Last week, as is our custom at home, I read to my daughter before I put her to bed. (We pick a mix of ‘long stories’ and ‘short stories’ and settle on a number beforehand, one which has to be conformed to by a ‘promise.’) On this particular night, the ‘long story’ was Edwidge Danticat‘s Mama’sContinue reading “A Bedtime Story About ‘Immigration And Separation’”
Tag Archives: immigrant experiences
The Implausible Immigrants Of ‘The Night Of’
In HBO’s The Night Of a young Pakistani-American, Nasir Khan, has a bad night out: he ‘borrows’ his father’s cab for a joyride, picks up a mysterious and beautiful stranger, parties with her, and wakes up in her apartment to find her dead, and himself accused of murder. Things look bad, very bad. And so we’reContinue reading “The Implausible Immigrants Of ‘The Night Of’”
An Unforgettable Image, Appropriately Contextualized
In the summer of 1992, I traveled to India to visit my family: my mother, my brother, his wife (my sister-in-law), and my little, then barely six months old nephew. The monsoon lay around the corner, promising mixed relief from the brutal heat of the North Indian plains; the humidity would still oppress, but evenings andContinue reading “An Unforgettable Image, Appropriately Contextualized”
India’s IIT Graduates Go Mainstream: Via Campus Shooting, The American Way
Graduates of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) are part of American life: professors, technology officers, and scientists at Ivy League universities, Silicon Valley start-ups, and industrial research and development laboratories. But these are rarefied environs, exclusive precincts for the technocratic elite; the IIT graduate’s presence here places his cultural achievements in a fringeContinue reading “India’s IIT Graduates Go Mainstream: Via Campus Shooting, The American Way”
Alasdair MacIntyre On Relativism And The Immigrant
In ‘Relativism, Power, and Philosophy,’ (Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association,Vol. 59, No. 1, September 1985, pp. 5-22) Alasdair MacIntyre writes: ‘Relativism’…names one kind of conclusion to enquiry into a particular class of problems. Those questions arise in the first place for people who live in certain highly specific types of social andContinue reading “Alasdair MacIntyre On Relativism And The Immigrant”
A Memento Of Fellow Travelers, Long Since Moved On
I have in my possession, one photograph of the only graduation (‘commencement’) ceremony I have ever attended–that for my first graduate degree, in ‘computer and information science.’ (I did not want to attend the ceremony, expecting it to be tedious in the extreme–it was–but I did want to send a keepsake back to my motherContinue reading “A Memento Of Fellow Travelers, Long Since Moved On”
Bilinguality And Being ‘Different People In Different Languages’
Over at LitHub, Ana Menéndez asks that age-old question ‘Are We Different People in Different Languages,’ and, by way of a partial answer, writes: For me, language was a kind of initiation into multiple realities. For if one language could be certain of a table’s gender and another couldn’t be bothered, then what was trueContinue reading “Bilinguality And Being ‘Different People In Different Languages’”
The Subway Car’s Daily Dose Of Culture
My train ride into Manhattan today reminded me that yesterday’s lament about the possible lack of adequate ‘cultural consumption’ in my life in this city was sorely missing one aspect of my urban experience: the culture that this city’s residents experience and ‘live’ by the mere fact of being in this city. This morning, IContinue reading “The Subway Car’s Daily Dose Of Culture”
Donald Trump And The Art Of The Presidential Deal
Shortly after I arrived in the US in 1987, I began working in my campus cafeteria (at the then minimum wage of $4.25 an hour.) One of my non-student companions at work was a young man who worked on the weekends as a replacement for the weekday staff. He was frivolous and funny and irreverent;Continue reading “Donald Trump And The Art Of The Presidential Deal”
A Grandmother’s Gift: A Curiously Significant Number
I’m a numbers nerd; in all probability, this stems from being a sports fan. I calculate sports statistics in my head; I can effortlessly multiply any pair of two-digit numbers in that same location; I retain an astonishing number of odd numerical markers in my cranium. As such, some numbers acquire a significance that goesContinue reading “A Grandmother’s Gift: A Curiously Significant Number”
Samir Chopra 