Today on my way to work - for a brief moment on the freeway I felt stasis in moving traffic - like there was no relative motion we were all standstill. I realized that I was going 15 miles over limit as was everyone else. I slowed down, breaking the rhythm and the utter peacefulness of the feeling. Could this be a parable for my life - that I need to break free, slow down if I need to - but find my own unique self ?
Richard Avedon -"I've worked out of no's. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narratives. And those no's force me to a yes. I have white background. I have the person I am interested in and the thing that happens between us," he said in 1994 explaining his technique.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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