Non-fiction essay, Embodied Effigies, Winter 2012

Source: http://issuu.com/embodiedeffigies/docs/embodied_effigies_issue_two/87



The Smell of Camphor and the Fragrance of Mustard


The sun has just set on this tiny Caribbean nation of 9 million people. I’m so far away from home, yet the sights, sounds, and odors are familiar. The television in the lobby of the guest house leaks out loud music; the neighbor’s TV plays a soap opera, at once recognizable by the high pitched squeals from the lead female character. A constant din of activity outside-bikes on the road with silencers that don’t silence, stray dogs yelping and dodging the wheels of the taptap, and then the breeze that gently caresses the ornamental palm
fronds placed at strategic corners of the guest house lobby here in Petion-Ville, Port-au-Prince. The breeze gently nudges the stacks of work-related papers strewn about on the dinner table. I miss this.

I miss the ambient noise, the competing blares from the television sets, the recalcitrant motorbikes on the street, and the warring dogs. As the aroma of fried plantains wafts through the twilight air, I can
almost smell the steam rising from a pot of freshly cooked white rice, of black mustard hitting the sesame oil on the iron wok, of garlic and onions fried in clarified butter. I miss this, this simultaneous assault
of the senses. I miss the varying decibels of the human voice—laughter, street fights, infants crying, sermons pouring out the loudspeaker attached precariously to the power line poles. I can see the dust on the tabletop, the imperfections of the paint on the stucco walls, the tell-tale signs of wear and tear on the curtains adorning the window, with one panel not quite matching the other. I like that all I need to do is walk across the street into the pastry shop to grab a quick snack. The Haiti of today stirs a longing, nostalgia for home, home where my parents are, home where I grew up safely ensconced by the cacophony of TV, bikes, dogs, street fights and crickets. The power may go any moment now, but the noises will continue to give you
company.

Travel essay on China, Khabar, January 2013

Travel essay, China, Khabar, January 2013
Source: http://www.khabar.com/magazine/features/travel_vignettes_from_china

Travelers to India and China alike will detect a palpable buzz in the air... of good times, great jobs, free-flowing wealth, general optimism and bonhomie. Shopping malls, luxury brands, and flashy new cars signal changing times in India, but on a much larger scale in China.

A huge billboard outside the international airport in Kunming, Yunnan Province, greets travelers as they enter and exit the airport. It sports a quote from Warren Buffett. His name is spelled out in English, but the actual quote is in Mandarin. Surely, this can’t be a quote by Buffett extolling communism, I think to myself. Nobody quotes Buffett on communism or the ills of capitalism. Even I, with my truncated knowledge of stocks and shares could tell you that Mr. Buffett is exhorting you to make money, albeit in Mandarin. That’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics”— a phrase you hear quite often in China.

I was in China for two weeks, to participate in two training workshops offered by my employer to their Chinese counterparts. Having traveled mostly within the Romance language parts of the world, I knew that the only thing that I could do to prepare for my trip was to arm myself with inane factoids about China such as this one: did you know that three out of four tall building cranes in the world can be found in China? It felt like I must have encountered all but one of those cranes during my travels in China. Try this other factoid on for size: the Chinese communist party anointed a small town in the southwestern Yunnan Province as Shangri-La? Yes, Joseph Hilton’s fictional Shangri-La is now an actual Chinese town. Or this: the largest peaceful migration of humans in modern times occurs when over 300 million Chinese workers hop on trains to visit their hometowns during the Chinese New Year holidays. Imagine if the entire population of the United States were to pack their bags and head off to various destinations. And this: a city in China is considered mid-sized if its population is only around 5 million.

I look back on my two weeks in China and search vainly for one word to capture my impressions. The words I find are all prefixed with “awe”—awe-inspiring, awestruck, and with a little stretch, awe-ful (and awe-mazing). My mind’s eye is peppered with images of broad highways snaking through anonymous exurbia peppered with gleaming new skyscrapers, and cranes stretching far into the horizon.

For two weeks, I visited Nanjing (the erstwhile Nanking), Shanghai and Kunming. I learned and unlearned many things about its peoples, its culture, and its cuisine. As an Indian living in the United States and visiting China for the first time, I was weighed down by the self-imposed burden of having to make insightful commentary and observations on comparative socio-political economics. I know now that you can’t explain China in pithy one-liners just as you can’t explain India or even the United States.

Travelers to India and China alike will detect a palpable buzz in the air-of good times, great jobs, free-flowing wealth, general optimism and bonhomie. Shopping malls, luxury brands, and flashy new cars signal changing times in India, but on a much larger scale in China.

Book Review, Muse India, September 2012

Book Review: India, A Traveller's Literary Companion
Originally appeared in the Sep-Oct 2012 issue of Muse India
Source: http://www.museindia.com/regularcontent.asp?issid=45&id=3640


Girija Sankar : India - A Traveller’s Literary Companion
A diverse picture of the geography and culture

