Skip to main content

Abroad At Home

The angst of the children born to new immigrants is a genre teeming with books. Many if not most of them are one hit wonders. Even the most talented and prolific writers often produce their best output when the are telling intensely personal stories. It is no wonder then that the first generation expat writers of Indian descent tell their coming of age (in America or elsewhere in the Western world) stories with much intensity of feeling. While their experience has been written about in excruciating painful detail, not a lot has been heard from their parents.

Nandini Pandya seeks to fill this gap in her excellent compilation of essays and short stories in the book Abroad At Home. Full disclosure - the book contains some articles I wrote as a columnist for Desijournal. The writers represent a wide swathe of expat Indian society from around the world. There are voices from Singapore, America, Canada and France who are physicians, scientists, technology consultants, artists, musicians and journalists among other things.

Each vignette in this collection covers an unique aspect of the expat experience - be it finding a spiritual home in a foreign country, assimilating the local culture while holding on to one's own, parenting challenges, having one's daughter become a soldier in Iraq or the anxiety of waiting for several years for a green card to materialize.

These are stories that will resonate with many who have not had their experiences abroad given nearly the same shelf space or importance as the genre that their kids went on to create. Pandya's idea of bringing the offline and online worlds together enriches the reading experience in an unique way. Readers of the book can read comments from the time that these essays and stories were first published online and now add their own. If you have wanted to hear the other side of the hyphenated Indian story, this book is a must read.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
I guess this is your first paper publication...Congrats!!
May be you can publish a book sometime...
7:24 AM
The Gori Wife said…
I'm always looking for stuff to read in this genre, thanks for the recommendation! And congrats on the publication.
5:09 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

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

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...
Post a Comment
Read more