Thursday, June 26, 2008
Monday, June 16, 2008
Unabridged stream of thought...
Day1:
what goes around, comes around...I am writing this one during the busy hour, 4:00 PM, well actually not the usual busy one though but for me it is as I start my work just about then. No particular reason for the title except for the fact that it has come from subconscious self and I usually do not like to ignore what it says. This week has been hectic, especially because of the fact that this is the fourth state I have been in just the first four days. My first experience with two things, one that seemed very fake but was actually real another seemed very real but was fake. I bet you didn't understand a bit and I do not expect that you do. This is, as far as I know, just e-thinking... If I haven't teased you enough, I am going to make references to the two things I was referring to above in a couple of places through this blog and you with your inimitable intellectual power have to decipher and tell me what is real and what is not. That's it for now folks... I have exhausted both my time and creative energy to write any further. Tune in later to hear more on the puzzle.
Day2:
I Just want to know who I am...Random thoughts, Random Ideas... You never know what goes on in a human mind. It is not just difficult but also impossible to capture these thoughts and ideas in a passage. It's a very beautiful friday morning and I am as usual keeping my self busy finishing up(cleaning up) stuff for the week. A chore for me, like it or not you've got to do it. Do you ever get the feeling that the place where you belong to isn't where you want to be and the place you want to be is what you are not comfortable in. Its hard to describe this feeling unless you experience it first hand. An Alien in the land of A, that's what I call thy self and everyone similar. Most people do not realize what a great opportunity they've got in being a first generation immigrant in the land of immigrants. Most people don't understand that it is not just a new place of work but that they are experiencing a new culture first hand. I still can't convince my self that this is a completely new culture as in a way I have, we have lived all our lives either this way or aspiring to be this way. But at some level we are still different and that will never change much.
What does america mean to you?I have been trying to answer this question for the past one year and am sure every one has a different opinion about this. As with any topic about or involving Indians, this might also lead to endlesss debates about the positive and negative aspects of a country, the cultures blah...But if you ask me to stop, hold my breath and give the most genuine answer, I will say without hesitation that America is where I can be my self. This obviously is going to start a huge debate and am pretty sure I am going to get some interesting opinions from people. But frankly, thats what it is all about. For an average middle-class indian who is more often than not tied down with dogma on how things should be done, how his life should be, staying in the united states could be a relief. Thats probably true for any immigrant in a foreign land. If you are in a place where at best you know only a handful of people, you tend to be yourself in a way enjoying every bit of what you are with out caring about what others around are doing. The same is particularly true if you are staying a rural community here in the United States, where things are much more simple as compared to an average rural community in India. You can actually find that people are actually laid back, with little or no connections with the outer world at least not to an extent where those connections start interfering with your day to day life...so different compared to any village in India where an average conversation between two middle-aged ladies fetching water from a parched well or a near by creek can be about their sons or relatives' sons living abroad.
Well, almost. America is still a land of a million(3 million) indians and there still could be the usual dogma on how a boy coming here should be graduating either from a well reputed university or slogging his butt off on the well-trodden software path, on how he should not be ogling at all the white skin at his disposal... But at a certain level no one cares. You live and let live... If my recent visit to a genleman's club was any representation of this true freedom (I would like to call that). I am pretty sure that there could me more than a few of my distant or close relatives in the crowd and I would have definitely cared about this fact if it were India, but here who gives a damn. I bump in to a cousin at such a place, am pretty sure I would given the sheer number of cousins I have staying here, I would just say hi and talk as if I met him in a marriage reception.
what goes around, comes around...I am writing this one during the busy hour, 4:00 PM, well actually not the usual busy one though but for me it is as I start my work just about then. No particular reason for the title except for the fact that it has come from subconscious self and I usually do not like to ignore what it says. This week has been hectic, especially because of the fact that this is the fourth state I have been in just the first four days. My first experience with two things, one that seemed very fake but was actually real another seemed very real but was fake. I bet you didn't understand a bit and I do not expect that you do. This is, as far as I know, just e-thinking... If I haven't teased you enough, I am going to make references to the two things I was referring to above in a couple of places through this blog and you with your inimitable intellectual power have to decipher and tell me what is real and what is not. That's it for now folks... I have exhausted both my time and creative energy to write any further. Tune in later to hear more on the puzzle.
Day2:
I Just want to know who I am...Random thoughts, Random Ideas... You never know what goes on in a human mind. It is not just difficult but also impossible to capture these thoughts and ideas in a passage. It's a very beautiful friday morning and I am as usual keeping my self busy finishing up(cleaning up) stuff for the week. A chore for me, like it or not you've got to do it. Do you ever get the feeling that the place where you belong to isn't where you want to be and the place you want to be is what you are not comfortable in. Its hard to describe this feeling unless you experience it first hand. An Alien in the land of A, that's what I call thy self and everyone similar. Most people do not realize what a great opportunity they've got in being a first generation immigrant in the land of immigrants. Most people don't understand that it is not just a new place of work but that they are experiencing a new culture first hand. I still can't convince my self that this is a completely new culture as in a way I have, we have lived all our lives either this way or aspiring to be this way. But at some level we are still different and that will never change much.
What does america mean to you?I have been trying to answer this question for the past one year and am sure every one has a different opinion about this. As with any topic about or involving Indians, this might also lead to endlesss debates about the positive and negative aspects of a country, the cultures blah...But if you ask me to stop, hold my breath and give the most genuine answer, I will say without hesitation that America is where I can be my self. This obviously is going to start a huge debate and am pretty sure I am going to get some interesting opinions from people. But frankly, thats what it is all about. For an average middle-class indian who is more often than not tied down with dogma on how things should be done, how his life should be, staying in the united states could be a relief. Thats probably true for any immigrant in a foreign land. If you are in a place where at best you know only a handful of people, you tend to be yourself in a way enjoying every bit of what you are with out caring about what others around are doing. The same is particularly true if you are staying a rural community here in the United States, where things are much more simple as compared to an average rural community in India. You can actually find that people are actually laid back, with little or no connections with the outer world at least not to an extent where those connections start interfering with your day to day life...so different compared to any village in India where an average conversation between two middle-aged ladies fetching water from a parched well or a near by creek can be about their sons or relatives' sons living abroad.
Well, almost. America is still a land of a million(3 million) indians and there still could be the usual dogma on how a boy coming here should be graduating either from a well reputed university or slogging his butt off on the well-trodden software path, on how he should not be ogling at all the white skin at his disposal... But at a certain level no one cares. You live and let live... If my recent visit to a genleman's club was any representation of this true freedom (I would like to call that). I am pretty sure that there could me more than a few of my distant or close relatives in the crowd and I would have definitely cared about this fact if it were India, but here who gives a damn. I bump in to a cousin at such a place, am pretty sure I would given the sheer number of cousins I have staying here, I would just say hi and talk as if I met him in a marriage reception.
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