I am finally working hard to finish up with the Ph.D. The deadline I set for myself is the end of this year. I don’t know what I will be doing after that, anything would suffice as long as I can write. After long days of wrestling with math stuff, for which I have a reasonable talent but towards which I feel no real ‘heartland’ affinity, when I get to the Cave, I closet myself in the bathroom and wrestle with at least 100 pages of a book every night.

While one has to read very attentively to be able to write, I am usually too tired and perhaps not self-motivated to sit down and do the writing. And then muses, external to myself, to provide me that starting spark, as always are in short supply. I should use those last few hours of a day before the calendar changes, more furiously. Anyway last night I was wrestling with Saul Bellow and his collection of non-fiction pieces ‘It All Adds Up’. The broad theme, if there is a broad theme, in that book was to observe America and then take a measure of its depth.

Bellow makes many points about how in a world filled with ‘distractions’, it becomes harder and harder to pay attention to the essentials which include beauty and truth. This bears out in my personal experiences and then those ‘kaput’ relationships. In those useless transactions what really happened was the attention was fixed on superficial questions such as ‘is she going to dump me?’, ‘is she bored with me?’, ‘is he the knight in shining armor?’, ‘do we have great sex?’ and so forth.

One clear symptom is that very few seem to want to absorb anything of value, be it great books, great music or great art deeply, as well as want to create anything of great value out of their own selves. Instead as Bellow puts it, here we have our ‘voodoo’ music, various intoxicants (TV included), purveyors of ‘cool’ ideas and various amusing sexual sampling schemes.

Also this well called USA, which to young people as we were once four or five years ago, peering over the edge seems to be the route to dreamland and so forth, on arrival morphs into Disneyland. Surrealism and irony seems to the governing principle. I used to wonder why I couldn’t stop laughing during the period of time I used to read the Wall Street Journal. Was it the absurdity of the world? Or was it the absurdity of the world, which is also embodied in me? Of course one can escape from it all by not paying any attention to it, by sticking to one’s own kind, living and interacting in a limited ethnic ghetto, with limited excursions into the other world. This is what I sometime call living ‘Desi Lite’, i.e., pretending to live as if US has everything ‘Desh’ has and thus is not any different.

Another idea I had of US that is slowly turning into an illusion, was that of the ‘melting pot’. In real life very rarely does this melting pot happen. The fresh arrivals stick to their already present substantial groups. What I have, only very lately, been observing is that some of those who were already here, and thus descended from people who had arrived perhaps 200 to 300 years ago, still hold on to their ethnic ‘roots’. My guess is this is that tribal affiliations run deep in men. I am going to explore this idea further in my writing.