He reached out to me and although the first inquiry almost lacked enough information to make a little suspicious, I felt slightly flattered. Interested in me? My future plans? I could contribute? Without much else going for me, I agreed to meet.

And I left the meeting with ambivalence rooted to the core. He opened his mouth and talked so intently and quickly that I couldn't so much as breathe for the first 15 minutes, it seemed. And what did this fast-talking aspiring-mini-mogul convey? A smooth, glib sales pitch, a business strategy, market research--enough to make him sound like he did his homework and knew what he was talking about. But did he know to whom he was talking? I felt like I could have better obliged as a venture capitalist, not as a broke student with nothing but ideas and some withering idealism.

I listened intently, and probably with a goofy crooked smile stretched across my face because I was curious to hear what he had to say; and I dithered between being impressed and feeling like I could have/should have seen this coming. I asked him clunkyly how he got his perspective on these issues and what informed him of all this?

Then the name-dropping started. This guy in a movie, this politician's son, the executive of this company. It quickly became clear: he had connections in high places and in all the right places to make this sort of a cutting edge project happen. Somehow he had the time, and the money, and the ambition, and gumption (though I've begun to wonder how much the latter is simply a reflection of the two former). How did all this get started, anyway? He started a year or so ago and now moved to a different city where all the action is, even though he's still actually taking classes here.

Some would call this a praiseworthy and undaunted drive. Yet, in the back of my mind I cringe because part of me wants to dissent and say, "No, that's just privilege." And in the face of the daily obligations that anchor me down, my sense of responsibility to fulfill them before I pursue grander schemes, and my own shriveling sense of motivation, perhaps I'm also just plain jealous.

Namesake

Happy new year to everyone. May 2008 bring better times for us all.

Spoiler alert!

I just saw the movie Namesake. It helped me and another friend round out 2007 and welcome in 2008 in one of the most mellow ways possible. I enjoyed the movie and felt that I could relate to it quite a bit--my family following a somewhat similar storyline in coming to the USA. Anyway, the movie stirred up some thoughts in my mind about culture, diversity, and the U.S. immigrant experience that I wanted to get out.

I enjoyed the movie for its recognition of complexities. Instead of resorting to the binaries of "us versus them," the immigrants versus "Americans" (as if those terms even have meaningful monolithic explanations), the movie offered a more nuanced perspective. A child born in a land foreign to his parents and ancestors, and given a name neither American nor Indian. Both signify a state of being neither this nor that, living in the grey, the area of fusion and redefinition. The movie continued to defy a simple and predictable storyline in its treatment of Gogol's relationships. Gogol, the immigrants' son, ultimately does not fall in love with the pretty American girl. Moreover, his failed married to a Bengali daughter of immigrants proves that sexual attraction and a common ethnic bond in a foreign land (foreign being the USA in this case!) are not enough to sustain love and a meaningful relationship.

Another gratifying aspect of the movie is that it subverts the image of courtship and the "typical American life" that U.S. media has worked so hard over decades to create. Gogol's parents do not court each other and fall in love. The marriage is practically arranged between these two strangers, and Gogol's mother soon follows her stranger-husband to a new life in a foreign country (USA). Yet, very little is made of the new couple's relationship--Do they fight? Do they love? Do the like each other? Are they happy? Few scenes attempt to provide direct answers to these questions. Thus, the movie reveals a different model of love and marriage--one in which strangers decide to make a commitment to one another, to care and look after each other, to raise a family together, and through the struggle of making this joint project work, perhaps even fall in love. In this case, though, love is secondary; nor is it the kind of western-American love that borders on lust. In one affectionate scene Gogol's mother asks her husband if he wants her to tell him that she loves him... "like the Americans do," she adds with a a dismissive chuckle. Nevertheless, the commitment between Gogol's parents appears as real and powerful as the "true love" that we westerners/Americans have come to hold in such high regard. When Gogol's father dies, his mother's grief is just as real as someone who lost their "true love," just in this case she lost a lifelong partner to whom she committed and over time learned to love.

