Much to late to the party but I finally got around to reading Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation. My workplace is predominantly thirty and under and Bauerlein advocates not trusting anyone in that age group - presumably their dumbness makes them a little dangerous. In my experience, the fundamental difference between "them" and the rest of us lies in how we get our information and how we process it. I don't know about them being spectacularly stupid - their ability to navigate the online world effortlessly is an asset in our line of work. I learn about nifty productivity tools and applications from them all the time. That said, my interaction tends to be fairly one dimensional so I was curious to see what Bauerlein had to say.
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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