I Had a Dream

I had a dream.

“It is 9:00 PM in India.

No TVs are on. Husbands help clear out the dining tables. Sons fetch their sisters’ jackets from the closets. Fathers check if their daughters’ and wives’ cell phones are completely charged. Elderly mothers-in-law hand shawls to their daughters-in-law and granddaughters. It may be chilly outside.

The men and elderly wave from the door as the women step out of their homes. As the elevators fill up on their way down to the first floor and the sound of women’s voices becomes fainter down the staircases, men shut the doors of their houses and apartments. They will stay up and wait for their women to return.

On meeting at a designated spot in the neighborhood, the women walk toward the lane where their maids live. A group of women joins them.

The larger group walks toward the local bus stop which is right next to the metro station. Women returning from work, laptop bags strapped to their shoulders, join them. Some women carry water bottles.

Mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, partners, friends, maids and their employers, housewives and professional women, step out of their homes, neighborhood after neighborhood. Teenagers and adults in T-shirts, kurtas, jeans, and skirts and older women in sarees and salwar kameez – throng the streets.

In every neighborhood, the women walk through the darkest corners which schoolgirls fear to walk past in broad daylight.

The women enter those lanes which their boyfriends, husbands, brothers, and sons avoid after sunset if the women are in their company.

They stop at the local bus stations and watch the men who loiter there.

They spend at least an hour, looking men in the eye at busy street corners. Many of these men try to touch them, poke them, or whistle at them during the day.

Then they walk back to their homes. Their husbands open the doors.

Every single neighborhood in the city witnesses these quiet processions of women every night. News channels report new cities and neighborhoods where the processions start. But they don’t try to interview the women anymore. Journalists and politicians have stopped their fiery debates on NDTV, IBN, and Times Now.They don’t fetch extra TRPs.The women have refused to cooperate with filmmakers….”

Then I woke up. ‘India’s Daughters’ is doing its rounds of controversy, debates, and discussions.

Chitrangada: Rituporno Ghosh’s Swan Song

I would like to think of myself as a studious observer of human nature. It is therefore not a coincidence that I enjoy representations of human nature and relationships in the printed word and celluloid by astute observers, or artists, who not only often hold a mirror to the complexities that make us human beings, variously fascinating and disturbing, but also raise questions about our identities. And these identities are seldom monolithic or monochromatic.

Rituporno Ghosh’s sudden death a few months ago seemed to have announced the premature stalling of a creative wave that was re-energizing Bengali cinema for some years. Hailed as a preeminent director of the generation after Aparna Sen, Ghosh depicted nuances of human relationships very delicately and reminded his audiences of the fine tones that mark every relationship. His intellectual ability to render Tagore in a vibrant, bold, and refreshingly new way coupled with his acute focus on details of time periods and choice of music, clothes, ambience, and actors, endeared him to lovers of cinema in and outside Bengal.

Ghosh’s  candor in expressing his sexuality through cross-dressing and openly urging society to accept the non-normative sexual identities as part of social life made him a daring, complex, sometimes misunderstood, and often ridiculed artiste. But few could argue with his talent to put a finger on the essential core of emotions that make us human.

In the last feature film that was released during his lifetime, Chitrangada: The Crowning Wish, Ghosh looks at gender and sexuality squarely in the eye and forces his audiences to rethink assumptions and condemnations. Drawing upon Tagore’s 1892 dance-drama, Chitrangada, about the Manipuri princess’s tale of love for Arjuna and reinventing herself, Ghosh weaves in the almost autobiographical character, Rudra’s struggle with society vis-a-vis his homosexuality and love with and for men and the painful journey to reinvent himself for one man.

What makes Ghosh’s treatment of the subject so special is the lack of melodrama and the minute attention to the different strands of emotions that intersect Rudra’s life and, presumably, the lives of this misunderstood community. On one hand, Rudra defiantly embraces his sexuality, dresses accordingly, interacts with past and current lovers, and masterly directs his dance-troupe to express the sea-change that the presence of Arjuna brought in Chaitrangada’s life and sense of self. On the other hand, he is painfully hurt when he tries to convince his father to attend his show and watches with studied but troubled silence as his parents’ life falls apart when he announces his decision to undergo a sex-change to be with his lover.