India is complex. It is befuddling, beautiful, harsh and confusing. India is a catch-22, a conundrum, a story within a story within a story. One billion people, 26 official languages, 2000 dialects, and almost all major world religions represented. This diversity and the fact that in spite of it, the country continues to amble along, and even show robust economic growth over the last couple of decades has continued to amaze the cognoscenti and the hoi polloi alike. An interesting characteristic that shapes this diversity is that the states in India are for the most part linguistically divided, with many of the states having a distinct language, script and several dialects of their own. In this regard, the Indian federation is more like the European Union than the United States.
It is perhaps their long familiarity with this situation that has allowed Indians in India to become adept at navigating differences. Hop on the Andaman Express in Kanyakumari today and find yourself traversing 277 train stations between Chennai and New Delhi, reading station signs in at least six different regional languages, and eating everything from sambar idlis to Hyderabadi biryani to aloo parathas, all in a span of a mere 56 hours.
A multitude of languages unfortunately does not lend itself to an easy understanding and appreciation of the rich vernacular prose and literature from different states. The beauty of truly knowing a language well is that it provides a vehicle to understand the music, the literature and the culture of the people who speak it. In India’s case, one cannot possibly be expected to master all of its many languages sufficiently to be able to take a deeper dive into the literature, folktales and stories of each of these states with linguistically defined cultures. It is to fill this breach, comes a delightful collection of stories in India - A Traveller’s Literary Companion.
Stories are organized in five sections, each pertaining to a geographically defined region in India - East, West, North, South and North East with stories from various states falling within each section. With around thirteen stories, the collection paints a diverse picture of the geography and culture of India. A few of the stories were written in English originally but most others have been translated from the vernacular. The book begins with a story set in Kashmir by Salman Rushdie and ends with one from Tamil Nadu, essentially covering the length and breadth of the country. Rushdie’s story, “The Prophet's Hair,” is a great start to the collection and is, based loosely on a true incident - the theft of a relic from a mosque in Kashmir. Using his signature style of magical realism, Rushdie weaves a tale that at once combines fact with myth and legend.
The collection is notable for its lack of a unifying theme. This choice is a conscious one on the part of Chandrahas Choudhury, the editor. It would seem that he has chosen not to create a forced sense of unity but rather let the different contexts, backgrounds, and literary instincts of the authors speak for themselves. In “The Accountant,” Kunal Basu imagines the world of the Taj Mahal just before and during the time of its construction by allowing the protagonist to go back in time to an earlier lifetime. An accountant with a passion for history thus becomes the Chotta Mimar, a young Persian architect who is part of the team designing the Taj at the Emperors’ behest.
Goa boasts a different kind of entry in the collection with Anjum Hasan’s “Eye in the Sky,” where Dawn, a young married middle class Indian woman, tired from the tedium of her marital life, feels a deep desire to just get away. She does just that one day, on a whim, after a spat with her husband. She hops on a bus to Goa. Through vivid descriptions of the beach resort culture in Goa and the conversations of foreign and domestic tourists, the story also manages to convey the challenges to a young woman traveling solo in India.
The highs and lows of ordinary life, the effect of place on one’s circumstances, human foibles and aspirations are all exquisitely brought together in the different stories. While a small collection cannot be expected to capture all the nuances and flavors of a region in its entirety, it does provide a window into a world which is normally denied to most people unfamiliar with a language and consequently the cultural nuances and subtleties. Though labeled a "travel essay," the book deserves characterization as a literary anthology. A delightful read promising the reader perhaps a more nuanced understanding of what makes India – India! 

Book Review, India Currents, August 2012

Source: http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2012/08/12/promise-happiness

The Promise of Happiness, Girija Sankar

BEAUTIFUL THING: Into the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars. By Sonia Faleiro. 240 pages. Black Cat, (US edition) 2012, $15.00.

In the non-fiction Beautiful Thing, Sonia Faleiro offers up a rare and fascinating account of Bombay’s dance bars through a raw, honest and, at times, heart wrenching story of Leela, the protagonist who is a bar dancer. Faleiro follows the life of Leela and a cast of characters from Leela’s family, her dancer friends, lovers, clients, dalals (pimps), and hijras (eunuchs).

The author, a journalist, spent five years researching the murky world of dance bars. 

In Bombay’s dance bars young females dance to the latest Bollywood item numbers, offer drinks and one-night-stands to men from all walks of life: the underworld don, the hit man, the poor college student out to charm his first love and the middle aged pot-bellied salaried husband out for a night away from wife, home, and creditors. Bar dancers like Leela often come from small town India, searching for a way out of poverty, abuse or just a sheer need for survival. Some are taken in by brothel madams who, Faleiro recounts, often scope out bus stands and train stations for seemingly hapless girls from far away villages. Some of these women, often illiterate, find themselves working in dance bars if they are lucky or ending up in brothels.

This tale unfolds with Leela fleeing her tiny home town at the tender age of 13 to escape sexual abuse from her father’s cop buddies. Her mother, a mute spectator to her father’s shenanigans, also suffers violent abuse. But Leela, displaying remarkable maturity at her young age realizes that her fate would be no better than her mother’s were she to stay in the village. So she flees. After working at a brothel for a few months, Leela finds herself at a dance bar. Not conventionally beautiful, Leela manages to catch the eye of Shetty, the bar owner, and begins a relationship with him.

Faleiro takes pains to explain that while dance bars do not explicity promote prostitution or sex work, dancers often end up finding steady “clients” among the men who frequent the bars. But Leela claims to have never done this galat kaam (sex work), when in fact she often has. In the murky hierarchy of the sex industry, the street walkers or the floating sex workers occupy the lowest rung, followed by brothel workers, followed by call girls—women who claim to be college graduates from respectable families. Bar dancers are at the highest echelon in this hierarchy, and as Leela states “When some people saw Leela, they saw a dhandhewali, working girl. But when she saw herself-in the mirror that hung behind her bedroom door ... she saw a bar dancer.”

Faleiro describes the silent bars, where men order not just a drink but also the female waiter who brings it to them. To Leela, who claims never to have participated in galat kaam, the silent bar workers are as low in the pecking order as the street walkers. But, bar dancers do not have to sell sex. That they do so is purely incidental.

The prose is free-flowing and often poetic. Faleiro hooks the reader in early on when she writes, “When they took her virginity from her, cursing that she’d knotted the drawstring of her salwar like it was a sack of atta she was saving for winter, all she saw were the peepal trees of the [police] station compound. Their leaves were crowded together ... to gossip and wonder at her shame.”

When we get to know Leela she is at the pinnacle of her career—clients showering her with gifts, her pockets literally overrun with cash (she even stashes some inside shoes) and a steady partner. But then things begin to unravel. Dance bars in Bombay are coming under increasing scrutiny and the state begins shutting them down. Shetty, her partner moves on.

Leela, like the many hundreds of women who have been suddenly left without a job, tries out other things before she and her friend find a benefactor from Dubai who promises luxuries, wealth and much happiness if the women would dance at Dubai’s night clubs.

Faleiro never hears from Leela again. What will happen to her we wonder. Will she make it big and return home with gold, wealth and much happiness or will she become yet another statistic?

For all the beautiful prose, one minor flaw in the author’s style is the excessive dependence on local accents and argot. Too many Kustomers, dirty-dirty and onomatopoeic references appear jarring to readers unfamiliar with the sub-continental English and Hindi.

Faleiro, whose first book was a novel titled The Girl (2006), has received much accolade for what critics have hailed as amongst the best non-fiction writing to come out of India in recent years. Beautiful Thing is as much a story about Bombay as it is about Leela and as such merits being ranked amongst the best in contemporary literary journalism from India. 

