The Portals of Chandni Chowk

I call it the Law of Ganesha, whereby passing through any doorway requires something to be left behind and something new to be accepted. This is the human dilemma, and it is one that is not getting any easier as there are ever more of us in this world, all unsatisfied, desiring progress and development […]

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To find a needle in a HAYMARKET

Was it a Riot, a Massacre, an Affair, or a Tragedy? I questioned. Considering today is International Labor Day, I have an important reflection when on a Chicago scavenger hunt to find a statue.

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Chicago stories

How some things change and other things never change strikes me every time I return to the streets of my hometown.

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The Veda and Voltaire

Does everything really happen for the best? I snarl, as Voltaire most probably did, challenging Leibniz with comedy and wisdom amid a world of atrocities.

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No one in the world is illegal

The past can be truly seductive, despite all the evidence to the contrary and the fact that no one has ever returned from it. That is why I have always been suspicious of nostalgia: it always sprouts in the present, no matter when it was sown from the seeds of what people prefer to remember, and never from the dead seeds of what they prefer to forget.

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Book review: “The Maze” by Panos Karnezis

  More than its reviews, it was the novel’s setting just after the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) — in which a remaining and lost Greek regiment wandered the deserts of Anatolia to find the sea — that sparked my curiosity to read Panos Karnezis’s, The Maze. Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong and A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Story are […]

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Gentrification: problem or progress?

I suspect that whomever can answer that question of whether gentrification is progress or problem shall answer all questions, because it reverts to a much more profound human challenge.

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Looking through the Chagall Windows

Properly called the America Windows, they are what everyone in Chicago has called the Chagall Windows for as long as I can remember, and I was born some years before they were installed in the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977. A tribute to a city and a nation from the great Russian-French-Jewish artist and […]

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Book review: “Ema, the Captive” by César Aira

Argentina, 1800s. A nubile captive, together with her infant child, are government prisoners, taken on long caravan as part of the supplies needed at the military outpost of a sinister colonial world deprived of women. It is just the beginning of the adventurous captivity of Ema, a “white” woman of unknown origins who is bartered […]

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