evil reporter chick

Kaka

2012-01-25T11:32:00.002-05:00

Kaka, standing on the balcony of the house
in New Alipur in the 1950s.

When I was a little girl, we lived in a house my grandfatherbuilt. It was common then for sons to remain in the house with their parentseven after they were married and had children. It was an extended family systemthat is dying out fast now in urban India.

I grew up rich with memories of relatives, close anddistant. I was privy to my father’s family history, told in most vivid detailby my uncle, Samir Kumar Basu. I always knew him as Kaka, the Bengali moniker for a father’s younger brother.

Kaka was only a year and half younger than Baba. The twowere extremely close growing up in Dhaka, Bangladesh, united perhaps in theireye problems that took root at a very early age. Both had macular degeneration.Both wore glasses so thick that I substituted them for magnifiers to look atflower parts for biology class.

Kaka lived on the third floor of my grandfather’s house inNew Alipur, then a fairly new development in Kolkata. He was a brilliant manand soon rose to the top of the companies where he worked. Eventually, hebecame director of Chloride India.

We ate breakfast together every morning. I sat with my roti,potatoes and cauliflower. He, with his half-boiled egg on a porcelain Englishstand and two pieces of white toast with butter.

Playing chess with my father in Florida, late 1970s

Afterwards, I climbed into the back of his Ambassador for alift to Gokhale Memorial, the school I attended in those days. On the way, we would talk about everything.It must have been irritating for him to have a five-year-old chatterbox gononstop before a hard days work was about to begin.

“Boddo kotha bolish,” he would say sometimes. You talk toomuch.

In the evenings, after homework, after an evening bath, Iwaited anxiously for my Baba and Kaka to return home. Both had a habit ofpacing from verandah to verandah. Kaka would whistle popular Rabindrasangeet. Itried to imitate him. How was he able to get tunes out with such precision?

We sat down to dinner together and Kaka always made sure togrill me on what I had learned that day. He’d quiz me with a geographyquestion. And when I wandered off point, he’d tell me I was talking too muchagain.

Kaka and me at a family wedding, 2009

In later years, Kaka moved out into a posh company flat. Iwanted to go spend days there not just because of the air-conditioning but tomonopolize Kaka’s time.

He never married or had children. Over the years, he grewaccustomed to life alone, though he was always generous to open up his home forothers. After my parents died in 2001, I often stayed in one of Kaka’s guestrooms.

Evening conversations were never dull with Kaka. We arguedsometimes but he always treated me with respect; asked me about things inAmerica that he did not know well. He was one of the few members of my familywho took a keen interest in my journalism. Even introduced me to his friends totalk about the Iraq war.

Kaka at Calcutta Club.

He especially liked to gab with his peers at Calcutta Club,a social club that was started in 1907 when Indians were not allowed into thewhites-only Bengal Club. Later in life, when Kaka became frail and his eyesfailed him completely, he held onto his trek to the club as salvation from loneliness.He left exactly at a certain time and was rarely late coming home. He nappedfor three hours, limited his cocktail hour before dinner and ate with extremediscipline. I admired that about him. How he kept to routine. How he neverindulged.

The last time I saw Kaka was in early December. I had stayedwith him for almost two weeks during a visit home. He liked to listen toBengali songs on my iPod. The noise-cancelling headphones, he said, made itfeel as though he were in a concert hall. He marveled at the technology thathis poor eyesight prevented him from enjoying.

Some nights, we watched Bengali soap operas on television.He listened intently to the dialog and when the screen was silent, I describedfor him what was unfolding. Ithought it was grossly unfair that a man who lived by himself should not havethe benefit of sight – without being able to read or enjoy television.

But Kaka never felt sorry for himself or allowed pity. Iwill always think of him as the most fiercely independent person in my family.

Several years ago, the night of my departure from Kolkata,Kaka sat me down at his dining table.

“Wait,” he said, shuffling off to his bedroom, counting hissteps as he always did and feeling his way to his closet.

He returned a few minutes later with an old jewelry box. Ithad once been a rich blue velvet. Now it was worn, the cardboard peekingthrough.

“Toke ar ki debo?” he said. What else can I give you?

I took that to mean that he thought I had all that I needed.True. Or that I wasn’t one for ornate ornaments that most Bengali women ogle.Also true.

He began telling me a tale of a trip he made to Hyderabad,years before my birth. The southern Indian city is famous for two things:Biryani, the Mughlai rice dish, and fresh water pearls, he said.

My cousin Sudip took all of us out to eat in 2005.
Kaka loved food and enjoyed it throughly.

“I bought this in Hyderabad. It’s not biryani,” he laughed.

A string of iridescent pearls glowed under the light of hischandelier.

“Kaka,” I said. “You don’t have to give me these.”

I wondered why he had bought them. Had they been meant for someone?Or had he just picked them up because it was the thing to do in Hyderabad?

“It’s a very small thing,” he said. “Wear them and think ofme.”

Last November, he’d called me in Atlanta to ask that I bringhim good Belgian chocolates. He loved the taste of cocoa on his tongue justbefore he went to sleep every night.

Kaka at a wedding in 2009.

My aunt, Pishi, told me that Monday night, Kaka had askedfor chocolate. She took that to mean that he was recovering from a recent boutof illness. But Wednesday, he was gone.

He died in his sleep, peacefully.

In 2010, when I visited Kaka, I had recorded some of ourconversations. Kaka loved to tell me stories about my father’s childhood. I hadplanned to finish those conversations. Ask him questions about a time with few records, save a few old black and white photographs. Kaka was awonderful storyteller and now an important part of my family’s oral history hasbeen silenced.

He was the eldest living of my father’s siblings. Manythought him as the family anchor. I simply thought of him as Kaka, the man whobecame my father after my own died, the man who stood by me always.

I will miss you terribly.

Kolkata Hipstamatic

2012-01-23T21:36:00.001-05:00

Life on the streets of Kolkata can be an assault to the senses for someone unaccustomed. For me, it's home. The vendors, the noise, the traffic, the smells, the sounds. Everything. I snapped photos with my iPhone when I was home in November and December. Of rickshaw wallahs, sweet shops, jewelry stalls, tea vendors and grand dame buildings about to fall flat on their faces. And so much more.

Archaic no more

2012-01-06T14:21:00.000-05:00

I wrote a story today about an important victory for rape victims.
Check it out on CNN.com
http://bit.ly/z4vI82

Cool hands

2011-12-26T20:07:00.002-05:00

Christmas is not a tradition I grew up with in India.

But who cannot love opening presents on a cold morning in front of a fire? Especially when the gifts include a pair of tomato red woolen gloves that come complete with special forefinger and thumb fabric that allows for -- what else -- easy maneuvering of the iPhone.

I don't have to take my gloves off to use my keyboard anymore. Joy!

Yes, my husband got me these gloves and yes, I love them.

Perhaps because I go to work in the darkness of the early morning -- at 6 a.m. to be precise -- and they come in most handy not just for checking email on my phone but also maneuvering the controls in my Mini.

Now I've got the whole world in my hands.

Last U.S. soldiers leave Iraq

2011-12-18T02:07:00.004-05:00

It was hard writing about the close of the Iraq war from so far away.

Deadly Iraq war ends with exit of last U.S. troops
http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/17/world/meast/iraq-troops-leave/index.html#cnn

Time for reflection

2011-12-15T13:37:00.001-05:00

I went with Georgia soldiers on a tour of the ruins at Ur, near Tallil Air Base in early 2006.

Spc. Jason Smith and me at Tallil.

The Iraq war isofficially ended Thursday for the United States.

Almost nine years after America“shocked and awed” Baghdad and young men andwomen from Maine to Hawaii began dying on foreign soil, the war isover.

CNN, like other news outlets, covered the last days for U.S. troops in Iraq. One of the stories aired wasfrom Camp Adder, otherwise known as Tallil AirBase, where I spent many weeks in 2005 and 2006.

Photos of Georgia's fallen at a memorial at Tallil.

It is deserted now. A ghost town. Sand bags returned to thedesert. Empty trailers. Abandoned medical equipment.

The last hot meal served there was on Thanksgiving Day. I rememberhow I hated walking down to the chow hall to eat. It was such a hike in windand chill. So long and lonely that I often skipped dinner. Ate Ramen noodles inmy trailer instead.

That trailer was home for me. I set it up the best I could,thankful to be out of a dusty tent, sleeping on a real mattress instead of anArmy cot. Thankful to be in a place that was relatively safe and free from therocket and mortar attacks I’d lived through on other bases.

The last laundry service at Tallil was last week. How many timesdid I turn in my olive green bag with my last name and last four of my social.Three days later, I’d get back my cargo pants and cotton shirts and if I waslucky, all my socks and underwear.

The PX is shuttered. The barber shop gone. Soon it will be hard to tell that the Americans were even here.

I was at Tallil with the Georgia Army National Guard’s 48^thBrigade. At that time, there were other U.S. units stationed there, as wellas the Brits and the Italians. Everyone wanted to go eat at the Italian dininghall. They served Chianti.

I took to this Iraqi girl at a health center near Nasiriyah. She
was one of many Iraqis I remembered as the U.S. war
formally came to an end Thursday.

Before the foreigners came, Saddam Hussein used Tallil for hiswarplanes. It was, unlike so many other U.S. camps that went up fromscratch, an established base with concrete buildings and paved roads.

Tallil, not far from Nasiriyah, was built in the shadows of the five-floorziggurat of Ur,the ancient Sumerian city that is also believed to be the birthplace ofAbraham.

The Mesopotamian wonder stood as reminder to the Americans of Iraq’sglorious past. It was so much more than the land of human misery they wereseeing.

I watched the understatedflag-casing ceremony Thursday that marked the end of the U.S. military mission in Iraq.

I helped write the CNN.com story and as I did, memories camerushing back. Of my first trip to Iraq under Saddam; of the sufferingI had seen over the years of American soldiers as well as the Iraqi people.

Those who spoke out about war’s end, including President Obama,said they hoped the sacrifices made in war would not be in vain – that

Iraq

would now be able to forge ahead.

What happens next remains a question mark but for me, today was aday of reflection. I clicked through 6,511 photographs in my Iraq album iniPhoto. I saw the faces of friends and enemies.

I saw joy and sorrow. Hope and despair. Highs and lows. And all thatcomes with war.

Read the CNN story here:

http://bit.ly/tonamr

Phoolpishi

2011-12-09T11:47:00.001-05:00

Phoolpishi and Pishemashai on their 50th anniversary.

I had just begin to cross the Atlantic yesterday when inCalifornia, my aunt lost her struggle with cancer.

I had hoped to return from India and be able to go visit her one more time. A deep sadness set in at the thought that I would never beable to see her again, hold her hand, share one last laugh.

She was my father’s youngest sister. My only other livingaunt, my Pishi in Kolkata, could barely stand to speak on the phone.

“Of us eight brothers and sisters,” she said in Bengali,“only four are still standing.”

A young Phoolpishi in Kolkata.

My eldest aunt died in the 1980s. Then, several yearslater, one of my father’s younger brothers died, quite suddenly. My fathersuffered from Alzeheimer’s for many years and was finally relieved of his agonyin 2001.

My aunt in California or Phoolpishi as I called her, wasdiagnosed with breast cancer a long time ago. She fought it and lived inremission for many years. She survived pneumonia in 2005, even after thedoctors warned my uncle and cousin Suman to prepare for the worst.

She was a fighter. Weak physically at times but steelyalways on the inside. So when we learned last July that her cancer had comeback, many of us believed she would get through this round, too.

But the prognosis was not good and somewhere deep inside,Phoolpishi knew her time on earth would end soon.

When I visited her in California, I sat on her bed forhours, talking about my childhood, our family and her only son, Suman. She showed me the jewelry she hadinherited from her mother and her mother-in-law. She gave me two of her ownsaris, a gold necklace and one made from magenta Czech crystals.

“You will wear them, won’t you?” she asked.

“Of course, Phoolpishi,” I replied, not realizing then justhow precious they would become.

Suman and his son, Saraf, were the light of my aunt’slife. Her eyes brightened when we spoke of them. She worried for them. Whowould care for them if she was sick?

When Phoolpishi visited Suman in Washington or New York,she often stocked his refrigerator with home-cooked Bengali meals. When Ivisited her in 2006, she made chicken curry, even though she disliked chickenand wouldn’t eat it even if you paid her.

She insisted on wheeling herself into the kitchen
to make payesh for me.

This last time, she insisted she make payesh for me. It’sa traditional dessert eaten on birthdays. My birthday was two weeks away stillbut Phoolpishi was adamant.

“I don’t know when I will be able to make you payeshagain,” she said.

She wheeled herself into the kitchen, and made the payeshwith vermicelli and a special molasses from Bengal. I ate three heaping bowlsbut she was disappointed.

“Bhalo hoyeni,” she said. It’s not good.

I hugged her and told her I couldn’t remember the lasttime anyone had made payesh for my birthday since my mother fell ill in 1982.

Phoolpishi holding me in
Kolkata, 1963

It was tough to leave California at the end of September.I knew then I would probably not see her well again. I knew I would probablylose another close connection to home; someone who strengthened my own roots;someone who had known me since I was born.

Now, on this bright winter day in Atlanta, I am sifting throughold-fashioned photo albums and remembering Phoolpishi.

With Saraf and Pishemashai in 2005.

How she easily dozed off in a car as soon as it startedmoving – a trait shared by my father. How she loved to play bridge, as did myfather. How she shared with him another passion – Bengali mishtis or sweets.When Phoolpishi visited us in the 1980s in Florida, she and my father spenthours in the kitchen making sandesh and bhapa dahi.

Before they bought their flat in Kolkata, Phoolpishi andmy uncle, Pishemashai, stayed with my parents. My father was especially fond ofhis little sister and Phoolpishi was devastated when my father died. He hadspent several months with them in Concord during his illness.

It’s often in death that we think about how loved ones influence our lives. We sit and wish we had done more with them;spent more time; made a greater effort.

I visited her in September in California.

I am feeling all those things today. She was the only oneof my father’s generation who was in the United States. And yet, I saw her morewhen we both visited India together.

My grieving today is tinged with regret. But I am thankful I was able to see herin September.

Before I left that Sunday morning for the BART station,she held my hand tight.

“I am very proud of you,” she told me.

And I, of you, Phoolpishi. Brave. Courageous. Generous. Kind.Inspiring.

You are free of your pain now. Free of the hard journey. Rest in peace.

A family photo taken in the early 1970s at my grandfather's house in Kolkata. Phoolpishi is on the right on the front row. I am sitting in the middle of the front row. Suman is to my right.

Flying away

2011-12-07T05:17:00.001-05:00

Fun in an English class with some of the 10th graders at Udaan.

In Hindi, udaan means flight. Like a bird flying off. Free to explore the world.

In my hometown of Kolkata, the Udaan Society is trying to help underpriveleged youth find that freedom through knowledge.

My childhood friend Vijay recently started a new weekend program at Udaan for students of all ages.

In a donated flat in Kolkata's Alipur neighborhood, boys and girls and young men and women who live lives under India's crushing poverty, find solace from the misery of their own homes within brightly lit rooms.

They are served lunch and encouraged to paint, dance, sing -- activities they might not otherwise engage in their gloomy homes. Many don't have both parents. Or their fathers are drug addicts. They come from uneducated families who are unable to teach them the importance of school.