Cover Story, Desi Jazz, Khabar Magazine, August 2012

Cover Story: All that Desi Jazz
Originally appeared in the August 2012 issue of Khabar Magazine
Source: http://www.khabar.com/magazine/cover-story/all_that_desi_jazz

On June 21, 2012, as we went about our daily activities, two Indian-Americans had made it into the annals of American music history, yet again. The Jazz Journalists Association honored Rudresh Mahan- thappa as Alto Saxophonist of the Year, and Vijay Iyer as Pianist of the Year. Mahanthappa won the same award in 2011, 2010, and 2009. In 2010, the Jazz Journalists named Iyer the Musician of the Year. Consider this: Iyer won an award that had been previously bestowed to jazz greats such as Herbie Hancock. Vijay Iyer also won in five categories in the recently announced 2012 Downbeat International Critics poll.

When one thinks of Indian influences in the global music scene, sitar maestro Ravi Shankar comes to mind, and indeed, his influence on Western performers and audiences is well-documented. Jazz great John Coltrane studied under Shankar and even named his son after the maestro. Today, Ravi Coltrane is himself an accomplished saxophonist.

“Guitar” Prasanna.

Music enthusiasts may also be aware of artists like “Guitar” Prasanna whose explorations of Carnatic music on the guitar have won him much praise and accolades, including stints as a composer for various Tamil films. But also consider this: the contemporary jazz scene in the States today is home to not just Iyer and Mahanthappa, but also, among others, to performers like Sameer Gupta, a noted percussionist who plays the tabla; Sunny Jain, a dhol player/percussionist who started a band that would feature the dhol as the lead instrument; Sachal Vasandani, a jazz vocalist; Rez Abbasi, a Pakistani-American guitarist/composer; and Rafiq Bhatia, an up-and-coming guitar player/composer.

Rafiq Bhatia.

The stories and musical journeys of the various artists profiled here—some of the most talked about desi performers who showcase jazz in their compositions and repertoires—reflect that very quintessential of immigrant experiences, a quest to marry the richness of the native and adopted cultures, whether the artist is a chef marrying diverse tastes or a saxophonist merging Charlie Parker with Kadri Gopalnath.

All what jazz

Rock ‘n’ roll, rock, and hip-hop feature prominently as early influences for artists such as Bhatia. But, as Indian-Americans, many were also exposed to Carnatic music, bhajans, ghazals, and Bollywood numbers, setting the stage perhaps for a greater appreciation of music in general and particular similarities in rhythms and tones. Early evidence of musical talent and precociousness is a common thread in these artists’ youth.

Sunny Jain.

“I grew up with Jain bhajans, Bollywood music, and a heavy dose of classic rock,” says Jain, who leads Red Baraat, a nine-piece dhol and brass band. His drums instructor, himself a bebop jazz drummer, encouraged Jain to join his junior high school’s jazz ensemble. Pretty soon, he was completely taken by jazz and began studying some of the jazz greats. Jain later went on to obtain a B.M. in Jazz Performance from Rutgers University and an M.A. in Music Business from New York University.

When his parents visited India, Bhatia, then a first grader, asked them to bring back a snake charmer’s flute. His precocious talent in music became apparent to his parents when he played the then-popular Hum Aapke Hain Kaun tune on the flute, almost as soon as he heard the soundtrack. Bhatia, the son of East African Indian immigrants, is a guitarist/ composer who enjoyed hip-hop growing up. His interest in jazz developed when he took up guitar in high school and started listening to Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane. Bhatia spurns categorization as an artist. His music may not fit cleanly into what people imagine when they think of jazz. “I make instrumental music that incorporates improvisation and draws on all of the music that inspires me,” he says.

Iyer grew up in a traditional middleclass South Indian-American household. Even though he didn’t start out playing Carnatic music, he was drawn towards it in his twenties. “Carnatic music has a certain symmetry, much like the kolam (South Indian design that adorns the floor in front of homes) or the South Indian temple architecture,” Iyer says.

Rudresh Mahanthappa.

By contrast, Mahanthappa, who started playing the saxophone in elementary school, was exposed to the occasional bhajan music at home, but not much more. Mahanthappa’s exposure to Indian classical music came from a college trip to India in the early ’90s. “It was a revelation,” Mahanthappa says. Attending traditional music concerts from sunrise to sunset, and being exposed to a whole new genre was eye-opening. And then he heard about Kadri Gopalnath, who had mastered Carnatic music on the saxophone. Something clicked. Soon after, he met Iyer and they began their creative collaborations that spread over many albums and continues to this day.

Sachal Vasandani.

In an introduction to Sachal Vasandani, NPR host Michelle Norris offers, “Every now and again you hear a special voice that makes you sit up and take notice ... Sachal Vasandani has that voice.” Vasandani, a jazz vocalist, drew attention when he won DownBeat magazine’s Collegiate Jazz Vocalist of the Year award in 1999.

Rez Abbasi.

Rez Abbasi, born in Karachi and raised in Southern California, is an accomplished guitarist and composer who was tutored by Ustad Alla Rakha. Abbasi, who will visit Atlanta in early 2013 for a concert with Georgia State University faculty and organize workshops on jazz and Indian/South Asian classical music, was exposed to Indian classical and film music through television and from relatives singing around the dinner table at family gatherings.

Sameer Gupta.

Sameer Gupta, a percussionist who plays a hybrid tabla and drumset simultaneously, became curious about jazz in high school and was at first hesitant about the art form. “I also didn’t like things that sounded ‘out’ and didn’t have patience for stuff that rocked the boat too much,” he says. With time, though, a greater appreciation of the music allowed him to embrace “the rocking that ensues when it is truly floating down the stream of consciousness.” Growing up, Gupta was exposed to the popular film and ghazal music from the ’60s and ’70s, but became a serious practitioner only several years after college, where he received a degree in Western Orchestral Percussion.

Prasanna, who attended college in India before moving to America, grew up with the music of Michael Jackson, Tamil composer Ilayaraja, Carnatic musician Lalgudi Jayaraman, and Iron Maiden. Given the broad range of musical interests, “jazz was just a logical extension of my curiosity,” he says. However, it took Coltrane’s record Ole Coltrane for Prasanna to truly understand and appreciate the art form. The record “drove home the point that jazz is much more than fancy chords, complex technique, and virtuosic playing. It’s about personal expression.”

