It has been snowing, without a pause, since last night.

And I have been trying to fit my dissertation within the limits of a ‘one page only’ application just as incessantly. Well, there has been some pause on my end, namely a night’s sleep, but the endeavor feels just as unremitting.

There is no clarity in sight, for either the damp and distraught sky or my mind. But it is a race to the finish. Can I finish the synopsis before it stops snowing?

I am competing with the sky – infinity, as it extends into the eternal and unknowable cosmos.

Soon, I will be howling at the full moon.

Yes, I am being melodramatic. And silly.

But indulge me.

A dissertation worth its name should be inflicted by drama.

It is only appropriate that I fight cosmos this snow draped, damp afternoon. And, test the limits of my human, rational, reasoning; defy destiny; scream at the haze above and abyss below; claim my existential realm, build and destroy, write and erase, think and rethink in defiance of whatever that invisible, infinite, eternal power is.

It is what we modern people do – compete with the cosmos.

And this is my modernist quest – this dissertation.

A thesis, a narrative that explains the world – empirically induced; conceptually deduced; reliably argued; authoritatively pursued. Beyond the doubt or force of even a slithering shadow of a snowflake.

A dissertation is, after all, a modernist battle cry: yes, I can; yes, I shall; yes, I will.

(And then, congratulations: yes, you have.

All this for one moment of validation? You insecure bastard child of mine: whispers the cosmos, as the snowflakes smile and slither past my window.)

Sail around the world? Yes.

Trace the shape of the world? Yes.

(Why is it round by the way? A cruel joke played by the cosmos in a sense: leaving us back where we started.)

Convince others of my narrative (by force or wit – and start the colonial-neo-colonial-imperial-neo-imperial-capitalist-neo-capitalist world system)? Yes.

I am doing what others have done, over and over and over again.

Not the hustling in abstractions part, though that too. Rather, the attempt to test the limits of my ability to think-prove-argue and conquer the world, via mind or matter – the modernist part.

It seems petty.

And silly.

Until I make it melodramatic – and find in my quest a modern valor; an ambition to reach the frontiers, trace the horizons, find new lands and open seas in between; shoot a rocket and get giddy over a fluttering cloth on a piece of a moon-rock; and tell stories of the journey (some call it social theory). Then this effort seems all right again – still silly but not petty; dramatic and grand in its self-involved abandon.

But abandonment is everywhere I turn to. The slow sway of the snowflake; the drift of the breeze; the meandering clouds without addresses; the awkward, jaunty waves of tree tops; even, the pit less neon street light.

So what is their abandonment and what is mine? Where do we meet and where do we leave?

Brooklyn sticks out its tongue – a block long series of rooftops stained by thick, sticky, black tar, painted with caring hands of weary landlords – to stop the wet snow in its track.

The mad, ethereal dance of snowflakes, falling with abandon, careless and dizzying, meets the roof top in silent sighs and rushes away to other business in puddles of water through the city streets. The city never stops, they say. Is it competing with the cosmos too? Heartbeat by heartbeat; snowflake-by-snowflake; water puddle over water puddle.

Where does it end?

When will it stop snowing?

And my dissertation?

Ah, that too.

The internet is too easy.  Sorry: too broad; let me use a scalpel on my point.  The way we design and define interaction online is too simple.  It’s limiting our concept of a connected world and is preventing the kind of breakthroughs that make this medium so exciting.

We are barely connected now.  Look past all the signal noise from the most popular sites online and you see a lot of people talking to walls.  They are clicking instant polls, commenting on random posts and stalking their high school crushes.  The accessibility of information (absolute and relative, important and not important) is eating our time and streamlining our thoughts.  The connections that were once celebrated – I can chat with someone in Bangalore right now! – are hollow and short.  We, the world, the known intelligent Universe are all speaking more English.  We are all thinking the same thoughts, accessing the same kind of information.  This is because it is too easy.

The internet is full of failure on the development level.  It is full of broken start-ups and incomplete revolutions.  What about failure on a different level.  Can a user fail when making a comment on a blog post?  Can a person fail a tweet?  Currently we consider failure in terms of content.  You might miss the point of a post and your comment will reflect that to an embarrassing level.  You might tweet a link to a Nevada bordello to the wrong crowd.  Those are embarrassments for sure, but are they failures in the same way as Betamax?

A failed startup begets an improved startup.  That doesn’t guarantee success – it just leads to improvement.  Who cares about success – I want more improvement.  Does a failed comment mean improved discourse?  Does an inappropriate tweet lead to improvements or simply to reticence?  Does that make it better?

