Mr. Sarkar told the new arrivals that, having spent a year in Raleigh, he was seriously considering staying on for a doctorate at N.C. State. The decision was momentous. “If you go for a Ph.D.,” a former boss in India had told him, “you won’t come back.” In the winter, Mr. Sarkar told the group, he planned to fly back to India to make the decision with his family. The juniors nodded, agreeing with this approach.

Then Mr. Sarkar described to the juniors something that had mystified him: While working an on-campus job, he said, he met an American student who had started out studying engineering in college. After a while, she had switched to chemistry, and then, finally, to English. He had been dumbfounded. But Mr. Sarkar said he had begun to have a kind of respect for this American propensity for drastic self-reinvention. “You’re required to take strong decisions,” he observed.

I liked reading this piece in the Chronicle about desis arriving in America because it stirred something close to nostalgia. (Via Arts and Letters Daily.)

(P.S. I took the above picture in Bombay some weeks ago. I think it was the gin that made the camera tilt so absurdly upwards.)

first-days-in-the-U.S.