My last name is a giveaway: I’m a Punjabi. But I’ve never lived in the Punjab and I have yet to master its language. The story of my attempts to do so reveals familiar struggles—by people like you and me—to fashion an identity, no matter where we live, whether in India or elsewhere. As aContinue reading “Language and Identity: The Case of Punjabi”
Tag Archives: immigrant experiences
Children and Nostalgia
I often find myself talking or writing about nostalgia. As I said here a little while ago: I’m an immigrant; nostalgia and homesickness are supposed to be my perennial conditions. In that same post, I remarked too, on the particular manifestations of both kinds of nostalgia–restorative, which concerns itself with returning to the lost home and reflective,Continue reading “Children and Nostalgia”
On ‘Bureaucratic Torture’ – Contd.
Yesterday I wrote about ‘bureaucratic torture.’ I anticipated it and remembered it with little joy. Today, I experienced it. I showed up on time at the consulate’s office (or rather, the office of the company to whom consular services have been outsourced.) I stood in line, dealt with the usual gruff security guards, was usheredContinue reading “On ‘Bureaucratic Torture’ – Contd.”
On ‘Bureaucratic Torture’
For the past few days I’ve been racked with a terrible anxiety: I have a visa application appointment tomorrow. At the Indian consulate, to apply for a ten-year tourist visa, so that I may journey back to the land of my birth and former citizenship. I’ve had photographs taken, filled out forms, checked and re-checkedContinue reading “On ‘Bureaucratic Torture’”
An Independence Day of Sorts: Beginning a Migration
15 August 1947 is Independence Day in India. It is also my father-in-law’s birthday, a midnight’s child. And it is the day I left India–in 1987, forty years later–to migrate to the US. My ‘migration’–such as it was–consists of pretty standard fare: I began as a graduate student, armed with an admission letter to aContinue reading “An Independence Day of Sorts: Beginning a Migration”
Kinds of Nostalgia
In reviewing Hadara Lazar’s Out of Palestine: The Making of Modern Israel, (‘Palestine: How Bad, & Good was British Rule, New York Review of Books, 7 February 2013) Avishai Margalit writes The term “nostalgia” was coined by a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, in a dissertation submitted to Basel University in 1688. It was meant to be usedContinue reading “Kinds of Nostalgia”
Loss of Faith, the Jewish Atheist, and Working Class Rebellion in ‘Christ in Concrete’
In yesterday’s post on Pietro Di Donato‘s Christ in Concrete, I had noted how Annunziata and Paul’s session with the medium, the Cripple, could perhaps be viewed as an affirmation of the power of the life-sustaining myth. There is a hint of irony in that suggestion, because among the central messages of Di Donato’s impassionedContinue reading “Loss of Faith, the Jewish Atheist, and Working Class Rebellion in ‘Christ in Concrete’”
Talking to the Dead in Di Donato’s ‘Christ in Concrete’
In Pietro Di Donato‘s Christ in Concrete, twelve-year old Paul and his recently widowed mother Annunziata go to meet a medium called The Cripple; she will help them speak with his father and her husband. After waiting for four hours, they are granted an audience. The Cripple is ‘short’, has a ‘positive voice’, a ‘wide neck’,Continue reading “Talking to the Dead in Di Donato’s ‘Christ in Concrete’”
The ‘American’ Overseas
A few days ago, from my vantage point at the University of Luxembourg, during a week of visiting a research group on Individual and Collective Reasoning, I posted the following status update on Facebook: As an American in Europe, I am getting shit for (on this trip): Budweiser (as always), the lack of a really goodContinue reading “The ‘American’ Overseas”
Finding Philosophy in Literature
This semester, I am teaching Philosophical Issues in Literature. PIL is one of Brooklyn College’s so-called upper-tier core courses; all graduating students are required to take a pair of these. Unsurprisingly, just about every student registered for my class told me during the first day’s introductions that they were taking the class because of aContinue reading “Finding Philosophy in Literature”
Samir Chopra 