Book Review, Lia's Purpura's Rough Likeness, JMWW Summer 2012

Book Review: Rough Likeness By Lia Purpura
Originally appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of JMWW.
Source: http://jmww.150m.com/PurpuraRev.html

Rough Likeness 
by Lia Purpura
Sarabande Books, 2011
978-1936747030, 224 pp., $15.95 paperback 

Rough Likeness, Lia Purpura's latest book, is an eclectic collection of essays and an attempt at explaining the mundane, the ordinary, and the things that do not usually populate dinner table conversations but are nevertheless part of the everyday imagination and life. Take the first essay, for instance, on buzzards: Why do we ignore the buzzard, she asks? A bird that does the job nobody else is prepared to do. I haven't killed a thing, the buzzard implores. Why see me as malevolent? "That no one wants my job that I go on being needed." In the essay titled "Against Gunmetal," Purpura laments about why some choose to describe shades of gray as gunmetal or as battleship gray. "Strike me down if I use it again. If I don't, right now, erase this method by which we impart, those of us who know nothing about guns, drama to a sky, pressure to a scene, hardness, knowhow, coldness to a description, glad for its hint of treachery, its sidelong, thanatotic meanness." Laziness in language and expression is something the author abhors, and is a theme that surfaces in other essays as well.

Purpura's prose is at once rich, lyrical, sudden, and provocative. Through her writing, she invites the reader to do what she does—provide everything you do, see, touch, or feel with the uniqueness of observation and attention that it deserves: "Here is a field between parking lots—real grass and dirt with bottles thrown in, amber longnecks, flat clears of hard stuff."

In the essay titled "Jump," Purpura ponders over the intentions behind a signpost that reads "Last Death from Jumping or Diving from Bridge June 15, 1995."

"Around the sign, around the inconclusive or—because of the or, the pause it stirs, the space it opens—fragments and conjectures gather: the last person was drunk"

Her reflective essays then are an essay (pun intended) into the layers folded under and between the everyday occurrences, the random signposts, the street signs, the buzzards flying overhead or the words attributed to colors (why gunmetal for gray?).

Rough Likeness can be savored whole or in bits, read from beginning to end or from the middle backwards. Purpura's writing is such that even without context, the prose is beautiful, to be enjoyed much like a Dali painting, different vantage points allowing for varied appreciation of the artwork.

That the author is also a poet is evident in the lyricisms and incantations in the writing, as when she describes a street as "that echt yellow stripe, those newly dribbled tar snakes filming cracks, curbs darkened with rain, fickle puddles, passing cars launching watery stars out of low spots to firmanents elsewhere."

The brilliance of Purpura's writing is such that even though her subjects in the essays may be ordinary (in the most fundamental sense of the word), in the rendering of the mundane as sublime and as that demanding acute and singular observation, she demands, nay commands the reader's absolute attention.—Girija Sankar

Poor Economics, Book Review, Hunger and Under Nutrition Blog, May 2012

First appeared in the Hunger and Under Nutrition Blog 

Source: http://www.hunger-undernutrition.org/blog/2012/05/book-review-poverty-economics.html
Poverty Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to fight Global Poverty - Abhijit Bannerjee & Esther Duflo,    Public Affairs. 2011.

There has been much debate recently on the efficacy of foreign aid and  whether international NGOs and developed countries ought to invest their tax dollars and grant funds in resource-poor countries.  These are very controversial issues and much that has been written both in academic and popular publications.

This book is not about any of them.

Poverty Economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo looks at the question of micro-approaches to poverty eradication, i.e. small scale interventions through local policy making or small but significant technological changes.  It avoids grand generalizations about “poor people” and tries to explain their challenges in context.  It also points out how in many cases, the basic choices that the poor have to make are already made for the rich.

The authors are both professors, economists and the co-founders of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT.  Through a number of field studies and using their favorite research method- Randomized Controlled Trials - the authors demonstrate that it is possible to have a significant and meaningful impact on the lives of the poor through context specific micro-changes. The book provides numeous examples from the fields of healthcare, education,micro-lending/saving, economic development and nutrition security, all in the context of the lives of people who make less than $1  per day.

The first part of the book focuses on the private lives of the poor and their approach to healthcare, education, and savings.  The second part discusses the efforts of institutions - large and small - in impacting the poor in meaningful ways.  Banerjee and Duflo also demonstrate how many big interventions fail because they often ignore or neglect local aspirations, cultures and contexts.   The real value of this book is that in case after case, the authors provide tools and techniques for understanding the performance of various interventions that have been implemented. Mainly, they rely on creative problem solving in the local context and the use of rigorous statistical methods to evaluate how indicators such as school attendance or healthcare availability have improved as a result of a new approach to problem solving.

In short, this book is a must-read for development practitioners working in the field of poverty alleviation and seeking new ways of approaching program and policy impact.

http://www.amazon.com/Poor-Economics-Radical-Rethinking-Poverty/dp/1586487981

http://globalhealthaction.org

On kid-friendly online news sources, India Currents, April 2012

Originally appeared in the April 2012 issue of India Currents
Source: http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2012/04/13/dont-just-google-it

Don’t Just Google It!

The teenage girl in the ABC sitcom The Middle asks her mother (played by Patricia Heaton ofEverybody Loves Raymond fame) where she could learn about love, seeing as Valentine’s Day was around the corner. The mother, exasperated and annoyed, dismisses the girl with a “Just google it,” then takes a moment’s pause and says, “May be not…don’t google it.” Where then do young adults and children go online to learn about love, the Arab Spring or the economic crisis? Where can parents go online to steer their children towards accessible, safe and reliable information?

Deepa Gopal, the founder and visionary behind U.S Based Youngzine started the website as a way to bring world affairs to the attention of her young son who had outgrown kiddie websites like Disney but was still not mature enough to get on Wikipedia. “Most mainstream media assumes some level of understanding. So, when we did not find any [websites] that fit the bill, we decided to start one!” Sites like National Geographic Kids, while very resourceful for general knowledge, may not provide much kid friendly content on current, international and political affairs. Deepa often found herself “tailoring content for [her son’s] schools assignments.” Barkha Madan, of Our Little Earth had similar motivations. She found herself culling stories from the Internet and tweaking them just so her nieces could read about the world in accessible and easy-to-understand language. The website and e-newspaper was born when Barkha’s edited stories were being forwarded to friends and family. Meera Dolasia'sDOGOnews (dogo means young or small in Swahili) was a response to the amount of research that her then second grader’s weekly homework assignments required on a daily basis. Why not start a website that does just that, Meera thought. And so, DOGOnews was born.

