Bittersweet Thanksgiving

by | Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The recent events in Mumbai have thrown a pall over the Thanksgiving break. That said, this is a moment to celebrate friends and family. Let us spare a moment for all the innocent victims and their friends and family.


Happy Thanksgiving!

This image, above, captures for me the spirit of Thanksgiving. What is funny is that I don’t look like these people. I had never tasted turkey before coming to the US. Thanksgiving at our house may or may not have a turkey – but it will surely have some spicy curries.

Even more complicated is the fact that, even in the US, this image could be regarded as being a myth – a feel-good vision of a past that may never really have existed. But as Picasso said, art is the lie that reveals the truth (or something to that effect, I am too lazy to google the actual quote). There is something in this painting, actually something in many of Normal Rockwell’s paintings, that touches me – deeply. I am not sure what it is – but I can’t deny its effect on me.

[See more of his art here]

Topics related to this post: Crime | India | Personal | Religion | Representation

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Sita sings the blues

I have been following Nina Paley's career for a while now. I first found out about her through the now defunct Desi website, badmash.com and have tracked her website off and on. Nina is an amazing animator and her best work is devoted to the Indian epic The Ramayana...

Educational Futures Thinking: New book chapter

Educational Futures Thinking: New book chapter

The philosopher George Santayana (1910) famously stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (p. 284). In other words, the “best” way to prepare for the future is to study the past and through that, identify patterns and trends, and then...

Systems level change in education

Systems level change in education

How do you design for change in complex systems—like education? Implementing large-scale changes within educational systems can be a challenging task. Doing so requires many actors, working at different organizational levels (and perhaps across organizations), to not...

AACTE Major Forum Presentation

I include below a copy of the AACTE Major Forum presentation (announcement here) that I made at New Orleans on Saturday, February 9. There were other things that I participated in (as listed here) and I will post about them later. Matt was supposed to do this talk (as...

Kuala Lumpur & Penang

I love Malaysia. I love its greenery, its up and down hilly landscape, the colors and designs of the houses, and yes the food. Malaysians are food crazy. There are food stalls everywhere and the range and variety of food available is just amazing. My first night here...

Mobile Technology in Teacher Education

I was recently invited to keynote The First International Conference on Mobile Technology in Teacher Education (MiTE 2015). The conference was organized by the School of Education, National University of Ireland, Galway. Kudos to the organizers (main point of contact...

SET conference: Mid-morning session

The next session State of ET in India Today and was led by fellow BITSian Manas Chakrabarti (now an independent consultant). He led an panel of teachers who have been using technology in their teaching. What was interesting was the manner in which corporate interests...

Technology Integration in Higher Education

Matt Koehler and I led a session on Technology Integration in Higher Education: Challenges & Opportunities for a day-long symposium titled: Colloquium on the Changing Professoriate. This is how our session was described in the program book/website: Technology has...

2 Comments

  1. Jamie

    I was thinking a lot over Thanksgiving as I watched the coverage in Mumbai on the reactions of the US. It was sad and my heart goes out to anyone who was impacted. We see what happens in our own borders, but don’t always see past the lines of the rest of the world…

    Reply

Submit a Comment

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