goodness.

 My first response to reading this blog again was, seriously, a post on parenting - that was what I last posted about? I can't help but write this with a grin twinkling across my face because you see, I am a parent now but back when I wrote this there were exactly two things in life I was certain about: no parenthood, no marriage. Hah! Reason number 1 to keep a personal blog going is to for the chance to laugh at your past selves.

I cannot help but feel grateful to be where I am today. I seem to have emerged from one crisis to the next stronger and eventually, better for it. Silver linings नहीं हैं, बनता बदलता नक़्शा है। I remember, sometime in 2011 or 12 meeting a psychiatrist and asking her, thanks for the diagnosis - truly - but why do I have depression? And she said, I could give you a wide range of reasons but is it really necessary to know why? It's hard to find a good psychiatrist because it's such a tough job, isn't it? There are good ones; once in a while you come across a wise one. 

I'm grateful because I feel invincible. Nobody gets to a place like this in their lives without the grit that friends are. And so, to the bricks that built me up: What a blessing to me you have been. 

Chandana

Tiggy

Deepti Moorthy

Stuti (do you remember that awful year of high school?)

Roshni (then and now)

Steve (possibly imaginary first crush but SO real and comforting)

Kavya Firefly

Sarath G

^, your friend I met at that party at your place in Sanjaynagar who was simply breathtaking 

Sharan

Jo - a toast, to our fabulous YouTube channel

Tina and Sonu

Samra

Ryan, Nithya (we are so witty in our chats and emails da!)

Shrey

Anjali (and our iconic Delhi trip)

Pari

Garima Diva

Pai

Pallo

Asif

Shilpa K

Chiku

Anurag (bhai - I'm working on our annotated copy of Anthropocene, Reviewed)

Pri

Shibani 

Sheena

Siddharth (for laughing when you did - it changed my life)

Simran

Justin (solidmax)

Atul (arre vah!)

Sushil (जीने का सबब पुख्ता कर रही हूँ)

अपनी घभराहटें किस assignment में बयाँ करूँ?

parenting

I wonder if people consider the philosophical and moral implications of bringing up a child.

One of the most common arguments I've heard for having children is the continuation of the family line. If a family wants to extend their lineage, why not write a well-researched account of its oral history instead? I would imagine it would problematise and enrich notions of who is a Muslim, etc., who is an Indian, etc. which we need desperately. It would take away academic (and by extension class, caste, geography and gender) monopoly over who writes these histories, and what kind of histories are heard.

But I digress. Not everybody cares about knowledge monopolisation and that's okay.

Another argument is having someone to take care of you when you grow old. This is a justified anxiety since not many of us care to die alone and it's comforting to have someone with whom you have an intimately shared history with. I imagine the economics of raising a child take care, partly, of this requirement. I think we may have enough to provide for ourselves when we grow old, were we to not spend on raising children. Of course, emotionally we may choose the intimacy of having our own children to share our old age with, rather than friends or other relationships. But that is not reason enough to have children, since it doesn't account for the personal liberty of the child.

I also want to protest against the hypocrisy of this justification: a parent-child relationship is considered emotional, and is operationalised emotionally, but the justification (particularly this one) to have a child seems rather transactional. In this sense, rural families who decide to have children so that they can pitch in economically seems to me a more candid approach to having children, although it is equally unjustified for the same reason: children are not a means to an end, just as much as parents aren't.

A third argument is that children are a source of company in an otherwise lonely world, or relationship. Let's not consider the latter situation, since children are not a means to make a parent feel better about themselves or their relationship with their partner. To the justification that children are a source of emotional joy and security, it's harder to apply the utilitarian critique because theoretically, parents also lend emotional support and comfort to their children. But does this always happen?

The question now is: once I decide to become a parent, do I also think about how to become a good parent? (By 'good' I mean, a parent who is emotionally caring and looks at a child not just as a source of emotional solace but also as an individual with rights.)

To understand just how difficult parenting is, let's compare it with teaching. As a teacher it is possible to have access to resources, planned training; to have the luxury of experimentation and personal space while working with children. Teachers get paid, too. As a parent, on the other hand I have almost nothing except anecdotal advice from almost everybody, de-contextualised resources, discontinuous support and a stupendous invasion of my private and/or professional life. What kind of support, really, do parents have on how to raise a child? Why does our society not acknowledge this lack?