Deepa’s passion was so strong that she quit her full-time job at Cisco after a 17 year-long career in computer hardware. With much technical and intellectual support from Deepa’s husband, Youngzine went live September 2010. Meera’s engineering background helped her set up Our Little Earth but with additional support from developers. DOGOnews had a modest start as a regular email update with PDF attachments which later led to a blog and then six months later, a fully-featured website.

When sourcing articles for the websites the writers start their research online on mainstream news, politics, science and technology. “I continuously scour the web for interesting content that could be intriguing, educational and appropriate for my young audiences,” says Meera. Youngzine’s Deepa tries to reach beyond mere expository text to explain the socio-political and cultural context that shapes the world’s news. This angle enables teachers to foster critical thinking amongst students. For instance, a recent article on the Arab Spring described not just the events but also the historical and political context surrounding the events in simple and crisp language. Deepa is quick to point out that in selecting topics, “avoid sensational articles that take center stage in mainstream media as there really is no value in those for children.”

Our Little Earth covers ten main stories each month and like Youngzine, “has a bias towards stories that provides an opportunity to talk about the rich historical and cultural backdrop on the region being covered.” The audiences for all three websites are children and young teens in the 9-14 age groups, school teachers and ESL learners. Studies show that the biggest drop off in academics happens in the middle school years, says Deepa, so the websites finds a way to sustain interest in that crucial age-group.

The websites are being increasingly sought after by schools, both within the US and internationally as a source of reference and teaching material. Schools from over 30 countries have already subscribed to Our Little Earth. Youngzine has already been recognized by the American Library Association as a “Great website for kids.” DOGOnews’ growth has been mostly organic, with parents and teachers spreading the word about website.

On desi-design bloggers, Khabar magazine, Feb 2012

Originally appeared in the Feb 2012 edition of Khabar.

Source: http://www.khabar.com/magazine/features/Desi_Do-It-Yourself_DESIGNERS

Living: Desi Do-It-Yourself DESIGNERS 

In the South Indian middle-class Tambram household I grew up in, “decorating” meant the frantic dusting of the center table before a relative stopped by for afternoon filter coffee. Sure, we had all the trappings of a typical middle-class home—a giant picture-tube TV, a wooden showcase of brown Formica with shelves stopping mere inches from the ceiling, a few brass lamps from my mother’s trousseau, and perhaps a stray souvenir from one of our many temple-hopping trips. But a centerfold for Better Homes & Gardens it was not. 

Perhaps our décor-deprived yet typical home was also reflective of our conservative, salt-of-the-earth sensibilities. Who cares how the walls look if you feed folks great food and supply enough gossip/intellectual nourishment to keep them coming back?

It’s this middle-class ethos that I now strive to overcome every day, as I incessantly rearrange potted plants on top of a kitchen cabinet in my suburban home in the U.S. Thanks to my web-browsing, I now know I am not alone in my amateur artistic pursuits. Some women, in fact many, have scratched this décor itch into successful blogs.

Take, for instance, Patricia Torres (coloursdekor.blogspot.com), who describes herself as an “ordinary person, a working woman, a mom, a wife, a friend.” When not at work at a multinational company in Dubai or tending to her daughters, she is busy at home “aspiring to see beauty in everything around me.” With a full-time job, she often wonders if she would have taken up design as a career if the opportunity had presented itself earlier in her life. It was a friend’s suggestion that she consider blogging about the million or so pictures she would take of things around her house that got her started. Her blog is her “design diary.” She manages to pull it off, blogging in between her day job, parenting and home-making.

As a teenager, Kamini Raghavan (saffronandsilk.blogspot.com), would spend hours arranging and re-arranging furniture, artwork, and flowers around her house, though she just started blogging about design in 2010. For most bloggers I spoke with, blogging is a relatively new experience. While some bloggers are professionally trained in design and décor, a few have successfully turned an amateur interest into a nearly full-time career. Kamini, who originally earned a degree in Economics, went back to school in the 1990s to earn a degree in interior design. She worked in the industry for nine years in the U.S. before moving back to India in 2006.

Sudha Sundareswaran (adesignenthusiast.blogspot.com), grew up helping her grandfather with his various woodworking projects, picking up carpentry skills along the way. Therefore, Sudha sees herself more as a design enthusiast than a decorator. She started her design blog more as a way to attract attention to her original blog on green/environmentally conscious living. As a result, she now juggles between three blogs—cooking, design, and green living.

Anuradha Varma (mydreamcanvas.blogspot.com) reminisces about decorating her own room as a kid, and being extremely possessive of the knick-knacks that she would randomly pick up. She started blogging in 2008 more as a way to chronicle her own experiences with design and décor. Her lifestyle blog, My Dream Canvas, evolved out of the countless hours she spent browsing through design-and-décor magazines and a desire to critique them. She blogs full-time and loves every addictive minute of it.

 Gagan (who blogs at Of Peacocks and Paisleys, http://gb73.blogspot.com/) quips that décor and design are part of her genetic makeup, since she is the daughter of an artist. She started her blog in 2010 when she realized that some of her comments on the blogs she followed were longer than the blog posts on which she was commenting.

A chance visit to any one of the blogs featured here will clue you in to the sense of camaraderie and bonhomie that prevails in the community. Bloggers regularly feature others’ blogs and posts, invite guest blogs, and organize frequent giveaways that mutually benefit each other’s blogs.

A good majority of the readership is drawn from the Indian community at large, whether from India, the U.S., the U.K. or the Middle East. Many bloggers have also tapped into the larger cosmopolitan global-design blogging community. Sudha’s blog was recently featured on apartmentherapy.com, the go-to blog for design inspirations.

Few bloggers seem overly concerned about readership. Blogging seems to provide such pure joy that many of the women I spoke to had never really considered developing their blogging into a business.

Travel essay on Costa Rica, India Currents, January 2012

(Originally appeared in the  March 2011 print edition of India Currents)
Source: http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2012/01/09/of-blue-morphos-sloths-and-ziplines

Of Blue Morphos, Sloths, and Ziplines

 We were instructed to wear dark clothes, preferably all black. No flashlights, no camera. Just your self, your imagination, and more importantly, faith in the guide that was to lead you through a two-mile hike in the dead of night through the coastal jungles of Costa Rica. The guide would later casually inform us that the stretch of jungle we covered by foot was the natural habitat of the Costa Rican jaguar, an elusive, rarely seen creature, but in any event, not an animal that you’d like to cross paths with, with nary a flash light to shine on it in vain attempts to keep it at bay.

