"The Return of the Native"

It’s been a month long hiatus and now I am back.
Was it an interesting month? One that I should tell everyone about?
Not particularly, but it was undoubtedly the busiest. There were these mountain loads of assignments to finish; a few cartloads of grading work to submit; last minute books to read, analyze and ponder over; some stuff to edit and proofread since the student council that I am a member of decided to bring out a newsletter and I was made its editor; friends to meet before they went off to their homes for summer vacation (and no I cannot come to Delhi simply because I can‘t afford to), and in the midst of all this business there was also an inability to blog and the words just seemed to dry up here (perhaps because I have to write so much in my daily, ordinary course of life anyway). Yeah, that doesn’t make sense to me either.

One of the finest things that happened last month was getting a handwritten, proper letter from my dearest friend Suvena. I came back home one cranky evening, hungry, homesick, and horribly tired only to open the letterbox and find an envelope for me marked in familiar writing. The letter and the gesture, they both made my day, no, actually they made my week and several days thereafter, just as Richa’s had in my second month in America. I really appreciate the effort that goes into writing letters these days given how all of us are so computer dependent. Thank you, ladies.

For one of the classes this semester, our teacher had chosen political memoirs for us to read. They were thus books seeped in tragedy and all against a backdrop of turbulence and political crisis. The places were therefore just as varied -- Cuba, Rhodesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Germany.
They were tough books to read, tougher to find faults with, and even tougher to return to when it came to doing assignments based on them and then reading them out loud in class so that fellow writers could analyze, discuss and rip apart every word that you held dear while writing it down in the first place. But they were incredibly fun and challenging as well. During one of our discussions, our teacher wanted us to think about a possible revolution in the exact surrounding that we were living in right now, that is our tiny university town, to which I countered by saying that revolutions weren’t possible anywhere in this country simply because it is such a lonely society. She said, “Convince me. Write it to convince me.” And that therefore is one of my projects for this summer vacation. Why revolutions cannot occur in lonely societies where there are just way too many boundaries between one person and another. Let’s see how that fares.

More later. And thanks to everyone who enquired about my disappearance and sent reminders via email, messengers, scraps, comments, etc. that I need to re-emerge, if not anywhere else, on Kirrin Island at least.