Glimpses from here and there

My favorite picture this week: napping in front of my school.

 

Look carefully. This is the shoe tree. When folks graduate, they throw
 their shoes up here. It creeps me out loads.

Being back

Being back is crazy. Just of a different kind. We are still wrapping up our second project (we had a two hour long presentation via Webex today). The paper with results from our original project got accepted at a Sustainable Development conference in New York and that's exciting stuff. But again it needs prep work. I've been on a couple of orientation panels at my school and the university and met lots of people. Tomorrow will be my first ever football game here (and tailgate) as long as the rain doesn't spoil our plans. This weekend is full of packing and moving. Classes seem intense this year with tons of reading and pre-work. The sun was out today and I took a nap outside school. And then another one back home. Naps continue to remain awesome. I am very excited about having proper furniture. Also, I miss home. I miss my folks. Sometimes it gets really quiet here (and it is surprising to me as I say that because in the past few days I have been trying to lower the noise and clamor of life).

The Worst Email Ever Written

This is fiction, made-up stuff

The worst email that was ever written was like a curse. No, scratch that, it was a curse. Once it was in your inbox, everything went awry. You sent your boss the email with those pictures meant for your boyfriend. You accidentally sent a copy of your bank statement to your mother. Who is usually not the best at email, but this one she managed to read this right away and called you ten times in a row. You think your brother may have a hand in this; he has never approved of what he calls your flighty ways and you can always imagine his self-righteous glee as he read your statement. 

Suggestions welcome

I am working on a piece to understand what motivates women to seek an international graduate education. I'd like to speak to both current and past students (who are studying/have studied outside their home country) and have a chat to learn more about why they made the choices they did. I'm starting to ask around and if you'd be interested in speaking with me or guiding me to someone, I'd greatly appreciate it! I'll be happy to give more details if required. Thanks.

My two bits on the Delhi Metro

Source:
http://respectwomen.co.in/life-of-a-woman-in-delhi-metro/

I vividly remember my first encounter with the Delhi Metro. It had been recently set up and made functional (especially the blue line which I was using) and I decided to use it to visit a book fair at Pragati Maidan. On the way there or back, I can’t remember clearly now, I recall sitting in a busy coach. A man was uncomfortably close to me and coming closer. I was younger then, and perhaps rash, so I gave him a few swift kicks to remind him that this was not okay. In retrospect my behavior is not very commendable either, but I forgive myself because I have let things slide in such cases more than I wish I had. This man started yelling brazenly ‘this lady is hitting me’ and it did not seem like if things escalated, anyone would help me out (notice the word rescue purposely not being used).

After that I stopped using the metro during rush hours and then pretty much all. I was hardly alone in feeling that unwarranted touching and ‘accidental’ brushing was going on during busy hours and otherwise. Soon the Delhi Metro launched a ladies compartment and I think it changed the face of the metro. I don’t think of transport as necessarily gender neutral. Especially not in India, where gender issues are a big problem. Traveling in crowded spaces for women means dealing with not just the regular annoyances of being cramped or pushed or having to board and deboard moving vehicles risking your life but also dealing regularly with the gropers and molesters. You have to pick your battles especially if travel is part of your daily routine. I don’t think you can spend all your traveling time fighting and possibly screaming and shouting. Especially when you know help is not always forthcoming.

Back (to the real world)

I am back in Minneapolis. Nowhere close to being settled, still have to shift houses and giant mattress that is the stuff my nightmares are made of. But I am back. It was a long, arduous journey, with stopovers at Frankfurt (reasonable) and Newark (delayed by 2-3 hours in addition to the 3 hour wait time. I had no watch or access to time and couldn't really tell. Which I think was for the best). It was a miserable trip, full of being sick and itchy-twitchy, hacking my lungs out and sneezing, and hallucinating. But who wants to hear about that. Or the fact that I love the world a little less after being in transit for 40 hours. Let me tell you about some of the other fun highlights:

Scored lots of free Internet at the Delhi airport by using sibling and sibling's friends phone numbers. Feel little guilty about extra customer representative calls they will get but since I was checked-in 3 hours in advance, needed some entertainment.

***

Reflections

I accept all the affection everyone is giving me at home with caution. Somehow, there is so much care and thoughtfulness, I am only a few minutes away from tears most of the time. I laugh to my family about my ability to cry-on-demand but it runs a little deeper than that. But I know that when I leave this bubble of familial love and foibles and hopes and hurts carried together for years, I will be back to my reality. Friends ask me to articulate my reluctance to give into my new life, to embrace it for what it is, and I am not able to do that well. I do enjoy it, it has made my world much richer and full of more hope and repair than it ever was. But I don't know if this is my eventual life. I am only just realizing that I am actually traveling through life. I used to wake up in Vietnam and realize with a surge of excitement, always tinged with incredulous wonder that this is my life, the one in which I get to explore.

***

Adulthood has meant making peace with occasionally cutting corners. There was a time when everything had to be just so (for me, for folks at home, in general in life). It was all full of discontent, irritation and the opposite of calm days. Now picking one’s battles feels like the right philosophy for life. Some things are more charming when worn out. I tell myself the smaller disasters, like the things I left behind or lost, are better than the bigger ones. Who is to know what is true.

***

Emails have in them so much power to affect  us. Just like letters did I suppose but I have never received an important message in my life via letters. I remind myself that even as I feel old (and remember dial-up modems with nostalgia tinged with relief at not having to use them any more), I am relatively young. I am happy to be in the 21^st century. Some people have other eras, decades they would like to go back to. None of that for me. In which world could I have traveled and built the life that I have now.

***

On some days, it feels incredibly hard to be away from home. I am not one for rose-tinting my view when looking at life or people. I have had strange conversations about how much I love my country where I have had to explain: I cannot be absolute in my affections, but to my mind that does not make them any less valid. But I remind myself of the moment I made the decision to leave, a beautiful light-filled Diwali evening, where I sat waiting and realizing that this could not be the life I will live any longer. Who is to say I chose rightly or not, only time will tell.