And then when his lover abandons him for a woman who can bear his biological child, Rudra’s heartbreak is difficult to bear. This is not only because a lover is gone leaving behind a sense of deep betrayal. Ghosh depicts very delicately what it means for a homosexual man to choose to create his own gender (thanks to medical advancements) and lead a life whole and complete. It is a different topic of discussion  that the film ends with what it does. But the question of choice that Ghosh raises through Rudra’s decision is crucial to anyone’s sense of identity.

Yet another point that makes Ghosh’s portrayal of homosexual relationships complex is the inclusion of negative reactions of Rudra’s lover upon seeing his changed body. Ghosh demonstrates the difficult space within which the non-normative sexual identity exists. When Rudra goes as far as going under the scalpel to achieve the most plausible circumstances for a consumable relationship, he is rejected because he is now a changed being, an Other, of Rudra himself. When Rudra finally returns home, symbolically and otherwise, Ghosh again explores how the parents of a homosexual adult in society struggle with social disapproval as well as unconditional love for their child. This deliberate attention to the nexus of emotions, expectations, aspirations, and the series of painful encounters, makes Ghosh’s film so remarkable and memorable.

However, as I finished watching the film, I was left with a few questions which I wish I could ask of Ghosh himself.

Does a man/woman need to change his/her sexual and gender-based identity for the person he/she loves? Can it not be for him/herself? Couldn’t Rudra go ahead with the last surgery irrespective of his lover’s decision?

Does a homosexual man need to assume a woman’s body in order to find and consummate a romantic relationship? Or, does Rudra’s reversal of the transformation process affirm the fact that his identity is ultimately not dependent on his lover’s presence?

As Ghosh’s swan song, Chitrangada, pays tribute to an exceptional artist and human being who never flinched from raising difficult questions that make social life difficult, strenuous, unhappy, but unquestionably human.

Experiencing India’s Diversity

Imagine the following itinerary in India.

Kolkata (eastern India): clear blue skies with wisps of white clouds in the morning, evenings lit up with strings of lights, gorgeous pandals housing mesmerizing idols of Maa Durga, endless crowds thronging the streets at any time of day, devotional music and religious chantings echoing in neighborhoods, phuchka and egg rolls at every street corner, Chinese take-outs, shopping malls teeming with people queuing up outside the fanciest restaurants, and wholesome home-cooked meals of rice, fish curry and meat curries, and rasgollas.  Below: Durga Puja in Kolkata.

Then a two-hour flight.

Hyderabad (southern India): Vahan (vehicle) puja on Dussehra; spreads of delicious vadas, paneer jalebis, biryani, double-ka-mittha, kurbani-ka-mittha; home-cooked khatti dal, alu-bhath, and endless dosas and idlis with chutneys and delicious sambhars; driving along the exquisite Necklace road. Below: Vahan/vehicle Puja on Dussehra.

Then a 24-hour bus ride.

Goa (western India): famous for its beaches, water sports, parties, nightlife, fish preparations, free-flowing booze, and fun-loving people, state-of-the-art tourism balanced by Old Goan Portuguese footprints, old rocky forts and lighthouses overlooking the Arabian Sea, and the Basilica of Bom Jesus that houses the body of St. Francis Xavier. Below: At the Aguada Fort in Goa, overlooking the Arabian Sea.

Another 20 hour bus ride back to Hyderabad. Four hours’ break to change suitcases. Then catch a flight.

Agra (northern India): noted for the world-famous Taj Mahal, numerous landmarks of Mughal architecture, various stuffed parathas (pan-fried breads), ghee-based rich and delicious sweets, dazzling bangles, intricate and elaborate henna on hands, and renowned temples at Vrindavan. Below: The Taj Mahal.

Then a four-hour bus ride.

Gurgaon (northern India): India’s millennium city, welcomes you to a culture of shopping malls, dizzying traffic, gusts of dust blowing from a city building American-style condos, offering take-out food of all sorts (Punjabi, Chinese, South Indian, Thai, Maharashtrian, Continental) and state-of-the-art hospitals. 3 million dollar homes and dazzling hi-tech stores and Software companies dot the city that was a cluster of villages only a few years back. Below: The Ambience Mall in Gurgaon.

Then a two-hour flight to Hyderabad for a few hours. Then a 12-hour train journey.

Tirupati (southern India): the world famous temple of Balaji Venkateshwara. Carnatic music, thousands of lamps, elephants, silk sarees, white dhotis, religious offerings to Balaji, the renowned prasad of laddus, authentic South Indian thali (a pile of white fluffy rice surrounded by 9 bowls of vegetarian curries), more dosas and idlis, trips to locations full of legends about Balaji and his wife, Padmavati, then a scenic drive down the Eastern Ghats to see more temples in their sculptural beauty.  Below: At a Shiva temple near Tirupati.

