Together again in .......

 I was 12 years old when I saw the Disney movie Anastasia on TV in India. The movie is a fictional-disney-fied account of Anastasia, the last Romanov princess and her "journey" from Russia to Paris. The fact that Rasputin is portrayed as an evil sorcerer & the Romanovs as beloved czars should provide sufficient insight into how close to history the movie actually is. 

Most people who have watched the movie would remember it as another Disney romance or heroine's journey at best. My pre-teenage mind, however attached itself to the arc of Anastasia and her grandmother. In the movie, Anastasia's grandmother(the dowager empress) gives Anastasia a music box with a promise of being "Together again in Paris". Somehow, this theme of being "Together again" at some location in the future just stuck with me..

Fast forward 15 years, my husband and I got engaged after being in a long distance relationship for more than 3 years. Given that my work was in Baltimore and he was going to B-school in Austin, we were readying ourselves for a long distance marriage, when I received a job offer from Dell, to work in Austin. I moved to Austin in December 2010 & we got married in February 2011. Given student VISA restrictions, Saurabh wasn't able to come to the US until July 2011, which meant I moved into our student housing apartment alone with my sparse furniture, waiting to start our lives together. On a particularly gloomy afternoon, likely in the throes of missing my new husband, my thoughts wandered back to Anastasia and her grandmother's promise of being together again in Paris. I grabbed a yellow post-it and wrote "Together again in Austin", drew 2 hearts next to the words and stuck it on the fridge. That Post-it stayed stuck to our refrigerator door for the next 14 years, the refrigerators changed as we changed houses 5 times, but the Post-it was a constant. During a particularly heated argument, in which I claimed that Saurabh's heart was "black", I drove home the point by coloring one of the hearts on the post-it black. Over the years, the Post-it got surrounded by magnets from our travels to all parts of the world as well as tiny hand-prints & art work from the kids' day cares and schools. My Post-it which started with a promise of Saurabh & I being together again, now included 2 kids and the lives we had built together.

Ever since, we made the decision to move to California and leave our home and friends in Austin behind, I have been thinking about my Post-it and its promise of being together in Austin. In 2010, Austin stood for a place for Saurabh & I to be together again, in 2013, when we bought our first home, it became the place where we first laid claim to a piece of land in America, when our kids were born, it became the city that welcomed their first steps and laughter, when we became US citizens in 2022, we went from being, Austinites & Texans to being Americans. As we leave this beautiful city in our rear view mirror, I take my Post-it and all it has meant to us, with me to California, praying that CA is as kind to us, that we are always together and are surrounded by all that means the most to us. Here's to being TOGETHER.....

Becoming us...

Saurabh & I became US citizens on September 9, 2022. Lot’s of people congratulated me & asked me how I felt about becoming an American. Their questions made me think about the entire journey that ended in us embracing a new nationality.

I moved to the US in July 2008 to get my MBA at UNC, Chapel Hill. At that time, I knew that I was borrowing upwards of $100K and hence knew that I would have to work in the US for a few years to pay off the student loans. Once the loan is repaid, I thought, I can come back to India with a US MBA and US work experience.

Come September 2008, the housing market crashed, and the US economy saw a recession that it had never seen before. Investment Banks rescinded offers, Consulting firms reduced hiring and corporate jobs disappeared. Foreign students(like myself) who would need VISA sponsorship were really caught in a fix since companies became even more reluctant to take a chance on sponsoring work VISAs.

For people like me who had come to B school with less than 3 years of experience and were looking to switch careers (Software engineer to Marketing/ Analytics in my case) it really spelled doom. I remember B school being a 2 year long job search. I must have written thousands of emails to alumni, made hundreds of calls and done at least 70 interviews before landing a full time job at a small company as a pricing analyst. While the job brought financial security and relief at not being evicted from the country for not having a job, the company had never sponsored an H1B visa before so I had to keep looking for jobs in case they changed their mind about filing one in April (annual H1B filing deadline). Thus began round 2 of continued outreach, emails and phone interviews, until an alum from Dell responded about an open position. This opportunity was extra special since Saurabh had just been accepted to UT, Austin for an MBA and if I was able to secure the job at Dell, we could finally be together after 3 years of being in a long distance relationship. I just had to get this job ( no pressure 😊).

