Even before I got around to buying myself an iPod, the pundits are writing its obituary. Only in the world of technology can a Rip Van Winkle emerge from a decade long slumber can fit right in. All you miss is a couple of over-rated hype cycles that have all but fizzled out by then. You just latch on the newest fad wave that comes along and all of a sudden the last ten years that you were absent does not count for so much - you are just as up to speed as everyone else who was around the whole time. Something seems wrong about that picture. When history becomes discrete packages that can stand alone without needing a the broader canvas of events and ideas that helped form them, it does not feel real. Large chunks of time can be purged out of the records without impacting much.
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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