i like your style

I saw the most amazing thing today:  A middle-aged man on a bicycle wearing a hot pink jumper emblazoned with the word “JAZZERCIZE” on the back.  

Not gonna lie: I kind of want one.

feeling like an adult in bengali

I recently started reading Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri’s third book.  I’m not going to wax poetic about how much her stories “speak” to me (though they do), or how well she captures the Bengali-American experience as I’ve experienced it (though she does).  But I did want to post a passage from the first short story about Ruma, a first-generation Bengali-American:

“By now Akash had forgotten the little Bengali Ruma had taught him when he was little.  After he started speaking in full sentences English had taken over, and she lacked the discipline to stick to Bengali.  Besides, it was one thing to coo at him in Bengali, to point to this or that and tell him the corresponding words.  But it was another to be authoritative; Bengali had never been a language in which she felt like an adult.  Her own Bengali was slipping from her.  Her mother had been strict, so much so that Ruma had never spoken to her in English.  But her father didn’t mind.”

I’ve often thought about whether I’m going to teach my kids Bengali.  I kind of want them to know a bunch of languages (right now, the list is English, Arabic, Spanish, French, and Hindi), so who knows if they’ll even have room in their heads for Bengali.  Also, I worry that my own Bengali isn’t good enough to teach to them and trust that what they speak won't come out as an unrecognizable Banglish mess.

“Bengali had never been a language in which she felt like an adult.”  I hadn’t really thought about it in these terms before, but perhaps part of the reason why I wanted to come to Calcutta was to feel like an adult in Bengali.

emo emu

I love really big birds that can't fly.  Ostriches are awesome.  Penguins are pleasant.  But I especially love emus.  So I was pretty excited when during the AIF midpoint retreat last week at Anandwan, a community living ashram for lepers and disabled people near the geographic center of India, Hemant (a fellow fellow) discovered a pen with a couple of emus.  Emus!  If I ever become an eccentric and reclusive pop star and have a zoo in my backyard a la Michael Jackson, I'm definitely going to populate it with more than a few emus.