The loneliness of a long distance migrant

by | Monday, March 17, 2008

“On bad days, I do feel lonely in a way that I can’t explain,” so says Dilip Ratha, a World Bank economist who studies the economics of migration. The article, a profile of Ratha’s life and work, is worth a read, but what really stood out for me was the above quote, capturing an emotion I have personally felt. This occasional yet powerful tug of one’s home country when living in a different land maybe the fate of all of us first generation migrants. It does not, by itself, devalue the choices (professional and personal), each of us has made, but such decisions are often made with the head. The heart sometimes tells a different story.

Note: The title of this post is a play on Alan Silitoe’s story, The Loneliness of a long distance runner.

Topics related to this post: India | Personal

A few randomly selected blog posts…

TPACK Newsletter #40, March 2019

TPACK Newsletter #40, March 2019

Here is the Special Spring 2019 Conference Issue of the TPACK Newsletter (#40, March 2019), as curated and shared by Judi Harris and her team. (Previous issues are archived here.) This special issue include all the TPACK-related papers/sessions that...

Triplet from China

The triplet ambigrams keep flying in. This new one came in an email from Chunlei Zhang, a faculty member at East China Normal University, having received his Ph.D. in Curriculum & Teaching from Beijing Normal University. He was inspired after reading my previous...

Best of SkyMall

I love browsing through the SkyMall catalog when I am flying. I never cease to be amazed by human ingenuity - the range of things we have built, irrespective of how useful (or useless they may be). Anyway, someone has now listed the 10 best (or worst, depending on...

Why math ed sucks (not just in India)

My friend Hartosh Bal (author of A Certain Ambiguity, a mathematical novel) has a piece in Caravan Magazine titled "Why Fields medalists are unlikely to emerge from the Indian educational system." He mentions the fact that of the three winners of the Field's medal...

Wine + GPT4 + Code Interpreter: WOW!!

Wine + GPT4 + Code Interpreter: WOW!!

OpenAI just released Code Interpreter. It allows you to execute Python code within a live working environment. One of the things that it allows us to do is take data files and conduct data analysis and create graphs and charts. Not knowing what that meant I decided to...

Glass half full?

Just discovered a great riddle/puzzle site: [wu:riddles]. As the site says: The riddles are organized by difficulty ... easy, medium, and hard. Then there is the microsoft section, consisting of weird, open-ended consulting-style questions. The cs and putnam sections...

It Takes Two: A scientific romp using AI

It Takes Two: A scientific romp using AI

Dark 'n' Light is an e-zine that "explores science, nature, social justice and culture, through the arts and humanities." It is a labor of love by a small, dedicated team led by Susan Matthews, former legal and policy wonk, turned editor and podcaster. I came to know...

TPACK Newsletter 8 (Feb 2011)

TPACK Newsletter, Issue #8: February 2011 Welcome to a new year and to the eighth edition of the TPACK Newsletter! Please forgive our long delay in getting this “mega-issue” to you. We’ll do a lot of “catching up” with what has been happening with TPACK worldwide in...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *