Mukul Kumar happy through cooking~ help foreign students feel NTU as a home

As international students living in another country for either work or study, it's not as simple as eating like a chocolate. We need to make lots of sacrifices and adjustments to turn our dreams into reality. Quickly adopting their culture, working style, communication, and food is crucial to feeling more comfortable here. However, loneliness is a major factor that can distort everything.

I am trying to join international or Taiwanese activities to make myself happy and divert my mind from loneliness. This helps me focus more on my work. Recently, I participated in an international activity titled "How to Make Rice Balls by Hand to Activate Your Brain Power" on October 27, 2023. The event was organized by Miss Ginger and Dr. i-Fan Li. During this activity, I met many foreign students, and we shared information about our countries and discussed various topics. Here, I realized that sometimes we can turn negative things into positives with just one tool: communication. Communication is a medium through which you can share your thoughts with others, making yourself happy and expressing gratitude to others.

Unfortunately, there are very few places at NTU where people can gather, and these places are not very friendly. I consider myself lucky to have met Miss Ginger, who gave me a rice cooker as a gift to cook by myself. She also gave me a package of Tainan Indica 18. I cooked Taiwanese rice and enjoyed it with Indian food. In my plate, the left side has Taiwanese rice, and the right side has Indian food: "DHAL" (Indian Hindi Name) made from Green Gram Beans and "ALOO BHUJIA" (Indian Hindi Name) made from potatoes. In the other plate, there's salad and "TILORI" (Indian Hindi Name), which is like a heart shape in my plate, and another dish known as "PAPAD" (Indian Hindi Name). So, my meal is like a combination of Taiwanese and Indian food. Hahaha, I really enjoyed this food.

I would like to express my deep gratitude to Miss Ginger for making me happy through cooking. I would also like to request her to consider creating an international group to bring foreign students together or find other ways to meet at a specific place. This would be a great contribution from NTU or her side to help foreign students feel NTU as a home.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Best Regards,
Mukul Kumar, Ph.D. Student ~ from India
Graduate Institute of Optoelectronics and Photonics, NTU.
 

Additional information 

1.Tainan Indica 18, which was named and published in 2018 and planted in Yilan Sanxing Kelin. I only put a little organic fertilizer and fern azolla to supplement the fertilizer. I dried it in the sun by myself.
2.Thanks to Ruzhen’s classmates for giving wedding gift electronic pots to foreign students.