Then a train journey back to Hyderabad.

Hyderabad: Diwali – festival of lights – and Laxmi puja at home, lamps lit all over the house, fire-crackers, delicious home-cooked food, sweets, and visits to family and friends. Below: Fire-crackers during Diwali.

Then a 23-hour flight to Seattle.

India is described as a diverse country. Experiencing this diversity is a very different ballgame.

Not only did I get to speak and hear Bengali, Hindi, Telugu, Goanese, and Marathi, the Hindi spoken in Hyderabad differs from that spoken in each of Goa, Agra, Gurgaon, and Tirupati.

The weather changed from one place to another. Although it was fairly warm overall, the dry heat of Hyderabad with a strong glare of sunlight was different from the humid warmth of Kolkata; the sea breeze in Goa and salinity in the air made the heat very different from Agra and Gurgaon where summer was on its way out and a slight chill was taking hold; finally, in Tirupati summer was in full swing with its heat, bright sunshine, and slight humidity.

The geography changed as much as the weather: the flatlands of Kolkata and Hyderabad differed from the sea and volcanic rocks of Goa as did the drier areas of Agra and Gurgaon and the rocky Eastern Ghats in Tirupati.

The food changed too: Kolkata’s rice, fish, and milk-based sweets differ from the spicy and sour sambhar, rich biryani, ghee-based sweets in Hyderabad; varieties of fried fish, coconut-based gravies in Goa differed from the buttery pan-fried breads and ghee-rich sweets in Agra and Gurgaon. Finally, unlimited rice and vegetarian curries, sambhars, and laddus in Tirupati stood apart from most of the things I had tasted till then.

This trip was a brief tour through the linguistic, climatic, geographical, and gastronomic diversity of India. And I had visited only 4 out of India’s 28 states and 7 unions.

Bengali films

I watched a couple of films recently. All of them were in my native language, Bengali. Most of these films did not cast well known actors but in all cases the storylines were interesting and performances were quite strong.

One of the films showcased a young medical student in a web of relationships with several women – his mother, his teacher, a blind date from his online chat rooms, and a soft-porn star who he fantasizes about. Although the relationships between the women is neither explored in great detail (except briefly in the case of the mother and teacher) nor complicated, especially in terms of their positionality with the protagonist, the film made me reflect on the number of women and the roles they play in many men’s lives. Especially, in the daily life of an otherwise ordinary middle class boy who leads an ordinary life as a medical student from a normal family background in a mega city in India. While each woman highlighted specific aspects of the young man’s psyche and life, he would be incomplete without all of them. While his mother supports and nourishes him every step of his personal life, his teacher offers a mature friendship that helps him find his bearings about himself, his deepest fears and desires, his sexuality, his life’s direction. While he misses class to watch porn in a run-down cinema theater in a shabby neighborhood, he covers his sexual desires and fantasies by indulging in a dating service, perhaps to convince himself of normalcy in needing female company.

The second film showed amother medical student destroying his career when his girlfriend betrays him and leaves him for a richer man. The med student tries to kill the girl and is declared clinically insane and sent to an asylum. A senior doctor takes interest in his case and offers to bring him home with her and assimilate him with her family for him to function within a family context instead of being isolated among other mentally-ill people. The more the boy lives with the doctor’s family the more we as audience begin to question the meaning of ‘normal’. Who is mad or insane becomes an interesting paradigm in the film as the dark secrets and hypocrisies within the ‘normal’ family surface. While the teenaged daughter prefers boys who drool over her low-cut blouses and hip-hugging jeans to boys who love her but can’t offer anything but love and roses, her unmarried aunt sustains a relationship with a married man who loves her but can’t divorce his wife. The father of the house, the doctor’s husband, exploits younger women employees and then transfers them to other branches of his office when they threaten to confront his wife. The director makes viewers question if this family is normal, healthy, and sane. Is the patient a misfit just because he expressed his rage and bitterness in public? Is this family normal because they avoid confronting each other’s demons for the fear of irreversible upheaval? This film had many good performances and the characters were as well fleshed out  as the relationships between them.