The idea is to take them away from their environments to help provide a boost in their education. Teachers volunteer their time to help the students with math, English, business education.

With Saddam Hussein. I teased him about his name.

Vijay asked me to teach a few English classes there this time. Some were 5th and 6th graders. Others were high school students. All were eager to learn English, a vital language for good jobs in India.

I had found it extremely rewarding to teach last spring at the University of Georgia. Teaching at Udaan was something else.
I am posting a few photographs of some of the older students.

One told me he wanted to be an astronaut; another, an engineer.

The idea is to get the kids away from gloomy home environments.

I wish you well. And if any of you are reading this, remember always that you only get one chance in life to go to school in India. Please stick with it. So you, too, can take flight.

Fly away from that which you cannot control. Fly away from empty bellies and sickness. Fly way from the pain of poverty.

But most of all, never stop dreaming.

Perfect palindrome

2011-11-11T13:29:00.001-05:00

Happy 11/11/11.

It's a perfect palindrome day.

And also a day to honor all those who served in uniform.

Read my story about this special date on CNN: http://bit.ly/rCmcHj

Red Tide

2011-10-25T21:02:00.003-04:00

Dead redfish on Manasota Key

Growing up in the Cold War era, I associated Red Tide with communism.

Recently, I saw the results of another kind of Red Tide. This one caused by a population explosion of toxic plankton in the ocean usually from environmental factors like warm temperatures, calm seas and high nutrition content, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

During my last trip to Florida, Red Tide blooms were moving northward along the Gulf of Mexico, turning some beaches into morbid scenes.

The Gulf was like a bathtub at Manasota Key and I thought I could float on the aqua waters, wash away stress and bask under the sun's glow. Instead, the beach smelled foul, much worse than the outer alleys of a Kolkata fish market where the fish mongers throw out the guts and scales from cleaning their daily catch. The easterly breeze was strong enough to make me want to breathe solely through my mouth.

I could not tell what the problem was until I walked down to the beach and there, for as far as the eye could see, were dead fish. Redfish and Grunt mostly.

Red Tide killed fish in the Gulf of Mexico

Redfish are sizable and they looked grotesque with their stomachs split open and their eyes popping out after many days in the sun. A fisherman said he had been on the beach three days before, when the fish still looked red. But no more. They had turned a color of death. Some sort of creature had pecked through the vast assortment of food -- a veritable banquet for crabs, birds and others that crawl the sands. Whatever it was had picked through the eyes and left only the sockets behind.

The predators had left the day I was there. Maybe the fish was too spoiled even for vultures.

It was a grisly scene of death. And yet, I suppose, nature's way of keeping balance.

Four days later, back at CNN, I stared into my computer screen, sizing up the photographs of a dead Moammar Gadhafi, his body bruised, battered, bloodied and discolored. He lay on a mattress in a Misrata meat cooler for days, rotting slowly but surely.

I thought of the Redfish.

2011-10-23T17:33:00.003-04:00

I spoke with Evelyn Apoko Thursday afternoon. She was abducted by the ruthless Lord's Resistance Army in 2001. Her story made me cry. And marvel at human resilience.

My story was published Sunday on CNN.com
http://bit.ly/rh9UUV

A long, divisive war will soon be over

2011-10-21T21:59:00.001-04:00

Georgia soldiers patrolled western Baghdad in 2006

President Barack Obama made a stunning announcement Friday. The war in Iraq would be over in December when virtually all of the remaining 40,000 U.S. troops will pull out and come home
.
After nine long, divisive years, the Iraq war is finally coming to an end.

I am glad for all those troops who will come home before the holidays to hug their friends and loved ones.
I am concerned about the future security of Iraq -- many of my friends in Baghdad still live in fear.

And, I feel strange that the war will no longer be a headline. It has been so much a part of my life -- from my first trip in 2002 under the controlled environment of Saddam Hussein's information ministry to my last journey there with so-called surge units in 2008.

The night that the United States began "shock and awe," it was pouring in Atlanta. I rushed in the rain to the Woodruff Arts Center from the Atlanta Constitution newsroom to cover a ceremony honoring Jimmy Carter's Nobel Peace Prize.

I lived in this tent for almost four months at Camp Striker in 2005.

I remember sitting there, amid nobly dressed ladies and gentlemen beaming with pride, taking in the pomp and ceremony of the evening.

But my mind was elsewhere.

I thought of my friends Salar Jaff and Hala Araim. Were they alright? Had they fled Baghdad? How many people were cowering in fear that night? How many suffered?

It was only a month later when I arrived in Iraq that I found the answers to my questions.

Less than a week after the U.S. bombing started, the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade Combat Team from Fort Stewart was about 100 miles outside the Iraqi capital. They had raced through the harsh Iraqi desert and were eying Baghdad, once the crown jewel of the Middle East.

I met up with some of them in April. Little did they know then how things would transpire in Iraq. In the first weeks of American occupation, the soldiers traveled in soft-skinned Humvees without fear of being blown up.

I thought about the first days of euphoria after the fall of Saddam as I listened to Obama from the CNN newsroom today. In another country not far from Iraq, the same kind of jubilation was unfolding on the streets.

Will Libya succeed in enforcing security so it can get on with the task of building democracy? Or will it turn into terror as Iraq did?

No one can answer such questions with any certainty, of course. We will have to wait and see.

In the meantime, to all my Iraqi friends and the many soldiers and Marines I met over the course of nine years: I raise my glass to your courage.

I am born

2011-10-13T17:14:00.004-04:00

Toborrow from Charles Dickens:

WhetherI shall turn out to be the hero of my own life or whether that station will beheld by anyone else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning ofmy life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) onthe thirteenth day of October. It was remarked that soon after my motherbrought me home, a white owl appeared before her on the terrace, glistening inmoonlight.

It was Lakshmi Puja day, when Hindus worship the goddess ofprosperity, grace, and charm. Lakshmi has a white owl by her side and the birdhave come to be known as a sign of good luck.

Mymother was then convinced she had done the right thing.

By thatI mean that she had picked me up only days earlier at an orphanage in theManiktola neighborhood of Kolkata. I had been left there, on the doorstep,hours after my birth.

Manypeople I have known in the course of my life have asked me why my naturalparents abandoned me. I do not fully know the answer to that. If and when I do,perhaps I shall write more.

Butwhat I do know is how lucky I was to have been left at that particularorphanage, run by American missionary Helen Benedict.

Mymother had just met Benedict at a luncheon at the Indo-American Society, whereshe was hoping to improve her spoken English. She told me she was attending afashion show. I never quite figured out what a missionary was doing at afashion show, but I am glad that Benedict went that day.

Shehappened to be seated next to my mother, who lamented that she had not hadsuccess in having children. My parents had been married 10 years by then.

Benedictperked up.

A childwas left on her doorstep, she told my mother. Would she like to come and look?

Mymother went the next day with my grandmother. Many years later, I would see thegate through which she entered the day and meet the caretaker who greeted her.

I wasonly a few days old. Apparently, my mother agreed to take me home the momentshe saw me.

Benedictadvised her that she ought to first consult my father. Isuppose there was a chance that he might not have agreed -- as much chance asthere is of snow falling in Kolkata.

He hadalready picked out a name. Monimala. Garland of jewels.

Atseven days old, I was taken home. To an old house at 206 Barrackpur TrunkRoad on the campus of the Indian Statistical Institute. The banisters werewrought iron, the floors, marble. The courtyard was shaded by tall coconutpalms.

Mymother told me when I was much older that she had gone up the narrow stairs, upto the roof and seen the white owl. She felt unfiltered joy and relief, likemonsoons after a searing May.

Manypages of my life are yet to be written.

But thefirst chapter begins with my great fortune -- a child left at anorphanage who came into the home of a brilliant mathematician and his beautifulwife. That child might have grown up in slums, might not have been educated.Instead, she traveled the world and grew up to write about it.

I tellyou this story on my 49th birthday.

Manypeople still ask me about my natural mother and father. But I tell them I hadonly one set of parents. They are long gone now but they gave me a life forwhich I will be eternally grateful. Yes, I an adopted child. Their blood doesnot run through my veins.

But Ihave something much more potent -- their love.

A man of peace, but not the prize

2011-10-07T14:17:00.000-04:00

Three pioneering women -- Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen -- won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Friday.

The Nobel committee recognized them for their "non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."

It made me think, as I always do every October when this coveted prize is announced, about the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known to the world as the Mahatma, or great soul.

And that he was.

The driver of India's independence movement, Gandhi remains the world's strongest symbol of contemporary non-violent practices, his civil disobedience practices served as a model for the civil rights movement in America.

He was nominated for the peace prize in 1937, 1938. 1939, 1947 (the year India won freedom from Britain) and in 1948, just before he was assassinated. That year, the Nobel committee decided to make no award on the grounds that "there was no suitable living candidate.'

Something to think about.

Joy and Death

2011-09-21T23:18:00.002-04:00

Two stories I have covered in the past came to resolutiontoday. Both involved international campaigns that urged freedom for whatsupporters called unjust imprisonment.

One ended in decided joy; the other the opposite.

The first was the reunion on an Omani tarmac of two youngAmerican men held in Tehran’s Evil prison for more than two years. Iranianauthorities finally released Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer. They ran down thesteps of the jet that ferried them to freedom and into the arms of loved ones.

Go to CNN coverage

Among those anxiously waiting was Sarah Shourd, alsoarrested with Fattal and Bauer for crossing into Iranian territory when theywere hiking in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region. Shourd, released on bail a yearago, is engaged to be married to Bauer.

She had not been able to savor her own freedom fully untilthis day. I know that from what she said about her ordeal on CNN last year.

Much closer to home, another drama unfolded. Authorities inmy home state of Georgia put to death by lethal injection Troy Davis, who hadbeen on death row for two decades for murdering an off-duty police officer,Mark MacPhail, in Savannah.

I first began writing about about the Davis case when it came beforethe clemency board three years ago. I spent time with his sister MartinaCorreia, who has fought from the very beginning for her brother’s release.Davis and his family have always argued that he was innocent and set up by thepolice to take the fall for MacPhail’s killing.

Later, I reported a deeper story with my colleague SonjiJacobs about the murder. After reading hundreds of pages oftrial transcripts and police records, I did not know what to think except thatthere was enough doubt in the case that a man’s life ought naught to be takenwithout further exam.

Here is part of that story that appeared in the AtlantaJournal-Constitution in November, 2007:

The police had nothing.

No fingerprints, tire tracks or murder weapon.The bullets extracted from MacPhail and empty shell casings found on the ground--- all from a .38-caliber pistol --- provided the only physical evidence.

Soon, though, police would tie the shooting ofMichael Cooper at the pool party, where Davis and Collins had been earlier thatnight, to the killing of MacPhail. The weapon in both, they said, was a.38-caliber gun.

A cop was dead and "there was a lot ofpressure to get somebody, " recalls Louis Tyson, who was on the Savannahpolice force and knew the Davis family.

Detectives began to interview people in theBurger King drive-through lane, in the parking lot by the bus station, acrossOglethorpe Street at the Thunderbird Inn.

Their accounts of what happened varied. But onedetail was critical: Witnesses agreed that one of the men gathered around Youngwore a white shirt; the other, yellow. And it was the man in white, they said,who first struck Young with a handgun, then shot MacPhail.

At 7:55 p.m. that day, police got a break. Coles,accompanied by his lawyer, walked into the Criminal Investigation Bureau officein Savannah. Coles told police that he saw Davis with a .38-caliber gun at thepool hall and that he had used it to hit Young on the head.

Immediately, police focused their investigationon Davis. They added a color Polaroid of him to a photo lineup. In the next fewdays, they tracked down Davis' family and friends and searched the homes of hismother and sister.

News of the manhunt appeared on television and innewspaper articles. Davis' trial attorneys would describe it as the "mostintensive investigation probably done in the history of this county."

They would also argue that police had fallen forColes' statements "hook, line and sinker."

And another excerpt:

On Aug. 19, 1991, exactly two years afterMacPhail's murder in a downtown Burger King parking lot, Davis went on trial atthe Chatham County courthouse.

The prosecution put on the stand nine witnesseswhose testimony, they said, proved beyond a doubt that Davis was the killer.

Fairly consistently, witnesses said a man wearing a white T-shirtpistol-whipped a homeless man, Larry Young, and then shot MacPhail beforefleeing the scene.

Perhaps most damning was the testimony of Young'sgirlfriend, Harriet Murray. She said a man wearing a white T-shirt pointed hisgun at MacPhail and shot him before the police officer could pull his gun outof his holster. MacPhail was down on the ground when the man shot him two orthree more times, Murray testified.

She pointed in court to Davis, identifying him asthe person wearing the white shirt that night. "He had a little smile onhis face, a little smirky-like smile, " she said.

Dorothy Ferrell, who was across the street fromthe Burger King, identified Davis in court and said: "I'm real sure,positive sure, that that is him, and you know, it's not a mistakenidentity."

Antoine Williams, who had just arrived to workthe graveyard shift at the restaurant, also identified Davis as the shooter.Davis' neighbor Jeffrey Sapp testified that Davis confessed to the killing justhours after MacPhail died.

When Coles took the stand, he admitted arguingwith Young but said Davis hit the homeless man. He said he had already turnedaround to run from the parking lot when MacPhail was shot.

Questioned about why he sought out lawyer JohnCalhoun the day of the murder, Coles told the jury he had worked for Calhoun"off and on."

The attorney had accompanied Coles to the policestation, where he told officers that he saw Davis with a .38-caliber gun justbefore the murder.

"Why didn't you just go straight to thepolice?" asked defense attorney Robert Falligant.

"I don't know, " Coles said."That's what I chose to do."

What Coles had not told police was that he, too,owned a .38-caliber gun. He later would admit it and say he had stashed the gunin some bushes before going to the Burger King. Coles had been convicted of carryinga concealed weapon and could not legally carry a gun.

During the trial --- and since --- Davis' variousattorneys have repeatedly asked why Coles and another man at the scene, Daryl"D.D." Collins, weren't ever considered suspects by police. Why wasn'tColes' house searched after they learned he was carrying a gun that night ---the same type as the murder weapon.

Police never recovered a murder weapon --- orColes' gun or the one he said Davis owned.

An expert on ballistics, however,testified that shell casings found near MacPhail's body matched those found inthe subdivision where another man, Michael Cooper, had been shot earlier thatnight at a pool party. Davis was linked to both locations.

And later in the story:

Davis was convicted and sentenced to die. But ashe aged on Death Row, witnesses changed their stories:

Murray said in a statement signed in 2002 that itwas the man following Young who hit him and shot MacPhail.

Murray said: "The man following Larrystarted digging in his pants for a gun and slapped Larry in the side of theface with it . . . I saw the man who was arguing with Larry . . . and whoslapped Larry shoot the police officer." Coles had testified that he wasthe person following and arguing with Young.

In 2000, Ferrell signed an affidavit saying thatshe was on parole in 1989 and feared she would be locked up again if she didn'ttell police what they wanted to hear. "I don't know which of the guys didthe shooting because I didn't see that part, " she said in her statement.

In his affidavit, Williams said: "I wastotally unsure whether [Davis] was the person who shot the officer." AndSapp said: "I told them Troy confessed to me. None of it was true."