The movie further decentralizes the white, upper-middle class U.S.American norms. This mostly becomes apparent from the way Gogol's girlfriend Max and her family are portrayed in the movie. The way in which Max's relative approaches Gogol and spews out stereotypes about India in an attempt to make friendly conversation, "Oh she returned from India rail thin!" Max's family tradition of vacationing (with their two dogs) in an expensive lakeside second home/cabin-mansion in the countryside. Max's attitude about life and her career, "I don't want to think about it right now, I just want to be free/happy/have fun!!!" And Max's failure to understand Gogol's grief--encouraging Gogol to go on vacation with her to escape the familial grief when at this time he actually wanted to be with the family, and alternatively wanting to join Gogol in the scattering of his father's ashes--inserting herself into the cultural and ethnic grieving customs where she did not necessarily belong as a mere girlfriend.

At the same time, the movie contained less satisfying elements, ones that suggest that the serious attempt at complexifying and defamiliarizing was dropped halfway. For one, Gogol's parents' move to New York City, and later the NYC suburbs is certainly highly plausible, but for a film, perhaps not the most interesting choice to make. Not to diminish the immigrant experience in NYC in any way, it's nevertheless worth noting that the NYC area is known for its diversity and large immigrant communities that can support and integrate newcomers. A much more challenging and interesting story my have consisted of following a newlywed immigrant couple into a rural american community, or to a city in some place like Alabama or South Dakota. In those places, the struggles to fit in, coexist, and get by crystallizes even more in the context of severe cultural and ethnoracial isolation. Interestingly, too, despite the movie's focus on an immigrant couple from India and their U.S.-born children, the movie was notable for the lack of interaction with/portrayal of the wide diversity of other U.S. ethnoracial groups besides the one epitomized by Gogol's "blond-American" girlfriend. For a movie set in the hyper-diverse NYC area, I would expect a little more. Furthermore, I would also expect that perhaps Gogol and his sister would, at some point, find a sense of solidarity with, or empathy for, the struggles of other minority ethnoracial groups in the USA.

The movie also reinforced some stereotypes, that it would have done well, perhaps, to defy. The depiction of Gogol's wife serves as the most glaring and disappointing example. A daughter of Bengali immigrants, we first meet her as a super-nerdy high school student who proclaims, "I detest American television!" She then disappears from the script, only to re-emerge years later as a hyper-sexy seductress. How did this transformation occur? Duh, she moved to France and started having affairs to liberate herself from the confines she saw in her mother's life, and somehow that process also made her really hot. Please. This treatment does a disservice to the French people and the way Americans view them. To reinforce such stereotypes of sexually permissive, and seductively good-looking French people is dishonest, and does not do justice to the diversity of looks and attitudes that exists in French society, as in any other. In another nod to simplicity, the movie also choses to raise Gogol and his sister as all-American U.S. kids, who talk the same way and hold the same values as any other American kid. While some immigrant children do indeed grow up to become American princesses and dudes, this overshadows the other portion of immigrant children who feel deeply torn between two worlds, cultures, value sets, and do not conform to the stereotypical norms of American teens.

Finally, the conclusion of the film left me a bit confused and only half-satisfied. The death of Gogol's father, the failure of his first marriage, and the scattering of his family enables Gogol to find meaning in the story of his name--the son of Indian immigrants, born in the USA, named after a Russian author whose book his father was reading in a train in India when a fellow passenger implored him to travel the world. The conclusion, though, conflates complexity with a form of simplistic cosmopolitanism. As the substrate in which Gogol's life was grounded deteriorates, Gogol declares that he finally feels free and the quote about traveling the world is restated in narration. Of course, any individual experience can vary widely, but the movie's conclusion completely brushes aside the opposite possibility--that someone in this position would find himself completely lost and alone in this world, raised in and accustomed to a world where he no longer has the same support system that existed when he grew up. This would acknowledge the sense of world-weariness and a dispossession that so many immigrants and ethnoracial minorities do indeed experience in a country where the mainstream does not sufficiently attempt to create a respectful space that acknowledges that they do, legitimately, have a right to belong. Such an ending, however, would contradict the long running American narrative of rags to riches, of melting-pot integration, and of rootless cosmopolitanism--and contradicting these would not appeal as much to the mainstream and thus to the box office bottom-line. Nevertheless, acknowledging such alternative realities--the American Nightmare that coexists in the same universe as the American Dream--would be a good first step in building a world that makes the latter cosmopolitan, integrationist ideals more possible and less problematic.