As luck would have it, I did get the job at Dell and it was the start of our happily ever after. Dell filed for my Green card and we made our peace about being in an endless queue and were prepared for regular H1B renewals every 3 years, when things changed for us again. Dell went private in 2014 and Michael was expanding Dell’s product portfolio by buying many software companies. I was picked to lead business development for the EMEA Software business and was contemplating becoming an immigrant for the 2nd time in my life, since the role required relocating to London. For most people, interviewing and being offered an assignment abroad is an exciting thing but for most immigrants it opens a pandora’s box of uncertainties which makes taking such decisions even harder. I was wrought with worry- what would happen to our green card applications? Would we lose our place in the queue? Worse still, what if I took the role and then couldn’t find a way of relocating to the US? With no job, and no sponsorship I would have to return to India, while my husband & home were in Austin, Texas.

As I mentioned, I have been asked many times about the decision of becoming an American citizen… It really is not as much a decision as it is a natural progression from getting one’s Green Card. Some people choose to become American citizens, others continue with original citizenship + US Permanent residence. The choice(really need) of getting a Green Card is most certainly a deliberate & DIRE one largely for the reasons I listed above. Any sudden change in one’s employment status can lead to a COMPLETE upheaval of one’s life. Most folks want a Green card primarily for the peace of mind of not losing the world they have built in a foreign country. A Green card also opens a plethora of opportunities even with companies that don’t traditionally sponsor work VISAs such as start-ups. For me, it just meant securing the life we had so painstaking built, so far away from India.

Luckily, the assignment in London was a blessing in disguise since it allowed me to file my Green card in a faster “queue” and we got our Green cards in 9 months – while I was 4 months pregnant with Reeth. A few months later, when we received Reeth’s US passport in the mail, I signed it on her behalf as her parent and for the first time it dawned on me that a very precious part of me was already American. By the time, I repeated this same process for Aranya’s passport, 4 years later, 50% of our family held American citizenships and I knew we would be applying for US Naturalization once we were eligible in a few months.

On the day of our swearing in ceremony, we found envelopes with a message from President Biden. The message told us that we shared a trait with all immigrants who have come to the US before us and also with the countless others who will come after us – “Courage”. Courage to leave behind a life we know, courage to leave behind homes and loved ones….. As I sat in the court room waiting for the Judge to swear us in, I kept thinking about these words from President Biden and couldn’t help but think about our parents and the courage they have shown in having their children be so far away from them.

The other thing that I share with all other immigrants is this perpetual feeling of being divided between two worlds. For me, it is India & the US… it is between the land where I spent my past & the land where I will spend my future… the land of my parents & the land of my children.

Being a Hindu, I identify with the notion of “Janm Bhoomi” which is “your motherland – where you are born & raised” and “Karm Bhoomi” which is “the land of your deeds & actions”. While India is my motherland, the place filled with childhood memories, the place of carefree times spent with school friends & grandparents, the place where I was educated and trained to become the person I was meant to be, America is what shaped me into the person I am and truly allowed me to soar as a professional. The star spangled banner might not evoke the same emotion in my heart as Jana Gana Man does, but I wholeheartedly agree with USA being the land of the free & the home of the brave. I may not understand all American popular culture, but I understand her values of hard work, perseverance and equal opportunities for all. These are values I believe in with all my might and the very first values I intend to pass down to my kids – kids with Indian names & American accents ❤

Saying Goodbye....

My (maternal) grandmother passed away last year in April... I was the only one of her grandchildren who could not attend the funeral and I guess that's the reason I have been carrying this mild heaviness in my heart for the past 8 months .... maybe more so because I never got to say goodbye... until a few weeks back when I went back to India and actually saw her picture on the wall, with the sandalwood garland that 100% confirmed that she was no longer in this world and i'd finally have to say bye.

Losing a grandparent is like losing a part of your childhood and as I thought about all the happy memories I had as a kid with Maa (that's what we all called), I began to reminisce about the stories she'd tell me over and over again with the same level of enthusiasm as if telling them for the first time..

Given that the majority of the time I spent with her was during student days, Maa was always full of stories about studying, working hard and having ambitions...Maa was a good student and had lots stories about her school, classmates, exams and her own performance in them...She once told me a story about how she had an English exam and one of the questions was - "what does your father do?", a fairly simple and innocuous question that any of us would be able to answer easily, the only problem was that - Maa's father was a treasurer/ accountant and she did not know the English word for the same, she only knew that he was a Khazanchi, the Hindi/ Urdu word for it... Not knowing the right word, she did not answer the question at all... when she told her friends about it, they laughed at her and told her that she could have written any other profession that she knew the English word for, doctor/ engineer, teacher, anything.... but that was Maa for you in a nutshell, completely, utterly and totally incapable of lying. Much later in life, if she was ever asked to tell a white lie or answer a question with anything but the absolute truth she would be extremely uncomfortable with it and would need to actually rehearse scenarios with someone just so she'd be comfortable about the situation...

