving bullock carts, planting seeds, spooking cousins in the dim light of kerosene lamps, etc. -- helped stem the rot, full-scale recovery started in the Fall of '85, when he joined the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
Four years and much fun later, he was decreed to be a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering. Kaushik had bought into the idea of `higher education in the US' during his junior year. He started his graduate studies (though not necessarily in Computer Science) at the College of Computing, Georgia Tech, in Fall '89. However, he made the cleverest decision of his life before the start of that quarter: he decided to change his field of dreams from AI and theory (his undergraduate thesis areas) to systems. While pursuing a will-o-the-wisp called Ph.D. in the marshlands of GaTech, he has picked up an M.S. in December '91. He continues to nurture hopes of eventually graduating and going on to fame, fortune, power, corruption and studies in Biology.
He is interested in photography, Genetics, and likes to travel and watch old movies. His other interests are in Operating Systems, Real-Time Systems, and Optimistic Discrete-Event Simulation, whence he hopes to make money to pursue his real interests. On the whole, he is grateful that his parents didn't let him have his own way during his childhood!
PS: The marsh-gas engulfed Kaushik completely in the Summer of '95, when he was declared an advanced enough case to be granted a Ph.D. He has allegedly gone west since then, and reportedly pollutes the Bay Area now.