It’s a ritual in my family: every evening at 7pm, we sit down with milky cups of kappi and we watch NBC’s Nightly News. Now that I live 3,000 miles to the right, I’ll be honest, I’m somewhat lazy and so the Bru/Taster’s Choice usually stays in the kitchen cupboards, but thanks to the magic of DVR, I never miss Brian Williams’ slightly nasal take on the day. For that– and a hundred other things, right now– I am grateful.

I cried while watching that segment, on the news. I cried again when I tracked down the clip and embedded it. I was so overcome with the awareness of how different my life has been, as well as by how excited these children were, to take imaginary flights on an old, grounded plane. Remember that? When our lives were just as shaped by what we imagined as by what is? When there was hardly a difference?

I’ve never had the sort of glamorous (or arduous…take your pick) job which requires any sort of air travel so I still like airports and airplanes. I always have. When I was 3.5, and we first moved to the Bay from Southern California, I used to beg my Father to take me to SFO, so I could watch the planes take off. A year later, when I went to India for the second time, I was elated to be on the plane vs. in the car, watching them, from afar. The simple idea of being in the sky thrilled me; the fact that I was transported to another world, one which reduced my parents to crying children themselves, only reinforced my sense of wonder at what an airplane could do.

We all have our individual reminders of how everything is utterly different, post-9/11. Almost all of us are now kindly “invited” to be actors in security theater– but that’s not when I’m hit with the “it’ll never be the same”-realization. I don’t feel that prickly, undeniable sadness when I’m putting my shoes back on after going through security or when I’m forced to remain in my seat for the final 30 minutes before landing at DCA. I feel it when I see the cockpit doors. Continue reading →

[Apologies this was delayed. It took me a while before I was ready to put pen to metaphorical paper on this subject]

As an American without hyphen I was gratified to see a consensus emerge around Obama as the better candidate, with even one of McCain’s own advisors crossing lines, and for Obama to emerge victorious. Given the state of the economy, I was pleased to see the candidate preferred by 4 out of 5 economists get the most votes.

But as a hyphenated American, after a campaign where I was repeatedly told I wasn’t a real American, I was thrilled to have the candidate more like me win. That’s a poor reason to choose a candidate, I know, but yes, I’m very tickled to think about the fact that the President of the United States will be a son of an immigrant, a man with a funny name.

I don’t vote based on personal appearance, but sure, I noticed that he’s roughly my height, weight and skin color (I’m better looking, but I wont hold that against him) and closer to my generation than that of my parents.

I don’t vote based on biography, but I appreciated that his father came to the USA to study, he grew up in an extended family, he know what it’s like to stay in touch with those you love over a noisy long distance telephone call. I didn’t think it would be possible that the President of the United States might have grown up and been hassled for being an American Born Confused something:

Even those [Illinois state] senators who seemed like natural allies treated Obama with nothing but enmity…dismissed him as cocky, elitist and… “a white man in blackface.” … Most frequently, they ridiculed Obama for his complex ethnicity. You figure out if you’re white or black yet, Barack, or still searching?… [WaPo]

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One election day, when I was in elementary school, our teachers took us to the lobby to explain the voting process to us. We got to see the machine, which was an old fashioned machine with little levers for the candidates and a big red pull lever that opened and closed the curtain and committed your vote. One voter even offered to let us watch her vote, and our teacher sternly refused. “Voting is a private act, and these children should understand that!”

I was very jealous. At that time, nobody in our family could vote.

My parents still intended to move back to India and so they retained their Indian citizenship both out of patriotism and pragmatism, since they were considering buying a place before they actually resettled, and you could only own property then if you were a citizen. My sister and I, both born in the USA, were too young.

When I was around 11, my father became a citizen so that he could sponsor his parents to come and live with us. There was no fanfare about this, I don’t remember when he took the oath, the family didn’t go down and watch him. But voting, now that was special. I’m pretty sure I went down with him to the high school down the block, stood on line for an hour, and went into the voting booth with him. That first act of voting was wrapped up with family.

Then my grandfather became a citizen, so he could sponsor my aunt to come to America. I helped him study for the test, sitting with him on his bed and drilling the material as he apologized for the fact that he couldn’t learn it perfectly the first time. Grandpa had always had a mind like a steel trap and although we couldn’t have known it then, his struggles were actually the first symptoms of the Alzheimers that would become obvious in coming years.

I went into the polls with him, even though I was a teenager and already looked like I was in my 20s. When we got inside, Grandpa let me vote for him. I said, don’t you want to vote? He had such strong political opinions, I didn’t understand. He said, no, I trust you. I turned the knobs, asking him if he agreed, and then pulled the lever. This was the first vote I ever cast, at age 16. In retrospect, that vote was tinged with sadness.

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