startling banals

Doctor Zhivago
Makes me wonder if most great love stories are about loss, hardships, struggle that stretches a person to his/her limits. Out of Africa still remains my favourite in this genre. I like to see it over and over again for the great life of Karen played by Meryl Streep and also to satisfy my own childhood nostalgia of Kenya - a very beautiful country of wonderful people. All the things - the pears, bananas, huge spinaches, fragrant bee-attracting pineapples, the sand-lined undulating coastal roads, the red-volcanic-mud-lined roads near snow-covered Mt. Kenya, the jacket-crows, the tapioca "mogo" wafers with red chilli & lemon sold on Lighthouse road in Mombasa, the white beaches, the blue-green sea, the centipedes that had turned an abandoned cement quarry into a jungle, the rain, clouds, even the huge ghost-like baobab trees.. seemed to be flowing with life. Don't find anything comparable here in Boston, impossible to relate to the people, the place, the way of life or anything at all. Everything is dead, on steroids, identity-less, homogeneous, impersonal and sterilized. I never was so much compelled to ask myself desperately, "What do I want in life, Why am I alive?" - not even in my days in IITB when I wanted to quit "education" and start a school. But there are a few things I like - teaching undergrads, lectures of some really great professors, no more hostel mess food - we cook at home and the company of classmates from so many different countries. But I miss my hostel life, friends and home. Saw a movie yesterday - "Rang De Basanti" in a theatre packed with desis. I have developed an intense dislike for budding NRIs - seems that the worst sample pieces in India are annually packed off to the US. Maybe it is just the loneliness and the fact that I don't belong here. I belong to Powai, Thane, Bombay and some part of me still lives in Mombasa.