Room(s)

I have a memory of summers, a summer and a memory, which are one of my happier ones. I remember walking back home, perhaps from tuition classes or German or one of the many random nothings that filled up my teenage and early years. The street lights are glowing, the evening is starting to cool down and the dust has settled for today. I can hear the hum of evening rituals, voices and television and bikes and shouts and clinking of utensils.

Fraud Indian Woman

So I dug through the archives and found this. I wrote this but never shared it? I think it was probably because of it doesn't seem to make a clear point, just ask questions. But I still find it a useful compass, even if it is two years later. 

At this stage in my life, I find I have no choice but to talk about gender or being a woman. I am not going to get into how I am at this point or stage in my life but I find that I have to speak. There are so many levels on which I am tired of seeing how the world works against women. In this I include both men and women. It is not a one way street. As I moved to Minneapolis, I found myself navigating expectations of how I should be both as an 'Indian' and 'Indian woman'. I am not the first nor the last person to do this. I am just talking about my experiences, which for the longest time I have held back from sharing because I wasn't sure if there was anything new in it. That being said, not being new doesn't make it any less important. I have also often wondered how is it that people reach a point of incredible frustration and disappointment with stereotypes and expectations. I get it now. It is the timeless story of the last straw breaking the camel's back. You reach a point where you cannot take it one more time.

A Borrowed Imagination

I was going through some old writing and blogs and I found a bunch of things that reminded me of who I was and where I was and how far I've come in some ways (and not in others).

The Last Colony

"Women are the last colony. Other colonies have been liberated. A colony is a person or place whose resources you exploit, whose cheap labour you exploit. So our colonizer, our families, exploit our labour, exploit our sex, exploit our reproductive power, everything."

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/columns/Harsh_Mander/the-last-colony/article4146418.ece

Frozen Turkey Bowling and Other Life Sports

That thing that says O'Hare, does it 
have a name? Is it just a display sign? 
I want it to be more

I jokingly ask a friend, if this will be the thing that changes my life and makes me more organized (the thing in this case being a padfolio with multiple compartments and a pullout binder). I want to believe it will be but as my friend says, probably not, but it's worth the hope. To which I say, hope should not cost 30 bucks. Really.

Spark Joy!

 “A good half of the art of living is resilience.”

― Alain de Botton

(his pithy lines are my version of the holy book or whatever)

I'm always trying to find the right balance of being out and doing things and living and simply being at home and just living. I've started to notice a pattern: I'll have a weekend or two with an intense burst of activity and then I will hibernate, to recover.