I am an early riser. During the dark winters of New England, I am up even before the sun, and that, you’ll agree, takes some doing. But though I am up, I am, usually, not about. Venturing out before the neighbors have had a chance to shovel the sidewalks is unwise, I’ve discovered, and I don’t bother getting out before 8 AM. In my South Indian hometown, Chennai, getting a head start on the day made practical sense because the sun could turn the outdoors [...]

Centum is Latin for hundred. I don’t know if Italians use the word anymore, but some people in India still do. To them, centum is what a smart kid would score on a math test. In the middle class neighborhood where I grew up, many adults seemed to believe that math scores were a perfectly good indicator of a child’s I.Q. – the equivalent of a Mensa rating. Read the entire essay. pdf. PhotoCredit: Jaybee

On the last day of school, no matter which city we lived in, we would be on the evening train to Madurai. The overnight train journey was always fun–but our annual destination–we were a little less excited about that. Madurai was my father’s hometown and my grandparents still lived there. The heat, the mosquitoes, the bathrooms a slippery tenth of a mile from the house, the sheer lack of things to do – these were some of the reasons we might have cited – if [...]

    I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” – Jorge Luis Borges, “Poema de los Dones”         The New Yorker  story by Salman Rushdie  featured the real-life tsunami that carried away fishermen and boys who had gathered to play cricket at the beach one fateful dawn. Reading this in a coffee shop in Boston, for the first time, I wept over this tragedy that  had struck my hometown six years ago — such, of course, is the power of good narrative.  It also reminded me [...]

When I set off to graduate school in the US, the Internet had not yet taken over the world. I actually spoke to people to gather information about life in America in general and my destination, New Orleans, in particular. So, I was delighted to find a woman whose son was an undergraduate at the university I was headed to. “My son had some problems initially with the food, but you should be fine. You are a girl, no?” she said to reassure me. Biting [...]