Three others --- Anthony Hargrove, Shirley Rileyand Darold Taylor --- stepped forward after the trial and said Coles confessedto killing MacPhail. Hargrove said Coles admitted letting a man named Troy takethe fall.

MacPhail’s family waited many years to see theman convicted of killing him brought to justice. They have lived with the agonyof a case that has been left hanging year after year, their loss relived everytime a legal proceeding brought Mark MacPhail’s name back into the headlines.

I cannot imagine that pain.

On the other hand, thousands of people worldwidehad doubts about Davis’ guilt. Did he pull the trigger on that hot Savannahnight? Or was it someone else? Perhaps we will never know the answer withabsolute certainty.

But we will never be able to bring Davis back tolife. He died from a lethal injection at 11:08 p.m. Wednesday.

Cancer

2011-09-16T21:45:00.000-04:00

My friend Anita died last night.

The news hit me today in the CNN newsroom like the blast of a bomb. I had fully intended to go visit her after my return to Atlanta this week. Now, I will never see her again.I will never hear her infectious laugh again. It made my husband Kevin's bursting laugh seem demure.

I probably never would have had the journalism career I have if it had not been for Anita. My resume landed on her desk somehow, and she wanted to hire me on the national copy desk. I will be forever grateful to her for having faith in me.

Anita fought cancer for many years. Thursday night, she lost the battle. She left behind a beautiful daughter, Kc, who will now have to navigate life without the nurturing of her mother.

Tomorrow, I journey to San Francisco, to be with another strong woman in my life -- my aunt, my father's little sister. I grew up calling her Phoolpishi, which means aunt of the flowers, her bloom faded with years of physical suffering.

Like with Anita, her cancer is back with a vengeance. Like Anita, she is strong. A fighter like I could never be.

She has endured and survived and is still with hope.I did not get a chance to see Anita again. Not on this earth anyway. But I will see my Phoolpishi tomorrow. And when I do, I will hear Anita's laugh surround me, fill me with warmth like an old English hearth on a bone-chilling day.

A future star

2011-08-12T08:47:00.006-04:00

This summer, another crop of interns spent time with us at CNN, working in various departments from the CNN Wire to Headline News. Chelsea Bailey was one of them.

Young, bright, smart, personable, curious. Chelsea has all the qualities to make a great journalist. Most of all, I appreciated her eagerness to learn and her verve for life.

She reported and wrote about all sorts of topics -- from a vial of killer Ted Bundy's blood helping to solve cold cases to Florida fishermen catching a massive shark. She helped me report one my stories about a group of devout Hindus suing a restaurant for having served them meat.

At other times, she was part of the wires team, updating daily stories or gnashing her head to come up with a new angle to the heat wave report.

Always, she approached her assignments with a big smile.

I taught a magazine writing class at UGA last semester and discovered the incredible rewards of working with young people who want to take up my profession, especially in a time when print journalism is undergoing a zillion changes. I miss teaching now. So when Chelsea and Molly Green showed up from the University of North Carolina this summer, I found an added dimension to my days at work, and relished it.

Working with Chelsea made me see journalism with fresh eyes. She helped energize me, inspired me to carry on.

Thanks for all your hard work, Chelsea. I will miss you. And I know you will shine.

Heading West: The Stage Stop

2011-06-26T19:21:00.008-04:00

On the last day of our vacation, we get back in the car -- after two days in Denver -- and head back west on a scenic drive towards Boulder. Back on winding roads with magnificent vistas.

We decide to pull off the highway in Rollinsville, hoping to grab a sandwich and something to drink. We are not sure about the tiny town at first. There's an antique shop and a place called the Stage Stop. "Serving hicks, hippies and bikers since 1868," says the sign atop the door. There are paintings on plywood on the walls and hardly anyone in the place.

We dare to go in to check out the lunch menu and are pleasantly surprised. Pulled pork and chicken salad sandwiches. Home made potato chips. Garden salads. We order and wonder about the place; ask the young waiter what it's all about. Soon enough the owner shows up.

His name is Patrick Schuchard and for years, he taught art at the University of Washington in St. Louis. When he'd had enough, he and his wife, Carol Crouppen Schuchard, moved out here -- this was where his father used to bring the family for vacations when he was growing up.

They live in a nearby town called Eldora but have a studio here. And the Stage Stop.

The building was originally the Toll Gate Barn for the Butterfield Stage Coach Company that ferried people across the continental divide through the Rollins Pass. Schuchard loved the civil war-era wooden building with its rough hewn post and beam timbers. He bought it, restored it and turned it into a cafe, bar and dance hall where artists like Judy Collins, Three Dog Night, Dave Matthews Band and others have graced the stage. This part of Colorado was hippie central once, Schuchard tells us.

Les the bartender stands before the old bar and tells us how the place was haunted. He has heard ghosts whispering.

Schuchard says two women once walked in and told him that many years ago their great uncle had hung himself in the basement of the building. Not a comforting feeling. But then again, the place was also a butcher shop in one of its many incarnations.

He shows us around the place, tells us of his dreams and ambitions for this unlikely establishment. He points to the oldest building in town, gives us history. Stephen Stills still has a house around here, Schuchard says.

He convinced a chef from a Boulder restaurant to come out here to cook. He wanted sophistication.

"We're not trying to o nostalgia here." he says. "I could have made it a very Western place. But I'm trying to make a peculiar brand of beauty."

We are fascinated with the art on the walls and inquire about Schuchard's work. Soon enough, we are inside the studio filled with his and his wife's art. All of it seems surreal in this town, tucked away in the Rocky Mountains. I am glad we stopped.

Heading West: Being and nothingness

2011-06-21T05:31:00.005-04:00

I have traveled to many lands but nowhere have I seen the landscape change as rapidly or as often as it did on our road trip through Wyoming.

I see the Tetons in the rear view now, white peaks contrasting against blue sky, as the highway winds downward into flatter lands formed of earth as red as Georgia clay. We drive into DuBois, a true cowboy town where the main road is dotted with a few eateries and shops and an old sign that says "Homestead." We poke our heads into an antique shop filled with old spurs, bits and colorized photographs. We eat burgers at the Cowboy Cafe. They are big enough to fill the belly of any hungry ranch hand.

We keep driving, not knowing where we will sleep tonight. Through the Wind River Reservation, past cows and even elk, and into Lander, where a mean wind whips through a main street that feels empty. This is an old mining town. It was the westward terminus of the "Cowboy Line" of the Chicago and North Western Railway. This is "where rails end and trails begin."

I close my eyes and try to imagine this place as it was a century ago.

There are plenty of dude ranches nearby. I am told that's a source for tourist dollars these days.

We keep driving. Into an abyss of nothingness. Nothing we can see but sagebrush and rolling hills in the distant. There are stretches of highway where we do not see any trailers, ranches, animals. No signs of life anywhere.

It's a strange feeling for me. I would not want to be alone here, I think.

It takes several hours to reach Rawlins. We think about staying there but keep moving. I can't stand the melancholy of a another town past its prime hanging heavy on every corner.

We turn right onto Highway 287, which will take us back into Colorado. It is evening when we reach Fort Collins. Downtown is bustling in this college town. People are spilling out of cafes and restaurants. I hear one man discussing Jean-Paul Sartre's brand of existentialism.

We had come from nothingness into being. Or was it the other way around?

2011-06-18T05:35:00.001-04:00

Heading West: Grand Tetons

2011-06-17T20:42:00.010-04:00

We drive out of Yellowstone through the south gate. For a few moments, the drive seems, well, boring compared to the visual feast that was before us all day long. But then, the highway bends and offers a glimpse of the peaks that form the Grand Tetons. Jagged mountains that rise a mile high from the ground, like gothic cathedrals reaching skyward.

We check into our cabin -- The Willow -- at Dornan's Spur Ranch in Moose, Wyoming. My colleague, John Branch at CNN's National Desk, recommended we stay there. He worked there once after he fell in love with the Tetons and could not bear to leave. The cabins are rustic but modern. And the best thing is the vast wine shop that rivals any in Atlanta.

Here's what Dornan's says about its wine:

"We know what you're thinking... how did a family of hardscrabble pioneer homesteaders end up operating one of the finest wine shops in the Rocky Mountains?

Like most things around here, the story starts with Granddad (JP Dornan), and his mother(Evelyn). While she was the "official" homesteader, she chose to spend much of her time in sunny California, leaving her son to "prove up" on the property. While traveling back and forth, JP befriended many of the wine families in California, who were then (1930s and 1940s) just getting their businesses started. Their families and our families have remained close over the decades, and enjoying fine wines has become a Dornan family tradition."

I am in heaven as I buy a bottle of Malbec, get comfortable in the restaurant and watch the sun set behind the Tetons.

The next morning, we begin the day early with a hike at Taggert Lake. Half the trail is still covered in snow. There are places where snow shoes might have been useful. We see a coyote but no bears.

We have lunch at the beautiful Jenny lake Lodge, where everything is just right. Even the butter is artfully carved in the form of a moose.

Jenny Lake is perhaps the most scenic place at the Tetons. Unlike the much smaller Taggert, Jenny is not frozen. The waters shimmer under the shadows of the towering peaks.

Another hike in the afternoon and then the drive back to the lodge. We decide to stop in and see the famed Jackson Hole ski village. On the way, we spot a moose off the highway, camouflaged perfectly in a boggy forested field.

For dinner we head into Jackson for an elegant meal at the Snake River Lodge. They have things like wild boar and elk medallions on the menu. Kevin orders the buffalo pot roast. I try a pork shank cooked in duck confit. How utterly decadent.

Our wiatress, Brandy Borts, says she came to Jackson 15 years ago and never left. My friend, John, will probably understand why, I think. I think it's beautiful here but I am too much a lover of urban jungles to make a go of it in Wyoming.

Brandy says she loves to ski, can't get enough of the landscape. So she works hard as a waitress so that she can stay.

Alas, we cannot stay. We have to make our way back to Denver soon.

Heading West: Yellowstone

2011-06-14T21:20:00.010-04:00

We drive into Yellowstone on winding roads between towering snow banks. The east entrance will close at 10 a.m., we are told, because of the risk of avalanches. I stare upward at the white slopes and wonder when they might come crashing down.

I grew up hearing about Yellowstone but somehow, I never made it out here. Then in 2009, I wrote a story for CNN about Audrey Peterman's crusade to get more minorities to visit America's national parks. I learned about people like Shelton Johnson, a park ranger at Yosemite, who tells his mostly white visitors the tale of the African-American cavalry regiment, known as the Buffalo Soldiers, who protected the land and toiled to build trails and roads.

Later, I was taken with Ken Burns' series on America's great parks. Nowhere in the world are places of such monumental beauty maintained and presented to the public as they are in this country.

I knew I had to begin my journey somewhere. I chose Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.

We are not disappointed.

At our first stop: a grizzly bear.

Then the smell of sulfur from the myriad bubbling pools of the acidic water that can scald you to death. here are more geothermal geysers in Yellowstone than anywhere else on Earth. Not sure how the buffaloes seem to roam so close. They leave plenty of evidence behind.

Old Faithful, was, well, faithful, spewing steamy water skyward shortly after its appointed time. It is not the largest of the geysers but it goes off regularly so tourists flock to the site.

The Grand Canyon at Yellowstone rivals its more famous sister in Arizona. The Yellowstone River crashes hundreds of feet downward in majestic falls and over the centuries has cut patterns and crevices into the rocks.

I marvel at the majesty of this place only to be told that the most breathtaking scenery still lies ahead.

Heading West: Winter in June and Buffalo Bill

2011-06-10T20:08:00.012-04:00

We leave Deirdre's house early in the morning. We have a long way to go.

We drive up Interstate 25, stop in Buffalo and then, Sheridan. It's Memorial Day and the town is shut down. Even the J.C. Penney is closed. There's a steady drizzle and I keep hoping that any moment, the sun will poke through the clouds. But not looking good today.

We think we might have lunch before the long drive ahead and step into the only place open: The Sheridan Palace Restaurant. A great big bear skin adorns the wall behind the cash register. The waitress is frantic. Why did they have to display the "Open" sign so prominently today. It' a holiday for God's sake. Who are all these people hungering for eggs, bacon or maybe a hamburger served with a mountain of fries?

It takes way too long to get our omelette. Then we begin the climb upward. We have to cross the Big Horn Mountains to reach Cody, home to the greatest museum in the West, save, perhaps, the Getty in Los Angeles. We drive higher and higher and then, the white stuff begins to fall and we are in the midst of a winter wonderland. Yes, winter, on the last day of May, when in Atlanta, my garden has already started to burn up without regular watering.

The white is majestic. I am not accustomed to such scenes. Kevin grew up in upstate New York. And even to him, the snow is amazing at this time of year. We step out of the car and marvel at the snow banks. They are almost as tall as me.

At Shell Falls, we walk down icy steps to gaze at a scene worthy of National Geographic. Torrents of water gushing down a snowy canyon. I kiss the cold stuff and we are on to Buffalo Bill.

At the museum, I marvel at how the pioneers lived. How there were colored folks here, besides the native Americans of course. I have to admit I did not know that much about the colorful life of William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody; that he received the Medal of Honor in 1872 for service as an Army scout. I gaze at a woolen suit worn by Annie Oakley, stitched finely enough to make the House of Chanel proud. There are rooms and rooms filled with native American pottery, bead work, baskets and blankets.

If you ever have a chance to visit this museum, do so. It's a treasure.

We head west to the Absaroka mountains, through the Shoshone National Park and arrive at our mountain cabin. We eat trout in a dining room warmed by a wood stove, in front of another bear skin on the wall. Tomorrow, we must get up early for Yellowstone.

Heading West: Deirdre and her cowboy

2011-06-08T19:50:00.012-04:00

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We meet Deirdre Stoelze Graves in Casper on a day when the clouds have given way to sun for a few moments and the wind is blowing like it always does in Wyoming. Deirdre came out here many years ago to get away from it all on the East coast. She got a job as a cop reporter for the Casper paper -- even gave us the crime tour of the city -- and ended up staying two decades.

Along the way she married a cowboy. I have only spoken to Dale twice -- on the phone, when I called Deirdre to talk Dart Society business. That's how I first met her, in 2008, when I won a Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma fellowship and spent a week in Chicago. I liked her instantly. She is such a free spirit. Crazy. Fun. Generous. Kind. And the heartbeat of the Dart Society.

Still, I am a bit unsure about staying with her. I have heard so much about her husband and the ranch but it all feels so alien to me, the city girl who revels in the bleakest urban jungle. Deirdre navigates us up Interstate 25 to Kaycee. A town had once thrived here but flooding destroyed much of it a few years back. Now, mostly, it is a collection of trailers and a few downtown buildings that survived, two bars and a general store that sells spaghetti for almost $3 a box.

From Kaycee, we drive anther 20 lonely miles inward. Rolling hills and fields of cattle and sheep give way to the sight of the Big Horn Mountains. This is Broke Back Mountain territory, where Jack Twist couldn't quit Ennis del Mar in, perhaps, an exaggerated story of love between ranch hands. It snowed in the morning, Dierdre tells me. The mountains are white. We drive further in, past red sandstone cliffs that remind me of Arizona, before we arrive at the doublewide trailer that Deirdre and Dale and their little boy Elliot call home. It's expensive to build a house out here, Dale says. It's much easier to plop down a trailer.