There are some people in this world who have really made a muck of being parents. Their children are trying their best to be well-adjusted despite their upbringing. Their parents, in turn are trying to cope with dark moments of feeling defeated and self-betrayed. Both children and their parents have to eventually find support systems elsewhere. This process is immensely difficult because of unnatural and unjustified expectations that society places on parenting and children's relationship with their parents.These expectations also make acknowledging this social failure almost impossible: bad parents are rare and their children have bad luck.

In fact, I think it's really hard to be a parent because although they are encouraged to be one, they are hardly given any pragmatic support once this irreversible deed has been accomplished. Parents are left stranded and unprepared to handle the enormity of laying foundational groundwork in a child's life, entirely on their own. Is it enough that women can fertilise eggs and lactate, that men can generate sperm, that they have a stable socio-economic arrangement, that they get along with each other? Where is the child in all of this biological and economic preparation?

Perhaps people who decide to be single parents have had the opportunity to think a little harder on the philosophical implications of bringing up a child, since it isn't a natural extension of their current state in life. It is not enough to think about the potential changes in one's personal life (given that that is also a crucial component of the decision-making process) simply because being a parent is not entirely about you.

We need to free parenting from its essentialist trappings. Being a parent is not natural, simply because procreation is. We need to think of it as a choice, as a role that people need support and preparation for.

freedom and democracy

Excerpt from The Diary of a School Teacher, by Hemraj Bhatt (trans. Sharada Jain)

While watching T.V., I came across a news item about a Madhya Pradesh teacher who had advertised in the newspapers for a female friend to massage him and fulfil his sexual needs. The police, on reading the advert, conducted a sting operation on the teacher and took him to the police station. Here, they asked him vulgar questions again and again – just to enjoy themselves at the expense of his discomfort. The teacher, on his part, was visibly ashamed and kept apologising, saying that he would never do something like this again.

The TV channels played this clip on loop. Several questions came to my mind. What do these channels want to convey by showing such news? What is worth showing and what is not? What was so great about conducting a sting operation on a poor teacher?

In a country and in a society where nothing is immoral if done on the sly, who gave the police and the TV channels the right to define morality?

This teacher could have fulfilled his desires without the advertisement. Then the police and journalists would not have known about him. But he expressed his feelings. What does freedom mean in a democracy?

Hemraj Bhatt (1968-2008) was a assistant primary schoolteacher in a government primary school in Uttarkashi. He was the only official teacher in a school for 51 children, ranging from classes 1 to 5. He began keeping a diary which was translated and published after his death. His reflections provide insight not just on his daily struggles to provide meaningful education to his children but also on the entire education system itself. Read the full diary here.

a friend and a therapist

Friends you can count on are rare. Friends who help you through depression are an even rarer subset. But should your friend also be your therapist?

I speak for myself when I say no, she should not. In the throes of depression I cannot see things which are fairly obvious. She makes the decision to be the calmer of the two and attempts to show these things to me. But this decision comes at a cost--she has to overcome her own fear and shock and try, at all costs, not to display it to me. She has to discard everything she's doing and concentrate entirely on me. No matter how she's been feeling, she must rally enormous emotional forces from within herself and use them to systematically counter every argument my corrupted mind throws at myself, at her.

But every time this happens, she is put in a terrible position of grappling between love and helplessness. Unlike my therapist, she has had no training in clinical psychology; any strategies she comes up with are ones she creates on her own, based on her intimate knowledge of me, the connections she makes from the history we share and her learnings from previous conversations. She never stops learning, she never stops trying for me.

But she's my friend. She's not a therapist. She comes from a position of love, and it is this same position which overwhelms her each time these conversations happen, because it is beyond the scope of our love to provide me with ways to cope with depression. Her love convinces me that I need these strategies, but it cannot always provide them to me. There is nothing right or wrong about this, and neither is this a limitation: this is a fact.

If you have someone like this on your life, don't take them for granted. Talk to them whenever you need to, but if you want help, go to a therapist or a doctor. Just like self-medication, forcing them to be your therapist is harmful and unfair on both of you. Remember that every breakdown you suffer from, they suffer with you, and somewhere it is worse for them, since they do not have medication or therapy to fall back on. You should.

thoughts on childhood in India

An interesting question came up today in our Child Learning and Development class - is childhood a social construct?

I'd like to read your thoughts.

