My grandmother's smile

I rushed into the room while my luggage was still in the car. “Your grandmother is waiting for you”, my aunt said.  It was last December, and I had just arrived from the airport after having traveled more than 8000 miles from New York City to this coastal city of Calicut in northern Kerala in India to see her. She was sick and bedridden for some time. Seeing me entering the room, she gave a big wide smile and kept looking at me. I hadn’t seen her for more than four years.  There was a glow around her and that wide smile was almost angelic; it is now etched into my mind forever. “We haven’t seen this smile for months”, my aunt added.  Apparently she had not smiled for days and weeks.

A few days after my arrival, on a pleasant tropical Christmas day, we were in the car taking her back to the ancestral home.  An Indian Santa Claus in a ridiculous costume was crossing the street in the furious traffic and he was drunk. I started laughing when I saw him and my grandmother also basked in the humor along with me, even though she was very weak.  Others in the car also joined us mostly because of the joy in seeing my grandmother laugh.

Last week, on Wednesday around noon, I was in downtown New York City near Battery Park working on my laptop when I had a sudden feeling of uneasiness.  Something felt not right and I immediately called my mom who lives in Michigan.  “What made you to call me from work, do you have ESP or something?”, she asked. She said she had been feeling uneasy that whole day since grandmother was not well and was trying to decide when to go to India to see her again. “Should I go in September?”, she asked me. I felt a rush of energy and emotion and I blurted out, “No, you better go now”.  “You mean I should book tickets for this week?”. “Yes, immediately and as soon as you can. Go on Friday if you can.”, I said. 

This Wednesday closer to midnight I was in bed getting ready to sleep and randomly browsing the internet on my iPad when my dad called me.  My grandmother had passed away peacefully while my mom was by her bed side.  I don’t know what force or energy had forced me to convince my mom to go to India, but she was able to spend almost three days with her mother and take care of her in the hospital with her siblings. 

My grandmother Safiya was born to a Muslim business family in the late 1930’s and married off to my grandfather around the age of 15 (my grandfather was about 19).  She gave birth to 10 children and by the time she was 30 years old, she already had a large family and enormous responsibilities.  I remember visiting her on vacation when I was a child and she would be the first one to wake up to make sure that breakfast was warm and ready and hot chai was on its way.  Food was the focal point for social interactions in her household with chicken biryani prepared on special occasions. The aroma of the spices would fill the air and my mouth would water and as a child who didn’t grow up there, I would try to make use of my minimal vacation time by eating and playing at the house as much as I could. I enjoyed the role of being the first girl grandchild of the family for a long time.    

    

 My dad’s mother also has a similar story.  I was a teenager when I last saw her and I still remember my last words to her that hot April afternoon, “see you again”.  She was a strong and determined woman who also gave whatever she could to the world, whether it was passing out “foreign” candy we brought with us to the neighborhood children or giving a little more extra to someone in need.  Both of my grandmothers were only teenagers when they were pushed into responsibilities.  Their lives were charted out for them instead of being able to plan their own futures.

They didn’t have time to think about what their passions in life were.  They didn’t think about what to wear to the next event or what new restaurant to try.  They didn’t think about makeup or shows or books or travel or shoes, for that matter.  I can’t even compare my life living in New York City to that of my grandmothers since they both put me to shame in how much they had compromised, accomplished, and sacrificed for their families. 

Thoughts on humility

A sideways glance, a sigh, no eye contact – yes, I have seen that before. It’s the yuppie who has just entered the cosmopolitan world of money and power – a world that is new and enticing, where he thinks he can conquer the world and conquer it all.

Humility is seen as a virtue by many peoples and cultures and placed in high regard, especially by Asian cultures.  Recently, I was in a few situations where I started thinking about humility and how people practice it.  In New York City, where everything is dense, people, streets, emotions, drama and life, I have found that certain individuals trade humility for pretentiousness.  In a city where the first questions someone asks are what you do and where you live, the pressure to conform has taken away the humility from many individuals. 

Success in America is also not always associated with humble people. If you are humble, you may not be able to toot your own horn. That in turn can result in less interviews for a job seeker, or less publicity for a new author.  However, there is a balance that people can learn, and that is the fine line between confidence and arrogance.

If you talk to very successful people, you may notice that the most successful people are not the most arrogant.  I have always wondered why the middle managers of success are the ones who are the most arrogant. Is it the fact that the very successful have nothing to prove since everyone knows they are already successful?

In the path to success, we all encounter many people who help us along the way, from our parents to our teachers, from the person who gives us our morning coffee to the person who operates the subway train, to the person who keeps the office clean.  They all share our path to success. It is up to us to make sure that when we get there, we acknowledge that every one of them played a role in our success.  It is up to us to avoid falling into the pit of arrogance.