Someone told me that Bengali cinema is going through a revolution. I agree. The range of stories and performances is impressive. Ordinary everyday lives and experiences of people caught in the humdrum pressures of education, love, fear,losses, passion, hatred, anger, jobs, and money become subjects of today’s Bengali cinema made in Kolkata. When our real life tensions get projected on screen, we feel a little less lonely in our worries and fears; we are not alone. And there are lessons to be learned from every film. If you have liked The Descendants, you will like many of these Bengali films.

Re-Location

One meaning of “relocate” means to move physically from one geographical region to another – the distance can range from a few miles to thousands of miles. I relocated to a new country six years ago. I took a very long international flight, flew through different time zones, waited for twenty-fours in an airport lounge in a brand new country and then greeted total strangers as potential roommates in front of a “leasing office” and signed tons of papers and finally was introduced to “wikis” and “Blackboard” in my first departmental TA meeting – all in the space of two days. Everything went past like a blur. What followed is, as they say, history. I relocated to a new city two weeks ago. I drove for eighty miles. Shopped intensively to set up the new place. My sister and my husband accompanied me at every step. Signed tons of papers in the leasing office. Emailed my department about setting up Blackboard and course modules. Took extensive notes at different Orientations. Every detail is neatly noted in a To-Do list. Checks against some items while the others wait patiently. “Blur” is a remote sensation. What will follow will become history too. But are both experiences of relocation similar? The excitement of attending graduate-level classes, reading and writing, being exposed to new schools of thought, teaching fifty students, grading papers, meeting Americans as colleagues, making friends with students from different countries and from different parts of India – was total. So many new experiences in such a brief time period filled me with happiness, joy, and hope. Interspersed were roommate issues and concerns about teaching and grading and course-loads. But until the first visit home, after a year-and-a-half, there was a sense of dislocation. While in our phone conversations I described to my family in India with bubbling excitement the new things I was experiencing here, I imagined conversations I would have with my sisters as I walked down the women’s sections, especially the ‘petite’ collections, in Macy’s and H&M. Many of us had similar feelings. Among friends, we would often talk about our families and things we have loved. Often, the more practical one among us would interrupt the discussions from becoming too emotional. The first trip back refreshed me and made me feel more settled here. I recognized home would always be with me. Wherever I go. The experience of living in one place while thinking of the other lessened.

As I complete this draft, I have re-located once again. From living as a married woman-professional in a long-distance marriage in Orlando, today I live with my husband in a new city on the opposite coast. I have started exploring a new career path. The juggling of time to account for work and personal time has started. Because I work at home (or in the library or in coffee shops) for the time being, self-discipline is crucial. Sometimes I don’t get as much writing done as I would like because I am researching; at other times, I feel good about myself for getting quality work done. Then I reward myself with a good movie or a phone chat or wait until my husband returns to relax with a glass of sangria. Friends and sisters tell me that life is on a constant roll – breakfast and lunch-pack, To-Do Lists, search, write, research, read, dinner, sleep. The same routine the next day. Until the weekend. Do something fun, unwind, relax, and prepare for the following week. It is a roll, with its share of swings and lows. But being at home where the heart is better than the anticipation of re-location.

The United States of ‘India’

There is no “India,” there are many “India-s.”

Often, nationals from India experience India’s linguistic and culinary diversity on foreign soil.

Year: 2004     State: Florida    Semester: Fall

The dark brown door opens into a large hall with a buff colored carpet. White wooden walls. The three-pronged lights glow with the switch turned off. No ceiling fan. Closed glass windows. Back home in India, carpeted floors would be foolishness. Especially in summer when temperatures comfortably climb to 110 degrees.  Walls are always of cement or stone, rarely of wood. Light switches flip the opposite way to turn on. Ceiling fans are a necessity; air conditioners don’t run 24×7. Windows always remain open to let in fresh air and are closed only during bad weather.

Once inside the apartment, the four girls meet each other for the first time. All are from India. They’re glad the Students of India Association clubbed them together instead of the International Students’ Office which would have allotted them roommates from different parts of the world.

Most university campuses have Indian student organizations. These associations work as a cultural grounding for students who have left their country behind. The executive committees organize and celebrate major Indian festivals, like Diwali (festival of lights) and Holi (festival of colors), and special days, like Independence Day and Republic Day. On the west coast of the US, there are two such organizations in Washington, two in Oregon, and sixteen in California. They are also responsible for assigning roommates to apartments.