'Zindagi Gulzar Hai'

There comes a time when you realize that you have surrendered a part of your heart to a book, film, television series or a professor because they leave you moved. The writer, the artist becomes a presence in your mind separate from your experience of their work.

With each redefining moment of watching Kashav's story I feel a complicated mixture of love and alarm at its intensity. I sometimes cannot believe this story has actually been written.

Sultana apa, you have my heart. Don't let me down; I won't be able to bear it.

[No spoilers, please.]

can we be counter-imaginative?

It was half past eight in the evening. I was cycling back from university to my hostel. (The road approaching my hostel is hardly a road; it has bumps the size of small hillocks. I usually stand up and ride this rough stretch.) I was emerging from an unlit, dark 400 metre stretch of this road when a group of four men suddenly jumped in front of my cycle, shouted "Ha!" and ran away, laughing. 

I stopped in my tracks and tried to understand what had just happened. Was this an issue of safety, human dignity, violence against women? Why did they do this? And suddenly, a thought entered my head: what made them behave specifically the way they did? This wasn't a spontaneous outburst; it was a planned, unwelcome flash mob. Even if it took them a couple of minutes, they had obviously devised their scheme carefully. It had been executed with perfection. In addition to this, it takes a fair amount of controlled recklessness to jump in front of a moving vehicle in the dark. It was imaginative.

Which brings me back to the idea of using imagination to devise strategies which can counter, or attempt to counter sexual violence. This is, of course, applicable only in situations where the survivors of sexual violence wish to put themselves out there, once again, without any guarantees of safety or success. Apart from the survivor's personal choices, it also depends on the kind of sexual violence we are trying to devise strategies for. It may seem exceedingly difficult, for instance, to come up with a strategy to counter rape as it is happening. But can we come up with a way to respond to being ogled?

There is some work being done around this idea by Blank Noise. 

The question of context is never far behind when thinking of issues of sexual violence or really, any social issue. There are no universal values, and there can definitely be no "10 Ways To..." counter being forcibly objectified. That said, we definitely can benefit from imagining, visualising, discussing and hopefully experimenting with strategies to counter this kind of daily violence against women, within our specific contexts.  

Initial thoughts on possessing a shaved head

1 The slightest breeze feels like waves of wind flowing over my head.

2 I still have to shampoo! Because dandruff doesn't go away with hair.

3 The kajal in my eyes and earrings seem to stand out more - maybe there is a facial proportion answer to this.

4 People, known or unknown, are franker with their reactions - they laugh or widen their eyes in a way that I cannot miss.

5 I have to rearrange the way I dance to hindi songs because I can't use my hair anymore.

6 It really does feel light up there.

7 Looking at my reflection in the mirror is an exercise in self-discomfort. It's sometimes hard to get used to the way my face has changed.

8 I don't feel nice when my roommate says, "you look like a boy!" And I wonder why.

9 There is a slight but significant shift in the way most men see me. It's as if I have become an object of curiosity instead an object of sexual overpowering, if only momentarily.

10 Women come and tell me how they have been wanting to do the same thing for a long time now. I know how that feels, because it took me three years.

11 I sometimes forget I don't have hair anymore, when I absently run my hand over my head.

12 It surprisingly doesn't annoy me when people stroke my head, but I can imagine it must be for others.

13 I suspect people ask women a lot more questions than they do men, when women choose to shave off their hair.

14 People ask a lot of questions.

dirty talk

Like sex, hygiene is something that people don’t talk about often enough. Everybody has their own personal definition of hygiene. Maybe we don’t need to talk about everything, you say. But when you share a bathroom, you do, I say.

We have our personal definitions of hygiene that we strangely believe everyone is aware of, and shares with us. We silently but irrevocably judge people based on how they leave the toilet, the sink, the floor, the taps, the drain. It is a testament to their character, their parents, their community and/or religion, the place they come from.

Notions of invisible ‘purity’ which form the basis of Hinduism and Sikhism may be hard to believe since they are, ultimately, abstract concepts upon which some people are alienated, murdered, sexually violated, exploited by other people in positions of power. But it’s interesting to note that while something might be visibly unclean to me, it might not be to someone else.

I live in a 2BHK flat with four other women. One of my friends in the other bedroom constantly complained how her roommate, K left the drain clogged with her hair every morning. To me, this is unforgivably inconsiderate.