Maa was completely devoted to her loved ones. Her husband, kids, grandkids, siblings, in-laws were her whole world and she loved every moment of being Maa.... but every now and then she'd share with us grandkids, glimpses from her own childhood. She told me how a girl in her class had disappeared from school and eloped with a boy. The incident had created widespread scandal in the neighborhood and almost overnight most girls were pulled out of school for fear of something similar repeating itself. Not being allowed to study was one of the biggest regrets of Maa's life. Once when she was telling me this story again, I told her that given that she was married at 13 years of age and was the eldest daughter-in-law of a pretty conservative family, the chances of her having utilized her education toward a career were pretty slim to which she said words to me that I will never forget .."I know I would not be able to work, but atleast I would have become more knowledgeable, I miss not getting a chance to gain that knowledge". In a world full of people drifting through school, college even masters degrees just to land cushy jobs, all my Maa wanted was to study to increase her knowledge....

My grandparents, uncle, aunt and the family had to leave Kashmir (their hometown of several generations) suddenly in the early 90's because of the terrorism in the valley. They left with the clothes on their back and a few valuable possessions. The exodus meant leaving behind their newly constructed house in Srinagar to live in tiny rented apartments, in the unbearable Delhi heat. Despite being displaced from her homeland, Maa was always cheerful. If she missed her home and motherland she rarely showed it... but she would grieve for it in her own way... she would comment how the fruits & vegetables just did not taste the same... her Hindi (the prevalent language spoken in Delhi) was very rudimentary which led to some very hilarious jokes in our family.... but never was she bitter, cynical or acerbic. She realized that life had dealt them a very cruel hand but she was determined to never give up..

Most parents attempt to teach the right values to their kids through words, but Maa lived her values of loving everyone, being exceptionally kind, assuming the very best in people and never ever giving up... every single day. I don't ever remember her holding a grudge or using harsh words for anyone. Sarcasm just did not exist in her dictionary. She would routinely get into trouble for having very detailed chats with new neighbors or the fruit/vegetable vendor or even strangers, but I don't think Maa understood that someone could use details gained from her in a malicious way. She did not have a malicious bone in her body and just could not believe someone else could be manipulative. Despite not being allowed to study to much, she never gave up on learning new skills. She balanced her own checkbooks, went to the bank alone and knew the cell phone & landline numbers of all her family (kids, brother, sisters & in-laws by heart). If she was guilty of any vice, it was pride in being a good cook and everyone knew that:) She loved to cook, she'd spend hours and hours laboring in a hot kitchen in an even hotter Delhi summer cooking for her family and she lived for the words praising whatever she had prepared.

As my eyes well up when writing these words about Maa, I remember the sensation of her soft hands cupping my face and she using her thumbs to wipe my tears and telling me that crying would make my eyes bad, and I'd have to wear glasses if I continued to cry... Well...Maa, I wear glasses anyway and my heart will always cry a little when I think of you....

Khususiyatein - Peculiarities

Anyone who knows me, knows that a million thoughts run parallel in mind at any given point of time. Usually they are full of checklists and plans and new things I need to plan and worry about...Recently, in one of my thought sprees, a particular chain caught on more firmly than all my other fleeting concerns. Oddly enough this chain of thought started when I was cooking eggplant(= aubergine/ brinjal). My husband had once told me that my late father-in-law claimed that eggplant gave his cold/flu like symptoms and this would be a topic of regular back and forth between him and my mother-in-law.... The eggplant train then took me on a whirlwind journey of all the other small harmless anecdotes I had heard about him.....

I never had the good fortune of meeting my father-in-law. My husband & I met almost a year after his untimely demise. Apart from the 2 littlest grandchildren, I am the only one who has never met him, never had the opportunity to know him one on one, never seen him repair odd electronic items(which I am told he was very fond of doing), never seen him drink an actual cup of tea(which again I am told he loved to make, share and drink with others), never been dragged from an adjoining room to watch a NG episode about migratory birds(which I am told he did with his kids, even at exam time much to my MIL's chagrin)....

I am told by my sister-in-law that he would be the one to run after you with a glass of milk, forcing you to eat breakfast/ a meal irrespective of how much of a rush you were in. I am told by our neighbor's in Delhi about what a kind and gentle soul he was. My mother-in-law often tells me about his generosity, how he would go out of his way to help strangers. My husband tells me how it was imperative to his father that everyone who came to their house be treated with respect and courtesy, irrespective of who the person was and what he did......

