Who are you?

BTW, since I have added a counter to my blog, I have realized that people are reading this thing... about 25 hits in the last couple of days! I'm impressed!

Will you now come out and tell me who you are? Especially since I discovered how many people at Pravah have my blog address, I'm super curious to know who actually reads this thing!

PS: Wendy, you don't count! ;)

musings at traffic lights

At New Delhi’s traffic signals, you can buy anything: pirated books, discounted magazines, clumsy Chinese toys, blessings of various gods and goddesses, sunshades for your car, an acrobatic performance by young children, copies of the Bhagavad Gita, boxes of tissue, bright yellow dusters, flowers picked up from graveyards, slices of coconut, booklights—you name it. Someone I hear about is even planning to teach street children enough poetry so that they can sell poems at traffic lights! I’m always amazed at the variety of things, and at the way any new hot sale item finds its way to almost all South Delhi traffic lights simultaneously. I marvel at the ingenuity and the excellent business sense behind the steering wheel covers in the hot summer months and behind the little children who try to shove The Cosmopolitan down my throat because, apparently, I look like a woman who reads and, apparently, women who read must read that magazine. Who thinks of these things, I sometimes wonder; how do they pick these things up? I hardly ever buy anything at traffic lights, but I do sometimes enjoy the sheer variety of this “street market” in the most literal sense possible.

Today, though, I saw a new one that made me very sad.

An old, hunched over gentleman was selling little Indian flags. Independence Day is around the corner, and my first thought when I saw those was of our Independence Day celebrations in school, for which we were all expected to paint little flags to bring to the auditorium and wave on command. Some of us painted them, others made life simpler by using colored paper strips, and still others bought ready-made flags very like the ones the old man was selling at the traffic light today.

After that initial moment of nostalgia, though, I was struck by the profound irony of the situation. This old gentleman, too old even to walk comfortably, was dodging traffic and jumping onto the road every time the light turned red in an effort to sell a few flags… to this man, what do 61 years of independence mean? To him, and millions of others like him, whom India had failed in so many ways, what does holding that flag mean? I don’t understand flags in general, but if it’s true that waving your flag high is an expression of pride in your country, what reason does this old man have to be proud of India?

Maybe I am being patronizing; maybe he has a lot of reasons to be proud of this country, maybe I should stop wondering about the thoughts of someone whose life I do not understand. But then again, if I stopped wondering about other people’s thoughts, I would no longer have a reason to write!

Diary readings

It's a rainy day, and I'm curled up in my chair reading old diary entries. Specifically, I'm reading diary entries from my months in Argentina. A long lunchtime chat with a French intern at office today made me nostalgic, so I decided to go back.

Reading those long-ago entries is weird. I'm struck by how much I wrote about people and feelings, how little I wrote about places. Given that I was in my first experience of a truly foreign land, you'd think that I would spend a large part of my diary time documenting the place I was in and the new experiences I was having. But I hardly see any of that; my entires record the mundane; they talk about friends there just as I now talk about friends here, they talk about many of the same feelings as I talk about now... really, it would be easy not to even notice I was in a different world.

In some ways, I regret that because I feel I haven't recorded Buenos Aires enough. I want to go back and revisit those places in my head but i can't. Kind of like how, in my last weeks there, I woke up to the fact that I had almost no photos of the place and was then clicking like crazy. I still regret not having a photo of the Bus No. 152, which carried me everywhere. That bus is actually a huge part of my memories of Argentina.

In other ways, I feel it's ok because I recorded my experience of Buenos Aires. I may never have done all the requisite sightseeing, and if I did, I may not have written about it; I wrote mostly about things that could have happened anywhere else. I recorded my arguments with people and my frustration at being in the doctor's clinic and needing to communicate my medical history in Spanish. I recorded the ways friendships were formed, the ways they grew and changed. I recorded my struggles at university and the joy of turning in complete research papers in Spanish. And occasionally, I recorded a super-cute cafe, the world cup madness around me, or the time my host mother prepared me a killingly spicy meal because she felt so terrible watching me munch green chillies with bland food!

