The Audio Archive of PEN American Center has some very interesting recordings. I found it as I was searching for talks by Margaret Atwood - whom I learnt yesterday is going to give a lecture, here in Atlanta on September 7, based on her retelling of the myth of Penelope. Listen to her adressing the question, "Does Writing Change Anything?"

When folks, who were considering to make a move to United States either to attend grad school or to take a better paying job, used to ask me what such a move could entail, I often pointed them to Robert D. Putnam 's bestselling, and very well written book ”Bowling Alone”. In that book, Putnam chronicled the steep decline he observed in the density of connective webs into which people integrate themselves here in the United States, as well as the consequent decline in social capital.

After fortuitously reading this book about four years ago, I also recalled a line from a conversation I had with an uncle on the eve of my departure to the United States. He said, "You go there, make enough money for ten or so years, and then come back here (to India) to live." I asked him why did he think this was the best strategy? He replied, "When I was there a decade ago, I saw through the trick they sell you there - you will have a whole lot of freedom to build a gold cage for yourself, but it will still be a cage." At that point in time, since I was living in a desi graduate student ghetto, and was struggling with the sense of alienation that came with the inability to fit myself into the larger world here in the USA, his words seemed to be prophetic.

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Apart from those times when I have found myself in "relationships" (linguistically, it is interesting to note that word “relationship” has primarily come to mean a romantic engagement of some sort with another person), this feeling of being "lost in translation" (a gem of a movie too!) has never departed. I am not saying this is the case (or will be the case) with every person who roughly has my profile – middle class, educated Indian immigrant. On the contrary, taking an example from my immediate family, I see how my sister and her husband have managed to successfully create for themselves the kind of extended social network which keeps their social capital from taking a nosedive. Yet, the cost is that their network necessarily mimics a version of life from back in India, i.e., while situated in America, it is exclusively Indian.

While I sometimes find in myself a desire to plug back and become a node in such a network - for all their random joke-y interminable adda sessions, late night card games, communal road trips, spontaneous lunch/dinner invitation to friends' places, etc - I also realize that my rootless cosmopolitanism with its desire to engage with a larger world will soon chafe at the boundaries of interests, sympathies, concerns etc that such bubbles contain themselves in. At the same time, my past attempts to integrate myself with a large and more diverse (in terms of race, class, culture etc) social ecosystem here haven't produced the results I desire. Perhaps I should modify that some what, and say “amorphous” results because the results I desire are also products of ‘the anxiety of choice’. In other words, I am aware that in the process of rejecting boundaries of bubbles, I am demanding a very “tailored choice": to be the part of a close knit group that comes from three or four different geographical locations, that is promiscuous in tastes of cuisine and wine, that is engaged with the world at levels higher that the pursuit of "happiness” (a code word for money), that is investigative and curious in attitude, that reads etc. And this brings me back to the opening Woody Allen’s monologue in “Annie Hall”: “I don’t want to belong to any group that will have me as a member.”

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It was these reflections held in my brain, which spied, and right away picked up, an article titled “Isolated Americans trying to connect” on the Yahoo News page earlier this morning. This article synthesis numbers, sociological studies, stories from the grapevine etc in an attempt to gauge the current level of social capital. I won’t comment on the stories told, except to note some of the more interesting statistics presented in this article:

”The trend toward isolation surfaced in the last U.S. census figures, which show that one-fourth of the nation's households — 27.2 million of them — consisted of just one person, compared to 10 percent in 1950.”

”the average American had only two close friends in whom they would confide on important matters, down from an average of three in 1985. The number of people who said they had no such confidant soared from 10 percent in 1985 to nearly 25 percent in 2004; an additional 19 percent said they had only one confidant — often their spouse.”

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It gives me something to think about, that golden cage, as I recall these lines from Adonis, one of the stars of contemporary Arabic poetry:

"Coming to this land Is an ode Not a litany."