Having said all of this, I would have known/guessed most of these things about him anyway and here is why..... All of the qualities I mentioned above are ones that live on through his wife and his children. I have often marveled at how my sister-in-law will stop and help people she meets on the road.  While my mother-in-law may complain about the smaller things, she definitely possesses a magnanimous heart for the bigger things in life and I know a lot of that must have rubbed off on her from my father-in-law. I can imagine him lost in his circuits and repairs, because I have seen my sister-in-law lost in her artwork for hours and hours at length. I know what people mean when they say he was good tempered and mild natured, I see it often in the calm and kindness my husband brings to the table, when I am on my usual rants. I see his kind and balanced thinking in the world views shared by all the siblings....

What I would never have known is the eggplant issue, the fact that he hated it if someone stole his slippers and did not return them to their proper place, the fact that he maniacally swept the bed prior to sleeping as he hated crumbs or any other minute particles on his bed, the fact that mosquitoes were a special nemesis and that he banned orange candy in the house as it had happened to become a choking hazard for one of the kids..... These are things I would never know, because these are peculiarities that surface with family, that come from seeing the person everyday in their truest , rawest form. These peculiarities don't make for impressive eulogies, but THEY are the ones that shape the person for someone who has never met them. These odd little nuggets help me know him as his kids and closest family did, these hidden treasures bring him a step closer from the very far place that he is at now.

I cannot even begin to imagine how hard it is to talk about a lost parent. I see it in the thin sheen in my dad's eyes when he talks of his father(someone I did know and loved dearly for 11 years of my life). I hear it in the longing in my mother's voice when she talks about her father (again, someone I had the good fortune of knowing and loving for 12 years of my life).. As I look forward to welcoming our baby into this world, I hope our family can help recreate my baby's grandfather for him/her...My own grandfather would often use the word "khususiyatein" to describe someone's peculiar and distinguishing/special behavior.

I hope we can all help my little one and the other grandkids know their grandfather through his khususiyatein.........

What it means to bear witness....

Today I visited Dachau in Munich. It is the site for one of the first concentration camps set up by the SS for the persecution and extermination of Jews and other undesirables/non-conformists (political rivals, communists, Gypsies, disabled and homosexuals). The Dachau site was used as a prototype to build the other 25 major camps in Europe and to train the early groups of SS men in the ways of inflicting torture and humiliation. My visit to Dachau has left me with more questions than answers about human beings, but first, I want to recount my experience visiting Dachau, so I can record this for the future and so I too can bear witness......

Let me start by saying that our tour guide was a highly spirited lady, let me call her M. M presented all the information with tremendous, yet controlled passion. It seems M got interested in understanding more about the holocaust at 15 years of age, because of the influence of her history teacher… Makes one really think about the quality of education we impart to our younger generations, for they will become tomorrow’s Ms or Gandhis or Malalas or MLK Jrs or they might become tomorrow’s Hitlers or Mussolinis or Gadaffis or George Zimmermans.

Coming back to Dachau, when you arrive in the town and as you drive into the memorial camp site, what strikes you are the apartment buildings close to the site. M told us that these buildings go way back and have stood witness to the horrors that ensued at Dachau. Moreover, it also meant that the people inhabiting those buildings and living in the town nearby KNEW what was happening at this camp and yet chose to say/do nothing. Several women from the town were involved with or married to the camp SS officers but they too were either oblivious of the happenings at the camp or wished to know nothing about it.

As you enter the camp site, you can see the remnants of what used to be the “welcome building” used for inducting new inmates. M proceeded to tell us of the cruel ways used by the SS men to further humiliate their new arrivals – one of which included having a metal pin poke through the bottom of the chair in which a new arrival would be sitting – to force him to get moving so the next arrival could take his place( and be inducted) hence saving the officer in charge the “labor” of saying “next”…..It makes you think of the level of de-humanizing that had to have taken place in the minds of these officers to treat another human being so vilely. Ironically, I only wish it had stopped at that….

As you go further, the gate of the camp greets you with the painful and cruel message: “Arbeit macht frei” – “Work makes you free”. I am sure anyone can guess what “freedom” that referred to. Next M took us to the museum which displays the few belongings that the inmates brought with them: Pictures of a loved one, a post card, a letter, official identification papers…Makes you think very bitterly about what must have been going through the person’s mind as he chose to put that in his pocket. Unfortunately you cannot help but think, what you’d take with you if something like this happened to you and here is the really sad part, there still are people in today’s world that are forced to make this cruel choice everyday….

