Skip to main content

Talking Balut

I met a few old friends for dinner while passing through their town recently. They all still live and work there and I don't anymore. We used to be work friends - a concept that is fading out these days with hybrid and remote work being more norm than exception for many. H has brought her mentee along - a young woman only a few years out of college. C had recently become a homeowner and we celebrated her. Conversation at some point turned to foods in a person's culture that the rest of the world would consider weird. It started with relatively innocuous things like eating fish head and goat brains but once folks had warmed up to the idea of sharing stories, it got a lot more interesting. 

C was hesitant to open up at first being so much younger than the rest of us but at some point she had embolden herself enough to talk about one of her favorite foods - balut. She was pleasantly surprised everyone took it in stride and it was not so scary after all. C was way more relaxed around us for the rest of the evening and seemed to have a fun time in company of strange older women with whom she had very little in common. My thoughts turned to my baby and I wished she would have such experiences too - of going a bit out of her comfort zone and experiencing a safe and comforting world and strangers who will some day become her friends.

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...