What is the point of web-based interaction?  I know: that’s way way too broad.  Consider specific examples.  My employer considers extra comments on articles an enhanced interactive experience.  The more buttons we add to a page, the more interaction we offer to the user.  But why?  What are we creating with those buttons?  At this point, the comments on an article represent a separate and completely unrelated aspect to the original content.  The applications we add to the page should be considered tools to the user-base.  The community uses those tools to create an experience that cannot otherwise be duplicated.  It also cannot be explained.  A proper interactive experience is to the user what a good moderator is to a discussion.  The moderator keeps the discussion lively and draws from it points that would not have been made and could not necessarily have been predicted.

I will continue this conversation in other posts.  I am painting with the broadest strokes imaginable here on accident.  This discussion will return to specific examples.  Look out next for the online language learning breakdown.  There is an important component missing from this market that needs to be launched.

Editor: This series is written by a IT professional from India.  She transplanted herself to NYC and worked for one of the biggest media companies in the world.  Despite her success, she was lured back home by the opportunities and developments present in one of the world’s fastest growing economies.  What does it mean to come back home? How is it to try the non conventional path?  What does a growing nation mean at the individual level? Follow her story here…

The photo above was taken from my Jersey City apartment the day I left to return home to India.  You can see the Statue of Liberty facing East on the right.  The script underneath the photo is a line from one of my favorite Kannada poems.  It means “Life’s about leaving behind what we have and yearning towards what we don’t.”  I love this line; considering my current situation, it couldn’t be more apt.  My life in the Big Apple was fantastic.  I have had one of the best year’s of my life there.  I was given more opportunities to fulfill all the dreams (and more) that this small town Indian girl could ever imagine.  But the problem with dreams is as soon as you fulfill one, another one rises.

Moving from the US to back home to India was not an easy decision.  It is always hard to get out of your comfort zone and do something that’s not conventional.  Thanks to the American thinking I have started questioning why I want to do something (at least partly now).  If not for this, I would have spent the majority of my life doing what is supposed to be the next best thing to do.

Living away from home – especially in a New York City coping with a bad recession while constantly hearing and readin gabout all the growth and magical GDP numbers in India makes you wonder if you’re in the right place.  Isn’t success about being in the right place at the right time?  Even though economically, India is doing great, socio-politically a lot needs to be improved.  I believe one can’t thrive without the other.

So I thought why not apply the skills I have learnt living away from home into something which I believe needs to be improved.  I hope this makes all the people in India who cry about brain-drain a little happy.  Maybe I am just stupid or way too idealistic.  I don’t know but a little that’s what I am hoping to figure out.

I would never ever imagined I would be writing about something like this on my century-old desk.  I have had all the horrific memories of slogging for my 10th, 12th and engineering exams on this.  It occupies about half of my room and mom keeps reminding me such a waste of space it is.  But I simply love it.  Few things are just so special and I am glad I am writing my first ever blog post on this.

You are learning Spanish and you want to use the web to teach you.  The New York Times broke it down for you on January 27, 2010.  The Web Way to Learn a Language by Eric Taub tells you there are free and expensive options.  There are social networks and black-box software available.  Do you want to hear paid actors speak textbook Spanish or do you want to interact with fellow students stutter in their strained accents.  It’s all there.

Actually not all of it is there.  Something is missing from the article.  And it’s important.

You want to learn Spanish.  How do you do it?  It’s a very easy series of difficult steps.

1. Fill your empty brain with Spanish vocabulary.

2. Speak Spanish badly.

3. Repeat #2 every day in every way for as long as it takes until you are watching Predator re-runs on Telemundo on a Wednesday night while every other idiot is tolerating CSI Miami.

Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha exist to complete step #1.  Your brain is empty and they know how to fill it with Spanish.  They offer variations of the same theme: turn a Flash application into an interactive vocabulary quiz.  The dings and buzzers tell you when you’re right and wrong.  The progress bar tells you how far you’ve come.  Eventually, your line will tell you and everyone else that you know how to ask for the bathroom in Barcelona.

The web is bigger than #1.  Rosetta Stone and LiveMocha are small enough to handle that because that’s the easy part.  Let’s try something else.  Let’s try to make #3 meaningful and engaging and interactive.  The web is waiting for an application that makes that possible.  This is what needs to happen.

There is a feeling every new language student shares.  Every student is overcome with this feeling the moment they are about to speak Spanish to a stranger.  It is a mixture of dread and shame and embarassment and frustration.  Overcoming this fear is essential to making #3 happen.  Recreating this feeling in a language website is possible and absolutley essential to building a truly innovative interactive experience.  The fear will not be overcome unless it is confronted.