Next we visited the sleeping barracks of the inmates. Small tiny military beds lined the rooms. It seems the inmates were given straw to use as a mattress to sleep on. Unfortunately, straw much like creativity, happiness and individuality (all three of which the SS stamped out under its jackboots) does not take too well to being constrained to a wooden frame. Punishments, beatings and even death could be the result of an apparently “unkempt bed”..In a place where humans were treated worse than animals, beaten on a whim, insulted and humiliated beyond compare, pictures of shining, polished floors, spotless soup cups and neatly tucked beds made me sick to the stomach.

Visiting the bathrooms brought a new horror. These bathrooms were the sights for the most brutal punishments that often involved hanging the inmates by hooks, causing wrists and/or shoulders to be dislocated, making the inmate unfit for labor and hence fit for the gas chambers, which again ironically were fitted with similar nozzles as the bathrooms.

As the tour finished, one thing became very clear in my mind….PEOPLE ARE THE SAME ALL OVER THE WORLD. No matter how enlightened we might be, how educated, how cultured and well-traveled, all of us are a little (or a lot) racist, bigoted, prejudiced and broken. 

Here are the two questions that have been haunting me since I left Dachau:

1.     How do normal people, people you’ve worked with, neighbors, customers and classmates suddenly become perpetrators of such heinous crimes? What light switch goes off that makes a person suddenly stop seeing another as a living, sentient human being? It has to be more than just” men following orders”… it has to be a much much higher level of mental and physical buy-in. M told me that several SS officers were questioned at the end of WWII, in an attempt to understand if they had psychopathic tendencies, resulting in such horrific behavior. It was found that 95% of them were perfectly normal people, loving husbands, dutiful sons, doting fathers (the son of an SS officer who had visited Dachau told M that his father was a “good, loving man”)…. These officers were just convinced that they were doing the right thing, they were sure that these inmates were lower life forms and they were happy to be doing what they were.

Slavery, persecution of African Americans, Apartheid in South Africa, Caste system in India, massacres of one African tribe by another…. Clearly we have learnt nothing and have hence been condemned to repeat history again and again and again.

2. If indeed: "The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing" then why did the “good” people not do anything? My hypothesis is that some of them were afraid of persecution themselves, but my gut says that most of them were happy about what was happening to their neighbors and colleagues and acquaintances. I am sure most of them had the others’ jobs/ shops/ businesses/ houses/ cars/ possessions already earmarked for themselves… Jealousy and coveting someone else’s things is a vile thing… it made spies out of comrades in the Soviet Union, it made life-long friends in Pakistan & India (during partition) covet the other’s house….it made informants out of neighbors in Kashmir, ensuring that the ones fleeing would be forced to abandon all belongings and leave barely with their lives….Unfortunately no world peace, food, water, electricity, houses, cars, riches for everyone will bring an end to such coveting….

Mankind will always find something new to covet, to kill over, to draw lines on a map over, to build a Dachau over…………..

Why I did not really like Haider....

Much has been said about Haider, Vishal Bhardawaj (VB)'s adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Let me start off by saying that as far as the story and it's adaptation is concerned it is a really good one. The acting is terrific, the choice of characters playing "the ghost of hamlet"and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ( the 2 Salmans), Gertrude and Claudius are all superlative. Moreover, VB has very cleverly woven in some key parts from the play into the movie, one of which is the song sung by the grave diggers.

Having said that, let me preface my next comments by adding the disclaimer that I am a Kashmiri Pandit. While this does not mean that I don't like any films based on the situation in Kashmir, I definitely did not like this one largely because of the one-sided portrayal of what happened in the 1990's in this film. Many of you will argue that portrayal of what happened in Kashmir was not the maker's intent, to which I will urge you to read my remarks below.

