Wonder or Wander

Written by Uday Prakash in Hindi / translated by Jason Grunebaum This book, with a cover image which reminds me of van Gogh, came to my hand after the bilingual reading presented by the author and the translator at the University of Chicago yesterday. The author defines this novel as a love story. He is quite modest. Rahul, in the middle of storms of corruptions and the casteism, falls in love with a girl with a golden yellow parasol and changes his major to Hindi literature to get closer to her. The moment when he feels the love so intensely is described like this: the golden yellow parasol turns into a butterfly and a butterfly sitting on the tip of the parasol the parasol itself. Then, 'now the butterfly, casting a spell over the whole world, had brought Rahul's sense of his own existence under its wing.'--How beautiful graphically! While reading this novel, my mind wandered around three countries: India, the U.S. and Korea. In the spell of globalization and the casteis...

For my dear friend , Last night I talked to a friend, who used to be a mother, a doctoral student, a part-time lecturer and a full-time employee all at the same time. Now she is only a mother of two daughters. She said, “For the last couple of years, I have lived quite different a life from the past. Too many things happened beyond my control. Now, even registering for a yoga class is too difficult for me. Nothing is easy.” Her second daughter, who just passed her second birthday, was seriously ill right after she was born. Her mother-in-law died suddenly. Her father has been ill for ten years and fell unconscious a couple of times in the past few months. She has been so busy caring others that until recently she couldn’t even think about how busy she was. Now looking at herself, she feels helpless. To everyone, there is a period of time with flood of misfortunes. It happened to me in the end of last year. I felt extremely vulnerable. Security was so alarming that even walking on the s...