It has rained and snowed and is now raining again and the fields, normally dry at this time of year, are like vats of peanut butter mud. My boots sink in and my mind in taken back instantly to Iraq, where trekking through mud on U.S. military bases had become a daily thing.

We get inside Deirdre's cozy abode and fill our bellies with salami sandwiches and homemade pumpkin pie. It is so quiet here. No distractions, save nature's fury and the barking of Clyde, the family dog who is ordered to chase the neighbor's beef cows away from Deirdre and Dale's property. They'll eat every last blade of grass, Dale says.

Dale is tall, lanky. He's not wearing cowboy boots or a cowboy hat. He's gentle and tolerant of Deirdre's friends who have interrupted the solace of his Sunday. But he's unmistakably a cowboy. The sun has deepened the lines of his face. They run like the rivers that cut the canyons out here.

Dale drives us to one of those canyons. We stand on the very edge -- no tourist barriers here -- and I strain to see the water many feet below. Deirdre and Dale were married here, they tell me. Suddenly, heaven seems closer and it doesn't matter that the rain has started up again. I am well covered in Dale's oil skin ranch coat and Deirdre's cowboy boots.

I'd seen all this only in movies before.

Deirdre says she feels too isolated out here these days. She craves interaction with people who can relate to her. Most folks around here see her as a hippie chick, the only Obama supporter around for many miles. But Dale grew up here and besides a vacation to Italy, he's hardly left Wyoming. And never will. Ranching is in his blood. He wouldn't know how to make a living any other way.

My dear friend has to reconcile her love with her lifestyle. She talks about it as we cram into the back of Dale's pickup and slush back to the house. Inside, Elliot prances about the counters and furniture. If he could, he's climb the walls. He has Deirdre's energy.

She breaks out the white linens for dinner. We sip tempranillo and watch the sun go down. We watch The Red Wall, as the sandstone is known, glow in the light. And listen to the silence outside. It is a life I could not have imagined before.

Wild West: first stop

2011-06-07T21:57:00.020-04:00

From Denver airport, we drive to Steamboat Springs -- a place that is as pretty as its name sounds. The slopes are closed for the summer but plenty of people are still around. As is the snow atop the mountains. On this day, everyone is excited about the sun. It's the first day in a while that the wet stuff has stopped, the clouds have vanished. A magnificent statue of an elk graces a public park by the river.

At Chocolate Soup, Chelsea serves us a savory scone and strawberry rhubarb waffles. I can tell this vacation will be filled with many lazy afternoons and heaping plates of delicious food. Never tasted a waffle with rhubarb before. It made me think of the pies at Yoder's in Sarasota. Only better.

From the picturesque Colorado ski resort, we drive northeast, through more rugged country. Just before the Wyoming state line, we come across the Hoopla shop in Walden -- elevation, 8,100 feet. Amy Symonds grew up here. Her father was a caretaker of a flourspar mine. That's the stuff they make fluoride out of. And very pretty pendants.

Her store is in the middle of a broken town. Nothing but a saloon, a barber shop and a host of trailers here. The opposite of Steamboat, I think.

Tom Waits is on the CD player. Symonds is wearing a giant fur hat on her head and stands behind the counter to greet her customers, all two of us. She sells all sorts of pelts -- mink, ermin, skunk. She sells hat boxes, vintage hoop skirts and handbags, jewelry, furniture and a bunch of other assorted stuff. Her shop was featured in a western magazine. She's happy about that. She sells me an old silver ring with a heap of copper on it. Looks like someone forgot to mold it into a more shapely sight.

We meander down the road, catch sight of a moose. I'd never seen a real live one before. We stop at Woods Landing, more out of curiosity than thirst, and sit at the bar with a folks who watch Fox News and hate CNN. On weekends, the dance hall is filled here with wranglers, ranchers and pretty girls. Bartender Mary Albright serves me an ice-cold Corona and tells me to never mind all those anti-CNN sentiments. She watches Anderson Cooper every night, she says. Tapes it when she can't watch it live. She was born in Germany, grew up in Nebraska and worked at Home Depot in Denver before she came to Woods Landing four years ago. Now, she makes a mean vodka tonic and watches people twirl on the century-plus-old floor.

After a refreshing drink, we are off on a lonely highway, through Laramie, the town that became notorious for the torture and murder of Matt Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming. Must be tough to live in a town that's become synonymous with something that evil.

The drizzle gets heavier in Laramie. The skies are gray. It's the end of May but feels more like mid-winter in Atlanta. We hit the highway to Cheyenne, the state capital. My colleague Matt Smith lived here once and suggested we stay at the Plains Hotel, a no-frills lodging in a beautiful old building. Matt said we ought to eat at The Albany, and so we did. The place used to be brothel, named after the Union Pacific trains from Albany, New York. They carried troops going off to fight in World War II who had some fun on their stop in Cheyenne.

There was a lot of gambling and prostitution here until the interstates shut all that down, says owner Gus Kallas. I stare at a photograph on the wall of the Thomas Heaney saloon taken in 1888. I notice one of the workers behind the bar. He is a black man.

Get well, my friend

2011-05-10T21:57:00.009-04:00

Valerie Boyd is one of the strongest women I know. Fiercely independent, passionate in her defending her views. Certainly, an inspiration to me, ever since I met her years ago at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I admired her talent, her tremendous writing skills, her astuteness as an editor. I especially felt a bond with her at a time when there were not too many women of color working in mainstream newsrooms.

So when I went to teach my magazine writing class at UGA (a job for which Val recommended me) more than two weeks ago and found out she had been hospitalized with pneumonia, I grew worried. After I received a message from her partner, Veta, I understood how serious Valerie's situation was. She was in the intensive care unit, sedated, intubated, on a ventilator.

For days, the update on Val's status sounded like this: She is getting better but she is still on the ventilator.

I thought of my own mother, who had been on a ventilator for the last three weeks of her life. When she died, I saw her chest still heaving on that machine and for a moment, believed that the heart monitor was wrong. How could she be breathing still when the monitor indicated her heart had stopped? I learned later that she had been kept on the ventilator until her doctor could order it to be shut off. It was one of the most horrifying moments of my life and an image that stays with me always.

I imagined Valerie, at DeKalb Medical Center, gasping for air, on that ventilator.

It was unnatural. She was too young to die like this. She has so much more to give to the world.

The strong-willed woman that she is, Valerie fought pneumonia like a soldier in battle. She wasn't going to succumb to something that robbed her of her independence.

She was deemed well enough to breathe without the machine a few days ago and moved into a rehab part of the hospital Monday.

When I went to see her Tuesday evening, she told me she had thought much about death. It was not in the natural order of things for her elderly father to plan her funeral. It was she who should be doing that for him.

She told me of her dreams in her frail state. How she had seen my parents as children again; that they were with me once again on this earth. And of all children of color, who fight every day for survival.

Valerie's near-death experience has made her cherish more all of life's beautiful things -- the sunlight and the birds, a slice of fresh pineapple (yes, she was craving slushy fruit), walking her dog. How strange she had felt that someone had to help her to the commode or watch her take a bath for fear she would fall.

I suppose most everyone who skirts death has similar thoughts. But Valerie articulated them from her hospital bed with the clarity and haunting beauty of her language that is familiar to all who have read her work, especially her biography of literary giant Zora Neale Hurston. In the drabness of hospital hues and in a strained voice that sounded like a 90-year-old chain smoking man's (we joked), she talked of her verve for life.

Yesterday, it was Valerie who was wrapped in rainbows.

I left her room at dinner time, walked back through the halls of a chaotic hospital where suffering knows no end. And yet, a calm settled on me and once again, I knew I was better for having seen my friend. And thankful that there would be many more meetings to come.

Remembering Ma -- and a great poet

2011-05-08T21:20:00.007-04:00

I made it through Mother's Day. I thank birthday celebrations for Rabindranath Tagore for keeping the tears at bay. Well, most of the time, anyway.

My mother died 10 years ago. At her memorial service, we honored her with the work of Tagore, who had been such a big part of her life. He won the Nobel for literature in 1913, the first non-European to be bestowed that honor.

This is what the Nobel site says: The Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Tagore "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West".

His words were magical, especially when they were sung. My mother went to music school, studied Tagore, even made a record.

As long as I can remember, she sat on the floor with a harmonium or, when we were abroad, at a piano, belting out her songs. She taught me Rabindrasangeet (the songs of Tagore) from an early age. For that I am glad, though I was impatient then.

In 1982, my mother suffered a massive stroke that robbed her of her ability to sing. Still, she tried. She sat in her seat in our Kolkata flat with a cane by her side and a Geetobitan (a book of Tagore songs) on her lap. She even organized musical sessions at our house and invited singers to our house.

This week, India and Bangladesh are celebrating the 150th birthday of the great Bengali poet.

Ma, I miss you so much. Not even Tagore, I think, would have been able to capture in words my sadness on Mother's Day.

Tet Kale

2011-04-04T22:17:00.003-04:00

Michel Martelly, bad-boy musician, is Haiti's next president, according to preliminary results released Monday.

He called himself an outsider to Haiti's corrupt political machine and when I met him at his home in December (see photo), he told me about how he would do things differently than all his predecessors -- dictators and leftist priests alike. Sitting in the entertainment room of his Peguyville house, I thought: Wow. How can a musician lead Haiti out of all its woes? Earthquake, cholera, poverty, corruption, more poverty, more corruption.

But he laid out a plan that began like this: "Don't hand Haitians money. They don't know how to handle it. I am Haitian. o don't even hand me money. Just come and rebuild for us."

I thought him earnest.

Out on the streets of Port-au-Prince, they were chanting "Tet Kale!" It means bald head, as in Martelly's. We will see now if the people will still be calling his name as he takes charge in Haiti.

His win made me want to get on a plane back to Haiti. He told me, after all, that he would take me around Port-au-Prince himself, if he were elected. I might just have to hold him to that promise.

The grimmest of anniversaries

2011-03-24T05:25:00.007-04:00

Anniversary stories are common in journalism. A year ago in Haiti, an earthquake devastated the country...

Anniversaries a great peg to revisit stories.

Number 10 is a big one and I am sure journalists around the country are gearing up to tell all sorts of stories as we approach the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Hard to believe sometimes that it has been that long.

I have been thinking of my own 10th anniversaries this year -- of a massive earthquake struck I covered in western India when I suddenly found myself in the midst of intense human misery.

Today is the 10th anniversary of my father's death. Alzheimer's turned his brain to mush and rendered his body weak and feeble. In the end, he had massive bed sores eating away the outer layers of flesh.

I knew he was very ill and was rushing to get home to Kolkata. In Amsterdam, during a six-hour layover, I found out he had died.

I sat at an airport bar, drinking glasses of cabernet and wiping away unstoppable tears.

I tried to calm myself with the thought of my father's pain finally ending; that he had found relief.

I landed in Kolkata and tended right away to his cremation,

Today, I went to work with thoughts of my father's death. It was one anniversary that went without notice in the CNN newsroom.

War

2011-03-19T23:33:00.006-04:00

Today is the eight anniversary of the Iraq war.

That fact got lost in all the breaking news, most significantly, the U.S. use of force against Libya.

It reminded me of George W. Bush's intention to remove Saddam Hussein. The term "regime change" did not surface much but that's essentially what's going on in Libya, right? The United States would not be leading the charge against Moammar Qaddafi if he were a friendly fellow, even if he did fire on his own people.

Lost also in the news of the last week are the horrific events unfolding in Cote D'Ivoire, where a political crisis has spiraled downward rapidly into bloodshed. The United Nations has reported incidents of people burned alive. Others have had their throats slit. At least seven women were butchered earlier this month -- the video posted online showed one who had been decapitated by the power of a big gun.

Crimson rivers are flowing in West Africa -- and in the East. Sudan, Somalia. Yet we hear so little in the news.

I hope that Libya does not escalate or turn into protracted war in the same vein as Iraq or Afghanistan. And while that conflict is most urgent, I hope we will not turn away from human suffering in other parts of the world.

What's in a word?

2011-03-07T16:08:00.006-05:00

Journalists in newsrooms across the globe have been grappling with the language they use in telling the story of the Libyan uprising.

It's not Tunisia or Egypt. The unrest there has gone beyond demonstrations and anti-government protests. So what do we call Libyans who are opposing strongman Moammar Gadhafi. Last week, CNN began using the word rebels. So did other news outlets.

Does rebel have a negative connotation? I don't think so -- unless there is Confederate paraphernalia involved. But apparently many people, including those fighting on the streets of Libya, don't like the word. They didn't like that we called the opposition fighters rebels.

We also began using sentences that said Libya was inching towards civil war. When does a conflict become civil war?

This was the topic of NPR's "On the Media" segment Sunday. How do words change the way readers perceive the conflict there?

Here's how Merriam Webster's dictionary defines these terms:

Rebel: one who rebels or participates in a rebellion
Civil war: a war between opposing groups of citizens of the same country

Susan Chira, foreign editor of the New York Times, said the newspaper began using both terms when it became clear that there was a military conflict in Libya. But she said the paper, just like CNN, has refrained from saying it's an all-out civil war, though it very well could become one soon.

Yes, words can change everything.

NPR host Brooke Gladstone noted this:

"Several people have told me that the moment they hear the word 'rebel' they begin to disconnect. The effect is compounded when combined with the phrase 'civil war.' Whether or not people like us on the other side of the world choose to engage or even follow the story is a decision each of us makes every day. We think we make those choices consciously, weighing the expense and time and mental energy with what we stand to gain. But often we decide without deciding. What we choose can hinge on the unrecognized power of a single world."

There are other words, too, that we journalists use that can influence the opinions of our readers and audiences.

Take for instance, "regime."

Merriam-Webster defines it as a government in power. But we don't ever say the Obama regime, do we? We only use it for governments that are deemed less than worthy.

Or "revolution." Sudden, radical and complete change -- that's revolution. But is that what happened in Egypt? Or were we too hasty to label it so?

Sometimes terms become contagious, used repeatedly by news outlets without a thought as to whether it's the most appropriate. The fast-changing events in North Africa have made at least this journalist think hard about every word.

New hope for a son of Libya

2011-02-20T22:58:00.010-05:00

This is Bashir Al Megaryaf. He's holding a poster demanding the release of his father, imprisoned in a Libyan jail for two decades. Bashir was only 1 when his father was detained. He has not seen him since.

But he has new hope in his heart that the two may be together again as the Libyan uprising against strongman Moammar Gadhafi gathers steam.

Bashir was among a crowd of Libyans demonstrating in front of CNN Center in Atlanta on Saturday. I had just finished writing a main Libya story for CNN Wires and CNN.com; had watched gruesome videos and listened to the on-air descriptions by witnesses of Gadhafi's bloody crackdown that was unfolding in Libyan cities and towns.

Writing about the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East have been overwhelming -- they are such powerful stories of human perseverance and courage. I wished so many times that I might have an opportunity to cover the story from the ground.

Thus far, I have seen it only from the CNN newsroom.

So when I stepped out into the gloriously sunny and warm afternoon Saturday, accosted by thousands of people attending a hair show, a cheerleading convention and a circus, I felt compelled to walk over the waving Libyan flags and the voices that rang out the loudest on Marietta Street.

Meeting Bashir brought Libya home for me. I have been reading a new book of my father's writings and could not imagine a life without ever knowing him. Suddenly, the idea of freedom in Libya, a nation have never visited, became very personal to me.

