although our eyes and throats are still dry from recirculated airplane air, our bodies are now safely and surely on american soil.

the flight from delhi to helsinki was uneventful, which is in notable contrast to any intra-India travels which never went quite as planned. and then our 8-hour layover in Helsinki could not have been further removed from the previous 2-months: it was several degrees below freezing and snowing, all the people were white too, the streets clean and the buildings straight and strong, the buses and trains predictably punctual and never more than halfway full, it was quiet. and yet, aside from the bracing cold, there was nothing shocking about this Finland. likewise, our arrival in new york has been seemless… part of a global continuum held together by overnight planes with live BBC world broadcasts. we walked off the plane into a waiting towncar, sped along the 495 without any competition from bicycles or livestock, pointed out posh indian restaurants along 8th avenue, and rose to the eight floor in a silent elevator.

i feel no need to adjust, no time for acclimation, and there is nothing surprising about manhattan even as i walk the streets with shoes still covered in cow shit from the paharganj market. indeed, even the time change seems to have had little effect on our systems (at least nothing a homecooked meal of line-caught salmon, a slow night of HBO on demand and a couple of ambien can’t handle).

to be clear, i don’t relish in such a cavalier worldiness (if that is even what this is?!). on the contrary, there is something quite disconcerting about the ease with which we continue to weave through these cultural warps.

India celebrates Valentine’s day… apparently it is one of those Hallmark holidays that has helped establish the notion of “cultural imperialism.”

Our Valentine’s day was supposed to be our first in Mumbai. But, the 20 hour train we thought we were getting on turned out to be a 41 hour train and one night became two. We spent the 14th eating masala cashews and yellow raisins, staring though a foggy window at the countryside flying by, and adjusting our angle of recline while reading to each other.  Needless to say, that much time in a lilliputian compartment makes you think about things like proximity, partnership and, yes, love. And now that it is a story, safely in a traveled past, I can’t imagine a more romantic memory to have shared.

Watching CNN in India is much the same as watching at home.  Cricket scores replace football on the ticker below, but the programming is identical.  However, there is a notable difference in watching American news from the vantage of a distant country.  Especially while following the current primary elections, it strikes me that no other political process is of such great (and even grave) importance to the world at large as our own.  And while we create a late night drama out of our electoral narrative, the rest of the world sits at a distance wringing their hands, eyeballs peeled. Read the rest of this entry »

Never has a country been so well suited to the exclusionary nature of photography. Picture postcards, or even the column of images to the right, do an excellent job of portraying a selective reality of an India limited to scenic vistas, exotic apparel and quaintly decomposing architecture. The other day, while sitting by an exceptionally idyllic brook which cut oh-so-lazily through a mountain pass of tea and coffee plantations, I noticed a young couple (for there are many young couples who come here to Munnar to escape the Tamil Nadu plains or the choking heat of the Keralan coast below) taking pictures.  More precisely, the man was arranging his wife (?) for a photograph with her body turned as if recently surprised and her arm awkwardly raised above her head to appear as if she was in fact supporting the tree instead of the other way around.  I could tell from where I stood that the glamour shot would not include the toppled playground or the rusty machinery to the right, or the struggling garden with a trash strewn stream flowing into the distance, just like that picture couldn’t include any of the other Indians who couldn’t make it that weekend for a mountain escape.