On this expedition (one of many in Costa Rica) we set out to observe the greenback turtle lay her eggs off the coast of the Caribbean sea in the Tortuguero National Park. As the nesting season for the endangered turtle had just begun, we were told to be prepared for a possible no-show. Having already experienced a bit of wildlife in Costa Rica, we were prepared for any eventuality, knowing that we would still enjoy the walk through the jungle.

We left our lodge and set out on a 40 minute hike through a trail straddling the edges of the beach and the coastal forest. When we arrived at our sector, we were asked by the spotters to enter the beach as they had just seen a turtle laying eggs. There she was, seemingly oblivious to a dozen or more scurrying human feet, laying eggs, one after another. She would have laid about 150 eggs that night. Her insouciance towards us humans was apparently a biological response. When the turtle lays her eggs, she gets in a trance-like mode. Our guide flashed the infrared flashlight on the nest, which the turtle had spent a good hour digging up. Different groups of tourists led by their guides would take turns gawking at her. I wondered how a human female would react were she to experience her birthing pains before dozens of squawking macaques or snorting pigs. I was glad the greenback was in a trance.


The turtle walk in Tortuguero was on day nine of our twelve-day trip to Costa Rica which included stops at Arenal and Flores, home of the Arenal volcano, to Monteverde, home of the cloud forests, Turrialba, where we went on a rafting expedition down the Rio Pacuare and, finally, Cahuita, your quintessential sleepy Caribbean seaside town.


Costa Rica figures high on the charts in adventure tourism destinations, and rightly so. There are plenty of adventures to choose from, even for a first-time thrill seeker, from white-water rafting to rappelling, to rock climbing, and zip lines. While most of these activities are popular enough to be found in most other travel destinations, Costa Rica’s lush rain forests and the sheer diversity of fauna and flora render these experiences particularly enjoyable. One can rappel down any mountain face or cliff. But rappelling down a 180 foot waterfall, in a thick central American jungle amidst luscious canopy is an experience of a lifetime. Or hurtling down the Rio Pacuare frantically paddling to navigate a rapid while keeping an eye out for a rare toucan and a even rarer Blue Morpho butterfly elevate this rafting expedition from others in less enticing surroundings.

The country’s national parks are well maintained, its guides are knowledgeable, and in general, there is a sense that the country and its people assume the mantel of eco-tourism seriously. I pride myself on being a naturalist—a lover of nature, ardent recycler, mostly vegetarian except when chomping down bizarre foods in the interest of adding to the been-there-eaten-that list. But, floating down the canals of Tortuguero National Park in a four-person motor boat on a cloudy, intermittently rainy afternoon, I realized I knew zilch about nature. Here’s a bit of trivia for you to mull over: there are  birds that hover around the spider monkeys as the latter are rustling branches on the trees looking for food to eat. The birds then scoop up any insects that the monkey unseats from all their scurrying. How is that for balance in the eco system? Or the theory that sloths (they defecate once every week) dispose off their waste in a hole at the bottom of the tree that they inhabit so as to return to the tree all the nutrients that the they used up. This points to the subtle checks and balances in the eco-system, something that we as humans in our ignorance upset, then learn rather belatedly about and finally scramble to make up for our ignorance.

Favorite books from 2011, India Currents December 2011

(Originally appeared in the December 2011 print edition of India Currents)

Source: http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2011/12/27/these-are-few-my-favorite-books

THE HINDUS, AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY by Wendy Doniger, Penguin USA. Paperback. 770 pages.  $25.

The Hindus, An Alternative History is the latest offering from Wendy Doniger, a world-renowned Sanskritist. As the title suggests, the book is but one interpretation of the evolution of Hindu thought. This is an interpretation that seeks to read between the lines of ancient Hindu texts and tease out the voice of the subaltern. With the texts as a foundation, Doniger interprets recurring themes including the symbolism of animals such as the horse and the dog (representing power and impurity, respectively), the notion of ahimsa, the voice of women, and lower castes. 

Doniger’s thorough scholarship is evidenced throughout, whether in the systematic treatment of the history of the subcontinent or in the sheer depth of the comparative analysis, from the Upanishads to the Vedas to the seemingly arcane Periya Puranas. The Hindus, much like more recent and popular nonfictional works about 21st century India, also touches upon the idea of multiplicity and diversity. How else can one explain opposing concepts such as extreme asceticism, renunciation, and monism in the Upanishads on the one hand and opulence and the Kama Sutra on the other.  

The Hindus is no light summer-time beach read. At 770 pages it demands serious reading. But the crisp language, tongue-in-cheek witticisms, and an engaging writing style compensate for the length and, at times, heavy prose. A must-read for any student of Indian philosophy and thought.

Interview with Bharati Mukherjee, India Currents, October 2011

(Originally appeared in the October 2011 print edition of India Currents)

Source: http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2011/10/21/country-undergoing-seismic-social-change

