Is my blog the only place where I can be, well, me?

Towards the end of the conversation that "Z" and "D" referred to as "office-hopping" to kill time, D crossed his fingers and jokingly hoped that I would blog about them.  You happy now, D? :)

By checking out my blog, these two, and a couple of other students I know of, get to know way more about me--there is more to me than the relatively straight-jacketed instructor that I am in the classroom.  I even use the dreaded curse word here, in contrast to the proper appearance I present while on the job.

As Shakespeare said, the world is certainly a stage and we are merely actors.  We play our roles as teachers, students, friends, spouses, children, mortal enemies, ... the list of characters we play seems to be limitless.  One day, we exit the stage.

I find that I am restrained at other places too, and not merely in the classroom.  When I go to India, for instance, I have to keep my criticisms of India under check, and not praise the US much either.  There, I am increasingly considered an American who has lost the rights to criticize India.

Once, when I shared with my father a column I had authored that was critical of India's policies, he politely remarked that I should not write such pieces because it would offend people in India.  "Is there anything in what I have written factually incorrect?" I asked him.  He agreed that I was correct, but that the criticisms would have been ok had I been only an Indian and not an American.

Ok, that was in the real world.  Would I have imagined that I would not jump at the chance of commenting on a juicy intellectual topic at a blog?  Never.  And that is exactly what I did.  I read the comments, and resisted every temptation to present my understanding and interpretation.

I suppose I could have joined in.  But, where exists the line dividing a blog-based conversation from a serious and heated discussion?  What if I came across as an argumentative jerk?  What if the intellectual arguments are viewed as personal attacks?  Especially when I don't know who the others are, and they don't know anything about me?  (Well, when they know me, people apparently want to make sure that I am not heard!)

So, I didn't.

We don't always reveal to the world what we think. As Holly Hunter's character noted in a movie (which one was that?) if everybody were frank all the time, there would never be any family reunion, ever!  

I played the character that I often do even here on campus: the mute!  I am getting to be so good at this that maybe I should take on Harpo as my middle name!

Will end this with the following photograph of India Gate in New Delhi.  Why?  I ain't gonna tell ya!

It was one of those smoggy Delhi days, and tourists were having a great time posing in front of this monument.  I wondered how many of them reflected on what the structure memorialized.  If they did, would have been reacting very differently?