Skip to main content

Being Heard

Following the horribly sad events unfolding in Ukraine from afar made me think of my first time watching Rashomon and then a few times thereafter in different points of time in life. Each time it became more evident that there is no single truth in the telling of history even if relatively recent. Events come to be seen in very different light as time passes and new perspectives emerge. 

The further we are from the place, time and people who are impacted or actors in the the story, the harder it is to understand what is going on. The question of who is at fault for what is going on today can provide much more than Rashomon's four perspectives on the same event. I have friends and colleagues who are native to either side and some whose families have roots that go across both. Depending on who you ask there is a different answer - it is a factor of their age, the strength of their connections to the home country and how their lives in America have shaped up to be.

My friend C wrote an impassioned note to people at her workplace - as a Russian, she felt compelled to separate herself from what is being done in Ukraine the name of that country. That reminded me of the riots in Gujarat in 2002, News traveled world-wide and in America those that were aware expressed concern about what this meant for the future of India as secular country; why more was not being done to make the madness stop. 

At the time, the average person from India when quizzed about events in Gujarat felt much like C does now, yet there was not much we could do. In a far more hyper-connected and always on world two decades later, there is this naïve presumption that the voice and aspirations of the average citizen matters specially when it is at complete odds with that of the powers that be.  

Comments

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...

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...

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...