In my opinion, this movie should not have been made with Kashmir as the backdrop. Nothing in the story required a set up that Kashmir would uniquely provide, rather setting it in Kashmir took away from the movie's main theme - Hamlet. Hamlet was set in a time when Denmark and Norway were at war. Nearly all of Shakespeare's plays are set at a time when kings ruled and neighboring armies attacked - case in point Macbeth ( set by VB in Mumbai) and Othello ( set by VB in UP Badlands) as well as Hamlet. Why Hamlet was the only one chosen to be set on a stage where there is a current day war like situation does not make sense to me. Coming back to Haider, while India and Pakistan have been at war several times, none of those times were picked for making the movie. Instead, VB chose the time period post 1995 to make his film. Hamlet's father in the play is KILLED by his younger brother. While it is unclear for sometime as to who has killed the king ( even to young Hamlet himself- leading to his doubts and the re-enactment of the king's death to verify Claudius'guilt), the fact that he is dead is certain. Hence, why unnecessarily induce the story line of people disappearing in Kashmir and the existence of "half widows and orphans"in the film? Now again you might say that the maker of the film can take poetic liberties and if he wants to bring in the disappearance angle he is entitled to do so. This is where I begin to feel let down and hurt as a KP. Nothing is shown in the film prior to 1995, where nearly 200,000 Kashmiri Pandits were displaced from their homes and thousands more killed. The film shows  instances of real footage where Kashmiri Muslims are protesting on the roads and leading demonstrations against human rights violations but nothing is shown about the misery, fear and inhumanity suffered by the Kashmiri Pandits. Hardly any mention is made of the mass exodus which resulted in the early 90's. Why show the suffering of one community and not of the other? Again, I will be told that the movie is not to show what happened in Kashmir and again I will say there is no reason the maker should have picked Kashmir if he did not intend to do justice to the ENTIRE picture.

Second, I think the maker got a little unlucky with the release timing of the movie. The Army has just come through as heroes for the people of Kashmir in the recent floods. In my view, the Army just did its duty in Kashmir by rescuing citizens of India ( whether they feel like Indian citizens or not is a separate issue) and this same Army was doing its duty in 1995 as well when it was arresting, questioning, interrogating and possibly even torturing who they believed to be a threat to India. History is rife with instances of Army deployments and the ensuing human rights violations. It is the ugly and undesirable by product of maintaining peace through the use of such extreme measures.

I came out of the theater, feeling like I had watched a  great example of excellent film making with wonderful music, beautiful cinematography and craftily super imposed situations and characters but still something inside me felt hurt and unhappy, like I had been party to a badly explained he said she said fight. If anyone is still in the mood to see a movie based on what happened in Kashmir, I would suggest watching I am. One of the 4 movies is based on the friendship between Manisha Koirala ( a Kashmiri Muslim still living in Kashmir) and Juhi Chawla ( a KP, having migrated to Delhi). I liked it for its sensitive portrayal and thoughtful layering of relationships during a very dark time in Indian history. If you want to see Shakespeare's plays being adapted - watching Maqbool or Omkara or any of the Romeo- Juliet sob stories should do the trick... Haider unfortunately does not get my vote......

Nirbhaaiya.....

Nirbhaaiya,
So many times I have started to write this and so many times I have broken down... too angry, too upset, too distraught to be able to write. It has been nearly 9 months since that unfortunate day..9 months since you breathed your last...9 months since your beautiful, fruitful life and its numerous dreams were extinguished by 6 monsters..

The fast track verdict is supposed to come out today and suddenly I am scared of it...scared that you will be failed again...It has already failed you some.....The cruelest of your perpetrators will be free to live his lowly, miserable life in 3 years... while yours ended... That's the part I am still not able to get over... Don't get me wrong...I hate what happened to you... detest the fact that some people could not handle the thought of a smart, independent girl who was out to achieve her hopes and dreams....I abhor the jobless, delinquent people who thought it was their "duty" to "teach you a lesson" because they were too stupid and messed up to even walk straight...BUT... I wished you hadn't died... I wish you had lived to see your dreams to fruition... I wish you'd been able to finally get that dream job... I wish you'd been able to support your parents, make them proud and live a full, happy and accretive life...I wish time and again that you hadn't died...

I am not even sure what/how to feel about today... As panels and mobs demand reforms, education, awareness and death for those lowlifes...I don't know what to hope/wish for...For a long time I was so angry that I wanted them to die a miserable, horrible death.. a death in which they would suffer unspeakably and then I wanted them to be re-born and die yet another painful death and again and again.....and yet now..I am filled with a void...Even if the court decides to napalm the criminals, I am not sure I would find closure..and here is why.. Every time, I will hear of another person's achievements I will think of you... every time another Diana Nyad completes a 103 mile swim I will think of you... every time another Auto wallah's son/ daughter ranks #1 in the CA exams I will think of you....every time there is any achievement/ success/ felicitation of the human spirit, of another's hard work, of someone else's perseverance and courage I will think of you and your incomplete and unrequited dreams.... and I don't know how to get closure on that....