It’s Tamil New Year’s Day today. In every culture, spring brings renewal of the material and the spiritual. I touched upon this in my post on the day of the Iranian New Year. Every traditional festival or celebration in the Tamil culture of South India begins with one ritual: the elaborate drawing of a kolam using [...]
A Kolam to begin the Day
It’s Tamil New Year’s Day today. In every culture, spring brings renewal of the material ...
The Way We Speak Now
When I meet someone for the first time, I’m like a new battery, all charged up. Antenna up, I’m processing that person’s voice, the intonation, the accent and the diction. Unintentionally it seems, I’m looking for clues about the person’s early years, schooling, upbringing and influences. When I speak to people from India, I listen [...]
Making Life or Death Decisions about College
Life has a way of chipping away at your sensibilities, of polishing your allergic reactions to people who grate upon your soul, of honing your response to challenges. It’s college admissions, round two, in our home this March. By tomorrow, seniors around the country will know what their choices are for college. Surprisingly, this time [...]
Words from the East: A Gift on No-Rooz, the Persian New Year
A few weeks before their new year in the third week of March, Iranians clean and rearrange their homes. They sew new clothes, bake pastries and germinate seeds as a sign of rebirth and renewal. The Iranian New Year celebration, or No-Rooz, which falls on March 20th this year, always begins on the first day of [...]
Something Old, Something New: An Encyclopedia Drops off the Shelf
When I found out that The Encyclopedia Brittanica would be going out of print soon, I was reminded of the old times. As I ask in this piece about nurturing the old ways, I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t hang on to the old system, especially if it served an immediate and practical purpose. [...]
India in the Diaspora: Bollywood Mania rocks the College scene
Indians have a way of letting their color run deep into the fabric of other cultures. I realized just how much the Indian had seeped into the American at a Bollywood mega show hosted last weekend in the Los Angeles area by UCLA’s Hindi Film Dance Team, Nashaa. From two blocks away on North Brand Boulevard, [...]
Speaking of Tradition: This Holi Time
I still remember the Holi of March 1976 in Delhi. I was a girl of fifteen. My parents and I were visiting my sister and brother-in-law for a couple of weeks in the city. They had just moved into their tiny apartment in Karol Bagh and so they didn’t know their neighbors well. Until [...]
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