Its what he didnt say …

I have watched Barack President-Elect Obama’s speech several times now.  Overall, I thought the speech was good, and had the right tone for the moment.  But I really absolutely love the gospel style call-n-answer part of the speech.  For 5 minutes he details the amazing and historic events that Ann Nixon Cooper has witnessed in her life (a truely amazing history).  And it occurred to me this morning the one thing he never says: Ann Nixon Cooper saw an African-American elected to President.

I know many reports and campaign advisors have said it – Obama (and Mccain) wanted race to play a very little role in this campaign.  But it hits home when Obama talks about truely historic events in this woman’s amazing life - woman’s rights, civil rights, buses in Montegomory, man on the moon – and ends it by saying “she touch her hand to a screen”.

Watch it again, it is truely an amazing part of the whole speech.

Click Me [I still can not figure out how to embed hulu clips]

(i just listened to it again, and her life is incredible)

iphone + blog?

I just downloaded the iPhone wordpress app and I have mixed feelings about the idea of blogging from my phone. on the one hand it is great for me to know be able to start jotting down a post whenever I want – there have been countless times where I have composed a post in my head but lost it when I went to actually write it.

on the other hand, I really like the idea of having longer more substantive posts. not giving in to the Internet ADD syndrome. to that end I don’t feel like a cell phone is the best place to make blog posts from.

we will see how this app gets used but one thing is for sure – it is time to start blogging more.

a hop, skip and a dash …

… and i am back. 6 weeks gone, 6 weeks in the motherland, and it was great. i was suppose to blog while i was there, but as it goes, i didnt. so, how does it feel to be back? i dont know yet – it feels weird, not that relaxing feeling of coming home after being gone for a while, but rather an ambivilance to being back.

riding back from the airport (i am in philly), the immediate sense of being back hits you – from the more orderly traffic sense, the crisp winter air, the lack of congestion. there was something comforting about coming back to the east coast – i dearly miss the sense of east coast of winter, the bite of the cold, the clouds in the sky, so it was nice to walk out of the airport to that.

but what was i coming home from? home. india has always been a great time for me in the past, but this time around, i realized it is more then a trip, or a vacation. i experience india in ways that i hadnt before, going out to some bars, enjoying new years on a rooftop party, and most importantly working and having a routine. bangalore wasnt travelling or vacationing – it was living abroad. waking up, going to work, meeting friends, coming home, unwinding. before bangalore, i spent more time with family and learning about family history then i have in a long time. on this trip most, i realized that while every one of my cousins in india has all this right there, i dont. i dont have mama’s, and fai’s in the next town over, or kaka’s living a bus ride away. i took it all in this time around.

i had a moment in the paris airport, where i looked out the window, and thought god, i just want to be out there. i want to live somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere different. this trip made me realize that more then anything else.

now to figure out how and where.

a city divided

at this point, i have spent a fair amount of time visiting philadelphia. during this last trip there, it occurred to me that i would never want to live there. there are probably two reasons for this, first that philadelphia has a sort of faux diversity, and second that it is really the epitome of urban sprawl.

about the second point, when i visit i tend to stay in the rittenhouse area, near center city. that area is probably best described as very new york-esque, lots of shops, restaurants, and bars within walking distance. but i have also stayed with my friend about a 15 min highway ride (on the other side of the river) from rittenhouse which is still philly. to get around from neighborhood to neighborhood seems rather difficult on public transportation, so most people either need a car or a friend with one. i was shocked at one point when we went to a shopping mall area, and drove for 30 mins on the highway, only to still be in philadelphia. not my kind of city.

more important, while there minority populations in philly, there is a very stark and clear division between the minority and poor communities and the more affluent areas. sure it is like this in many if not most cities, but in philadelphia the difference between the quality of life for a black person and a white person is very clear. if you are in the rittenhouse area, it is almost always obvious who is shopping and who is serving, who is buying goods and who is selling goods. neighborhoods go from nice and clean to poor and dirty within a city block. in the end, there is poor integration between communities and truly very little actually diversity in the day to day. not a city for me.