On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 4:37 AM, Deepa Mohan <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > there are times, I must say, when I am wondering what my husband and I are > doing here, when ALL our family is Over There. Why should I be running > around trying to do something about my city...I have only one life, I could > certainly spend it at greater (physical) ease, with greater material > comforts, *and* surrounded by family, in the US. Why this feeling that our > lives are here? I..."don't know". It is just so. > > Cheers, Deepa. > >> >> > Deepa, I live in Canada and my family lives mostly in the US and the Hyderabad Metro area. In the US I worked with an international organization and had a visa that was not on the immigrant track so I felt pretty secure in many ways about not having to explain identity. It helped a lot that every single one of my colleagues was equally transient and permanently from someplace else. If you think NRIs have a committment problem, we were the uber uncommitted. It was also the 90s and pretty much everyone in north america lived in a bubble. Canada is far less sanitised than the US. My neighborhood has prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, homeless people, shopkeepers, millionaires and TV anchors, First Nations people with their tragic history of interrment( i consider it burial!) in residential schools where white missionairies abused them, workers from the Arctic North who make 80,000 a year for 5 years and get burnt out from lack of sunlight and return to "warm" British Columbia. Slums right next to the rich and the straggling middle class. The frontier like North and its cold are never far here. My parents were absolutely horrified to see that money cannot buy insulation here except for the super rich. I don't live in a gated development so the real world is right outside my windows and doorstep - poverty, mountains, ocean, so much rain that it seems hardly a coincidence that weeping varieties of every tree abound - weeping willow, weeping birch everywhere. Finding richness of experience wherever one lives is important. Conversely richness is available everywhere too. -- “Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream." ~ Lao Tzu (courtesy -Peacefrog)
