Thursday had dawned like any other Thursday with the beep-beep alarm going off on the cell phone. A sickly dawn spread across the dark sky outside and the city paled across the river preparing for another day same as the last one. Continue reading My Durga
Category Archives: Featured
Becoming Indian: Memories of Graduate Student Life in the US
It was all there. The little bits and pieces of India that had managed to pass through strict inspection. For some of us, it was in the form of three or four bottles of the leading brand of coconut oil, enough to last two years of our serious, nothing but scholarly existence in this well-populated university town in Florida. Enough to oil our heads and necks and the pages of our complicated advanced level cheaper Indian reprints of textbooks that had traveled with us through endless labyrinthine chutes of airport security.
Continue reading Becoming Indian: Memories of Graduate Student Life in the US
Peripheral friends
I remember a woman I met a long time ago who went hiking with me in California. She was a native of those mountains, having climbed those heights often in childhood.
Me, a city person, unused to those heights, kept lagging behind.
Every few steps she stopped for me, turned back, sometimes climbed down. Often, she would stop by the wayside to show me a berry, telling me which ones were edible and which ones could kill. I trusted her judgement instinctively, tasting a huckleberry for the first time or smelling a sage leaf. Continue reading Peripheral friends
Durga Puja, Fall, Kashful and the city
I got out of my apartment building yesterday and there they were. A bunch of dried, white grass flowers framed by concrete next to a stern sign that read : “Private. Do not trespass.”
Kashful. Or its distant cousin has bloomed in Jersey City. Fall has touched even the concrete.
Kashphool? Or Kashful? How do you approximate from Bengali? Wikipedia tells me it’s called Kans grass in English, a grass native to South Asia. (“Kans grass”! Sounds strange. Not much better than Saccharum spontaneum, apparently its scientific name.)
This Kashphool in Jersey City is different from the ones at home in India.
Continue reading Durga Puja, Fall, Kashful and the city
Facebook, old photographs and memories
Throughout the history of time there’s been Facebook. At first, in ancient societies, photographs were used in human social networking only to identify people. But evidence has been found that many denizens of those older cultures preferred other markers in the space for profile pictures to identify themselves as a flower, a celebrity or a cartoon character that they thought represented them.
In the initial days of Facebook, people were scared of revealing themselves.
And then, a time came when everybody started sharing pictures. Those inhibitions started receding slowly, much like the slow ebbing of a wave on the beach. Perhaps teenagers who are on Facebook nowadays can’t even remember those days.
But I can. I can remember that day on the beach.
That’s because an old photograph has resurfaced on Facebook.
Continue reading Facebook, old photographs and memories
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