Rewind to the present

My year off came to an end in early August, and to mark the transition I found myself heading back to the aca-duh-me. During my year off I finally started to live a more fulfilling life. After my college escapades in NY--a state that had deceptively caputred my imagination growing up in the Midwest--I retreated back to the Heartland; back to my parents' home to regain my bearings and heal from a slew of pscyho-physical wounds. In my old room, I indulged in months of ample sleep--"treating" my body to one of the most basic necessities that our crazy society has for some odd reason relegated to luxury. (Note to policy-makers: in Constitution v2.0 please include a clause about the right to a good night's sleep for all).

I practiced many of the things that I had thought were necessary for a fulfilling life--cooking with my mom in the kitchen, eating dinner on a regular basis with my parents, spending more time with friends, going to the library every week or two to read magazines and browse through the bookshelves--and concluded, "Yes, this is good." In the summer that launched my year off and the one that rounded it out, I planted a vegetable garden in our backyard. I sowed seeds and planted small seedlings, weeded, watered, and generally tended for my plants with daily check-ups that seemed to give me an extra sense of meaning and purpose in life. And something to look forward to, because while watching the plants grow each day was fascinating the real privilege came when they decided I had been good and rewarded me with the freshest and tastiest produce I could possibly eat.

During the year off after graduating from college, I also took the time to reconnect with cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents overseas. I flew over twice in order to get reacquainted with some of the relatives I had completely drifted apart from and to strengthen the otherwise flimsy long-distance family bonds I had managed to maintain through all these years of trans-Atlantic separation. I realized that six weeks of togetherness was a good start, but not nearly enough; and this reconfirmed the importance of family--that a lifelong priority of mine ought to be nurturing those family bonds in spite of the distance. Through family, I found a gateway to my own identity and my own heritage--elements of my being that had withered and I so desperately need to reclaim in this cosmo, globalized, disorienting, multieverything American life. And thus, I journeyed into the past through a family genealogy project. It took me back centuries in some cases, and to countries across the world I had never visited, and it exposed me to a few of the compelling life stories that linked generations of my ancestors to the present and somehow brought to my existence on this earth.

And then I tried to figure out what I'm doing, should do, could do with my life on this earth. (Yes, I tend to think about such things in a trivial manner). College graduation found me with no job offers, probably almost entirely because I had resisted any sort of job search. But either way, I was too burnt out to dive into something new and too uncertain over what sort of career to pursue. So during this "year off" I tried to think about it, and I tried to look for jobs, and then inevitably I got nervous and insecure. And inevitably that set off a cascade of trepidations and hesitations and disillusioning realizations that led me to feel that my BA had symbolic value, as a stepping stone, but other than that was kind of worthless. Here I am, young, (ivy league?!) educated, broke, living at home, and mostly unemployed (save a little tutoring and infrequent substitute teaching on the side).

I spent about half a year looking (admittedly somewhat casually) for work, and with no offers I conceded to the need for a backup plan. I surrendered to the notion that I might have more luck, or be more valuable in this (meat)marketplace, with another degree. A master of something or other. And I looked around for schools and programs, and I took the ridiculous GRE, and I wrote my applications essays, and I submitted them online.

So even though my college graduation felt like an exhilarating liberation from the chains of deeply disappointing, at times ineffective, institutionalized education, I now find myself back in the same system. Unfortunately, this time it was much more of my choice. I could have avoided it, or put it off longer, but I chose to go back partly to get it over with sooner rather than later, partly to reap the benefits, partly because I didn't have the gumption to make something of my life without another line on my resume. How I let myself down sometimes...

So here I am, back to where I started when the urgency of panic, frustration and despair drove me to take up blogging at the beginning of college. This time I chose to come back. I thought it would be for the best, I thought I'd be in control more, or do it more on my terms, and I thought the social dynamics would be a bit easier... However, these first few months of my first semester back in school have gradually stripped away the hope I had built up for a sane and satisfying experience. Now I find myself wondering again what in the world am I doing?

Two long but fascinating articles about China and India.

Impasse in India - by Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books. A review of, and analysis of the issues raised in, The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India's Future by Martha C. Nussbaum.

