Ever since I read this hilarious Jerry Seinfeld quote on lipstick "Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not color, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end." in the book If Ignorance Is Bliss Then Why Aren't There More Happy People ? Smart Quotes for Dumb Times, putting my face on in the morning before leaving for work has not been the same. I find myself smiling stupidly into the mirror sometimes I have even burst out laughing. I am among those who have graciously accepted "God's final word" on the said matter but there are those who find it harder to do so. I have a lot more troubling settling on the right color for the place, time, occasion and outfit. Seinfeld's word is hardly the only or the final one on lipstick."Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick." said Gwyneth Paltrow. There is a certain timelessness about women's relationship to makeup (including lipstick). This 1958 article in Time magazine could as well have been written earlier this year.
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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