Skip to main content

Some Remembrances

At an elocution contest in high school days, a petite girl with an amazing voice recited Martin Luther King's "I have a dream". The passion she put into her words made up for the cultural context she lacked. The audience was enthralled. J was told about the significance of today at daycare through pictures and posters. Needless to say, I was educated on "peace" and "freedom" at dinner time - and it brought back a rush of old memories.

Also, that evening, someone I would later have a crush on recited an excerpt from "A Stone For Danny Fisher". I found a copy and read it immediately after. It became one of my favorite books at the time - I still remember it with nostalgia though it would be hard to remain objective given the reasons.

A favorite uncle thought I was too young to read Harold Robbins and urged me to read Albert Camus, Graham Greene, Alberto Moravia, Andre Gide and Somerset Maugham instead.

He would go on to introduce me to many authors, memorable books over the years but had it not been for him catching me with "A Stone For Danny Fisher" it may have never happened - at least not that young. If only all events in life cascaded to result in as much good as this one did.
Labels:

Comments

Priyamvada_K said…
Hey, I too loved the Danny Fisher book :). Good to hear about it after all these days.

Priya.
12:39 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

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
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more