I hope to write more about Bashir in the days ahead. Meanwhile, you can read about Libya and the rest of the region on CNN.com

Baba's legacy

2011-02-14T10:52:00.006-05:00

A new book of my father's writings was released last week. "The Selected Works of Debabrata Basu" was compiled by Anirban Dasgupta, one of my father's former Ph.D students who now teaches at Perdue University.

Dasgupta wrote in the introduction of the book that he took on this task with a great deal of apprehension. My father was the best teacher Dasgupta had ever had, he said. My father, he said, never used any notes or read anything out in class. He explained everything with effortlessness and clarity that Dasgupta said he never again experienced.

I know this to be true because I sat in on many of my father's classes. I was not learned enough to understand the complexities of what he was teaching but I could see how at ease he felt with his students and why, they, in turn, admired him so. I never had a knack for mathematics, as my brother did, but I always did well in algebra, geometry, arithmetic, trigonometry and calculus only because my father took the time to sit down with me and explain why things were the way they were.

"Never try to memorize formulas," he said. "They are a recipe for failure."

In the book, his former students said my father told them the same thing. I suppose that's why they all turned out to be successful.

My father was known as somewhat of a radical in the field of statistical theory.

In 1955, he published "The Basu Theorem," a fundamental tool for proving independence of statistics, said his colleague Malay Ghosh. It is often used in statistics as a tool to prove independence of two statistics, by first demonstrating one is complete sufficient and the other is ancillary.

"The theorem itself is beautiful because of its elegance and simplicity, and yet one must acknowledge its underlying depth, as it is built on several fundamental concepts of statistics, such as sufficiency, completeness and ancillarity."

Later in life, my father became a Bayesian. In other words, he believed it was necessary to incorporate prior knowledge, along with a given set of current observations, in order to make statistical inferences. "You cannot ignore history," he would say to me as I proofread his essays, trying desperately to understand the formulas that came interspersed in stories about circus elephants and Martians who landed on Earth.

If you roll the dice a thousand times and it comes up six, then on the next roll, the chance of again showing a six are higher than any other combination, even though pure statistics will tell you otherwise -- that your chances of getting a six are still one in six. There must be something going on to influence the roll.

I thought I would remember that the next time i hit Vegas, but I never really understood how my father was able to prove those theories mathematically.

As I skimmed the pages of the book posted on the publisher's website, I felt incredible pride to be my father's daughter (the first photo is of me with my father in 1969). I loved him deeply in life but I never took the opportunity to sit down and understand the world of numbers that engulfed my his head.

A decade has passed since my father died of Alzheimer's, a disease that robbed him of all things, the ability to use his brain. Towards the end of his life (second photo), my father could not talk, could not express himself. I realized that the end was near when I asked him: "Baba (the Bengali word for father), what is two plus two?" He stared vacantly ahead, right through me.

I left his room at our flat in Kolkata and closed myself in mine. It was where all my father's published works sat on a varnished bookshelf. He had led such an incredible life and I knew that day that I was about to lose him.

I thank Anirban Dasgupta for taking on this book on my father's work. You are living proof of my father's genius.

Is it a revolution?

2011-02-11T21:57:00.005-05:00

I have not posted anything in a while -- I've been drowning at work with the Egypt story.

But today, it happened. The unthinkable, really. I never thought that sheer people power would bring own Hosni Mubarak. But he was gone, as abruptly an surprisingly as he ascended to power after the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.

And now, the world waits and watches as Egypt moves on. After euphoria, after celebration, what will happen? Mubarak is gone but has there really been a regime change? Or will the military rule now with an equally iron hand?

It is too early, I think, to say that Egyptians succeeded in their revolution, which incidentally coincided with the 32nd anniversary of the fall of the shah of Iran. I can still remember the joy in the hearts of all of my Iranian friends and fellow students at Florida State University in 1979. They did not know then that their beloved homeland would soon become a repressive state, an Islamic republic.

So, I will keep writing the main Egypt story for CNN.com and hold my breath to see whether it turns out to be as momentous as everyone said it would be today.

Hannah

2011-01-19T20:32:00.005-05:00

On a dark and wintry night, the bar at Fornino looked inviting. Warm. Soft candles on the white marble counter.

We were going to have just one drink, to warm our souls and rest our feet before we headed back down 5th Avenue to visit some friends.

But somehow, one drink turned into many hours of good wine and conversation. Behind the bar was Hannah Norwick, young and eager in a No. 12 green and white Joe Namath jersey that was a Christmas present. Was she even born when Namath played for the Jets? Probably not. She was fresh out of Smith College. Interested in writing -- maybe even going to Columbia Journalism School.

Turns out Hannah was only 24 and excited about the life that lay before her. Tonight, that meant rooting for the home team in the AFC game, though everyone knew the Jets didn't have a chance. But Hannah never gave up, her verve for life matched by her enthusiasm this New York night. She even bought us doubters a round of wine and beer.

Sure enough, Hannah. I took the stunning Jets win to be a sign of all good things to come your way. I'll be thinking of you during the AFC championship game and wishing I were in Brooklyn.

'Misery adds to misery'

2011-01-09T12:15:00.004-05:00

A year ago, I wrote a blog that began like this: "My heart breaks."

I had just arrived in Haiti after the earthquake and the scale of suffering was shocking.

A year later, my heart is still breaking.

In Port-au-Prince, so many lives are unchanged. Survival was difficult in this nation before the quake. Now it is that much more so.

I met a man named Carlos Jean Charles, who spoke English well and took me around the tent city at Place Toussaint, across from the National Palace. He had a life once as a software engineer, as a husband, as a father. But after a year of homelessness and despair, the will to live was fading.

I wrote about him in an anniversary piece for CNN. Here is an excerpt:

Charles shakes his head, in disbelief that he lives in this reality.

Misery, he says, adds to misery. "It makes people fight," he says, showing a scar on his face. "Someone tried to kill me for my phone."

The government, he says, doesn't care about people like him. "I know Haitian politics. They like it when we are living like this."

More than a million Haitians displaced from their homes by the earthquake are still eking out lives in tent cities once thought to be strictly temporary.

Charles puts a few drops of chlorine bleach into the water supply at his shack. Now there is another worry: cholera.

He fears that the day when he can leave this place is still far in the future. He hopes that when it comes, he will be able to remember how to live like a human being.

Until then, he walks -- from Place Toussaint, uphill to distant neighborhoods like Petionville. He is a man without destination. He walks to forget.

You can read the full story and watch a video here:
http://bit.ly/eul8bX

Suchitra

2011-01-03T10:21:00.008-05:00

"If they answer not to your call, walk alone,
If they are afraid and cower mutely facing the wall, open your minds and speak out alone.
If they turn away, and desert you when crossing the wilderness,
trample the thorns under thy tread, and along the blood-lined track, travel alone.
If they do not hold up the light when the night is troubled with storm,
with the thunder flame of pain ignite thy own heart
and let it burn alone."

This is the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore that was set to music and became a favorite of Mahatma Gandhi's during the struggle for Indian independence. I heard the poetic words of courage first from my mother. She had a big booming voice and loved to sing this song. I also heard this sung by Suchitra Mitra, one of Bengal's most well-known Rabindrasangeet singers.

There was a time in the late 1970s and early 1980s when my uncle would organize musical sessions at his house. Mitra would come to lend her voice on sultry Saturday evenings.

She died of a heart attack at her Kolkata home on Monday. She was 86, born the same year as my father. My cousin informed me of her death. She knew how much Mitra's songs meant to me.

She took music lessons at Viswa Bharati University, where my mother had also gone to hone her skills. My mother filled our house with Mitra's voice.

She loaned her voice to yet another song that came to represent another struggle for independence: "Amar Sonar Bangla" (My Golden Bengal) played on every radio in Kolkata during the Bangladesh war. It later became the national anthem of independent Bangladesh.

I have a Suchitra Mitra CD playing now and think of my beloved Bengal mourning her death.

For all my Bengali friends, here is the news story in Anandabazar Patrika.
http://www.anandabazar.com/

Survival -- and love

2010-12-27T21:10:00.004-05:00

I first met Falone Maxi when she was lying on a mattress on the dirt. A sheet was her roof. But she liked it that way. Healing from her wounds suffered in Haiti's massive earthquake, Falone did not want to be within concrete walls. What if there was another "catastrophe?" she said to me.

She was only 23. Quiet. Shy. Yet I admired her strength, her courage to face recuperation in, of all places, Haiti, where her family has little and life offers her even less.

I kept in touch with her over the months, even took her back to stand in front of the rubble of her university. I did not know if I was doing the right thing. What if all her nightmares returned?

She longed to see Mica Joseph, the classmate she had been trapped with for six long days under the rubble. Falone told me she survived because of her faith in God. And because Mica has been there with her. On my last trip to Haiti, earlier this month, I took Falone to see Mica.

I don't cry often when I am on assignment, but when the two women, closer now than sisters, met, I found myself reaching for a tissue.

Read the story on CNN.com
http://bit.ly/e22flJ

A long and winding road

2010-12-13T20:32:00.003-05:00

It's not that far from Port-au-Prince to Ouanaminthe, a town that borders the Dominican Republic in northern Haiti. I'd say it was about 200 miles at most.

We ventured out Thursday morning after a day and half of intense post-election protests in Haiti, encouraged that the light rain would cast a calm. The main road outside our hotel was clear. The airport was open again. So was the market nearby.

We -- I am on a reporting trip with colleague Jim Spellman -- were on our way for a story for CNN.com.

We drove by the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, past the big island of La Gonave, and over the Artibonite River, now rampant with cholera. We made our way through Gonaive, a town hit hard by successive hurricanes a few years back and then on a bumpy, winding road through the mountains where sometimes our maximum speed was perhaps less than five miles an hour.

Haiti’s landscape is breathtaking. Mountains accost the sea. Banana trees grow alongside ferns, bougainvillea, oleander. But everywhere in this troubled land, beauty is marred by human misery.

High up on this road, we mingled with the clouds and tasted the dew on our tongues. We came across a small trading post, where oranges and papayas took on neon hues against the black mud and grime of the market.

A woman held up live chickens with one hand; another had partially skinned a freshly slaughtered goat strung up by its legs on a wooden post. Medieval was the word Jim used.

Onward through small towns where people eek out minimal existences. Through Plaisance. Limbe. And Cap Haitien, the nation’s second largest city. We passed the Hao Jin Great Motorcycle Company, the Ebenezer Depot, the Alexis Car Wash, Bar and Restaurant, the Flambeau Hotel and the Thanks God store.

Darkness fell. We had been travelling for more than seven hours. The road was pitch black. And still rife with potholes and tar that had peeled off who knows how long ago.

Then in Romeo, everything changed. Street lights shone brightly and the road turned smooth. I felt as though I had come off a dirt road onto I-75. Even the lanes were clearly demarcated and signs warned of upcoming speed bumps.

“That’s because we are near the border with the Dominical Republic,” said Yardley, the translator. Everyone laughed, but I could not come up with a better reason why things had suddenly changed for the better.

We were only a few miles away from the other nation that shares Hispaniola with Haiti. The two nations are night and day. And the DR, though very much a developing country, seems like paradise to most Haitians.

“It’s a different world there,” Yardley said.

Onto Ouanminthe, our final destination. We were tired. No, exhausted, from the car ride. But we all noticed how things quickly changed back to Haitian standards inside this small town, where cross-border trading is one of the biggest activities.

We checked into a gloomy hotel with no hot water nor much electricity but that charged us $120 a night. Its name was Ideal.

Protests in Haiti

2010-12-08T14:52:00.003-05:00

I have been covering the post-election fallout in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where people tell me they are fed up with a government that has failed to deliver.

This year alone, Haiti has endured a massive earthquake, a hurricane and a cholera outbreak. They say they can't take that their will not be respected now. They say the November 28 presidential election was rigged; that Jude Celestin, the government-backed candidate, did not win a place in the runoff.

Many favor Michel Martelly, a popular and flamboyant Kompa singer known by the monicker of "Tet Kale," which means bald head in Creole.

The city was tense Wednesday after many hours of protests. People set buildings and tires on fire. They used the concrete rubble from the earthquake to block the streets and torched Celestin's campaign headquarters.

Here are two pictures of me covering the story for CNN. You can read it on www.cnn.com

Elizabeth

2010-12-07T20:25:00.008-05:00

I was working at a table at the outdoor cafe at the Plaza Hotel in Port-au-Prince when the news hit my BlackBerry. "CNN confirms Elizabeth Edwards dies."

My heart sank the way it would at the news of the passing of a friend. Just the night before, I'd fallen asleep to images of Elizabeth -- Anderson Cooper was reporting that she was near death.

A burst of emotions overcame me because for all the stuff you hear about a politician's wife, all the drama she had been through in the last few years, I remembered a reporter covering her first presidential campaign who was taken with the down-to-earth nature of Mrs. Edwards.

On a frigid winter day, I was among the crowd at the Manchester Public Library at a Edwards campaign stop. John Edwards introduced his wife on stage. Elizabeth, standing just behind her husband in a black pantsuit, stepped forward on the stage and waved to an enthusiastic audience.

"That's his wife?" asked a woman in the crowd. "She looks so real." She was not the trophy wife everyone had expected of the candidate known for his good looks and charm.

"I was 25 years old when I first met John Edwards, " she said when he announced his candidacy a few months before. "He was earnest and energetic and unashamedly sweet. He was principled and wildly intelligent, and he was a tremendously warm person. Twenty-nine years later, John Edwards is exactly the same person. To my great chagrin, he also looks exactly the same."

But many of her supporters saw her as the smarter of the two. They viewed her as the backbone of the campaign.

"Sometimes I see him getting bombarded with information, so I will tell him to be himself and not to forget to smile," she told me in an interview I did for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I'll be the ballast for. . .the people whose job it is to download information to him."

She told me about the time she met John, how it was not love at first sight, how he eventually swept her off her feet. "He was nice enough," she said. "Pleasant. But it never occurred to me that he might be the person I would spend a quarter century-plus with."

But when he leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead to say goodbye, she was smitten.

It never occurred to us that he would have an affair, father a child with another woman while he was running for president in the next go around. Not after everything she had given on the campaign trail. She had even thought about how she would behave if she got into the White House.

"You get a megaphone as first lady, " she said. "You have to use it responsibly, but you also have an obligation to use it or the betterment of the country."

Elizabeth Edwards never got that chance. But I am thinking of her words now as I await results of the Haitian presidential election. And I'm glad I came home from the 2004 Democratic convention with a sign that simply said: Elizabeth.

Tourist

2010-11-22T22:23:00.000-05:00

Tourist, don’t take my picture
Don’t take my picture, tourist
I’m too ugly
Too dirty
Too skinny
Don’t take my picture, white man
Mr. Eastman won’t be happy
I’m too ugly
Your camera will break
I’m too dirty
Too black
Whites like you won’t be content
I’m too ugly
I’m gonna crack your Kodak
Don’t take my picture, tourist
Leave me be, white man
Don’t take a picture of my burro
My burro’s load’s too heavy
And he’s too small
And he has no food here
Don’t take a picture of my animal
Tourist, don’t take a picture of the house
My house is of straw
Don’t take a picture of my hut
My hut’s made of earth
The house already smashed up
Go shoot a picture of the Palace
Or the Bicentennial grounds
Don’t take a picture of my garden
I have no plow
No truck
No tractor
Don’t take a picture of my tree
Tourist, I’m barefoot
My clothes are torn as well
Poor people don’t look at whites
But look at my hair, tourist
Your Kodak’s not used to my color
Your barber’s not used to my hair
Tourist, don’t take my picture
You don’t understand my position
You don’t understand anything
About my business, tourist
“Gimme fie cents”
And then, be on your way, tourist.

