City of Angels

Well here I am ,at long last , in the Los Angeles, and I find that I have after all, very little to say. I can offer no startling insights on the land of the free. I can only say, that it may well take internity before I call this land, as beautiful as it is, home.

After the excitement of anticipation, after the sleepless nights, the hopes and the fears, living here is surprisingly mundane. There is every convenience, machines of all kinds, that are taken for granted here, that take the place of the maid servant back at home, and it is that humn touch that I miss.

In USA distance is of no great consequence, if you have a car(and the money) , anything can be got within the hour. America runs on ts cars and there is the rub, for the poor international student who drives on the wrong side of the road, to whom the system of roads and freeways is a maze, and the idea of waiting for a pedestin to cross the road is simply alien!

It has to be said that people here are courteous to the point of being painfully polite! Everyone is dreadfully helpful, and ironically compltely uninterested in another's business...Quite the opposite of India really. And yet I love the motherland for all her flaws, the surly auto-drivers, the rude conductors(I'l never complain about the pubilc transport in Madras again- at least in exists! ) - the heat, the dust- in this cold and spotlessly clean place(yes, California is cold! Any plce below 30C is cold for a Chennaiite)...And I am so terribly afraid that in time .I will become a person of no land...unable to return, wholly and without regrets to the land of my birth and unable to love the land I live in.

I am homesick right now, for friends and family and my dog. I'd give a great deal to have them scold me right now, or bug me or jump on me(whichever applies)But it is not always so. I can go for hours together without feeling the gnawing emptiness inside me, mostly when I am in Barnes and Noble the chain of bookstores)...that is very nearly Paradise on Earth!

Well, I am done unburdening myself. If it sounds depressing,don't let it worry you, its probably the jet lag speaking. An hour from now, only this printed proof will exist to show that I ever felt this way .