Growing older

As I referenced in my last post, things are a little iffy right now with my grandmother's health. I arrived today in Bombay to see her, uncertain whether this is one of the last times I will get to see her ever again. She's still hospitalized, and for the first time in my life, I went to go see someone in the hospital. I've been hospitalized before, but I've never seen someone I care about looking frail and plugged into heart monitors and IV drips. I understand now why that experience is so frightening for so many people, especially for parents who have to see their babies/young children like that.

Phone calls in the night

As a kid growing up in America, my biggest fear was hearing the phone ring in the middle of the night. It seemed ominous, and the very idea brought with it a sense of foreboding. My grandparents, living thousands of miles away in India, were the cause of my concern - what if something happened to them? In all likelihood, it would result in a phone call in the middle of the night.

When tragedy strikes

For the second time during my year abroad in Taiwan, tragedy has struck painfully close to home.  I'm not talking about a death in the family (though that has happened too), I'm talking about the kind of tragedy that makes international headlines, that captures the front page of the New York Times, that sets Twitter abuzz with Tweets.  

First it was the Mumbai attacks.  Woken at three in the morning by a text message from my mother, I came out of my bedroom to the living room, turned on CNN, and watched for the next three hours as heart-breaking images of a city I loved go up in flames and turned into a war zone, and sobbed and shook as I learned that my uncle had been killed in the line of duty.  The agony was prolonged, of course, as each time over the next three days that I sat down in front of the television, the siege was still ongoing, it's final toll unknown, the gun battles still raging in the corridors of the majestic Taj hotel.   I felt broken and helpless watching this senseless violation of spaces I frequent whenever I visit, felt panicked at the thought of just how lucky fate can be sometimes, that people I loved were not in those places when they so easily could have been. 

The experience was a horrible one, and I had hoped that I would never have to go through something like that again.  Except on Thursday morning, I woke up and checked my email before leaving the house as I always do, only to find that a student at Wesleyan, my alma mater, had been murdered in cold blood in the middle of our campus bookstore.  Once again, the feelings of helplessness, fear, and that sick feeling in my stomach returned.  This was another place that I loved, another place so achingly familiar to me as I watched the news footage online that I knew all the surrounding buildings, streets, recognized the cherry trees in bloom, another place shattered by an act of senseless violence.  

The attack at Wesleyan sent shockwaves throughout the alumni community in this virtual age, with Facebook status updates, online away messages, Twitter and LiveJournal all affording a virtual venue to express our collective shock.   I can only imagine what the atmosphere on campus is like today, and it breaks my heart.  I did not know Johanna, but the horrific nature of her death and the sense of violation is enough to shake me to the core.  Reading that her killer, Stephen Morgan, had potentially planned a shooting spree on campus on a day where hundreds of students would have been easy targets sitting on Foss Hill during Spring Fling made chills run down my spine.   

Wesleyan will heal, just as Bombay has begun to heal, but the scars will likely remain, though perhaps Wesleyan will have an advantage.  College populations, unlike the landmarks and residents of a city, are a transient lot.  Their memory is short-term, limited to four-year stretches of time.  Those who are on campus right now will, undoubtedly, remember the events of Thursday for years to come.  Those who come after will not know, and so maybe healing is a possible goal, but for me, as an alum, the memory of a place I love and the knowledge that it was destroyed will never fade.  

Olympic fever?

It seems to me that unless your country is one that traditionally excels in the Olympics (China, the United States, Russia, etc), you stand little chance of accessing coverage of the Games.  If you are lucky to get coverage, if you live in Asia, chances are it's not going to be of the hot ticket events that everyone is dying to watch (like gymnastics), but is more likely to be something along the lines of badminton and table tennis, sports that are taken very seriously in this part of the world.  

I'm frustrated though, because you would think that in this age of internet, there would be myriad chances to watch the Games online.  Indeed, NBC has advertised thousands of hours of coverage online, so that viewers can pick and choose what events they want to watch. 

Only you have to be in the United States.  And you have to have a PC, or a MacBook.  

I know I'm not alone in being frustrated in the lack of access to events I really want to be watching, and it strikes me as downright bizarre that both Chinese television (CCTV) and sites like You Tube failed to anticipate the demand of those of us who want to watch and cannot.  Had You Tube signed some sort of deal (I've read reports that they did, but the lack of footage available on the site attests to a different reality), I bet they would have made a small fortune on the Games.  Or even NBC - if only they would realize that there are people OUTSIDE of the United States who would like access to online content - they too could have capitalized splendidly on their monopoly.  

But since this didn't happen, I'm stuck with Olympic fever and no cure, and no more enthusiasm.  For a world sporting event, I am truly and deeply disappointed.

UEFA 2008 Final

One step forward

The beautiful game