By Félix Morisseau-Leroy

Now this

2010-11-04T21:37:00.004-04:00

Tomas is approaching.

The hurricane is predicted to hit Haiti by Friday. I called my friend Mariot in Port-au-Prince. "Are you OK? What about your family? Are you still living under a tent?"

"No," he said. They were living with his aunt in Delmas. He had resisted concrete walls until now. What were they to do?

"It's crazy," he said. "People have nowhere to go. There is cholera everywhere."

How do you survive a hurricane when all you have is plastic sheeting for a home?

My heart is breaking. Again. For Haiti.

Balaka

2010-10-27T14:25:00.013-04:00

It's done.

The flat in the building called Balaka (which means swan in Bengali) at 68 B Ballygunj Circular Road is no longer my home. After nine-and-a half years of caring for it from across the globe, I completed the final act of an arduous sales process in Kolkata.

I've posted a photo taken out front this week. With me are Kalu and Bimal, two men who have done menial jobs at the building for most of the years my parents lived there.

In that flat, simple and not so large by American standards, I laughed, loved and lost. It was home for so many years.

It was there that my mother regained her verve for life after a massive stroke nearly took her life in 1982. She gained freedom in her small way, learning to wheel herself around the rooms and hallways with ease, poking her head into the kitchen and instructing the housekeeper how to make perfect Bengali fish curry.

Some evenings, she arranged for musicians to come to the flat. We'd sit on rugs on the floor and sing the songs of Tagore. My mother's voice was gone when she was left half paralyzed, but she belted it out anyway. I sometimes caught her eyes watering. She lamented little after the stroke but I knew she yearned to play again the harmonium and sing the songs she loved most.

In the morning, after she had her third round of Darjeeling tea, she picked up the phone and called our relatives and friends to learn news of their lives. My mother was the glue that held our family together. When she died, I stopped knowing details about my aunts and uncles, cousins and friends.

It was there in that flat that my father sat at the dining room table for hours pruning his bansai plants. He filled the verandahs with greenery. The dahlias bloomed with fierce, spreading hues of reds, pinks and oranges across the view.

Or he sat with his magnifying glass struggling to read newspapers when the macular degeneration in his eyes began to blur his world. He often worked out his mathematical and statistical theories in his head, his hands moving in the air as though there was a chalkboard before him. He had made a name for himself in probability theory. Later in life, when Alzheimer's began winning the battle, my father could not add two plus two.

Everything changed today when I signed over the final documents to the man who purchased our flat earlier this year. I waited in the West Bengal registration office for a long time, sandwiched between a zillion people in a British-era building now filled with cobwebs and dust.

My friend Vijay (on the right in the registration office photo) made it all happen for us. Without him, my brother and I might have still be mired in West Bengal bureaucracy. I really don't know how to ever thank him.

But for a moment, after I signed the final document, I felt as though I had wronged my parents somehow. As though I had given away the place where they had found solace. I asked the new owner if I could take the brass nameplate on the door that carried my father's name. (photo)

Then I descended down the long British Raj era staircase, its terrazo warped by footsteps from many decades. I turned back only once. And left with my memories, brilliant like diamonds.

Coming home

2010-10-24T21:27:00.006-04:00

The taxi refused to take the Eastern Bypass -- too dangerous in the wee hours of the morning before the sun comes up and lights up the despair of Kolkata. Instead, we took the old route from the airport in the northeastern part of the city to the south.

I had not taken these old roads in a while. But as a little girl, when life was harder, but oh, so much simpler, we traveled to the airport this way and stood on the "viewing deck" to see planes take off and land. It was a rarity then. Flying seemed so exotic, so other-worldly. Now, all I do is complain about sitting in cramped seats as we pass over oceans and continents.

At 3 in the morning, the city is finally quiet.

The thousands and thousands of street stalls and stores (like the ones in this photo of a shopping area near my house) are shuttered. Those who can afford it are sleeping soundly in the comfort of air-conditioning. Most are under whirring ceiling fans that bandy the humidity about -- or nothing at all.

The heat has fallen after months of the monsoon, but after the glorious autumn weather in Atlanta, I feel hot. Restless.

I had not expected to pass by the flat my parents called home for so many years. I have returned to Kolkata this time to finalize its sale.I thought I would not have to see it until later.

But instead, we pass by the front gate, the taxi driver unknowing of the burst of emotions within me. I try hard to hold back the tears. I feel them welling. I don't know whether to look or not. But I cannot control my glance.

I peer at the gate through which the taxi might have driven had Ma and Baba still been here. Ma always stayed up for me, no matter how late. I'd walk in through the front door and see her in her wheelchair, her eyes heavy with sleep would light up instantly at the sight of her only daughter.

She'd have tea ready for me. Maybe a snack. My bed would be made up with fresh sheets, a clean towel hanging in the bathroom.

There is no one waiting for me now.

The taxi driver carries me away from that moment of intimate familiarity to another place. A friend's flat, perfectly comfortable but with the sting of loneliness. Daylight breaks early here; by 5:30 the city is springing to life again. But for me, today, everything is dark.

Evita

2010-10-22T08:30:00.010-04:00

She was a bastard child whose rags to riches story enthralled the entire world. At the tender age of 15, Eva Duarte moved to Buenos Aires to make a name in showbiz. She sang, she acted. She saved all she could to move into a flat in fashionable Recoleta. It was her way of telling the elite that she had arrived.

She had escaped the misery of life in the provinces for one of comfort.

But none of it would have been noted had she not met and fallen in love with Juan Peron and become the first lady of Argentina. The soul of the country. Standing up for the working man, even while she dressed in her furs and pearls.

Whether you believe in her purpose or whether history has deemed her disingenuous, Evita was iconic in life -- and death. She succumbed to cervical cancer at the young age of 33.

After a massive funeral, her embalmed body was to be placed at a monument in her honor. But a military dictatorship ousted Peron. The names Juan and Evita became taboo; it was illegal even to possess a photo of them. Evita's body was taken out of the country.

It took 16 years for it to be relocated. Many say her corpse had been mutilated.

Juan Peron returned to power in the early 1970s; his wife Isabel, who succeeded him as president, brought Evita home. She now rests in the Recoleta Cemetery in the Duarte family crypt. Every day, tourists visiting the cemetery flock straight to her grave, much like they do to see Jim Morrison at Pere Lachaise in Paris.

It's an unassuming memorial to a woman who lived so grandly. A bigger tribute to her is at the Eva Peron museum, which has a collection of photos, film footage and her things, including her elegant gowns, suits and shoes.

Ironically, I returned from the museum to my flat in San Telmo only to see the movie "Evita" with Madonna and Antonio Banderas playing on television. Well, not so ironic, perhaps. Argentine TV probably shows that film quite often.

I had never seen the Andrew LLoyd Webber musical. I tuned in in time to hear Madonna sing: "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina."

The next day, I stood before the pink government house, where so many years ago Evita had stood in victory on the balcony. Where her husband had propped her up when she was too weak form cancer to even stand up. I imagined the roar of the crowds chanting her name. What a time it must have been.

San Telmo

2010-10-17T12:22:00.002-04:00

It's spring in Argentina and on the streets, jacaranda trees were about to burst into full purple splendor.
colonial buildings. We rented a flat for a week in San Telmo, the oldest barrio in Buenos Aires.

San Telmo is lined with cobblestone streets, old-time cafes, tango parlors and dozens of antique shops. On Sundays, the main street is closed to traffic as artists sell their wares or perform on the streets.

I've posted a few images of our barrio. You can see the street festival, of course.

And the bars and restaurants.

Of note here are two. La Brigada, featured on Andrew Zimmern's "Bizarre Foods" show on the Travel Channel. We went there with Raymond Broussard, my sister-in-law Sheila's ex-husband. Raymond is really into eating all sorts of meats and so we did. Braided intestines and cow testicles were among them. I hope my Hindu family in India does not see this post.

The second place I loved in San Telmo was Taverna Baska, A Basque restaurant recommended to me by Time magazine's world editor, Bobby Ghosh. Bobby told me to try the octopus. It came perfectly cooked, so tender that it melted like butter in my mouth, and slathered in a delicious paprika sauce. Yum.

More coming on my fabulous trip to Argentina. I've posted more photos on Facebook.

Soweto

2010-09-27T21:12:00.004-04:00

Hector Pieterson was only 12 when he was gunned down -- a hail of bullets cutting short the life of a young black boy and triggering what came to be known as the Soweto Uprising against South Africa's brutal system of apartheid.

On this gloriously beautiful spring day, I stood at a plaza named after him. A stark monument, a museum, a photograph. All around, life goes on in Soweto, still a world away from Johannesburg, just like it was when Hector was a school boy.

I was a little older than Hector when he was killed. I only learned about him when I entered college, protested apartheid, marched for divestment. Read about Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko.

On June 16, 1975, students were protesting the use of Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors, as the medium of instruction in schools. When police opened fire, Hector fell on the corner of Moema and Vilakazi streets. Sam Nzima captured a black and white photograph of Pieterson's limp and bloodied body being carried by a fellow student.

I stood now in that very spot with Nathaniel Mudau, a driver who works for CNN in Johannesburg. He insisted we have a photo taken in front of the memorial. So we did. A teenage boy named Karabo snapped the photo and printed it out on a battery operated printer.

Nathaniel showed me around Soweto, where he grew up, where his family still lives. We stopped for lunch at Ethel Maria's. She grills chicken and beef in her front yard and serves them with salads, rice and porridge mostly to local policemen, teachers and nurses.

Ethel Maria has lived in her two-room shack in Soweto since 1965. She still doesn't have running water inside the house. Life is still a struggle for her, 16 years after a black-majority government finally took power in South Africa. At 51, Ethel Maria does not harbor hope in her heart anymore.

Maybe it will be different for her children but freedom has meant very little life changes for her. Freedom did not give her a bigger place, respite from work seven days a week

On top of a makeshift grill, she made the best chicken I tasted in South Africa. After the meal, everyone at the table shared a wet towel to wipe our hands and paid her $4 for the meal.

Then Nathaniel took me around Soweto. I've posted photos here of the murals painted at a power plant and the shanties that still dot the landscape.

In the days of apartheid, black people were forced to live here. Many awoke at the crack of dawn and spent a fortune on a rickety old bus that took them into Johannesburg for work. Now, downtown Johannesburg is apocalyptic. Abandoned by whites, the wealth has been sucked dry and the one-posh apartment buildings and skyscrapers have stood still in time.

Nathaniel made me put up the windows to the car in neighborhoods like Hillbrow -- the crime there makes the most violent parts of Atlanta look like paradise.

Life is much calmer in Soweto. But hard still for most of the residents.

"This is the way my house was then," said Ethel Maria. But back then, she did not have her Nelson Mandela apron, the one she proudly wears every day when she cooks in her front yard.

BIg Cats

2010-09-15T21:02:00.005-04:00

I touched a lion for the first time in my life at Lion Encounter in Zimbabwe. Paul Dube, who has worked here five years, took me around, warning me to always use a stick to distract the young lions, never to run if there is trouble. They will chase you down and kill you, he said.

The conservation park, on the edges of Lake Victoria, is an attempt to repopulate Africa's wild with lions. Their numbers have been sadly dwindling. There used to be 250,000 lions roaming the wilds of Africa. Now there are fewer than 40,000. In some places, there are no lions left at all.

Dube and his staff of about 60 study the lions at their park -- the big cats there are more used to human contact. But they are quickly weaned of dependence and they learn to survive as they would in the wild. Once they are able hunters -- when they are about 18 months old -- they are released into the bush.

I doubt I will ever get another chance to get so close to these magnificent yet ferocious creatures, save in captivity. Their skin felt like sandpaper -- rough and rugged enough to take varnish off wood. I don't know why I expected them to be soft and furry like the tabbies I once had.

When they yawned, you could see the teeth that can tear apart an antelope, even a zebra, though I was told the giraffe's kick can kill a lion. A few days later, when we saw adult lions sleeping in the bush at Chobe National Park, a terrible fear set in my heart. And I wondered what I was thinking for having gotten so close to one.

Mosi-oa-Tunya

2010-09-12T17:00:00.009-04:00

Mosi-oa-Tunya means: the smoke that thunders.

It's an appropriate name for what the British named Victoria Falls, the largest curtain of water in the world, a mile-wide cataract in the Zambezi River between Zambia and Zimbabwe.

My father spoke of it when I was a little girl. He told me one day, I should feast upon this incredible site, one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

We traveled from the town of Livingstone, named after the famous British physician and missionary David Livingstone, by bus to Zimbabwe. We could hear the roar of the water, feel the spray long before I actually laid eyes on nature's magnificence. There it was, in all its glory. Enormous amounts of water tumbling into a deep gorge, water and sun meeting everywhere to form rainbows.

In 1855, when Livingstone first encountered the fall of the Zambezi River, this is how he described it:

"After twenty minutes' sail from Kalai we came in sight, for the first time, of the columns of vapor appropriately called 'smoke,' rising at a distance of five or six miles, exactly as when large tracts of grass are burned in Africa. Five columns now arose, and, bending in the direction of the wind, they seemed placed against a low ridge covered with trees; the tops of the columns at this distance appeared to mingle with the clouds. They were white below, and higher up became dark, so as to simulate smoke very closely.

The whole scene was extremely beautiful; the banks and islands dotted over the river are adorned with sylvan vegetation of great variety of color and form…no one can imagine the beauty of the view from any thing witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight."

My photographs do not do Victoria Falls justice.

If you every have a chance to see for yourself, go! Victoria makes Niagara look like a backyard waterfalls.

Seeing through the colour lens

2010-09-07T15:28:00.019-04:00

Driving through picturesque Cape Town and its environs in the Western Cape, I was truly awed. If you have ever driven down the Pacific Coast Highway, especially from San Francisco to Carmel, you will have good idea of how incredibly beautiful the scenery is here.

Rugged mountains heaving upward to the sky from humble beginnings where Atlantic waves crash violently on jagged shores. Pablo Neruda's ocean green clashing with azure skies and the lime green of Fynbos, Afrikaans for Fine Bush, the native vegetation of succulents and shrubs.

Snaking highways take you through paradise at Chapman's Peak, Hout Bay, Camp's Bay -- idyllic fishing towns where fish and chips shops serve up freshly caught Hake. And vineyards that offer tastings of the best Pinotage, Merlot and Chardonnay.

The houses dot the hillsides, graceful and full of splendour. You think: Yes, I could live here. Spend every day in this lush, luxe setting.

But you need a non-white person with you to tell you the real story of the Western Cape.

Even now, 16 years after South Africa established democracy and passed the strongest constitution in the world, perhaps, that bars any sort of discrimination, the vestiges of apartheid are not lost on a person of color.

