Weekend Warriors

It was Friday evening. The weekend just officially started as I got back home from office. It gets dark early these days after the daylight savings time ended in early November. By 6:30 pm, it was pitch black outside. The doorbell rang and our dog, true to his guard dog instinct, darted towards the front door, barking loudly. Thinking it must be a package delivery guy, I peeped outside and saw an African American youth standing outside our front door--with his hands up.

It took me a few seconds to put the dog in his room and come back. By that time, the young man was already walking away. I opened the door and called him back. 

“Why did you feel the need to have your hands up?” I was genuinely curious to know. "Were you trying to gesture that you are unarmed?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Anthony said (I am not disclosing his full name to preserve his privacy). “I am aware that I am a black man showing up uninvited within your property after dark. If I were you, I myself would have hesitated to open the door,” he added. “So thank you for trusting me.”

The poignancy of that moment forced me to write this blog. 

This young man with impeccable manners, may be in his upper teens or early twenties, is trying to make an honest living by selling magazine subscription, pet accessories and kids toys. As it is, door-to-door selling is one of the toughest jobs to earn a living from. But imagine having to do that while fearing for your life, in your own country, because the color of your skin!

I remember chatting with one of my African American classmates, when both of us were in law school, about how her mother taught her brother to always stay out of trouble in order to stay alive! Somehow it did not make me feel any better that a black mom needed to teach her son things that even I, an immigrant mother of brown skin, did not need to teach mine.

Coincidentally, this weekend I was catching up on the past episodes of Patriot Act, the Netflix talk show series by Indian-origin comedian Hasan Minhaj. In one of his recent episodes titled “The Broken Policing System,” Minhaj reminded the viewers that it has been more than five years since the peak of the “Black Lives Matter” protests, but black youths like Anthony are far from not having to fear for their lives as long as the law enforcement officers are trained at the very beginning of their career to “warrior policing” techniques rooted deeply in racial distrust.

But one has to keep hope alive.  I hope my opening the door to Anthony shows my son that America is not stuck in the Jim Crow era that he is reading about in “To Kill a Mockingbird”--his assigned reading for ninth grade. I watched the movie before, but never read the book. I decided to read the book in parallel with my son to be able to have a deeper conversation with him. I downloaded the audiobook and kept listening during my longish drive to and from San Francisco on Saturday morning to volunteer with the Development School for Youth (DSY), organized by a national non-profit for helping inner-city youths, many of them African Americans, connect with adult professionals who can help them succeed in life. I got to meet bright youngsters like Destiny, who chose a colorful superhero name--"Red Wings"--for herself during an ice-breaker exercise with the volunteers. I came back home with heart overflowing with hope to begin the Thanksgiving week in the right spirit.

Some of us are just weekend warriors, but certainly not the wrong kind of warriors.

The Unstructured Summer

“I’m the child of your rainy Sundays.

I watched time crawl
Over the ceiling
Like a wounded fly.
. . .
I know Heaven’s like that.
In eternity’s classrooms,
The angels sit like bored children
With their heads bowed.”

These lines from a poem called "To Boredom," penned by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic, perfectly capture my current fascination with boredom, especially in the context of my teenage son’s ongoing summer vacation this year.

My son will start high school this Fall. I love the concept of ‘gap year’—the year-long break some students take typically between high school and college (as Malia Obama famously did). While we don’t quite have a whole year between middle school and high school, we decided to make this summer a ‘gap summer’ —an agenda-free, unstructured one, fully knowing that it might make my son feel bored.

But I believe in the power of boredom to lead to creativity. In my summer 2013 blog ‘Ode to boredom,' I wrote: “Creativity must have these pregnant phases of nothingness to retool its cradle, i.e., your brain.” This observation was based on just my own instinct at that time. But since then I have found both anecdotal and research-based support to back-up my position.