After three days, I jumped in the middle of what was, technically, their dispute, because each bedroom has its own bathroom. I confronted her as soon as she came out of her bath. I spoke to her unkindly, asking her what she thought of herself to leave the bathroom in such a terrible condition for her roommate. I said a lot more, too, assuming that she was doing this out of laziness or disgust. (Eww, who picks up hair from a drain?)

She was stunned. She simply assumed that the cleaning staff was doing the needful. I sharply corrected her, no, it’s your roommate who’s cleaning up after you.

That night, I happened to eat alone in the mess; my roommates had finished before me and had gone upstairs. I realised that my friend had never mentioned having spoken to K about her discomfort. She, as I, had simply assumed that K was at fault because she didn’t share this common code of hygiene with the rest of us. Neither of us had stopped to think that we had never verbalised this code to anyone.

I hadn’t pulled up K for leaving the bathroom dirty. I had attacked her for not reading our minds.

Why can we not talk to each other about hygiene? Just because four women happen to follow a particular aspect of this all-important code doesn’t mean it becomes obvious. The bathroom is one of the most crucial spaces in a house—unlike the kitchen, it’s a space that everyone uses frequently. It’s a private space that we are forced to share. We confront our uglinesses, we let go (forgive the terrible pun), we strip ourselves bare in that room. It is impossible that each of us does this identically. Even when I was living alone, it was the bathroom that made me feel most vulnerable when a guest happened to use it.

I think it’s time my roommates and I overcame our shame and disgust and spoke to each other frankly about hygiene. In matters of dirtiness, the bathroom is no match for the mind.

Life, this endless conversation with yourself

Silent in sanity, audible--
In madness.

Zohra Sehegal, The Telegraph, 2004

Ab ki baar...

And a close favourite:

Seeing there is no place left for reason or humanity.

Source

"People are lego." - Shibani

"Tamizh is spoken with the tongue; English spoken with the jaws."

- Arun Prakash Samiaiah

Madras, meri jaan

It was perhaps a sign of things to come when the first thing I saw the moment I stepped into Chennai Central a year ago was a biriyani kadai. It was around 4 pm and a couple of people stood around, consuming generous plates of chicken biriyani. I thought to myself, chicken biriyani? Interesting. It wouldn’t have been ‘interesting’ in Bombay. It wouldn’t have been interesting anywhere else except in Madras, back then, considering I had assumed that the entire city was vegetarian.

I wish I could meet that girl and enjoy the surprised look on her face as she saw the streets lined with as many biriyani kadais as there were amman koils (perhaps more). Perhaps they became highlighted in my mind because I couldn’t immediately shake off my surprise.

We’ve all met people who say to women-who-take-offence, so what if we use ‘rape’ casually in our conversations? It doesn’t make us rapists, it makes you over-sensitive. The curious thing about language is how it infects you and sits in parts of your brain which get lit when you encounter change. I never realised that parts of my brain had been infected by ideas of Madras being a vegetarian city, until I passed by a couple hundred poultry shops, non-vegetarian restaurants and kadais as I left the station.

Sometimes it doesn’t even have to be a change as obvious or tangible as moving cities. Perhaps there’s wisdom in the idea that it’s good to move around people different from you. What happened to me when I moved might happen over a conversation with someone tomorrow.

An overwhelming majority of my colleagues love non-vegetarian food. They cook, consume and celebrate it like I never have back in Bombay. I felt the irony: it was as if Madras was gently pulling my leg. Madras, like most Indian cities is a city of pluralities. There are only-on-Thursdays, everyday-except-Thursdays, egg-is-fine, fish-smells, chicken’s-best, swear-by-seafood, will-eat-anything-that-moves pluralities among non-vegetarians as well. Food is as protean and alive in its contradictions and patterns as its consumers are.

It isn’t as if these puzzles don’t exist among vegetarians. But it was important for me to understand that no city can ever be flattened into a single food type. Only living beings have blood types; places don’t. I would never do what I did to Bombay since it has an enduring reputation of being a melting-pot, cosmopolitan, global village, fluttering immigrant magnet, whatnot. But I did it to Madras because I figured it’s down south where everyone eats idli-dosa, is super-brainy and speaks Tamizh. How does one apologise to a city?

As April descended into Madras last year, the city’s famed summer season became a constant refrain. It gets hotter in a room if you keep saying it’s getting hotter. I couldn’t really feel the difference. People from Madras and Bombay alike would ask me, how are you managing? It must be so much better in Bombay, no? I’m managing fine, thank you, I said. If Madras gets hot by nature of its geographical location, Bombay doesn’t fare any better thanks to its relentless pollution and smog.

