I left India and flew back to America to my empty life. I got back into work. Amidst nightmares of losing Didi and days of bawling with grief, I somehow planned a trip – to spend Didi’s birthday; Mar 19th in Venice. Human beings are strange.
I started the Crossing Party Lines – Long Island chapter in Feb 2023. It has been an incredibly rewarding experience.
“Delhi Burning” screamed the headlines of a major newspaper. It was November 2nd 1984, and riots plagued Delhi, after the then Indian Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her own Sikh bodyguards. When the news of her assassination broke, mobs of Hindus filled with rage took to the streets in Delhi, seeking vengeance & killing any Sikhs they came across. Two days after her death, most areas of my city were under total curfew as the flames of communal fire erupted in neighborhood after neighborhood.
Our mindset is still locked in old forms of warfare, but a new form of war is right at our doorstep. Albert Einstein famously said, “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”We know now that a key weapon […]
The intersection of caste, class and gender make Dalit women the most unsafe women in India, their official rape figure of 10 rapes per day is NOWHERE near the truth. Another day, another gang-rape story. A victim, whose biggest fault is being a woman, in a culture that regards women as lesser humans. Several perpetrators, […]
My earliest “memory” of America is of my father telling me about the moon landing. “ John F Kennedy said we will put a man on the moon in 10 years and the Americans did it. “ As a little girl growing up in India, I imagined a country called America whose presidents were visionaries, whose people […]
Remember the scene from the movie “Titanic”? The ship has hit the iceberg and taking-in water rapidly. Rose: Don’t you understand? The water is freezing and there aren’t enough boats. Not enough by half. Half the people on this ship are gonna die. Cal: Not the better half. Now re-imagine the scene such that the iceberg is […]
A hyphenated identity doesn’t mean we always get to play on both teams. As an Indian American, it is hard to escape the cacophony of diatribe for and against four more years of President Trump. Indian-Americans have traditionally affiliated themselves with Democrats but today their loyalties are split; two seminal events — the election of […]
