Musings of a White Haired Teenager

July 7, 2021: The rains did not hold back today. Today was the first day of classes. For a decade, until 2020, I would be at Delhi’s T3 airport on July 7 greeting wide-eyed eager students from Wake Forest as they would embark on the five-week class with my family which I fondly called “Invisible India.” To take them into the heart of middle-class India – CR Park in Delhi, Salt Lake in Calcutta. Throw them into CA Market and have them pick out the live chicken for dinner, converting one student to eternal vegetarianism when the person realized “where chicken actually came from.” Live animals. But those happy days were snatched from me and many others. Today’s class on Communication and Technology started on Zoom. And I realized something that I had suspected all along – students would rather be online than in class. The academic industry hype is to claim that students want to be in the classroom. Maybe not. They want to leave home after high school in America and get the “college experi

July 6, 2021: Did not happen. At 600 miles per hour, at 30,000 feet, with time fighting with earth's rotation this day did not exist in my life. Except at the very end, when I spoke to a bondhu on the phone and life was good. There is nothing more satisfying than knowing I am close to a place I helped reconstruct. Now it is time to rest. As Hank Williams once said, “ I am a rambling man .”

July 5, 2021: Fog happens everywhere in the morning. It is a thread that ties our lives across the different parts of the World that a nomad populates. I actually heard a person use the word “nomad” as a personal label. Don’t hear that term too often. But the post-pandemic World may produce more nomads, those who travel through space and time constantly finding a home wherever the body is. I know of a person who travelled through many places and times and survived nearly nine intrusions in the nostril to demonstrate that the pandemic had not touched the person. How does the virus decide? You can be in a pre-pandemic World one second with evidently no trace of the virus with an iron tight vaccine protection, and the next second, that same you, as you walk through a door you are in a virus infested place and your vaccination means nothing. Try walking into an airport anywhere in the World today. The mask is back, sometimes the face shield and in the middle seat for some airlines the PPE.

July 4, 2021: There will always be fireworks on my mother’s birthday. She could have claimed a movie for her – “Born on the 4 th of July” exactly 159 years younger than America. So, as long as there are fireworks in America on Independence Day there will be fireworks for my late mother’s birthday. And the fireworks this year was the celebration of a victory. The aroma of cooking through my neighborhood as the distant thunder was heard through the night sky. On the TV screen Washington and New York came right after the other as they tried to outdo each other in the display of the end of an era. The President has promised that America will be doing cook outs today. Well from the looks of it, New York certainly cooked up the harbor with a firework show that signaled to the World that a new age in beginning. The dark days are over as a TV commentator said about New York, doing a comparison from one year ago to today. New York, I think she said, is back to life. Life indeed. Because we hav

July 3, 2021: A normal day, where the normal is indeed a hybrid. Not just of people, time, place – but the hybridity that comes from the way we have designed our lives. A day before Independence Day, and I will probably watch the movie by that name tomorrow. It is normal to get up in the morning and be greeted by hundreds of WhatsApp messages. A truly 24/7 system where someone in my numerous groups is always awake at any time and forwarding jokes. It does not matter when I wake up, where I wake up, but five hours from WhatsApp is an assurance that there will be something to wake up to. A message from a bondhu. Almost always there. Then there will be someone to talk to also, a simple “Hi” staring at me from the screen could elicit an immediate “bollo” or a “What’s.” It is normal to be never alone. No matter where or when. There is a bondhu always to share a few messages. It is normal to brew coffee, have packet of Parle Glucose biscuits carefully dunking it in the coffee.  They do break

July 2, 2021, Starting tomorrow I will be dropping the place designation, it is yours to deduce : I used a phrase today that I made up on the spot to describe a situation that I had never imagined would come about. I have written about this before. More than a year ago when it was clear that our Wednesday afternoon porch gatherings were not going to be possible, we switched to the Zoom virtual porch. People happily came. Every Friday at 4:00 pm we would gather. Some with a glass of wine sitting in the backyard, others on a sofa in a living room. We would solve the World’s problems, talk of the pandemic, spur over politics, we grieved the loss of one of the rectangles on the screen when one of us passed away. This thing was set up by me and it was my responsibility to do the set up on Zoom and invite everyone. Every week. About 56 weeks now. I attended nearly every one of these. My nomadic body was committed to the 4 pm time. Wherever the body was. Sometimes the 4 pm became 1 in the aft

July 1, 2021, Commentary from after dinner: Frantic. Things change quickly. Even as the day begins normally, things can change. Today, on this stalled-monsoon day, some people truly showed that they knew what they were doing. These are people just going about doing their work and pitching in to do more. It started with a bondhu needing some support with a family member at a hospital. There was a need for COVID-19 tests, perhaps blood and eventually a room in the hospital. In most cases some of these tasks can get to be yet another source of stress for the family. Today, the volunteers kicked in and it was really impressive to see how quickly they were able to make the connections and were in a position to offer the support if that was needed. But it was not just them, one can see the willingness to support as needed amongst so many people. Devdas pitched in and was ready to step in. Then the needs shifted and a whole other community pitched in. As they have so many times, over and over