Well, then, I think. So what if all this (well, minus the world cup madness!) could have happened anywhere else in the world? It happened to me in Argentina. And it is the most important part of my Argentine experience, the part that shaped me and changed me, the part I carry in my heart.

I'm hoping to start working on a series of essays about "home" and about my many homes. I'm hoping to draw more on photographs and document more of the wonderful places I was lucky enough to live in. But even as I do so, I will now always know that somewhere in my diary, there is a very private definition of home for each of those places... a definition I couldn't possibly share or expect anyone else to understand, but it's what makes that place home.

Friendship Day

What is that anyway? Who decided we'd celebrate friendship on the first Sunday of every August? I always thought it was a Hallmark thing, but I jsut discovered (yay for Wikipedia!) that the US Congress declared it a holiday in 1935. Hmm, very interesting. I would love to read the bill/ listen to the speech that preceded the Congressional acceptance of friendship day as a national holiday. Was August just an arbitrary month, or was there a debate that led to its choosing? "We think friendship is somewhere between independence (1st week July) and hard work (1st weekend September)" or "Hmm, well January is New Years' Day, Feb is Valentine's, March is too soon after Valentines, May is Mother's Day, June if father's day, July is independence day, oh whatever, just throw it in August... no other big day coming up then, is there?" Hmm, I can feel a little story forming in my head about how the nation adopted Friendship day.

Anyway, sitting here in India, friendship day has never meant more than a few friendship bands in school, and mostly a Hallmark/ Archies phenomenon since. I don't think I ever appreciated Friendship Day before I went to Buenos Aires.

Argentines celebrate Friendship Day on July 20th, which happened to be just a few days before I was leaving the country at the end of my Study Abroad. Totally unaware that the day was Friendship Day, my friend Chris and I set out to have a last dinner together in that beautiful city. We had identified a restaurant we had been meaning to go to for many weeks, so we showed up there. All full. Oh well, we thought, we are in Palermo, the part of Buenos Aires that has at least one restaurant (and often more!) on every block. We'll find something. Nope. We walked for about-- what was it, Chris? 2 hours?. We went from restaurant to restaurant and cafe to cafe, but everyone looked at us incredulously: Today is friendship day, you should havemade your reservation weeks in advance! We finally lucked out at an all-you-can-eat Sushi place, where they only had a little table for two because most of the people waiting were in larger groups.

Later, Chris treated me to dessert at Persico's (oh, dear old Persico's! I miss that place!), and again we had some waiting to do. But we got to observe a most interesting phenomenon: every table, really, every single table, was same-sex. On an average day, if my gay best friend and I went out anywhere, we fit right in but were always mistaken for a couple (and he enjoyed that game enough to go around buying me red roses to get my host mom all worked up! Oh Chris, do you remember that kid who sold you a poem for me? :D). But that day, on friendship day, we stood out. Boys and girls aren't friends in Buenos Aires, which perhaps explained why, whenever I mentioned my "mejor amigo" in India, people would correct me by saying "'amiga', for a girl you would say 'amiga' not 'amigo'". Umm, thanks for the Spanish help, but I know what I'm saying.

Still, overall I liked the Argentina Friendship Day. It felt like an actual celebration, as important to them as Valentine's Day. Friendship seemed as important as love.

Ooh, but Argentina's rationale for Friendship Day is even more interesting. Check out this quote from Wikipedia: "The idea for Friend's Day goes back to Argentine teacher, musician, and dentist Enrique Febbraro, who lobbied to turn the anniversary of the first moon landing into an international day of friendship, along his Rotary Club de Once, in Buenos Aires. He argued that on this particular day, the whole world had been friends of the three astronauts. The first official recognition of the day came with decree No. 235/79 by the government of the province of Buenos Aires, which authorized the celebration and gave it official nature." Hahahaha, dear Argentina! Nowhere else could that rationale have emerged!