Empire of Lies - by Guy Sorman in City Journal. An analysis of China's economic development and communist regime.

I wish I knew where to start or how to begin. There have been a few nights since that May 8th post when I felt an inkling of a desire to seat myself in front of the computer and begin to type up some sort of post that would pass as a summary of my past year and provide some sort of explanation for my prolonged silence.

I haven't been able to, though. For one thing, lately I only seem to get the urge to write late at night before I'm about to go to bed, and that conflicts with the other part of me that doesn't want to let my sleeping schedule swing out of wack from a night of heavy thoughts and lots of typing.

Then there are deeper issues. I've been wondering what the purpose of my online presence is. As my last two somewhat-cryptic posts before my spell of silence indicate, the question of privacy and the net has been on my mind. With the explosion of social networking over the last two years people's social lives have shifted online in a serious way. The online and the real life personas are overlapping more and more. Yet, for me, in a way, being online usually had some element of privacy and escapism (maybe that's not quite the right word?). When I started to blog a few years ago, it was to vent, to toss off the weights that daily life burdened me with, to indulge in all the ridiculous(?) rhetorical flourishes my heart desired, and to be honest with myself in a way I never felt I could.

Even though I wanted to escape the confines of the judgments and whimsical opinions of people I knew in my life off the computer, part of what I sought online was to connect with people. I hoped to type my truth, and I hoped complete strangers would stumble upon my thoughts, have the patience to read them, and then validate me to an extent with a supportive comment. That unrequited human contact meant the world to me at first (and it still does in a way). But after the euphoria of the first couple positive comments began to wear off, I started to feel like I was sinking into a sort of oblivion.

Like the American Dream, Rags-to-Riches stories, the internet is also full of mirages. In this 21st century frontier, I thought that I too could become someone--because it seemed like every other click of a link revealed a fresh-voiced blogger with a loyal and growing following, somebody who made something of themselves online when they couldn't off the net. My "loyal following" of some four or five people here mean the world to me, but after a while into the plateau it felt like coming home to supportive parents--I wouldn't trade it for a thing, but it begs the question, where to go from here?

Then I began to wrestle with the privacy question through the lens of content. I naively envisioned the blog as a tool that would let me write about whatever I wanted. I thought I would be free to express myself almost without limits. Yet I felt stifled, and the twisted thing was that I felt like I was stifling myself. Once I had my fill of ranting about myself, I wanted to turn to political issues, to write about current events and to sound off on controversial topics. I wanted to partake in that great (mostly debased) public debate on the matters of our times, because that debate molds our society and steers it in certain directions, and I felt that task was of utmost importance.

With that in mind, at times I felt that blogging about my personal crises was sort of self indulgent and trivial. If I felt animated enough about a certain topic with public dimensions I should put my effort into writing about it and inviting dialogue. Unfortunately, I held back. I always hesitated because I wasn't sure this was the right place. Mixing posts about my private conflicts with very public, and more formal, essays? Maybe I need another venue to publish non-personal essays, but somewhere into my burnout I lost that enterprising drive.

This is where I start to get really tangled up in my ifs, buts, and maybes.

I still think that there is a value to the writing I've put up here for the past couple years. I believe in the importance of being able to connect to people on a personal level, and sharing my life stories and reading about others' personal challenges has helped me realize that we can form human connections that transcend political, ideological, and religious disagreements. Reading others' personal blogs (and trying hard to suspend criticism) has revealed to me that living through the daily grind can create so much solidarity and commonality among people of such different walks of life. And I've found that withholding sharp judgment is paramount to the success of that task because reading a personal blog is like accepting an invitation into someone else's home, a unique and intimate glimpse into someone else's life. Approaching it that way brings out our respectful sides and from that we can connect and build bridges. And so, if personal blogging can build solidarity and understanding, once the effects ripple out doesn't this lead to public and political ramifications?

Now, if I could only figure out where to start or how to begin.

I guess it's time to start coming out of hiberation? More to come soon. -ish. I hope.