  

A Thanksgiving Day

Thanksgiving for me is usually spent at my parents’ house in Michigan with a warm fire and sumptuous dinner that consists of a mixture of Indian and American dishes. This year, I decided to stay in New York City to skip the strenuous holiday travel after exhaustion from my recent apartment move and an anticipated trip oversees coming up in December.

Yesterday, I took a walk in the brisk morning to go to the Macy’s parade. I was hoping to catch a bus, but the sun was shining and the beauty and quietness of it all made me skip taking the bus. It was a little eerie to see New York City so quiet, when the excitement and madness makes way to calmness. However, it wasn’t long before I could hear people at distance and I knew that I was getting close to the parade. Then, I saw people with strollers, grandmothers, couples, tourists, and locals eagerly walking in that direction.

As I continued walking, I saw a person crouched up on the side of the street with a few bags wearing a hooded old sweater. As many of you know, it is not an uncommon sight in the city to see a homeless person, and I don’t always stop. This time, something in me made me stop and go back. I couldn’t tell if the person was a man or woman since all I could see was a small part of the face; I felt I had to give something. The person looked up surprised as if awoken from a deep sleep, and it made me a bit sad.

At the parade, I saw the floats of Ronald McDonald, Snoopy, and Spiderman; people were screaming and laughing, little kids were perched up on their father’s shoulders, and tourists were looking at the floats in awe taking pictures of everything in sight (probably their first American Thanksgiving). My festive mood was tampered with the thought of the crouched up person in the street. It was a reminder to me that there are people who spend their Thanksgiving without a home, a family, or a smiling child next to them. It was a reminder to me to be thankful for my family, friends, and my home.

Urban Grit - Lower East Side

Many neighborhoods in Manhattan have lost their inherent character in the past 10-20 years due to gentrification. However, in the Lower East Side, you can still see the grit of New York City on an aging wall, a broken door, or an occasional dumpster.

Waste of Time

Some of you who have read my blog before have probably realized that spring is my favorite season. In-spite of the temperamental rain and irritating allergies, there is something rejuvenating about spring that sets it apart from other seasons. I am back and ready to blog again after an absence of four months. My absence from this blog also made me realize how everything is ephemeral.

I decided to calculate the amount of time certain individuals (who shall remain unnamed) spend on Facebook and other social networking sites. The figures are alarming and a bit sad. I thought about my life and other people’s lives wasted away, the time squandered into the depths of networks and binary numbers unable to ever be recovered; the lost time sucked by a wormhole and never to be seen again.

Deeply regretful of all the time that I and others have wasted, I thought for a moment about what to do about it. Is social media addictive? Of course it is. What is that makes it so alluring? I realized that it is the basic human tendencies and extreme emotions that make social media the most alluring: the connections, popularity, narcissism, pomposity, curiosity, insecurity, and depression. These extreme emotions somehow make their way into people’s use of these social media tools. It is usually the most social and narcissistic or the least social and insecure who is likely to be online most of the time.

I had two cups of premium Italian coffee today and with caffeine still pulsing in my system, I couldn’t help but calculate the hours spent on social media networks. Say you are an addict, and my definition of an addict is someone who spends more than 2 hours a day on a social media website: this includes sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace , LinkedIn (yes, it needs to be included too), and Friendster (if you are one of those people who still use it), 2 hours multiplied by 365 days a year is 730 hours a year.

730 hours is enough for someone to write a novel length manuscript, learn a brand new foreign language, pick up a new musical instrument, travel to a few exotic countries, volunteer at a few shelters, meet a few new people, or read a few books.

After calculating the lost time, the hours seemed to go through the wormhole along with other faces and expressions, each social media website logo devoured by it, into an abyss.

Social Media Networks

Social media seems to have infiltrated every person's life and influenced their lifestyle. The question becomes, how big is your network? Networks connecting through networks can be exponential in nature. For example, say a person has about 200 friends on Facebook. If each of those 200 friends are connected to 200 different friends, that becomes 40,000 second degree connections. If each of those 40,000 people are connected to another unique set of 200 friends, the number goes up to 8,000,000 third degree connections. It means that an average person could have about 8 Million third degree connections, which translates to the entire population of New York City. If we take it to the fourth degree, it becomes 1.6 Billion, almost a quarter of the world's population. So, the six degrees of separation theory makes sense. We are all connected to each other through a matter of a few human connections. When we look at the complexity of networks, they will eventually evolve as a simplified model where everyone else has access to everyone else in the world within a few degrees.

Moving

Link to my blog "Moving":