A Country Undergoing Seismic Social Change

Girija Sankar • Published on October 21, 2011

What was the inspiration for Miss New India? In previous interviews, you had mentioned visiting Bangalore and meeting call center customer specialists … can you elaborate on that? Did the character take shape over time or was it any one person who provided the creative spark?
I visited Bangalore many times. A first cousin of mine also lives there; she used to work for the UN, and later bought some land and built a house in Dollar Colony [ed: a place that is mentioned in the book], a place where people could reserve land only with international currency. Only expats who could afford it would buy there.
I have always been interested in immigration, but what I was witnessing in India now was a seismic social change, in gender relations and in social relations. There is now internal migration in India—people from small towns, like Anjali, who would never go to an IIT, or Yale, but still have the opportunity to strike it big in the metropolises of India.
People like Anjali attend missionary schools, learn English, and want to go places that their parents wouldn’t have even dreamed of. I was witnessing, on these trips, a whole new middle-class emerging—young women from modest backgrounds, whose only escape would have been marriage, moving to a big city, interested in adventures for themselves, with no chaperones, no community to show their disapproval; I got to know a lot of them during my visits. Some stayed at Anglo-Indian boarding houses; some were pooling their resources together and renting apartments. I made several trips to get to know these women. I also got to know the trainers who work at call center training centers. Some trainers whom I’d met on my first trip to Bangalore had already moved on and started their own training business the next time I met them!
What I hope I have gotten across through the book is that there are both winners and losers in the new India. There are the young Anjalis who have significant disposable incomes and seem to be caught up by the wave of consumerism. There is this sense that I have made it, I can go to the mall, and buy a Versace or a Gucci with my salary, my money. Their parents would not have been able to do it.
But there is also corruption and land grabbing. I recently read in the New York Times about the farmlands are being compromised and being sold off for commercial real estate. Also, even though I hadn’t interviewed anybody that was raped I have read about the gang raping of women employed in call centers in places like Gurgaon.
There is both corruption and empowerment. I have tried to capture both in the book.
Was there any one individual in particular whom you’d met that provided the backdrop for Anjali’s character?
There was a young woman who came with her parents for high tea to my cousin’s place. The parents thought I might know of Silicon Valley bridegrooms for their daughter. The conversation was flowing well, until all of a sudden, the father and the daughter started quarrelling. The girl must have been in her late 20s. She told me that she would come back and visit me the next day. She did come back and poured out her story, about her dreams and ambitions, about how she bought a condo for her parents and yet the power dynamics between parents and children had not changed. Parents continue to control their adult children’s social activities. She told me how women of her age were no longer interested in marriage as the only goal in life, but rather as one of many goals. Her story is not Anjali’s story, but hers and the many others that I later encountered on my trips to India provided the initial sparks for Miss New India.
I also interviewed venture capitalists who had started companies in India.
As an essayist or a sociologist, you write about general trends. But as a novelist, you write about a single character that seems ordinary but has extraordinary interests. This is what I tried to do with Anjali.
Minnie is a very interesting character. Miss Minnie Bagehot reminded me of Mrs. Harter, our neighbor in Ooty who lived in an old bungalow. How did this character take shape for you?
Oh, I have known several of them all my life! In Kolkota, where I grew up, there were many such Anglo-Indian ladies. In Bangalore though, they seem to be a dying breed. Again, I wouldn’t say that everything in the book is a perfect reflection of reality. After all, it takes memories and imagination to transform perceived reality into fiction.
Did you actually sit-in on a training session for “accent enhancement” at the training centers?
I didn’t sit through a training session. But I did spend much time with the trainers and got many hours of interviews with them. I also pored through their training manuals.
In your research did you find that the new corporate culture or even the sub-culture of Bangalore erased or disguised class, caste, and communal lines? Would you characterize it as positive or is it merely a superficial thing?
There are seemingly two corporate models in Bangalore—the old traditional business model and the new IT corporate culture, which in turn seems to be a replica of Silicon Valley. The IT city in Bangalore is in fact called Silicon City! There is much more fluidity and interaction between different ranks of people in the new IT culture, which contrasts with the structured tier-conscious culture of the old business model. Also, pay scales today are very different. In the IT corporate culture, it really doesn’t matter where you come from. Caste or class doesn’t matter as much as your ability to get the job done! I found that very striking. But of course, this new corporate culture still has to contend with poor roads, and outdated infrastructure.
What kind of a reaction has the book received so far from the Indian audience in India or in the United States?
Back in May, USA TODAY named it one of 10 must-read books. The book has already been featured on a number of book blogs, clubs, reading groups.
I think what the Indian audience likes about the book is the main characters’ belief in their right to happiness. Also, the book deals with the idea of immigration in reverse. People like Peter Champion, a white American who immigrates to India; or people like Parvati and Auro who move back to India, or even Anjali, who migrates internally, within India. These are themes that resonate with the Indian audience.
Do you see yourself writing more about the new India?
I really couldn’t tell you what sparks the idea for a new novel. Writing a novel is a major undertaking. Currently, I am working on two projects—the very beginnings of a novel and a collection of stories.
Any books that you read recently that have really caught your interest?
I plan to read Solo by Rana Dasgupta. With all the flying that I do between San Francisco and New York, I expect to find some reading time in flight!
I am thrilled that Indian writers in English are now moving on from subjects related to India or the immigrant experience and taking on whole new projects. The trouble, say 15 years ago, was that people treated Indian fiction about India or the immigrant experience as sociology or ethnography. Writers like me had to persuade people to see past the ethnography and treat our work as literature and imaginative work. We had to say, if you want to read about tribes, then read scholarly work.
Is it easier to get published these days if you’re Indian American? How is this different from when you started out?
There is a sense now, and quite rightly so, that very fine literature is coming out of India, and the Indian diaspora. This did not exist when I started out. But at the same time with all the problems that the publishing industry in general is going through right now, I just don’t know if books as we know them will exist anymore. When some publishing companies are being owned by oil conglomerates, who knows what shapes books will take.
I think that we now have a large group of Anglophone writers of Indian origin. English was a foreign language that history bestowed on us Indians. If India had been colonized by Germans, then we would have had Indian writing in German instead. But since London and New York are major hubs of the publishing industry they are able to discover Indian writers who write in English. However, finding a market for translated manuscripts is that much harder because the industry does not seem to be interested.
What kind of advice would you offer fledgling writers amongst the readers of India Currents? What do you tell your students?
I tell my students to read as much as they can and to write with passion; if you don’t have passion, then writing is simply going to be an exercise; it will also end up seeming like an exercise. In my creative writing workshops, I urge my students to read, read, read; you don’t always have to read works of writers who write like you … you can learn from both good books and bad books.
I would like to hear your take on recent debates in India about who can write the big India book? Do you have any comments on that?
I thought India Calling by Anand Giridharadas, [ed: see the August 2011 issue of India Currents] was a very moving book and I enjoyed it very much.

Review of Miss New India by Bharati Mukherjee, India Currents, October 2011

(Originally appeared in the October 2011 print edition of India Currents)

Source: http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2011/10/21/zeitgeist-modern-india

