Was browsing through a nice article on how branding has changed in the time of the www. This GE campaign was very successful. I had to share that with J and she loved to doodle on it. It's her favorite thing to do at the moment. Branding can mean different things depending on context. Sometimes my mind drifts like an ice floe upon the open sea.
From out of the blue today an old memory came back to me. I remembered the feelings of extreme revulsion at a picture that B sent R of a fetus selling as gourmet food in Taiwan. I made myself look it up today. I could not comprehend her insensitivity at the time. I was over five months pregnant and J to me was an embodiment of God who lived in my womb. I was worshipful more than anything else. It made a mockery of my condition as it did of my frame of mind.
It was obviously hateful yet I did not feel any anger. I felt more numbed than anything else. I deleted the mail and emptied the trash folder. Never mentioned that I had seen it and R made no reference to it either. In the complex map of B's psyche where would this fit ? I analyze no more but sometimes on a quiet morning such as today it resurfaces to trouble me. B to me is a someone I would be scared of alone and in the dark. B is the angel from hell with a tinny laughter. Haven't R and his family branded me for life ? I feel like a slave with their number burnt on my back.
Maybe to calm me my mind drifts to the word frangipani and here is a beautiful photoblog.
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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