I plan to think and write about my understanding of America, through my experiences here over the last three years. I hope to explore areas that are of the soul and also of the land. I hope to get a working essay by the end of 2003. So here is the tentative beginning.

The Irony of America (At the end of third year of my American sojourn)

Man always seeks to escape unbearable reality by seeking an alternative reality. However rarely is the whole scope of the alternative reality clearly glimpsed much less understood. In my case the reality was once India and the escape was an idea called America. The America of my imagination and the America of my daily reality are now two whole circles whose circumferences intersect in parts, in arcs and on occasions, which in reality are less than frequent. I wouldn’t term this a disappointment because my evaluation would be a function of my perception rather than what reality is. What then is America? This is a hard question with a multiplicity of answers.

However one fact, by virtue of its repeated experience surfaces; America for me is mute silence. Silence of much agony, silence of displacement, silence that comes after one has had a hearty cry, silence that one constantly wears like tie if not like a coat. And what I have come to see is that this affliction is not mine alone, because if it was mine, I could have faulted it as something personal, some fatal flaw in my character. It then must also be shared by this place that I live my days in. I have come to that conclusion by not so much as logic as much as by feeling and direct experience. Someone might here say, “Why silence is good isn’t it?”

To that I would answer, what one is referring to is not silence but solitude. Solitude is of the deep woods, the sea, the breath of a lover passing over our face, of dark night and multiplicity of universes. Silence however is different. Silence is the recoil of a gun, the devastation after a bombing, the groping of sweaty bodies in dark rooms and the anti depressant induced daze. How to tell the difference? Easy answer for that, plumb the unrest of the heart.