I am not the proud owner of an iPod and will likely never be. By the time my four year old comes of age there will be something cooler, hipper, hotter around and she will want that instead. In the meanwhile, I am a bemused onlooker marveling at all things than the Pod can be, do and spawn - including a sub-generic culture and accoutrements such as a muff dock. Has the Pod been infused with life lately ? If so the Pod-shrink may not too far behind. Quoting from a nice essay on what the iPod stands for
"But there's more to the iPod than a personal statement. It contains my entire musical collection, a life's worth of memories, opportunities, juxtapositions and discoveries. Its epic storage capacity feels almost archival, like a tiny library of Alexandria, automatically organized and with optional belt clip.
I envision archeologists, thousands of years and many great wars from now, unearthing my corpse to find, to their great amazement, my still intact iPod clutched in a desiccated paw like some musical Rosetta stone. Perhaps my music could serve to lend these scientists some empathy, even some understanding of the madness of our times. Or would the shuffle play function reveal some horrible destructive farting noise?"
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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