Return to the Big Apple.

I had the pleasure of visiting the USA after many years to attend the convocation ceremony of my daughter who was graduating from Brandeis, Boston. Alighting at JFK airport the T shirts proclaiming “I love NY” were missing, however the density of commercial language and digital signage, billboards advertising for computers, luxury goods and electronics were everywhere. Walking through the streets of New York I couldn’t help noticing the local inflections, that map the patois of a city that has appropriated the land from the native Red Indians and the languages and culture of it’s myriad emigrants as its own. The city appeared spiritually jaded and more decrepit than ever before – a spiritual and aesthetic vacuum hovering in the air. It's not depressive that a climate of uncertainty hangs over the country as proof that it is impossible to know definitively another and rational nets that try to capture the essence of a superpower. However it does not mean that the US has to undergo severe austerity programmes, to escape the black economic hole the policy makers have dug for themselves. Even now all the greatest technological breakthroughs are coming out of the US or Silicon Valley and that is a powerful indicator that ‘’yes we can’’ recover. Steve Jobs is in seventh heaven and even Adam would be tempted again to take bigger bite of the Apple stock – as it has become the ‘’apple” of everyone’s portfolio. I would like to endorse Paul Krugman when he said that the west should spend its way out of recession. If the sales of Bespoke jeans at $1200 or the hand painted Italian bikes at $ 20000 are any indication then the celebrations have begun in a muted fashion though the toast may be with Red Bull rather than Dom Perignon in keeping with the new found conceit of understatement. My daughters thought that it was like shopping in Paradise, but after 3 weeks I was bored and broke and this no country to be without the greenbacks. I wanted to go back to my own place which everyone says is unbearable and lousy but I am happy and appreciate its frugal warmth, where life is not so mechanical. In the aircraft dinner is served and later cabin lights dimmed, while we are suspended in a void above the trackless water of the Atlantic Ocean. Despite the lack of oxygen and serotonin, a strong urge for physical linkage to a fellow mammal arises! Finally we land in Bombay from the white noise of Paris – jet lag so heavy that our mortal souls are leagues behind us; being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down, from the vanished wake of the plane. Our souls left behind like lost / unaccompanied baggage -Vinay