There are very few things quite as fugly as the Styrofoam coffee cup - i.e unless you are like this artist who uses them as his canvas to sketch on with Sharpie pens. Suddenly the lowly cup becomes a beautiful work of art. The pictures reminded me of the black and white illustrations in the version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam I had many read years ago - I cannot remember the name of the artist though. Yet the difference in context of the art could not be starker. One a volume of old love poems made more magical by sketches and the other the doodlings on a thoroughly modern disposable coffee cup.
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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