Sad news

I am sitting at my computer, not really watching the television, which is on in the background.  Putzing on the internet and drinking SoCo and lime.  It was a warm day.  I have a lot to do at work.  I’m feeling lower today than usual about work, but finally it is still light out at [...]

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Mother Theresa was an atheist!?

Say what?
Suddenly she is so much more interesting– to have made her life living in Calcutta watching homeless people die and taking care of down-syndrome street babies that will never walk, without even the conviction of the will of God behind her.
Which does, in a way, make her seem more saintlike. Her charities are [...]

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This is why I still occassionally read The Times of India

Driver takes wrong turn, ends up stranded with a trailer containing a 65 foot airplane fuselage on a dead-end road.  Flees angered Indian shopkeepers.

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Mining.

Have set out to read back journals; am mining for this essay-thing I have been writing; fear I will have far too few journals show for the year.
To write a diary every day is like returning to one’s own vomit. –Enoch Powell
The journals begin, actually, in Simla, in an A5 size, 144 page book [...]

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The Art of Travel

While looking for Stranger in a Strange Land, I found a book called The Art of Travel in a bookstore that just happened to be in the basement of a nearby subway.  It was like Fate.
What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
And
Journeys are the midwives of thought.
Both Alain [...]

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gifts.

Two first graders run up to my desk, thrust chocolates into my hand “Sara!  Sara! Indo! Indo!”  One girl has told me she wants to go to India someday so twice now I’ve showed her and whomever she brings along, because Korean middle school girls come in pairs, some of my pictures.  In addition to [...]

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study bunny

As I’m studying for my Korean test, I am starting to realize how much Bengali that I have already forgotten. It’s on the tip of my tongue but I can’t for the life of me remember how to say glasses. Even though I can see in my head the little faces of the [...]

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Ah yes.

Here we are finally at the point, everything as usual: miserable progress on the Sunday crossword, cup of coffee gone cold, Law and Order SVU reruns for white noise, when abject terror sets in. Terror of being the least prepared future English teacher ever to set foot in the Republic of Korea, ever. [...]

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An email I just sent to the professor who is essentially responsible for my becoming a traveller:

Everyon'e probably heard this story by now.
In Amritsar we took a jeep to the Pakistan border at Wagah. They do this ritual bringing down of the flags thing every day at sunset. So a thousand people–I don't really know how many, I've never been good at estimating quantities, but a lot–come from Amritsar and [...]

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How do I feel about the fact that I am being sent abroad by the US state department?

Some people, when they go to India, go to Ghana, to South Africa, they learn about how little a person really needs. They find themselves thinking 'Why not have the pantry in the bedroom? Why ever go to a shopping mall?' They learn that orphans that take cold showers in the winter are [...]

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Sometime before Republic Day.

The girls whose names we know, Martabel and I ask Basanti about. Puja, Dipya, Sangita, Induja, Laxmi. A refrain emerges–alcoholic, invalid, or absent fathers, mothers mostly domestic servants. Induja's mother died of breast cancer.
Jasmine takes me by the hand into the hall, sits me on the stairs, sings love songs and dances Bengali [...]

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15, 16 January 2006

The driver who took us to Sharup's village burned incense on the dash, wiping away the ash as we prepared to depart. The weather is inclement; bullock carts and rickshaws appear no more than ten seconds from our overtaking them and the turns in the road even less, which has been a source of [...]

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the incompleteness of the photo record

My photo record is incomplete. For example, this photo:

is of a house outside of Phodong in Sikkim. Ross and I were sitting in the front lawn, apparently. Right next to the clothesline. A man came out of the house carrying a small baby; he was talking to the baby in Nepali, the only words [...]

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I’m sorry, but it always comes back to India.

You know what gets me–the things you notice; or don’t notice. Example: I brought a bottle of Heinz brand ketchup from India. Why? It was Heinz tomato chili sauce and I thought, this is so cool. Because of the spicy cuisine they market spicy ketchup to Indians, and you can’t get this at home. And [...]

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home again home again

The group minus one: Peter, Anna, Ross, Greta, Me, Mark, Jaye
Put up some photos of the Wagah border at Flickr.
Siliguri, a city cum train station, airport, and bus hub, is an unbelievable dump. At a restaurant that was recommended in the Lonely Planet, we met a guy who went to college in the midwest. He [...]

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