Privacy and the Net

The internet used to be thought of as a new frontier, a new, untamed "wild west" of sorts. The internet offered anonymity, privacy in addition to the functional benefits of staying connected and accessing almost unlimited amounts of information. Of course, this new frontier also introduced new worries. It offered opportunities for scammers to find new prey around the world (who hasn't received those e-mails about a supposed Nigerian billionaire?). The net made disseminating viruses and spam much easier, and it also enabled virtual communities centered on illegal activity to flourish. That was the internet of the 90s. It was anarchical in some says, but if you weren't up to mischief or too naive you probably didn't have much to worry about. But now we have Web 2.0. Now we have MySpace, Flickr, Wikipedia, Blogger, YouTube and tons of other websites that let users become part of the content creating endeavor.

Web 2.0 is exciting, no doubt about it. It's empowering; it gives voice; it opens up new opportunities for people who have been failed by the conventional route. The new web also helps us keep in touch, make connections, and share information. While we've been quick to harness the opportunities all this provides, I think very few of us were prepared to deal with the repercussions.

Once Google and Yahoo! were curious search engines that existed in the periphery of pop-culture. Today they're full-scale big businesses, traded in the stock market and all, with obligations to turn out profits to their shareholders. While Google, YouTube, and many other exciting Web 2.0 websites began humbly, sometimes in the basements of their very own independent and entrepreneurial creators, they are no longer small and innocuous Little Trains That Could. Recall some recent developments: Google's quarterly gross revenues are well past the billion dollar mark, and its stock price now sits around $450 per share--compare that to the stock prices of other giants (Wal-Mart @ $50 per share, Ford @ $8 per share, Microsoft @ $28 per share) and draw your own conclusions. News Corp, a massive media conglomerate that owns Fox News among others, purchased MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Just a week or two ago, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.

This, my friends, is the incorporation of the internet. Websites that depend upon user participation and collection of user data are turning into massive corporations. But what does it mean when companies can turn our search queries, blog entries, e-mails, and online profiles into huge bucks? Well, looking back on the history of corporations, it probably means we should be worried.

At the same time, as a Blogger user and a Gmail user, two free Google services, I've often been greatly appreciative of what Google has done. I appreciate this blogger platform where I can express myself in an ad-free environment, or with ads if I choose and want to make some money. Gmail is also a wonderful, user-friendly service, which offers tons and tons of storage space. Google also offers GoogleEarth, translations, and tons of other great, free services. By extending so many free services to users around the world without ripping people off, Google probably rightly earns its motto "Don't be Evil." So with so much to be grateful for, it's easy to let our guards down and lose sight of things we ought to be concerned about.

The web has become so deeply integrated into our daily routines that we often fail to think about how our own net activity can be used against us. For example, while we might feel comfortable sharing somewhat private or confidential information in an e-mail with a friend, we often forget that once we send off that e-mail we lose control of it. It could be shared, forwarded along, and ultimately come back to haunt you. Furthermore, we are now beginning to learn that even if your friend, say, deletes that e-mail it still can be retrieved. In fact, forensic scientists are telling us that unless very concerted steps are taken, almost any digital piece of information can be recovered after deletion.

Those are personal minutiae, though. At what point do we start worrying about really losing our privacy? To get at the answer, take, for example, this piece Adam Penenberg penned for Mother Jones about Google. The first two paragraphs alone were enough to make me a little uneasy. As Penenberg describes, Google (and other search engines) track your IP address and your queries. Although that might not be too alarming, it becomes disconcerting when you consider the AOL slip a few months ago when they released a massive database of user search queries that enabled people curious enough to actually decipher the identity of some people whose searches were part of the database.

Consider, also, how Gmail scans your e-mails in order to target ads to you. Very smart scheme, but it didn't stop a privacy brouhaha from erupting over it. Also consider the recent Facebook News Feed debacle. This new option tracked every activity you made on the website (recording what you did and at what time you did it, to the minute), notified your friends about it, and let visitors to your profile track your changes, too. It's not too hard to think of a situation in which you want to go online, but don't want everyone to know about when and what you did. Facebook caved fast, issued an apology, and quickly rolled out new privacy settings. Hats off to them.

But the incorporation of the internet along with its growing grip on our lives means that at some point something irksome will happen again. For many, the sheer volume of personal information that a simple ego search renders is already more than they want publicly available. It seems we've already lost control over that. And with the tracking of almost every single thing we do online, we are increasingly losing control over more aspects of our lives--surrendered to the databases of growing corporations.