Random thoughts in war and peace
Life on the streets of Kolkata can be an assault to the senses for someone unaccustomed. For me, it’s home. The vendors, the noise, the traffic, the smells, the sounds. Everything. I snapped photos with my iPhone when I was home in November and December. Of rickshaw wallahs, sweet shops, jewelry stalls, tea vendors and grand dame buildings about to fall flat on their faces. And so much more.
Christmas is not a tradition I grew up with in India.
But who cannot love opening presents on a cold morning in front of a fire? Especially when the gifts include a pair of tomato red woolen gloves that come complete with special forefinger and thumb fabric that allows for — what else — easy maneuvering of the iPhone.
I don’t have to take my gloves off to use my keyboard anymore. Joy!
Yes, my husband got me these gloves and yes, I love them.
Perhaps because I go to work in the darkness of the early morning — at 6 a.m. to be precise — and they come in most handy not just for checking email on my phone but also maneuvering the controls in my Mini.
Now I’ve got the whole world in my hands.
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| I went with Georgia soldiers on a tour of the ruins at Ur, near Tallil Air Base in early 2006. |
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| Spc. Jason Smith and me at Tallil. |
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| Photos of Georgia’s fallen at a memorial at Tallil. |
The last hot meal served there was on Thanksgiving Day. I rememberhow I hated walking down to the chow hall to eat. It was such a hike in windand chill. So long and lonely that I often skipped dinner. Ate Ramen noodles inmy trailer instead.
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| I took to this Iraqi girl at a health center near Nasiriyah. She was one of many Iraqis I remembered as the U.S. war formally came to an end Thursday. |
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| Phoolpishi and Pishemashai on their 50th anniversary. |
“Of us eight brothers and sisters,” she said in Bengali,“only four are still standing.”
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| A young Phoolpishi in Kolkata. |
My eldest aunt died in the 1980s. Then, several yearslater, one of my father’s younger brothers died, quite suddenly. My fathersuffered from Alzeheimer’s for many years and was finally relieved of his agonyin 2001.
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| She insisted on wheeling herself into the kitchen to make payesh for me. |
This last time, she insisted she make payesh for me. It’sa traditional dessert eaten on birthdays. My birthday was two weeks away stillbut Phoolpishi was adamant.
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| Phoolpishi holding me in Kolkata, 1963 |
It was tough to leave California at the end of September.I knew then I would probably not see her well again. I knew I would probablylose another close connection to home; someone who strengthened my own roots;someone who had known me since I was born.
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| With Saraf and Pishemashai in 2005. |
How she easily dozed off in a car as soon as it startedmoving – a trait shared by my father. How she loved to play bridge, as did myfather. How she shared with him another passion – Bengali mishtis or sweets.When Phoolpishi visited us in the 1980s in Florida, she and my father spenthours in the kitchen making sandesh and bhapa dahi.
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| I visited her in September in California. |
I am feeling all those things today. She was the only oneof my father’s generation who was in the United States. And yet, I saw her morewhen we both visited India together.
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| A family photo taken in the early 1970s at my grandfather’s house in Kolkata. Phoolpishi is on the right on the front row. I am sitting in the middle of the front row. Suman is to my right. |
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| Fun in an English class with some of the 10th graders at Udaan. |
In Hindi, udaan means flight. Like a bird flying off. Free to explore the world.
In my hometown of Kolkata, the Udaan Society is trying to help underpriveleged youth find that freedom through knowledge.
My childhood friend Vijay recently started a new weekend program at Udaan for students of all ages.
In a donated flat in Kolkata’s Alipur neighborhood, boys and girls and young men and women who live lives under India’s crushing poverty, find solace from the misery of their own homes within brightly lit rooms.
They are served lunch and encouraged to paint, dance, sing — activities they might not otherwise engage in their gloomy homes. Many don’t have both parents. Or their fathers are drug addicts. They come from uneducated families who are unable to teach them the importance of school.
The idea is to take them away from their environments to help provide a boost in their education. Teachers volunteer their time to help the students with math, English, business education.
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| With Saddam Hussein. I teased him about his name. |
Vijay asked me to teach a few English classes there this time. Some were 5th and 6th graders. Others were high school students. All were eager to learn English, a vital language for good jobs in India.
I had found it extremely rewarding to teach last spring at the University of Georgia. Teaching at Udaan was something else.
I am posting a few photographs of some of the older students.
One told me he wanted to be an astronaut; another, an engineer.
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| The idea is to get the kids away from gloomy home environments. |
I wish you well. And if any of you are reading this, remember always that you only get one chance in life to go to school in India. Please stick with it. So you, too, can take flight.
Fly away from that which you cannot control. Fly away from empty bellies and sickness. Fly way from the pain of poverty.
But most of all, never stop dreaming.
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| Dead redfish on Manasota Key |
Growing up in the Cold War era, I associated Red Tide with communism.
Recently, I saw the results of another kind of Red Tide. This one caused by a population explosion of toxic plankton in the ocean usually from environmental factors like warm temperatures, calm seas and high nutrition content, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
During my last trip to Florida, Red Tide blooms were moving northward along the Gulf of Mexico, turning some beaches into morbid scenes.
The Gulf was like a bathtub at Manasota Key and I thought I could float on the aqua waters, wash away stress and bask under the sun’s glow. Instead, the beach smelled foul, much worse than the outer alleys of a Kolkata fish market where the fish mongers throw out the guts and scales from cleaning their daily catch. The easterly breeze was strong enough to make me want to breathe solely through my mouth.
I could not tell what the problem was until I walked down to the beach and there, for as far as the eye could see, were dead fish. Redfish and Grunt mostly.
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| Red Tide killed fish in the Gulf of Mexico |
Redfish are sizable and they looked grotesque with their stomachs split open and their eyes popping out after many days in the sun. A fisherman said he had been on the beach three days before, when the fish still looked red. But no more. They had turned a color of death. Some sort of creature had pecked through the vast assortment of food — a veritable banquet for crabs, birds and others that crawl the sands. Whatever it was had picked through the eyes and left only the sockets behind.
The predators had left the day I was there. Maybe the fish was too spoiled even for vultures.
It was a grisly scene of death. And yet, I suppose, nature’s way of keeping balance.
Four days later, back at CNN, I stared into my computer screen, sizing up the photographs of a dead Moammar Gadhafi, his body bruised, battered, bloodied and discolored. He lay on a mattress in a Misrata meat cooler for days, rotting slowly but surely.
I thought of the Redfish.
Evil Reporter Chick 