In India, living with roommates is a relatively recent phenomenon which is gaining momentum as the Information Technology boom scatters young unmarried professionals across the country.  Typically, people live in houses built by their parents. In the biggest cities, many families live in personally owned apartments; out-of-state students often stay in residential hostels and out-of-state professionals rent apartments and live with their families.

In Florida, the four girls will share an apartment with roommates for the first time. Excited and glad to be in their comfort zone (they’re all Indians after all), they sit down on the carpet and try to get to know each other.

What language will they speak?

Priya speaks Bengali (from the eastern state Paschimbanga whose capital is Kolkata).

Chetana speaks Marathi (from the western state Maharashtra whose capital is Mumbai).

Sunita speaks Hindi (understood all over India but belongs to 5 northern states).

Gayatri speaks Telugu (from the southern state Andhra Pradesh whose capital is Hyderabad). English is the only common language. Everyone understands Hindi, but only one speaks it fluently.

There are almost 200 languages in India, 1600 if dialects are included. The Constitution of India recognizes 18 official languages. The currency is printed in 15 languages. Any job application form is printed in 3 languages – English, Hindi, and a regional vernacular. Most of the languages have their distinct alphabets, scripts, and vocabularies and can be as different from each other as English is from Chinese.

Now that English becomes the apartment’s lingua franca, as in India, they turn towards becoming closer roomies. Why not cook together?

Two are vegetarians and two are not.

Gayatri – a strict vegetarian from southern India – does not know the taste of onion and garlic. She has grown up eating dosa, sambhar, and chutneys.

 

Sunita – from Delhi – occasionally eats eggs. She was raised on roti (chapatis) and less spicy curries.

Chetana – from Mumbai – loves fish and chicken. She loves Pav Bhaji.

Priya – from a food connoisseur’s family in Kolkata – eats and enjoys everything.She loves her fish curry.

According to The Hindu-CNN-IBN State of the Nation Survey, conducted in 2006, 31% of Indians are exclusively vegetarians. Their food habits stem from “inherited cultural practice rather than individual belief.” While Brahmins (highest caste) in many states tend to be vegetarians, this study shows “regional location” often determines food habits; hence, coastal areas have more fish-eating communities than land-locked central and northern areas which have more vegetarian communities.

Since everyone eats vegetarian food in the Florida apartment, why not cook some daal (lentils boiled and seasoned with spices) and rice on Day One?

Once the daal is boiled and ready, each girl suggests spices for tadka, chhok, baghar, phoron. They mean “seasoning” in their respective languages.

What will be the seasoning spices?

Gayatri suggests cumin and mustard seeds.

Sunita chooses cumin seeds and green chillies.

Chetana takes out mustard seeds and tomatoes.

Priya brings dry red chillies and ‘panch puran’ seeds.

These are only four ways. If potatoes can be cooked in at least three hundred ways, as Shashi Tharoor writes in From Midnight to the Millennium, imagine the multiple seasonings possible to add flavor to an otherwise bland daal.

Soon enough Gayatri’s mustard seeds and Sunita’s green chillies lock horns. To dispel a gathering storm on the very first day of their comfort zone, Chetana and Priya call up Papa Johns’ and order a large all-veggie pizza with no onions.

Bhalo. Achha hain. Bagundi. Sahi hain. Good.

November 2011

Curry Doesn’t Work for Desis Anymore?

2011: Priya and Natasha want pasta and burger, not chapatti and curry. Unlike their mother Anjali in the 1960s.

“My childhood was different,” remembers Anjali, “it was a rule that we had to eat homemade daal and curry at least twice a week.”

In the United States and Canada, children of Asian Indian origin increasingly prefer burgers, pasta, and cornbread to Indian food.

While students and professionals from India cook simpler traditional meals regularly, many Indian Americans make a quick sandwich. The latter, the Indian diaspora, are often called desis, i.e., originally from/of desh, home country.

Anjali’s father, Dr. Maninder Siddhu reached Oregon as a graduate student in 1959 and his wife Manpreet joined him in 1960. He was the “first visible” Sikh in the area with his turban, unshorn hair, beard and moustache, characteristics of men born into Sikhism. Sikhs form a minority religious group in Punjab, a north western state in India. When the Siddhus flew 8,000 miles to Oregon, the memories of Sikh/Punjabi food did too. Like most immigrants, homeland’s food on the table anchored the Siddhus in foreign soil.

