Name Change
My H1-B visa application went through (after languishing in INS purgatory for months) late last week. But this NYT article (h/t Sepia Munity) doesn't give me much hope of ever crossing over into the "human" side from the "alien" side (I am a "resident alien") here in the United States, unless of course I take action, and legally change my name.
So I am taking suggestions here: I need a last name with less than or equal to two vowels in it, such as Smith or Jones or Bush*, and a nice first name. For staters, how does Bob** Smith sound? :)
* I harbour hopes that my imaginary spawn (or spawn of spawn) will run from president one day, and no way in heck is there gonna be a President Dandamudi - okay, a little more likely if there is a President Obama before that
** I can't find the article now but I belive I read a while back, either in WSJ or NYT, that Bob is the most popular first name an American CEO can have. And this CEO list at Wiki has six Bobs
My Daily Notes
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On Class In America
Rants from an email I wrote to my friend, C, in reply to his question if I knew any works of fiction (or non-fiction) addressing the subject of class in current-day USA, akin to Balzac's novel, ‘Pere Goriot’, with its sharp emphasis on class differences in Parisian society
I can think of no books right away that deal with class conflicts and differences in current day America. The closest I have come to in my scattered fiction reading is Edith Wharton's work, such as "Age of Innocence", or Faulkner's work in which "class" shows up directly or indirectly. Bellow's "Augie March" can also be seen as a meditation on class mobility. But then none of this work has anything to do with current class conflict or differences.
On a quick level, this may be because class in America is (has always been?) in some fashion pegged to the degree of non-assimilation, and in the "good old days" (about which "conservatives" have wet dreams, and Disney runs its empire on) also to race. So if one looks for the "lowest" class in America, it would be the immigrant - Pedro, the leaf blower and grass cutter down the lane, at the bottom, with Palvayanteeswaran, the programmer, or Kim, the laundry shop owner, perched above Pedro, and the generic John Doe spread above them like a rain cloud.
It is my guess that spillage doesn't happen, much, between these diffuse classes to make fiction about. Besides, America with its pleasent hokum of "pursuit of happiness" (I have noticed that the latest Cadillac ads have borrowed this pithy slogan) makes talking about class impolite or impolitic. This also enables crafty folks like Bush -II, coming from a blue blood political dynasty, to cast themselves as regular beer drinking Joes, never mind all that expensive Andover- Harvard- Yale education.
The closet that recent fiction (which I have read or scanned) has come to talk about this subject is Lahiri's "Namesake" (the only parts I liked btw) - Gogol's yearning for his parents to approach the "classiness" of his (NYC's Upper Eastside) girlfriend Max's parents can be read as a desire to bridge class differences. Chang-Rae Lee's "Aloft" (which I was scanning last weekend at the Tampa airport) also seems to have taken a stab at this subject.
Book Posts
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Art Note - Ajanta
"In the Holy Caves of India" (on Ajanta cave paintings) is the the fifth most emailed article at the New York Times website[1]. Like many places I have never visited in the Indian subcontinent (for example, all of India above the Tropic of Capricorn has never been visited), Ajanta has come to me only in books. That said, I have ogled plenty at the painting of Padmapani, the lotus bearing Buddha[2], at Ajanta. I am biding my time as I completely forget India (come amnesia, come faster), so that when I return, I will explode - like Ocativo Paz did in his "Indian" books, "East Slope" or "A Tale of Two Gardens"[3] - into poetry.
[1] Does this mean that the "argumentative" Indians have swamped NYT's readership?
[2] Also read that article from the Hindu on Ajanta; much superior to the NYT one
[3] From Paz's "A Tale of Two Gardens":
"It rained, the earth dressed and became naked, snakes left their holes, the moon was made of water, the sun was water, the sky took out its braids and its braids were unraveled rivers, the rivers swallowed villages, death and life were jumbled, dough of mud and sun, season of lust and plague, season of lightning on a sandalwood tree, mutilated genital stars rotting, reviving in your womb, mother India, girl India, drenched in semen, sap, poisons, juices."
I talked to my mother in India earlier this morning , and she reported that our ancestral villages in the Krishna delta region (in South India) have suffered from a massive deulge of torrential rain and flood - the entire harvest has been wiped out. And as the thought of Paz passed through the circuits, I remembered that particularly beautiful passage on rain in India.
Scannings
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