Anyway, since today is "Friendship Day," I'm going to take the opportunity for a shout out to all the friends reading this blog. To my dear friends in Delhi, in different parts of India, in Argentina, in Mexico, and to all the wonderful friends from the hill (some still there, most now scattered through the world), thank you so much for your friendship. The last few weeks have been rough, and I couldn't have made it through without all your love from different parts of the world. So thank you all for being a part of my life.

Thin lines

At Pravah, we talk a lot about "walking the thin line." In the last few days, I'm thinking about a lot of thin lines, especially ones that I talked about at length with Sarah Wider. If you are reading this, Sarah, those conversations from last year are informing these thoughts, and I would love to know how you respond.

The first is the thin line between the objective and the subjective. The line between being passionate about an issue and distancing yourself enough from it to be able to see it clearly. I've been thinking about this with respect to myself as well as many people around me, but on this blog, I'll keep the comments about myself.

I'm beginning to realize that it's hardest for me to work on issues really important to me. I have had all these big plans about working on the issue of disability, but I'm not sure I can do it effectively; it is simply too close to my heart. Little instances of insensitivity on the part of basically well-intentioned people (there have been a lot of these lately), little slip-ups and mess-ups, little thoughtless remarks or actions, are becoming painful... I don't know how to step back from them enough to understand or explain them rationally.

I've tried clarifying calmly a couple of times, but i've stopped since i didn't see much difference and since I didn't end up able to do it calmly. I've tried asking for things I need different from what other people need and explaining where I'm coming from, but I've more-or-less stopped doing that too because it hasn't made enough of a difference and because it's become too emotionally exhausting to always be making requests, always be asking people to go out of their way, and always be giving explanations.

That isn't "active citizenship." That is making my peace with the denial of what should be rights. That isn't what I would encourage the students in my workshop to do. I know all that.

But it's still my reality right now. It's relatively easy for me to speak up on behalf of others and their issues; it's hard for me to speak up for my own issues. And it's not just about work; it was at least as hard and possibly harder to fight the battle for disability rights at college. I'm trying to do it anyway, but it's making personal relationships a lot more complex; the more I sense someone's (unconscious but complete) insensitivity to chronic illness/ disability, the harder it is for me to get along with this person. Yes, it's important for me to separate the viewpoint from the person, but when the viewpoint seems to attack you personally even if the person doesn't know it, that's hard to do. So even as my head rationalizes and recognizes that the person in front of my doesn't necessarily know anything about the debilitating chronic illnesses I live with, my heart closes itself to her/ him for hurting me repeatedly, although unconsciously. I wish it weren't like that, but it is.

Why does this remind me of Sarah, though? Well, she and I had a fascinating conversation about the place of emotions (specifically anger, but others too) in intellectual discourse. We disagreed with the idea that emotions are somehow separate from our intellectual work (or any other work) and agreed that anything we did was only complete if every emotion of ours was in it. In my heart, I believe that. But that doesn't mean I'm ok with bursting into tears as I speak during a meeting because that's the kind of emotion that topic is bringing out. Is it then that i don't fully believe what Sarah and I talked about, or is it simply that I believe everything I have been taught about decorum and appropriate public behavior more than I believe that? I need to walk the thin line between bringing in and articulating my emotions, which I believe are integral to the issue, and not losing sight of the rational, objective understanding of where the other is coming from. I need to walk the thin line between listening to my head too much and listening to my heart too much.

Which, I guess is kind of linked to the next thin line-- the line between the private and the public. In some ways, this whole entry is intensely private and a part of me says it belongs in my journal, not on my blog. In other ways, this entry is intensely public, and the other part of me says this entry belongs on a public space because I truly wish someone else in this kind of situation had written about this (and i THANK the author of "the damaged self" for having the courage to write that book). When i started this blog, I knew I didn't want it to be a public account of private moments-- and if anyone were to compare my blog to my journal, they wouldn't find more than maybe 10% overlap. And yet, I'm finding that the divide isn't so clear.

But then again, how could the journey from self to society ever happen if some of the private didn't, sooner or later, become the public?