But in 1960s’ Oregon Manpreet found it “very challenging” to cook Punjabi food like ‘makai ki roti’ (ground-corn bread), ‘sarson ka saag’ (spinach in mustard), and ‘gulab jamun’ (rose-flavored dessert). She hunted down substitutes for ingredients and served Punjabi food on the table. As a result, “the cornbread tasted different” because it substituted ‘makai ki roti.’

In Ontario, where the family moved in 1963-64, Manpreet did not need substitutes; she drove 500 miles to an Indian grocery store in Toronto and stocked up on months of rice, daals, and spices. Refusing to let go of Punjabi culture, Manpreet ensured, unlike other immigrant relatives, that her children ate Punjabi food along with the adults. While Anjali’s cousins ate pasta and the adults dipped chapatti into daal, Manpreet’s children chose days of the week to eat American food and ate Punjabi food on the remaining days. So, spaghetti and sauce, sandwiches, and different kinds of meat, roasted, grilled or barbecued, shared the Siddhu table with saag and curry chicken. Neither did the children “rebel” against Indian food nor could they refuse it.

However, remembers Anjali with a fond smile on her face, when her Naani (maternal grandmother) visited from India, the family feasted on “real Indian stuff” like ‘parathas’ (shallow-fried stuffed bread), pooris (deep fried breads), and ‘halwa’(dessert). But often Naani would complain that Manpreet was losing touch with the delicacies, like the inexhaustible list of chutneys (sauces) made from various spices. Although the Siddhus grew some herbs in their garden, the limited variety didn’t satisfy Naani. Her worry that Anjali would never learn the family’s culinary secrets kept her awake. Anjali’s parents nodded grimly – they shared her anxiety.

Luckily for Naani, Anjali learned the basics of Indian cooking from her mother. But today, a successful doctor, wife of an established doctor, and a mother of two children, she cooks mostly American food – “time constraints” don’t permit the “effort” it takes to prepare Punjabi meals. Nevertheless, she often serves chhole (garbanzo beans), rajma (kidney beans), and curry chicken for dinner.

Moreover, today is a “world of difference” when it comes to availability of Indian food. In Seattle, with seven Indian restaurants on 14^th Avenue alone, there’s no dearth of curries, samosas, idlis and dosas. Add to that the twenty Indian grocery stores which sell essential ingredients and pre-packaged delicacies like paneer and chutneys that delight both cooks and connoisseurs in the Seattle-Tacoma area which ranks 13th nationwide for its Indian American population.

Does she feel she has lost anything? Of course, says Anjali, with a distant look in her eyes. “I can’t cook things my mother could.” After a brief silence she adds, “If I had to, I could.”

She says it’s important her daughters learn to cook “some Indian food,” she’s confident they will because they like it and miss it when they are away on trips.

While culinary secrets, which distinguish food in one Indian family from another, get lost in the currents of the immigrant experience, “it’s a trade-off” between career choices and family traditions. And since third generation immigrant children “miss” their grandparents’ traditional food, all is perhaps not lost.

December 2011

Fun with iPad

I am not a gadget happy person. I use a cell phone because I need it for emergency contact when I’m not at home. It has in fact blunted my ability of memorizing phone numbers. I use a laptop because everyone writes on computers today. As a result my longhand writing is becoming slower and I am becoming less patient with hand-writing and scratching words or looking for an eraser. The delete or backspace key is lightning-times faster, or so it seems to me. I still hesitate to use new softwares that I know make saving files much easier. But I am very glad that because of the internet and digitized research databases I can download articles from remote libraries worldwide and also read electronic versions of scholarly books anywhere anytime.

Toying between hesitation and anticipation I finally brought home an iPad. As soon as I figured how to operate it (and it was surprisingly easy – thanks to Steve Jobs’s design and vision), I looked up iBooks and iTunes and started downloading books and video files. What I found prompted me to write this piece.

A casual browse led me to several files on a range of topics that was astounding – astronomy, literature, general chemistry, medical research, calculus, Medieval Age, Darwin, machine learning, and many more. What was most exciting about the find was that each brief lecture (10 minutes to an hour) was made available by the most prestigious academic institutions around the world. While ‘What is Great Literature’ was a recorded discussion by faculty members of Oxford University, the Machine Learning course was taped from a class in Caltech. These are only a few examples. I thought of my undergraduate days – the interminable trips to libraries to get hold of one book, or the number of book-orders at the city library to borrow an important recent publication. Of course all the very best books and articles will not be available through Apps; but the ability to access a range of information is an incredible boon.

