YEAR AT TAUGHT ME

ted a tumultuous year, learning unusual life lessons

- M. SRIRAM

In my chunky, colourful sneakers, seated in a cozy chair with my MacBook open, I felt on the frontlines of a battle.

When I told new acquaintances or sources that I'm doing my masters at Columbia, they would sometimes reply, “wow,” or “lucky you”. Now, people puffed their cheeks out. “Damn, how's that going in this environment?” “Are you okay?”

My father has a quaint habit of sending me pictures of newspaper articles, rather than web links, of articles he thinks I will find interesting, on WhatsApp. This could range from a scoop I published or missed, Virat Kohli’s retirement, or traffic jams in Mumbai. Increasingly he only sent articles about students being deported from the US and Indian students expressing their anxiety.

Both my parents and my paternal aunt, a career academic, had no compunctions in their advice for me: stay quiet, lay low, keep your thoughts to yourself. Either they didn’t recognize the irony in telling a journalist to suppress expression, or worse, and likely, they feared for my life and future, and their free speech values died at the altar of familial protection. While I fretted about my thesis, deadlines, graduation, I was struck by how my parents seemed to care only about my safety. They didn’t once enquire about my work.