The Zeitgeist of Modern India

Girija Sankar • Published on October 21, 2011

MISS NEW INDIA by Bharati Mukherjee. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Hardcover. 336 pages. $25.
Anjali Bose is a small town girl with big city dreams. In defiance of her parent’s wishes for her to be married soon after high school, Anjali seeks bigger and better things. Her aspirations and her journey from small town Gauripur to Bangalore, 21st century India’s city of hopes and dreams, is writer Bharati Mukherjee’s final offering in a trilogy dealing with the clash of contemporary and traditional India, followingDesirable Daughters and the Tree Bride.
Fast paced, and with too many characters clamoring for the reader’s attention at times, Miss New India attempts to capture the zeitgeist of a young, modernizing country through Anjali’s journey,  both literally and figuratively.
In Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, Anjali finds a place to stay at Ms. Minnie Bagehot’s, an Anglo-Indian landlady and certainly one of the more colorful characters of the book. Every setting in the book offers contrasting views of India. In Miss Bagehot’s house, Mukherjee portrays the old fading India of the Raj era. The Dollar colony, the ersatz American suburb transplanted in Bangalore, functions as the symbol of the new India. Anjali’s parents represent the old guard of custom, tradition, and family honor while her new friends in Bangalore represent the dynamism of the modern generation.
But Mukherjee expects the reader to accept that small town values are perforce contradictory to big town sensibilities, an assumption not even her central character seems to maintain consistently. Anjali’s characterl, despite being the focus of the story, is not well developed. Everything, from Anjali’s decision to acquiesce to being seen by prospective grooms, her bus journey across the country, her new friendships and new life in a big city, seem rushed. Her naiveté and apparent lack of confidence in some areas and brazenness in others contributes to a very foggy portrait of the character. And the many partially developed side plots—the cantankerous landlady, the gay mentor, the young American photographer friend, the roommate with dangerous liaisons—dilute the central plot and with, the character of the protagonist.
The story ends through a serious of rapidly unfolding events, some more contrived than others.
Miss New India, in trying to portray all that is happening to India—the rapid social, economic and cultural changes—perhaps offers too little in the process, quite like a 13-day 14-country tour of Europe. It might work for some, but others might prefer a meandering 7-day trip through just one country instead.
Mukherjee, however, excels in her detailed portraits of the social life and work culture in Bangalore. The reader gets a ringside seat into the everyday operations of call centers and the closely related language training institutes.
Miss New India is a primer on 21st century India to readers who are unfamiliar with the country and its culture. One gets a sampling of the traditional family mores and values, the small town mentality, and the still-present gender bias. But one also gets a good helping of the newness in Bangalore, and the fast -talking call center operators.
While offering nothing new in its story arc, Miss New India lends credence to the idea that 21st century India is the perfect muse for a story teller with all its dynamism, internal contradictions, and a billion stories within.

Review of Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother, JMWW, Fal 2011

Originally appeared in the Fall 2011 edition of JMWW.
Source: http://jmww.150m.com/Morrisonrev.html

Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother
by B. Morrison
Apprentice House, 2011
ISBN-10 978-1934074657, 342 pp., $18.95 

What is the welfare stereotype, if there is one? Women with children, living off a generous state, unwilling to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and do what it takes to make it in this big bad world. Such stereotypes of course, never account for the ways in which such women become welfare recipients. Set in the 1970s, Barbara Morrison's Innocent: Confessions of a Welfare Mother is a resounding salvo for welfare recipients whose struggles in and out of welfare dependency are overshadowed by the weight of such stereotypes.

Morrison is a young, fresh out-of-college woman taken in by the 1960s social movements. She marries a fellow hippie (Lewis, a tall, jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Fix it, with braided ponytails to boot), gets pregnant, and lives out of a bus. What follows in Innocent are Morrison's beautifully rendered chronicle of her decline into welfare dependency and slow climb out of it.

Morrison was born into a white middle-class family from Maryland. Her Father was a doctor from a working class background and her mother an authoritarian who forsook her chance at a career to raise six children. Growing up, Morrison stayed out of her parents' sights, away from her perpetually angry father and yard-stick yielding mother. She writes "I was amazed to learn later that it was normal for children to do things to attract parental attention. I wanted exactly the opposite." (Pg. 2).

Morrison attended college, often while having to work to make ends meet. Some of her older siblings benefitted from her parents largesse and attended Ivy League colleges, but not her. Marriage and children closely followed. While pregnant with her second child, she separated from her husband. Unable to find employment and unwilling to head back home to her parents, she decided to get on welfare. Welfare, as Morrison suggests, is not always the default option. As her friend Jill asks, "How bad do your choices have to be before welfare seems like your best choice?" Welfare or Federal Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, a federal assistance program that ran from 1935 to 1996, replaced later by Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), the 1996 "welfare reform" enacted under President Clinton), contrary to popular notion, is a fairly convoluted process, Morrison soon learned. The eligibility criteria needed to be met (rent an apartment, raise a child), case workers needed to be appeased, followed by innumerable trips to the social welfare office to follow up on late checks, and wrongly written checks. While the young mother struggled through the early months of living off welfare, with a toddler, another in the way and brutal New England winters, she is comforted in warmth and security provided by her single mother friends, also on welfare.

Originally appeared in Jul/Aug 2011 edition of Eclectica Magazine
Source:http://eclectica.org/v15n3/sankar.html

The Receptionist Engineer at Hotel Del Peregrino

by Girija Sankar

Photo by David Graham

Please turn the lights off when you leave the room, Jose requested of us. But we forgot every time, only to be gently reminded by him again. His English was halting and accented, but correct. The owner of the hostel was a gringo, a Canadian transplant. Must've fled the chaotic yuppie life of urban north America, we surmised. Jose was there, every night, doing the graveyard shift. He was there to let us in, at nine p.m. one night and one a.m. the next, on Christmas Eve. It was Christmas Eve in a Catholic country,so we stepped out to attend Midnight Mass, hoping for a picture-perfect syncretic celebration of the birth of Christ in the Catholic and Mayan Yucatecan tradition of Merida. All the Churches were closed. So, no Christmas Mass, but the zocalo across from the main cathedral was teeming with locals and tourists alike, swaying to reggae music pouring out of the many bars dotting its periphery.

So, yeah, Jose had to let us in a little past midnight. We stayed in the next evening, hoping to work a "chat with a local," chalking up easy-to-recall memories of "Oh, the Yucatecans are very friendly," to dole out at dinner conversations with friends back in the ATL.

Jose the receptionist soon morphed into Jose the Yucatecan, and then Jose a once-med student who renounced medical school in favor of engineering to stay close to his parents. Jose the engineer traveled far and wide—to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and El Salvador. And Louisiana. He attended school in Louisiana. We never asked him why his family returned to Mexico. He learned about hard work and honesty in the U.S., he told us. A thwack on his buttocks from his teacher in middle school still ricochets. He works three jobs now to put his grown kids through law school: the graveyard shift at the Peregrino, as plant supervisor in the morning, and then as a production engineer for a few hours later in the day. "I enjoy it," he tells us,in his soft voice. "It's good." 

The toilet flush in our room won't work, but I don't tell Jose. He is an engineer who has traveled far and wide and now works three jobs to put his kids through law school in Mexico.