A meaningful online lnaguage tool would make this promise to users: this will make you talk and it will force you to listen.  And you will most likely feel really uncomfortable while you’re doing it.  This is not the online language tool version eating your Spanish vegetables.  This is the online language tool version of your first Spanish date.  A horrible experience that left you with a lifetime worth of lessons.

All of the language websites profiled on the NYT article were fine in their own way.  They should be used along with library books, classrooms, and private tutors to support all the students in the middle of the #1 phase of their lessons.  This new tool described here would compliment any and all lesson plans with engaging practice tools.  In other words: the world wide web needs a language lab.

This is from TED.

How do I put this constructively?  I need to eat and sleep in my apartment to protect me from the rain and the cold and mosquitoes.  I need my spouse to enjoy the same comforts as me.  Collectively we have utility bills to pay and insurance premiums to account for and student loans to crush our near term dreams.  I need to prop up all of these things and yet I know I’m doing something wrong and this video puts it all to words.

We are made to be isolated by our dreams.   We move away from home in pursuit of something bigger and more rewarding than our presence, drawn in by the bright shining light at the top of a hill.  Meanwhile, our homes are cluttered and dirty and in the way and so we leave them for our new organized and optimized environment.  Our kitchens become clean and orderly.  There are no smells and we don’t sweat unless dressed for it.   Anyway…

The point is that we can’t abandon one track for the other.  We can’t find the special Sardinian wine and sit on the floor for the sake of our golden years.  How to right this boat?  I ate Chipotle for lunch yesterday – that was stupid and wrong and I knew it with every bite.  The lives that are defined in this video are lives that are not chosen and in the cold empty space of my dreams, I am free.

I was looking for a specific book but my eyes wandered. Instead of picking up the book on methodology that I needed to read urgently I found myself leafing through Urdu poems. There you go again, Ms. PhD student: so easily distracted; so fickle. But the scandal does not end there. Bright winter sunshine rushes in through the window and I can almost hear the soft snow on the ground, from last night, melting away – gently melting in the sunny embrace. In the hushed silence of a New York apartment I read aloud Azmi to myself.

I look at the bookshelf again, and see the title: Argumentative Indian. Why do I find the same book on the bookshelf of every Indian friend who lives here in the U.S.? Is it a comment on my circle of friends? What does it say?

Is it meant to be a reminder of who we are, though we live so far away from home, every time our distracted eyes fall on dusty bookshelves? Is it a validation; or a yearning to break the silence of empty apartments and shrill deadlines with some hearty rambling? The endless adda over cigarettes, cha (not chai) and the occasional samosa and jalebi as I remember life to have once been?
I remember moving into the new house; the smell of clean walls and empty floors. My father installed a fancy key chain lock on the main door. Dada and I both observed it to be a rather excellent idea: open the door just that wee bit to satisfy your curiosity about who might be standing on the other side and yet, without commitment. The door was neither closed, nor open.

The key chain broke within two days of our moving into the new house. Just for the record, Dada and I had very little to do with its collapse. Actually, if I remember correctly, the base for the chain dislodged from the wall. And the door was never closed (during the day, and sometimes on forgetful nights). People streamed in and out, through the door, all day long: and adda carried on. It was no environment for children to grow up: Ma reminded us all. We had to study for examinations after all. Such distractions will not do. Only purposeful ones: music lesson twice a week, art courses over the weekend, walk to the library and film festivals when they are on.

Twenty-five years later I am still dealing with distractions. The key chain at our New York apartment is very strong, indeed. Nobody visits during the day; and hardly ever at night. But I am filled with memories of adda and guilty pleasure of reading: Aaena.

I guess Ma won after all.

And the secret desire to rebel, to contest, to ramble and revel in angst…?

Well, it is on the bookshelf now. The Argumentative Indian: on bookshelf after bookshelf of feisty Indian girls and their American apartments.

Though I must admit that beyond questions of becoming a cliché and wondering if one exists – truly – only in distracted, stolen moments, such consensus on reading material is rather disturbing. Sincerely, an argumentative Indian.

It’s back to the methodology book now.

Winter

I am tired of the way the stale air
lies when my radiator rattles and pings and
most especially that
it is defensive about it.
go aheads and hiss
the air you give me is used and stiff but I breath it anyway
it’s not my fault
I was just out there…

and now I’m back in because
winter is what you come in from and wait out
patiently

Andrew,

Like I said, I’m a regular reader – going on two years.  It took me a while to understand the format of the Daily Dish.  The rapid fire posts, the jump-links.  The various awards and photos.  You are right, this is a broadcast medium at heart and I climbed the learning-curve because you were constantly refreshing content and I was stimulated enough to endure.  Now I’m on top, so to speak, and the view is a crystal clear vista of a brick wall.

