She is pissed. As if that's a news! As much as she tries to convince herself that race is a social construct and she should not ever say " I hate white people", every time she encounters the white feminists in her class, she gets so annoyed ( Read more... )

Now she has officially decided that her current school is a bureaucratic shithole. Throughout the last month,she has been running around from one office to another, signing loads and loads of paper.She would really do anything right now to settle for a quiet week when she will be able to concentrate on her academic stuff and maybe attend a ( Read more... )

So her new Program Director is a Renaissance scholar. Just like her previous program director. She is from England,speaks in an impeccable British accent and wears multi-colored frocks.And oh yes,she is also from an Ivy League school, just like her previous program director.She does not have any experience of dealing with her personally.Not yet. ( Read more... )

So for the last fifteen days she has been living in a new town, attending a new school and a new program.Yes,she has relocated to Texas.Texas--sometimes she herself has trouble believing. She indeed is living within the heart of the empire. But everyone keeps telling her " But it's Austin". True, it's Austin.But there are signs of Texas everywhere ( Read more... )

FACT : The Brits and the white Americans have failed to develop their own culinary cultures.

REASON : They were ( are) busy fucking other peoples' lives throughout the world.

She has never really felt any identification with India.Rather, she felt a strange kind of affinity with Kolkata. She would use the old colonial "Calcutta" rather than the decolonized "Kolkata" during most of her conversations. In order to sound familiar. In order to maintain her sense of connection with the familiarity of the already canonized ( Read more... )

I know why she emphasized the 'i's.
I know wht she hardened the 'r's.
Erasing the soft 'd's.
I know that impulse to osund recognizable.
I know the impulse to osund alike.
Fortunately or unfortunately,
English has never been an equalizer.

All social systems are based on space. Real, material space which you can touch, feel and take in. So colonialism involves, almost always, a massive transformation of space. While this is something she has known theoretically for a while, it is extremely disconcerting for her to witness the same process within the boundaries of the city she calls ( Read more... )

She is never away from Kolkata more than ten months. She comes back every ten months, spends two consecutive months in the city of her birth. The time that is allotted to her by the American university system and its nine-month long session. She normally tries to squeeze in a four-week long summer class or a teaching assignment in between. The ( Read more... )

How does one begin to use the language?How does one begin to explain the social,the economical,the global in a language that is accessible to all?During one of her great homecomings,she realized she has lost the language to explain what she feels.What she knows.Or,rather she has never acquired it.She began to realize that language is classed. ( Read more... )