In a passive-aggressive conversation with my mother, I realised that the climate, like the food, is another infection we unknowingly let fester in our minds. The tongue is a vicious organ. The heat of Madras is as much about climate as it is about supporting a dark-skinned, loud-mouthed, Dravidian, anti-Hindi, conservative, ‘Madrasi’ narrative of the south.

Sometime in July, a friend from Bombay asked me if I missed the city. I had visited home for a few short days in June and began to outline to him specific places, moments in the day, restaurants, lanes, places and people that I could see vividly in my mind. Yes, I missed Bombay, I said. The friend nodded his head with great self-assurance. Once you’ve lived in Bombay, you’ll miss it anywhere, he said. Madras is no match for the energy, vibrancy and of course, the heady nightlife that the city has to offer. Do they have nightclubs in Madras?

This conversation repeated itself over many people across time. Unsurprisingly, none of these views came from Madrasis themselves. Which made me realise something else: Madras is possibly the most unpretentious Indian metro of all. It simply doesn’t believe in calling attention to its city-ness.

Perhaps the place where this hits you the hardest is its airport. Madras Airport is one of the most unassuming airports I’ve ever been to. A local train stops at walking distance from the airport: you can literally walk into it from the station’s subway.

Just late this February, I accidentally wandered into the International Terminal and it was calm, quiet and almost empty. There was a man sitting in one of those small shuttle cars and he asked me if I was lost. I told him where I wanted to go, and he happily offered me a ride. I couldn’t believe my ears. He ferried me—the only passenger—all the way to the Domestic Terminal and even stopped in the middle to offer his friend a lift. It was quirky, it was heart-warming and it was possibly when I realised for the second time that I had fallen in love with Madras.

Sometime in August, I was talking with a friend about something I don’t remember now. We were standing on her terrace which overlooked the junction between KMC and Eega theatre. While she spoke to another friend, I happened to look down at the traffic inching its way home.

Constant references to the horrible traffic in Bombay are not just a matter of fact; they are subtle boasts to Bombay’s city-ness. A city is not really a city unless it has frustrating, incurable traffic jams, yawning sky-scrapers, a ballooning population and a taxing daily life, among other things. Madras has bad traffic in patches, not too many tall buildings, a population which balloons in pockets and situations and a fairly laidback daily life. I wonder what makes Madras a city. I’d ask her but she doesn’t seem to care enough to answer.

What Madras does seem to be proud of are her beaches. And they really are worth the vanity. There are so many beaches, I could pick them to suit—or mould—my moods. Go to Bessie when I’m feeling light-headed, or talkative and friendly, or contemplative. Go to Palavakkam to be seduced. Go to Thiruvanmiyur beach when I feel I need to be alone, to be soothed and reassured. I’m not sure yet what Marina and Neelangkarai will offer me.

Sometime either in December last year or January I was going back home from Koyambedu bus depot. I was in an auto, and it stopped at a signal. It was around half past seven in the evening, and I was foolishly trying to read a book by the streetlight. As I bent the book this way and that, multi-coloured lights began gently streaking my hands. It felt like someone was playing with me: touching and letting me be as the streaks blew across my hand.

The book lay forgotten as I twisted my hands in the lights, feeling the colours wash over my skin. As the auto-anna restarted the engine, I peeked out to find the source of my delight. It was a string of neon-red, blue and green fairy-lights adorning the sign board of a fertility clinic. The clinic was shut but someone had left the lights on. Somehow they had bent and stretched their way inside the auto I was in and lit me up. That was the first time I realised I was in love with Madras.

it's time to move on, dear writer/film-maker

I have a tingling in my elbows. When that happens, it usually means that I can sense what fictional characters are thinking. And something tells me that a certain breed of fictional characters - the ones that aren't really dead or alive - are tired of humans.

Ever since Stephanie Meyer came out with the Twilight series, there have been books, films, more books, more films: in short, an onslaught of fictional paparazzi on vampires, werewolves and their human hybrids. I think the Living Dead, as we shall collectively refer to them now, are a little annoyed with this (very possibly) misinformed representation of them and their lifestyle, particularly food habits.

I think we, as readers, must consider the consequences of encouraging indolent writers or film-makers in this world by consuming their uninspiring explorations into the world of the Living Dead. There can only be so much speculation about a population which, let's face it, we don't really know has decided is alive or not.