I do not associate your content with the Atlantic Monthly.  I think that’s important.  I do not associate your content with anything other than yourself.  Your friends, your enemies, your opinions, your arguments, your obsessions, your everything.  For a while, I was satisfied with that.  Your perspective offers readers your expertise on various DC goings on.  Additionally your personal story is compelling enough to color several socio-political issues with a relevant point of view.  But your POV is only valuable if it’s directed outward.  But The Dish is an inward-facing organism.  Hence, my shabby view.  I only see you.

So…

This is all about you, Andrew.  Isn’t that weird?  Sit on that for a minute.  As your reader, I’m tracking you in real time deal with too much information.  I know you know that.  You’ve said it before – this is what blogs do.  But that doesn’t sit well with me.  I don’t care that much about you.  Should I?

I started reading Studs Terkel recently.  I see meaningful connections between his work and yours.  Our evolving society has meaning and texture.  Essentially, you both strive to document and ponder our life in this place.  Studs found meaning in the people – their fragments and stories – the things that they did, didn’t do – the fun stuff and boring stuff.  Some of it meaningful and lots of it confusing.  Studs took fragments out of the whole and weaved together a contextualized story.  It took time and patience and editing.  Studs was a hub of information.  He organized it and provided that context.  Your work is on the other end of the spectrum – the boring stuff, the fun stuff, the right stuff, the wrong stuff – the dissents, the back-pats – all of it is from you, about you.

Your expertise is valuable.  It is lost on Chris Matthews’ rapid fire show where fellow pundits pass around a hot potato until the next issue.  It is diluted by the wide-open valve that is the Daily Dish.  It is hollowed out by an echo chamber unto itself, as represented by the blog roll on the bottom right of your page.

This is not an email where I tell you that I’m done reading your work.  I’m trying to make a broader point.  Why does your process matter? Patton Oswalt has a great bit about preventing George Lucas from making the prequels. The punchline (word for word): I don’t give a shit where the stuff I love comes from; I just love the stuff I love.

Well anyway, I’ll keep reading.  This is getting interesting.

This is a language spoken by many many human beings on the planet earth that were not born and raised in Milwaukee, WI.  To be fair, I’m sure there are several such people who can contradict that generalization (I am not one of them…. yet).  It is Bengali (Bangla).  It’s the other mother-tongue of my household and the one I don’t know.  I have been teaching myself this language using the Teach Yourself Bengali book and CD set.  At this point, it’s been years.  I can repeat the same phrases and understand or misunderstand or not understand the same vast expanse of human communication in Bengali as before.  So I’m stuck – but that’s not very interesting nor is it the point of this post.  Every language student gets stuck and the solution to that problem is always the same – talk more.  Listen more.  That’s an easy problem to solve with hard work.  (Side note: if you know of a good Bengali class in the NYC area, please let me know).  The real point of this post is about the neural realignment that is slowly taking place deep inside my brain.  The Bengali neurons are clearing brush somewhere in my brain; cutting down trees, digging trenches, laying pipe for what ostensibly will be a new thought-center.  This foundation is coming at some destructive expense.  Before these foundations are complete, I’m working at half-speed.  There’s a bottle-neck in my brain and when it hits me hardest, I start to feel homesick.

I’m still here (here is not there and there is where Bengali speaking non-Milwaukeans live and work).  Homesickness is probably not the right word because it connotes geographical displacement.  What about mental displacement?  I can’t process thoughts the same way, so I can’t react to predictable circumstances in familiar ways.  The familiar is now unfamiliar.  I blame the grammar.

I’m not educated enough to explain Bengali grammar.  If you happen to speak that language (and English) you will notice that quickly.  But the grammar breaks my thoughts before I can finish them.  Quick example: Bangla does not specify gender in subjective personal pronouns.  There is no ‘he’ ’she.’  It’s all relative.  This makes things interesting in my mind when I consider notions such as God (”He” in English and “Or” in Bangla).  But my Bangla level is not deep enough for theology.  I also had to look up ‘pronouns’ before I could identify my point as specifically: subjective personal pronouns.

The point is this: each successive thought requires strenuous deliberation to complete.  There are no more reactions to things – there are contemplations of grammar rules, vocabulary restrictions, and speed.  By the time a thought is generated, it dies before it can go anywhere.  When I’m robbed of my internal monologue (robbed is too strong a word, I realize), I lose a sense of self.  Then I become unfamiliar to myself.  That’s when I feel homesick.  Is this why it’s harder for adults to pick up new languages?