August 2008
15 posts
my first night in India
I wrote this my first day here.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 Mumbai. Impressions. I drove home with a family friend. It is comfortable and hardly awkward, surprisingly. We talk about traffic rules. How and why people drive. I tell him how smaller cars are growing popular as gas, petrol, prices are going up. He tells me how the city is worried about the Nano, the Tata smartcar. “They can...
bangalore
This past weekend we went to Bangalore.
I hadn’t been there in something like ten years, and otherwise only for one-night stops spent in hotel coffee shops and traffic jams. So I was expecting something the Bangalore of the media - the city alive with the IT buzz, constantly moving, living on crazy hours - Australian and American and European - and, at the same time, the little city-town I...
Life is measured in blogposts
Me: (describing where I'm going next week-ish)....but the island, to get there - you gotta take a boat. which holds 10 people and one guy who rows
Serena: You'll have so much to write about!
“Suburban kids are uniquely mean. They don’t have the dangers of drive-by...”
– Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There’d Be Cake (via derbygirl)
I was talking to my grandfather today. Well, it was more like listening to my grandfather tell me about the times when he was a kid (he’s almost 90, now).
He was telling me about culture, as he called it - really, about the role of women and how they were treated in the 30’s.
The story was about a girl who was married and fought with her in-laws. They didn’t get along. She...
Marriage, uhm, culture shock part 17
My coworkers and I were sitting around talking about life and not-life and nothing really. I usually do the listening and wide-eyed asking.
Because the truth is that my family is more Indian than American (or anything else) and a lot of the culture I am so shocked by, my parents would consider understood, and if not understood, at least very unsurprising.
We’re all girls and engaging in...
Obama Ready to Announce Running Mate →
I’m so excited to find out who he’ll choose as his running mate. I’m hoping it’s someone I really like. And that reminds me of college apps (granted, coming out of senior year, almost everything can relate to college apps). You know a decision is made, you just have to wait to know what the decision is.
writing for a foreign newspaper
Feature stories generally are supposed to be about something different/unusual. Here, the ‘exciting’ difference is usually progress - movement from what India was to what India will be. And a lot of this progression is movement westward, adoption of western thinking, influences from the west.
Seeing that I come from the west, I’m constantly unsurprised and unimpressed,...
McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Hamlet (Facebook... →
Sometimes, I don't know what to think...
The newspaper I work for has a TV Guide section - a little magazine that comes out once a week. It’s full of stuff about flashy celebrities, the TV stars and movie stars.
Today, I had the exciting job of choosing letters to the editor.
I know it’s the norm for letters to the editor to be addressed to a Sir, but it really annoys me. Especially since the editor of the newspaper is a...
I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop. - NYTimes.com →
I don’t like this at all, it reminds me of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Photos (that most people take at least) are supposed to be records, not fiction
“Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of...”
– “Snow Geese”, Mary Oliver