what does it mean for a person to choose a partner. to what degree does the person resign himself from the world in doing so. to what degree does the entire world blur before this chosen person. how mindless can the plunge into a relationship be such that the body loses control, loses its sense of orientation, loses its sense of being. such that there is no rising back again. such that there is no u-turn. the world has faded into semi-oblivion, and the person has surrendered to the pull (and hold) of a new magnetism, a new axis. is now a powerless atom in a magnetic field and has totally let go. and what if the partner still has control, still has a will, still has a mind, still has a world.

in yoga class yday the instructor asked us if we could lay on our backs and raise our legs up and then slowly rotate them to come above our head such that the feet touched the mat behind the head. and she said something very important. make sure you don't push yourself beyond where you can go. make sure you don't lose your sense of orientation, your sense of where and in what position you are with respect to the ground... its a deep thought. the fear of falling does not scare one as much as the panic of not knowing how one is oriented, how one is positioned. only when one knows that, can one soften the fall, or pick oneself up successfully after a fall. only when one knows that, does one have any control. without the knowledge of which way the certainty of earth lies, one is utterly lost. and that's why the panic. it gives one a stricken feeling of hopelessness, of extreme vulnerability, of being powerless.

yday for the first time i realized i could do it. that i could actually feel the ground beneath my feet, above my head. that so far i panicked only because my mind thought it was contrary to what it had always known - the head above the ground beneath my feet.

but its not always so simple to be conscious of one's orientation with respect to the force before which one is futile.

birds of a color...

the world is surprisingly clan-nish even today. its not only the bongs and the chinese who remain glued together no matter where in the world they are and no matter how hybrid a society they live in, its practically everybody.

am i the only who is annoyed by an attitude of - you and i are indians, so we should be familiar. even the random indian 'uncles' i bump into at airports, on campus (assuming they are profs), in conferences, etc. think i am obliged to converse with them because i share their home country. you can almost see a sense of adopted paternal/patriotic pride in their eyes and faces as i answer in reply to their inquisitiveness that i am a phd student....??!!!

and today even the hispanics! lord the save the mingling world where i thought the word 'foreign' was losing its meaning (copyright: United airlines). a room full of hispanic student-friends (colombian & mexican; at least they have a liberally large clan = all spanish speakers) proudly tell us how they are so different from the rest of 'us'. mind you, they didn't realize they were differentiating themselves from anyone. all they were trying to explain was that "throughout most hispanic states, people trust their friends (& strangers) more than their family (!!!), because one does not choose one's family but does so, one's friends". and one person goes "because we know that if we extend help to family (one finger), they will grab our entire arms. so hispanics don't stand by and for their families". another goes, "in fact, once hispanics move to the US, they cut off ties from those left behind so that they are not obliged to help them". clap, clap, clap. i'm so glad you guys all agree on that so proudly. while 'us'= (literally the non-friends in the audience) = the lone chinese, the lone brown south asian me, and the few americans, look around and scratch our brains to understand this...

so the hispanics are different from us. and they don't stick by their clans. and yet the room is full of hispanics because one of them has a dissertation defence on. they really do stick by their friends. or maybe they just stick by their own kind who have managed to migrate into this land of plenty. wow. i'm becoming racist, in that i do not like the races who do not not racially segregate.