Imagine a person who wants to know the basics of Evolution. There are at least 12 files on Evolution – from Darwin to present theories and controversies. Any teenager who listens to these files just might develop interest in the field and grow up to be a major evolutionist scholar or scientist.

I used to be fond of Chemistry as a young middle school student. If I want, I can follow the entire course on General Chemistry and learn what every college science graduate knows. Prateek can brush up his knowledge of Algorithms from the MIT course available for download from the App store.

I think what I’m driving towards is not how fantastic the iPad or the iPhone or any other hi-tech gadget is. I am spellbound by the availability of knowledge and information. Technology helps this widespread accessibility. Knowledge is not restricted to a few – while institutes make some of their valuable information available, such technologies make them accessible to the general public.

I have often been an advocate of face-to-face meeting and interaction over online and virtual friendships. Why be on FB when you can meet in a coffee shop? Why chat on GTalk when you can step out of your house and meet the person? Why use Skype on an iPad on a train and not enjoy the scenery outside?

But if you have an iPad and you can click on thousands of iTunes files or iBooks and read and learn when you want to learn and what you want to learn, more iPad and Apps I say! Of course one should be able to prioritize real-life interaction and classes over virtual ones; but since knowledge is available through such devices that make texts so readable, one should access it as often and as much as one can.

I believe in education because that is the source of an enlightened mind. Access to knowledge should be able to match the desire for knowledge. I sometimes feel that the average college student in India, if granted such access, will genuinely embrace education and not just a degree. Because, most of us know, college degrees often don’t guarantee education. They only grant degrees, statements of higher literacy. Fewer students enjoy, cherish, and utilize what they learn in college because they want to be educated and not just literate. I am hopeful that the more knowledge is made accessible to students, the more they will take genuine interest in educating their minds.

And as more and more countries become technology-savvy, the more they will be able to download such Apps and enjoy intellectual rides!

I do.

A Book-reading Version of Julie and Julia?

I’ve been thinking of creating a reading list of good fiction for myself. And read the books that I haven’t been able to get to for whatever reason.

Looking at NYTimes bestseller lists and book reviews gave me some idea of where I may start. Then I came across the book, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Although the title sounded a bit like ’10 Things you want to do before you die’ I flipped though the tome one afternoon. In a few minutes I wasn’t flipping anymore: this book is an astonishingly well-compiled collection of titles and brief summaries of novels (used in the broadest sense), organized according to publication dates – from pre-1800 to 2009. The brief introduction to each book is written by either an academic, a literary journalist, a literary critic, a well-known book reviewer, or other experts.

May be it was the warm glow of the yule log in the fireplace or the ‘Silent Night’ playing in the B&N store, an idea occurred to me. I thought of attempting a Reading Marathon. My ambitious self jumped the gun and thought of ALL the titles, but my more practical self calmed me down. I went to the ‘from 2000’ section of the book. 53 titles. Read-able. Roughly 1 book a week. And, maintain a running blog of my response to each book I complete. Doable?

I copied the titles in my notebook. Now I’ll start hunting down the books. And then maintain a blog dedicated to my reading. I’ll try to follow the sequence of titles in the book, but I’ll have to adjust if/when I don’t find a book as soon as I need it.

Many years ago I used to maintain a list of books I had read in a year. Now, I am going to follow a reading list instead of reminiscing. Let’s see how that works.

Good luck to me!

Seattle

Sleepless in Seattle…..Seattle’s Best Coffee…….Grey’s Anatomy and the amazing characters…..that used to be Seattle for me…until April 2011!

Now I live in Seattle – my new city, my new home. Minutes away from the UW Library, I walk a new road to be with what I love most….

After almost seven years in sunshine state Florida, the drizzly grey mornings were quite new….but what was also new were the variety of green, shapes and sizes of leaves, the flowers that seem to bloom everywhere – sudden bursts of purple, red, and yellow along the sidewalks, and the quick shifts in weather – a grey 7:30 am glides into a bright sunny 8:45 completely unnoticed!

Seattle is very pretty…… I still can’t get over the flowers that I saw in the first few weeks of May – it was late Spring then. The Evergreen/Emerald State is indeed dazzling. I hear this glory of green is short lived as grey steely wet days come to stay from September onwards. Well….until then, the ex-Floridian will brace the intermittent sunshine, the gorgeous green, the delicate flowers in their incredible range of colors, and soak in the new experience of living in a new city after a very long time 🙂