Tuesday 13 April 2010

Dear Mr. Giridharadas

Dear Mr. Giridharadas: Please tell me how to pronounce your name so I can recommend you verbally to my friends and associates. (And since I'm an etymologist ignorant of Hindi, please tell me what it means, OP-ED-wallah!)

I look forward to your promised book, unless of course it's entitled "Awakening from the American Dream: The End of American Exceptionalism" which would mean you had beaten me to it! Googling doesn't reveal your birthdate and birthplace.

Not that it matters with the matter at hand, but on an around the whirl flight in 1988, I spent several interesting days in pre-Mumbai. I relished your Art Deco aquarium. And at my airport motel I watched a man teach his teen how to swim. He turned out to be the King of Bombay Soap Opera. He introduced me to some idiosyncratic local media types. I also had an enlightening pit stop at the Nehru Institute.

Alas, Air India's computer was down so I couldn't visit other Indian venues, like Mother Teresa's Calcutta and R.K.Narayan's hometown. (The Michigan State Press published him while I was there in the 1950's finishing my course work for a Ph.D. in Am Lit.) I flitted in and out of Delhi, New and other, on my way back to Philadelphia.

I live in Weimar, Germany now, studying the Bauhaus and other Teutonic aberrations.

Patrick D. Hazard, Seifengasse 10, Weimar 99423.

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