Yes, you can go to South Africa and go on safaris and see its National Geographic beauty, but you cannot ever forget what was here. And if you look closely, behind the hills, far away from the tourist signs, you will still see apartheid.

At Hout Bay, you can see the flats built for coloreds when you get high up on the hill. There it is. In all its ugliness.

Or what about Ocean View?

"Look there," said my guide Gillian Schroeder, a coloured woman who grew up in the Cape Flats (pictured with me at Chapman's Peak). "How ironic. There's no view."

Just rows and rows of horrific housing built inland to house coloreds evicted from Simon's Town, a place where tourists now venture to look at African penguins and shop for antiques.

And what about the blacks? You can't even see their townships from the main roads and highways. They are tucked away like the poor in Rio de Janeiro's favelas.

Only here, I cannot forget that they were forced from their homes and put in segregated communities when apartheid was enforced in 1948. The Group Areas Act mandated separate communities and non-whites were plucked from the homes and throw into horrid shanties without any surrounding trees, without electricity, without anything save gray dust and misery.

My drive to the Cape of Good Hope (pictured above) was marred by conversation with Gillian of the past and present. Even though everyone is equal now in South Africa, there still is apartheid. Blacks still live in the townships. They still do the manual labor. the most menial tasks. Coloreds live in the flats. The richest neighborhoods, the nicest places are still all white.

In the United States, laws were changed but racism has taken many years to subside. It still manifests itself now, more than 40 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

In South Africa, it was different. There was brutal white rule and then a black majority democracy. But centuries of oppression don't just go away, especially when the ruling class is still here. In my native India, the colonizers left. Here, they stayed.

How do you live side by side after all that hatred, all those tears, all that cruelty. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission can help, but it cannot erase the emotions swirling in millions of hearts.

I have to say that it is truly amazing to me how blacks, coloureds, Indians and whites live side by side now. Those who were oppressed have amazingly forgiven.

But as my friend, Stephen Moagi of Capetown said, it is hard to forget.

His name tag at work reads: Stephens. Like a last name. None of his white employers have bothered to correct it. Small, but telling, I thought.

Eunice, a black waitress at Bertha's restaurant on the ocean in Simon's Town (pictured, top, left), gives her name as Thabiso. That's her name in Xhosa. That's what she prefers. Except no one ever bothered to ask.

You don't have to look hard to notice. Just take your eyes off the guide books and tours. And you will know the real South Africa.

In Cape Town, I cried

2010-09-06T13:52:00.018-04:00

I will start my southern Africa journey here, at the Slave Lodge in Cape Town.

It is not where I physically began my 10-day trip to this part of the world. But it is where I choose to begin -- in a place of beginnings and endings, of hate and love, of breathtaking natural landscapes and ugly scars of human cruelty.

For all the magnificence I have seen on this incredible trip -- lions in the wild, one of the seven natural wonders of the world and the collision of two great oceans at the Cape of Good Hope -- nowhere did I shed more tears than in this stark rectangular building that once housed thousands of human beings who were not recognized as such.

Today, the oldest slave lodge in South Africa looks beautiful in structure. (See picture.) But go back in time.

There were no windows then, just slits in the wall. People manacled and tied together in a manner worse than animals. They spent hot, suffocating nights here. During the day, they were marched out to toil.

The tourist guide books don't tell you much about the wretched history of South Africa. My book dedicated most of its Slave Lodge blurb to the architectural splendor of the building, not to the unimaginable pain that was borne here.

It is now a museum dedicated to those whose names will be forgotten by history. They are no Vasco de Gamas or Simon Van der Stels (for whom the now famous Stellenbosch winelands are named). Just ordinary people plucked from their homes and taken to suffer and die.

I stood before a map that showed all the places from where the Dutch brought in their human captives. My eyes went straight to India. Malabar. Cochin. And yes, Kolkata. I stared at the Bengal dot on the map of South Asia. I felt a hot drop land on my clenched fists.

I thought of my mother telling me stories about British colonial rule in India and the picture at my grandfather's house of a water fountain in Maniktola: "Europeans," it said on one side. "Indians and dogs," on the other.

I sat in the dark museum, staring at images of mothers torn from sons and daughters, separated forever. I heard the clack of wooden clogs slaves were forced to wear here so that their Dutch masters could hear them if they tried to move at night.

I imagined.

And for all the death and war I have seen, I could not ever feel the sorrow of this non-life that thousands of people, including my ancestors, lived through.

Or didn't.

I have many friends in the United States who tell me personal stories of racism. Their ancestors were slaves. Their parents lived through segregation. I recalled my conversations with the poet Natasha Tretheway. Of racism, hate, ignorance.

I grew up with stories about Bapuji, father of the nation. That's how Indians revere Mahatma Gandhi. I read about how Gandhi, as a young lawyer, fought for rights in South Africa. We all know what he did when he returned to India.

School was filled with history lessons on the East India Company, the Dutch, the Portuguese and the British. I grew to womanhood familiar with colonialism's fury.

Yet, I had never felt its sting in India -- I was fortunate to have been born 15 years after independence. I felt it more in the Deep South but never in ways that were physically or psychologically damaging to me.

So here I stood, in lovely Cape Town, surrounded by majestic landscape, and all I saw was heartbreak and blood. It was mapped out before me, on a museum wall.

It was the first thing I saw in Cape Town. And for the next few days, I would think of nothing else.

Next: A guide with a view.

Water, oil and Iraq

2010-08-23T21:06:00.007-04:00

Five years ago, a tropical depression formed in the Atlantic and began moving towards Florida. Later, it would become one of the worst hurricanes to hit the United States.

Katrina.

On the day that the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast, my friend and colleague left Baghdad to return home. I watched her drive off into the hot, dusty Iraqi afternoon, went back inside to the tent that we had shared for a month. Her cot was empty. So was my heart.

It was tough enough being embedded with the U.S. Army. But to do it solo, in the middle of a raging war? I began to feel sorry for myself until I heard the news from Louisiana.

The next day, at the Camp Striker chow hall, I ran into Louisiana National Guard soldiers. The 256th Infantry Brigade Combat Team had been at war for a year, based at nearby Camp Liberty. They called their pad Tigerland.

They had lost about 40 men. Each day, they had smelled the acrid fumes of bombs and ammunition, seen the worst of humanity. They were exhausted and so ready to go home.

It should have been a happy few last days. Instead, it turned wretchedly bittersweet.

They could not take their eyes off the television screens. Image after image of New Orleans under a 30-foot wall of water.

One soldier recognized his block in the lower 9th ward; even thought he saw his house, just the rooftop visible in the footage.

"Look, look," he said. "That's where I live."

The excitement quickly turned to dread on his face. He sat stone cold at the table, not being able to say anything for a few minutes.

Then: "Well, that's where I used to live," he said, running off to the AT&T phone trailer to see if he could check on his mama.

I am sure his effort was in vain.

New Orleans was dark. No lights, no phones. Nothing.

The soldiers quickly realized that a great many of them had no homes to return to. There would be no deliriously happy homecoming with firecrackers, parades and cake. Amid the joy of reunion with their wives and children, they would

Many of them wanted to get on a plane that instant so they could help their fellow Guardsmen with rescue efforts. In their last days in Iraq, a guilt gnawed at their hearts. Some felt lucky to be in Iraq.

Life seemed like a series of terrible ironies at that moment. So cruel and unfair.

I crawled back into my tent that night no longer wallowing in my loneliness. Just grateful to be have a home back in Atlanta. Grateful to be alive.

I read a story on Slate a few days ago about the same brigade, back in Iraq, back in the chow hall glued to the TV screens. Only this time, it was oil instead of water.

Leaving Iraq

2010-08-19T17:58:00.006-04:00

The last of the 4,000 soldiers in the 4th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, crossed the border from Iraq into Kuwait Thursday. There are no U.S. more combat brigade teams left in Iraq. All is going seemingly well for President Barack Obama's plan to pull to leave just 50,000 troops there by September.

Hard to think about how it was then.

By then, I mean seven years ago, when the United States invaded Saddam Hussein's Iraq and U.S. soldiers deployed in droves.

In 2003, I looked at the American Humvees and Abrams tanks rolling through Baghdad. The soldiers wore aviator glasses and pointed their M-16s triumphantly. I stood among crowds of Iraqis and like them, pondered the course of history.

I did not know then that more than 4,000 of those soldiers would die in Iraq, along with thousands of Iraqis, many of them caught in the middle of dirty urban warfare.

By the time I returned as an embedded reporter in 2005, Americans ruled the landscape.

Camp Liberty was a sprawling American base with air-conditioning, movie theaters, stores, restaurants and other amenities the Iraqis lacked. Even now, Iraqis say they have no electricity or other basic services. A young lieutenant who was waiting to catch a plane with me on the military side of the Baghdad airport told me that if the Americans could deliver electricity, they would win the war.

In a way, he was right. By 2008, Iraqis asked me why the world's superpower could not give them something as basic as power.

This year, protests erupted over the lack of power. In a land where temperatures soar to 120-plus in the summer, it's hard to live without a fan. Only two-thirds of Iraqi have their electricity needs met -- in Baghdad, it averages to four hours a day.

I thought about the day when I returned to my tent at Camp Striker and the AC unit had shut off. I sat on my cot dripping buckets of sweat and and tried to imagine life for Baghdadis outside the camp.

Seven years after the war, basic services are still a problem in Iraq.

So is insecurity.

Many people like to point to the drop in violence as a marker for success in the war. But my Iraqi friends still worry about stepping out with their children.

A car bomb exploded in Ramadi Wednesday night, killing two people. That may not sound like a lot compared to the height of the war when hundreds died each month. But when it is your husband or your mother, it's everything.

Another 48 people died Tuesday in an attack outside a military recruiting center in Baghdad.

When will the killing end in Iraq? When the Americans are gone? When the Americans are still there?

When will the government be formed? It has been almost six months since the parliamentary elections and still there are no agreements on forming a new government.

"Iraq is still at the beginning of the story of its evolution since 2003," Ryan Crocker, the former American ambassador to Iraq, told CNN.

I cannot pretend to be an expert on Iraq and pass judgment on this day being hailed as another milestone in post-Saddam history.

Today, I am in the comfort of my Atlanta home, thinking back to all the suffering I saw in the past.

I think especially of Dahlia, a young girl I met in the barren fields of dust and scrub near Nasiriyah. She was walking testament to her name: Dahlia. A bright flower in the midst of drab.

She wore a crimson and lemon yellow printed robe, her head was covered in a black scarf - at 10, she was old enough to respect the modesty taught by her culture. She stood barefoot in front of a lone U.S. Humvee that stopped before entering the gates of Camp Cedar.

Dahlia's father was killed by Saddam, she told me. She never went to school -- there were no schools nearby. She lived in a makeshift tent with her mother and brother.

I asked her what she wanted to do when she grew up. "Nothing," she said, as though she knew her fate was bound to the bleak sands of southern Iraq, that she would never break out of poverty.

She thought for a while longer. "I want to work at Cedar."

That was in 2006. The U.S. military closed Cedar shortly after I met Dahlia. Now so many more of those bases are gone.

No, today, I cannot share in the optimism of all those who hail Iraq a success. I think of the hundreds of Dahlias I met in the midst of war.

You go, girl!

2010-08-17T21:17:00.010-04:00

This Sunday, I will be watching the premiere of "Aarti Party."

Aarti Sequeira won this season's "The Next Food Network Star" on Sunday night. A lot of us at CNN were rooting for her -- she worked as a producer in the Los Angeles bureau for a while. And, we felt, she was the most talented cook among the finalists.

But I wanted her to win for another reason.

I loved the way she infused the spices of my homeland into her cooking. I watched her week after week as she turned out dishes with roasted cumin, garam masala, cardomom. Those were the smells of my childhood, the aromas wafting out of the kitchen and into my bedroom on a warm, muggy Kolkata morning.

Aarti makes things like South of the Border Shrimp Masala. On her new hard-won show, she says, you might expect something like a Sloppy Bombay Joe made with a chicken tikka masala sauce. YUM! (as Rachael Ray would say)

Every Sunday night, I salivated. And from the very first episode, I wished for her to perform well. Her cooking reminded me of my mother's.

I admired my ma's improvisational skills. Leftover McDonald's fries would show up the next day in a chicken curry. Vegetables on their way to being thrown out would star in a Bengali-style mixture of five spice -- nigella, cumin, fennel, fenugreek and mustard. Pure heaven.

In a way, I thought of my mother as the first Indian fusion cook. We lived in a small town in Florida. She could not always obtain the spices or ingredients she needed. So she substituted whatever she could find at the Northwood Mall Publix in Tallahassee.

Arrti had that same spirit of infusion and innovation. I wanted to taste whatever she served up. I loved her style, especially that big smile and even bigger flower tucked in her mess of black curls.

I enjoy watching cooking shows but have always lamented the lack of South Asians on the network. Finally, we have Aarti. You go girl!

I'll be watching.

Bangla kobita (poetry)

2010-08-16T20:37:00.001-04:00

This poem is written by one of my favourite Bengali poets, Joy Goswami. It loses in the translation, of course. And yet...

In the evening sadness comes and stands by the door, his face
Is hidden, from the dying sun he took some colors and painted his body
The sadness comes in the evening,
I stretched my hand and he caught my wrist, in an iron-hard clasp
He caught me out from my room, his face
Is black, he is ahead of me and I follow him
I crossed from the evening to the night, from the night to the dawn, then the morning, the noon, the day, the month
Crossing water, tree, boat, city, hill
Crossing blows, stumbling, poison, suspicions, jealousy, graves, genocide, the bones and ribs of civilization, swamp and grass
Then crossing my own death, death after death, going on and on
The bony fingers holding nothing but a pen
Nothing...

Freedom and flooding

2010-08-14T05:28:00.007-04:00

A difficult agreement created Pakistan 63 years ago. The "land of the pure" was partitioned off from India and both nations became independent -- Pakistan on August 14, 1947 and India a day later.

Though it split India apart, we were finally free. No more British Empire. No more second-class citizenry.

That's why today should have been like any other August 14. Joyful. Celebratory. Patriotic.

Instead, Pakistanis will be surrounded by the misery created by torrential monsoons. Walls of water have drowned everything. The mighty Indus flows bloated -- in some areas, it has swollen to 20 kilometers in width.

"Poor Pakistan. It can't catch a break," said a friend of mine in Kolkata, referring to a the awful earthquake, political crisis and militancy, which mars the landscape with violence every day.

She wondered what might have happened if Pakistan had never been split off from India.

Hypothesizing on the course of history, is ultimately, useless, but I thought about how things might have been different. Or not.

Nothing would have changed the cresting of the Indus this week. Nothing would have changed the water pouring from the skies.

My thoughts this day are with the people of Pakistan, separated from me by history, but not in soul. And I hope India will temper its own celebrations on August 15 and pause to reflect the terrible suffering of its neighbor.

Kaniatarowanenneh

2010-07-29T11:26:00.007-04:00

Kevin's parents, Ed and Jean, have rented a summer cottage on Washington Island in Clayton. The place is perfectly situated -- a watery feast for the eyes on the Saint Lawrence River.

Ahead lies Canada's share of the Thousand Islands. Once in a while, a huge freighter floats by effortlessly, it seems, traversing deep waters toward Lake Ontario or on its way out to the Atlantic via the Saint Lawrence Seaway or as the French call it, the Fleuve Saint Laurent. The Native American tribes, of course, had their own names for the massive river. In Mohawk, the name is Kaniatarowanenneh, meaning, what else but big waterway.