Let's turn towards a different species to excavate, create, berate, vegetate on. The secret life of cacti, perhaps? Or the reclusive world of marine invertebrates? How will we ever know what else will catch the attention of young people around the world as unpredictably as the Twilight series did, if we don't let go of the Living Dead? It is time to let them be.

the abuse of anger

What an abusive privilege it is to show anger by yelling at an employee. A sign of authority, a show of ego, an utter masturbation of frustrations which have nothing to do with the real matter at hand. Raising one's voice is quite as hurtful as raising one's hand. What is pain? Is it just the red sting after a slap?

My office is a modest 2BHK apartment in a residential building. There are usually about six people in office. An employee had decided to resign and sent an email about it to my boss today about it. Soon after, she was called into the room where he usually sits, and asked to shut the door. He expressed his shock and anger at her in such a loud voice, it boomed throughout our tiny office like a sudden explosion. It wasn't a solitary exclamation, it was an onslaught. Very soon, it became physically painful to not intervene. I am still ashamed at not going inside the room and asking him to shut the fuck up.

Hearing someone being shouted at in an extremely loud voice is akin to hearing someone's tortured cries of pain. It is frightening. It crumples your insides and you fear for their sanity and unconsciously your own. It is a physical assault, a blow that you cannot quantify, like a relentless, invisible, punching fist. 

It makes you frustrated for being in a working environment where laptops and people are so closely located to each other that it is impossible to have a solitary bad day or a freewheeling gchat with a friend. 

Working in a small company creates the watery illusion of belonging to a family. It's hard to escape this illusion. When the sink floods, you run down to call the building's plumber. When there's a full-day power cut, you pack your laptops and head to your boss's house. You all fit around one table for lunch. You know what to order for breakfast for her at Trichy, Tirunelveli, Erode, Kochi and Vellore respectively. You industriously spring-clean the office the morning of Saraswati Pooja even though you don't really give a shit about Saraswati Pooja. You steal your colleague's favourite chair and try not to laugh as he searches, annoyed, for a chair with just the right height. You take your sick colleague to hospital and force her to go home after the check-up. You tease your boss mercilessly when you spy a hickey on his neck. You carry an extra spectacle case because you know she will definitely forget hers on your trip tonight. You scold people for not putting their shoes in the right place or cleaning up after making maggi. It's not a 'cool' thing to do - it happens because you work with an average of six people in a 2BHK apartment six days a week, 8 hours a day.  

If you are someone's boss, no matter what the size of your company, I believe you do not have the right to shout at your employee. I don't care if you know more about her personal life than other bosses would care to. I don't care if you've offered her help and advice beyond your professional capacity as her senior. You cannot, cannot raise your voice at her, challenge her character, deride her friends and family, dismiss her personal choices. You cannot try to extract information from her roomie behind her back. 

I'm sorry, S. I should have stood up for you the moment he began to hit you with his voice. I should have asked him to fuck off when he approached me for information. I'm sorry I let you down.

If you happen to work in a small office or department, don't let the friendly environment dilute your outrage. Even if he is a great boss, a caring mentor, an interested colleague - if he shouts at you in a manner that hurts, frightens or threatens you, let him know. It is a terrible, burning violation of your self and there is no justification for it.  

arriving

4:23 pm: That feeling of wonder when you know that you have been in two different places in the same day. In the morning you were in one city: an entirely different experience which made a different person out of you. And then you crossed over to another city, setting on its horizon. Changing cities like a chameleon. It takes time to arrive to another place, even if you've been there before. 

question

When it comes to trusting people, is it incorruptibility to not learn from betrayals, or is simply foolishness?

old dreams

I recently read a letter which had a vision of my future. The writer imagined that four years later, in 2013, I'd be teaching a group of 18 year olds about languages across the world. I'd also be alone in a different city somewhere, spending my free time walking around, soaking my senses in myriad sights, sounds, smells.

When I read that letter, it struck me how old some of my closest dreams are. It doesn't make my desire to become a teacher more valid than someone who has decided to teach today. It doesn't rule out new dreams, younger dreams. I'm simply humbled by their power. Things change every day; there are no footprints in a desert. Once in a while, a wind blows again and again, steady among the shifting sand dunes.

This wind is now making me change my direction once again. If you know anyone who has done or is doing a B. Ed in India, do let me know. I want to become a teacher.