For example, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creative genius behind the celebrated Broadway musical ‘Hamilton,’ emphasized that it’s good to be bored. He wrote: “Time alone is the gift of self-entertainment—and that is the font of creativity. Because there is nothing better to spur creativity than a blank page or an empty bedroom. I have fond memories of pretending ninjas were going to come into every room of the house and thinking to myself, What is the best move to defend myself? How will I ‘Home Alone’ these ninjas? I was learning to create incredible flights of fancy.”

Some psychologists actually recommend that children be bored in the summer. Dr. Teresa Belton, an education expert said in a BBC interview that boredom could be an "uncomfortable feeling," because society has developed an expectation of being constantly occupied and constantly stimulated externally, but boredom is crucial for developing “internal stimulus,” which then allows true creativity. 

And unstructured idleness is healthy not only for the children. Author Brian O’Connor wrote an article in the TIME magazine in the summer of 2018, reminding adults why doing nothing is one of the most important things they can do.

So far freestyling the summer vacation is working well for all of us. Our son is spending significantly more time in the kitchen, whipping up delicious avocado toasts and made-from-scratch pizzas when he is bored. He is playing way too much video games with his friends for sure, but he is also going for a run with our dog in the middle of the day, practicing his conversational Bengali with grandpa while gardening with him, or biking to the local library, picking up not only a new book, but also a cup of bubble tea on his way back.

Suddenly, not planning the summer feels like the smartest thing that we planned for our son this year.

Half-and-Half: Twenty three and me

I migrated to America twenty three years back in the summer of 1996. Notice that I chose the word ‘migrate’ rather that ‘immigrate’ or ‘emigrate.’ The dictionary definition of ‘immigrate’ is to come to a foreign country with the intention to permanently settle there. The dictionary definition of ‘emigrate’ is to leave one’s own country to permanently settle in another country. When I first came to America, I didn’t know whether or not I would settle in America. It was barely the act of physically bringing myself to another country with no clearly-formed intention of where to settle eventually for the long run. I came to pursue graduate studies in Electrical Engineering. My husband was already a graduate student at the University of Maryland, and I started graduate school there in Spring 1997. With both of us on temporary student visas, there was no certainty about whether we would go back to India after our studies were over, just like my parents did in the 1960s, or whether we would adopt America as our home.

I was twenty three years old when I first came to America. You do the math. As of now, I have spent exactly half of my life in America, and the other half in India. It feels strange to think that the year 2020 onwards I will have spent more time in America than I had spent in India from the time of my birth to the time of leaving India to come to America. Sure I visit India every year, sometimes more than once a year, but visiting is not the same as going back. After 2019, it will be mathematically incorrect to claim that I have spent ‘most of my life’ in India. That realization gave birth to this blog.

I had thought of capturing my thoughts via a blog post in August 2018, when our family completed ten years of “immigrating” to the silicon valley. I know technically ‘immigration’ requires moving to a whole new country rather than moving from one state to another state within the same country. But, to us, moving to California after spending twelve years in Maryland (greater Washington DC area, to be a little more geographically inclusive) was no less than a country-level immigration. Compared to the East coast, California felt like a different country altogether. The terrains are different. The vegetation is different. The sun scorches more. The sky dazzles bluer. The ocean is colder. And especially in the silicon valley, the techno-cultural vibes feel younger. Plus I swear in East coast I have never seen rainbows, sometime double rainbows, this frequently during my commute time! Coming to California gave me a sense of ‘homecoming’ that strangely I never fully experienced in the East coast. 

Somehow I never got to writing the ten-year California anniversary (“Caliversary”?) blog in 2018. But it appears that the connection between the prime number twenty three and me is a little more primal than my connection with the nice round number ten, because this time, I could not rest easy without penning down my thoughts about spending exactly half of my life in America. At this point of time, my existence is a perfect hybrid of twenty three hereditary chromosomes from India and twenty three influential chromosomes from America. There is little doubt that the rest of my professional life will be in California. But it will be interesting to see, when it comes to choosing a place to settle after retirement, who wins the ultimate battle between nature and nurture—my birth mother India, or my adoptive mother America.