Skip to main content

Hearing Truth

We met a local university professor of French at my neighbor's party last night. E is from DRC and has lived in our neighborhood for the last few years. A very unassuming man with a big smile, he is always easy to talk to. Given the times we live in, it was no surprise the conversation turned to events in Ukraine. There was an older gentleman B in the group whose grandparents escaped the Bolshevik revolution and arrived in New York. They were from an Ukrainian village close to a town that has been the news lately. While B has no family he knows of in that country, the war is more personal for him than it is for the average person with no connections there.

E said in his very quiet and polite manner, that his country has been in a war for decades and no one in the world knows or cares about what is going on there. Congo is irrelevant, makes no breaking news and does not garner the support of the world for its troubles. The number of deaths per day is not a number anyone wants to deal with so its not talked about. 

So it's just hard for him to understand the double standards and why the way that part of the world is responding to the current situation should come as a surprise. E had spoken some hard truths that were unsettling for potluck dinner in suburban America. The conversation moved on quickly to neutral and non-controversial topics like someone having just learned they would be a grandmother in summer and planning to baby-proof the house for when the grandbaby would visit. 

No one had the desire to learn from E what it meant to live in a war-torn country for decades or the struggles of his immigration story. It made the white South-African couple who were also there uncomfortable to talk about why they left that country. Then they committed the ultimate faux-pas - the told B ever so eagerly that they like him were from Africa too. We suddenly went from being a sleepy neighborhood where nothing interesting ever happens to a dinner table where the political tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. 

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...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...