Here are a few photos of this shard of paradise that my in-laws are calling home until it's time to return to warmer climes in Sarasota. The first picture is of the only kind of traffic jam one is likely to stumble upon around these parts. On the small bridge to the island, people and cars give way to the geese.

Hybrid & City Lights

2010-07-28T09:14:00.003-04:00

I have been pondering the purchase of a new car an have seriously been thinking about a Toyota Prius. It's hard to give up 51 miles per gallon.

Toyota hasn't won me over completely yet. But this shot in Toronto could make a convincing ad. The CN tower is so beautiful at night and next to the car is an art school, also cleverly designed and illuminated.

What I saw at the harbour in Toronto!

2010-07-27T11:33:00.003-04:00

A modern-day stoning

2010-07-07T21:21:00.001-04:00

Read about an Iranian woman about to be stoned to death.

On CNN.com:

http://bit.ly/bOA1PB

Why not saffron, green and white?

2010-06-27T13:51:00.006-04:00

Every four years, when the world crowns a new football champion, I root for Brazil. I grew up a being a Brazil fan -- my father told me Pele was the greatest athlete ever.

As I grew older I wondered why my homeland wasn't able to field a team to play in the World Cup. After all, when I was a young girl in Kolkata, I watched my cousins and friends kick the ball around with bare feet on a dirt field in the neighborhood park. Even now, every open field sports a goal net or stumps and bails.

So why then can't an emerging global power, a nation of 1 billion plus, compete in soccer?

Why is India ranked a miserable 133rd out of the 202 football playing countries. Yes, India ranks even below war-ravaged nations like Rwanda and Sierra Leone. I suppose our only solace is that Pakistan and Bangladesh come even further down the list.

Many theories abound on India's poor performance.

Some say India's soccer program is run by people who are corrupt. They are more interested in lining their pockets than they are in athletics. The head of the football federation is, for God's sake, the aviation minister!

Others say India's real love is that other sport that Americans have yet to embrace, the one that involved the stumps and bails: cricket. Or that club football has never attained the kind of professionalism it has in other countries.

India last qualified for the World Cup in 1950. But the barefooted team never made it to Brazil to play because they couldn't afford plane tickets to the other side of the world.

A football fanatic friend of mine says India can't play anymore because it has fallen behind the curve. For many years, players insisted on bare feet when other nations were speeding ahead with fancy spikes, special grass and other new technology.

Instead, in my hometown, millions of people are crazy for Brazil. I remember watching World Cup games in 1998 -- the crowds lining the streets were awash in yellow, blue and green. They cried openly when France defeated their team in the final. I felt as though I were on the beach in Ipanema, among Rio de Janeiro's Cariocas -- not in a middle-class Bengali neighborhood of Kolkata.

So I am forced to root for a country other than my own again this year. I have to reserve the Indian flag for that other World Cup, the one that involves the stumps and bails. India plays host next year. Maybe they will even nab their second Cup win.

Viva l'Italia

2010-06-14T17:56:00.011-04:00

I never wanted Italy to win until today. But it's my top pick in the World Cup pool this year. So...

... at 2:30 this afternoon, I gathered with friends at Fritti, a neighborhood restaurant, to watch Italy versus Paraguay.
In the end, my friend Jack said he'd buy me another glass of fine Italian Pinot Grigio if I donned his tricolor shorts. So I did. And said a Hail Mary. It didn't quite work. Score: 1-1.

That's really a loss for the fine talians.

But the Pinot Grigio was fine-r.

Happy Birthday, CNN

2010-06-01T20:21:00.009-04:00

It's CNN's 30th birthday today.

I was not yet 18 when Ted Turner launched his visionary network. I didn't know then that I would be a journalist, let alone work for the world's most reputable news network.

I watched CNN cover the Challenger disaster, Baby Jessica and then the Gulf War. CNN had arrived. I watched Christiane Amanpour report from Bosnia-Herzegovina and admired her talent and courage.

Just before the invasion of Iraq, I spent several weeks in Baghdad covering the U.N inspections and writing about the fear in Iraqi hearts. War was imminent in a nation that had already suffered so much.

I was alone on that trip. And nervous to be in a police state. I found friends at CNN. Eason Jordan, then a top executive at CNN, offered me workspace and conversation. It was a relief just to be in the presence of friendly faces.

But the world of broadcast remained alien to me.

I was a print journalist and newspapers were still turning profits. But the industry changed rapidly.

Last year, I left the Atlanta Journal-Constitution after 19 long years. Needless to say, the decision was tough.

But I was lucky enough to land at CNN. The more I learn about television, the more I am fascinated.

The stories on CNN's 30th anniversary are focusing on a pivotal time for the network. Outdone in the ratings race in prime time, CNN, say analysts, has to figure out how to reinvent itself before it gets beat at its own game.

Maybe.

We'll see where the next few months take us.

But f you ask me, CNN does a mighty fine job bringing the world to millions of homes. Every day. 24/7. And I am glad to play a part.

Ma

2010-05-17T22:10:00.009-04:00

I refrained from posting this on Mother's Day out of respect for all my friends who are mothers and for all my friends who still have mothers.

But Mother's Day is tough. Very tough.

Nine years ago, my mother died.

May 19, 2001.

A few months before 9/11. It became a year that everyone remembers for the terrorist attacks. I remember it as the year my father died, and, exactly two months later, my mother.

Every year on this day, a melancholy descends on me.

I don't feel like doing much of anything save look at her photographs and her handwriting -- I still have all the letters she wrote me from Kolkata. I even have her clothes, fresh from her closet in our flat. Even after all these years, they smell like her, though the scents are fading and I desperately don't want them to. I put a few of her things in a plastic bag to prevent her from escaping.

I miss her smile. I miss her hand on my forehead. I miss her kiss and her embrace.

I miss everything about her.

She had a massive stroke in 1982. She was only 51 then. But she lived another 19 years, bound to a wheelchair, half her brain cells gone. Toward the end of her life, we exchanged roles. I became a mother, taking care of her, making all the important decisions in her life. She was almost like my child, completely dependent on me.

And yet, every time I gazed into her eyes, I thought of the immense sacrifices she made -- as a young Bengali woman who came to these shores not speaking English, not knowing how to operate an electric stove or drive a car. She endured the death of her own parents from afar, endured her loneliness. Never shared her pain with us; only her joy.

Only later, only after she died and it was too late to talk, did I discover her journals and writings. Only then did I realize how incredibly steely my mother was.

Only now do I appreciate her fully. Now that she is gone. Forever.

And a deep void fills my life. Today on the anniversary of her death. And every day that I live.

After 'le catastrophe'

2010-05-14T21:33:00.002-04:00

Four months on, horror has given way to acceptance. But desperation is everywhere in Haiti.

Here is the link to my slide show on CNN.
http://bit.ly/cf7JlT

Celebrity in Haiti

2010-05-08T23:48:00.001-04:00

I spent time with Sean Penn in Haiti for CNN.
Read my story at http://bit.ly/cROzVw

More about Mariot

2010-05-07T19:10:00.005-04:00

You read about Mariot in an earlier post.

In January and February, he was hired by CNN to drive us around. On my latest trip, he drove me around and translated for me. Mariot's English, all self-taught, is very good.

Stuck in Port-au-Prince traffic, Mariot and I enjoyed interesting conversation.

He gave me a book this time: "Like the Dew that Waters the Grass." It's a collection of words from Haitian women -- about gender violence, political turmoil, Aristide, jobs, lives and most of all, perseverance and courage.

Mariot signed the book to me: "Don't try to be a copy of somebody else."

Even more precious is that he rescued the book from the rubble of his quake-destroyed home.

Thank you, Mariot.

The rainy season

2010-05-03T01:04:00.007-04:00

It rained heavily in Port-au-Prince tonight.

I stood in the balcony of the Plaza hotel -- the exact spot from which Anderson Cooper broadcasted his show in January -- and looked beyond. At the Champs de Mars, the city's central plaza that is now home to thousands of people left without anywhere to go after the massive January 12 earthquake.

I thought about what the rain must feel like under a flimsy tent or plastic tarp, water seeping in from every direction. I watched as people tried to close shut the entrances, some of them just thin cotton sheets or blankets. Suddenly, the constant noise of the street came to a halt, replaced by the thud of monstrous drops falling hard from the sky. And the laughter of gleeful children cooling off after another scorching day.

The water started building along the roadside and I knew that in many of the camps, dirt had turned to mud. I was at the Petionville Golf Club earlier in the day, where resident Vital Junior had told me how treacherous the place becomes when it rains. About 50,000 people are living on a hilly nine-hole golf course at the once-swanky club for the elite. From its perch, the club affords a beautiful view of the city on a clear day. So many of Haiti's elite must have sipped cocktails in the clubhouse and looked down on those below.

Now, the view was marred by human misery.

From the Plaza balcony, I ran back to my room, wet from the few short steps through the hotel's open-air courtyard. What must it feel like to have no shelter from the elements.

I listened to the rain; reminded me of the monsoons in India. I knew more was on the way for Haiti -- May starts the rainy season here.

And people who have already suffered too much will suffer some more.

Back to Haiti

2010-04-30T01:19:00.004-04:00

I returned to Port-au-Prince yesterday.

Before January, it was a city known to me only through books and a few films and of course, the news – always bad news. But CNN sent me to Haiti to report on the aftermath of the earthquake. And my eyes were opened to a whole new world.

I saw Haiti for the first time after devastation and suffering of epic proportions. I regretted that I had not seen it before.

But before in what? “Normal times?” What were normal times for Haiti? This country has been through more turmoil and pain than any other nearby.

In news stories, you see phrases like “the most impoverished nation in the Western hemisphere.” You see on CNN that Haiti’s comeback will be that much more difficult because of lack of government, lack of system, lack of everything.

When I was there in January and February, I worked closely with a CNN producer, Edvige Jean-Francois. She taught me to see Haiti the way it ought to be seen – outside the American lens. She showed me the richness of culture, the wealth of Haiti. Not in monetary terms, but in other ways that matter.

Now, almost four months later, I am back.

I still see uncleared rubble and buildings teetering on the verge of collapse. But the smell of death has gone. There is no longer that dazed look on people’s faces – the look you have after you have lost everything, when you haven’t yet distilled the horror that has befallen your homeland.

On the way from the airport, I saw school children wearing bright checkered uniforms. I knew then that Haiti was progressing. Slowly, perhaps. But moving forward.

Earth Day

2010-04-22T16:16:00.003-04:00

Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day.

Millions of people around the globe are holding events today that reflect on the planet and increase awareness of the environment. Back in 1970, when Earth Day was launched, the event was limited to Baby Boomer activists keen on seeing green. Now, of course, green is cool. Green is in. Green in hip. Green is, well, mainstream.

Even America's giant corporations are involved with Earth Day activities. Good or bad, Earth Day is big business now, as a story in today's New York Times points out. Companies like AT&T, Pepsi and F.A.O. Schwartz sponsor green events. And environmental agencies concede they must partner with corporate America in order to spread the word about the evils of fossil fuels.

But those who were involved with the movement back then lament that the environment is not a priority as it was then with participants of Earth Day. For most Americans, the environment sits low on the agenda. It's certainly not a make-or-break issue in political campaigns. The fervor of the first Earth Day participants, say some, has been replaced with the convenience of going green with the utmost ease. It's not hard to buy green these days.

Documentary filmmaker Robert Stone made an important point in a story that appeared in the New York Times today: that the environmental movement is a victim of its own success in clearing up tangible problems with air and water.

“Every Earth Day is a reflection of where we are as a culture,” he said. “If it has become commoditized, about green consumerism instead of systemic change, then it is a reflection of our society."

Sisters

2010-04-20T07:00:00.005-04:00

I don't have a sister, though sometimes, in my childhood, I got a taste of what that might be like because we lived among extended families. The line between a cousin and a sister quickly blurred.

But I longed for the sister I never had.

Like Elizabeth and Jane Bennett in "Pride & Prejudice." Or even the dysfunctional variety in "Rachel Getting Married."

I wanted to share clothes and the heart's innermost secrets. Wanted to whisper into the night until we both fell asleep. Wanted someone to be there. Always.

So when Deirdre came to visit Eileen, I went to see the Drennen girls. Of course, I enjoy spending time with them -- I have known Ei for almost three decades and first met Deirdre in the mid-1980s when she came to visit Ei in Tallahassee. I gave her one of my salwar kameez suits. It looked grand on her, I thought. She was so thin and tall and pretty.

Eileen has four sisters. I have always been jealous of that. But she gels perfectly with Deirdre. Unmistakably sisters. One comforts the other -- always has, in times of divorce, illness and the darker things in life that take us down.

We sat around the living room table and talked. And talked. For a few moments, I pretended. Sisters, we were.

And at 10:30 at night, when the Drennen girls realized their bellies were empty and the groceries were still intact, we piled into the kitchen to fix a fattening concoction of macaroni with Swiss chard, cheese and more cheese.

How divine.

Loadshedding

2010-04-08T06:44:00.010-04:00

India has come a long way since my childhood.

And not.

This week's headlines: Celsius rises, so does loadshedding. In American English, this means temperatures soaring above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and no electricity for hours and hours and hours.

That's the way it was when I was growing up in Kolkata. The only relief was to take a plunge in the rather polluted Ganges (see photo).

At school, it was difficult to concentrate. Instead, I'd be busy wiping dry the droplets of sweat on my textbook. One time, I'd obliterated the face of Shah Jahan (the Mogul emperor who built the Tak Mahal) in my history book with a good dousing. I watched the black ink run down the innards of the cheaply printed text. Too bad his son Aurangzeb could not dispose of him that easily.

Going home on a searing summer day was no comfort either. No bath because there was no power to pump the water to the roof. No fan. No respite. At night, we wet our bed sheets and put slabs of ice on our mattresses to stay cool inside the thick cotton mosquito nets and watched flying cockroaches and creepy insects crawl up the sides.

We'd wait for the monsoons to begin-- usually the first or second week of June. My brother and I would stand in the courtyard fully clothed and let the rain soak us through. There was nothing that felt more soothing.

And now, in 2010, despite all of India's economic gains, my friends and family in Kolkata are doing the same as we did 40 years ago.

The problem, says the Telegraph newspaper: Snags in the coal-supply chain are causing power generation units to perform below capacity.

While government agencies played the blame game, almost every Kolkata resident suffered power cuts this week for at least six ours. Worse still, the monsoonal rains are still far from the congested city -- the weather forecast calls for hot and humid days.

Still feel like complaining about the pollen?

Crossfire

2010-04-02T06:50:00.012-04:00

If you look at the map on photographer Shahidul Alam's Web site, Bangladesh is a sea of yellow pinpricks -- each virtual thumb tack pointing to a killing by the Rapid Action Battalion, a security force formed in 2004 to fight corruption in the South Asian nation.

The ruthless guardians of the nation stand accused by human rights groups of the torture and extra-judicial slayings of their fellow citizens.

Alam, a brilliant photographer and passionate defender of human rights, focused his heart and his camera on the state-sanctioned terror; on all the people allegedly caught in the "crossfire."

In a collection of photographs catalogued as "Crossfire," he shows us the hospital corridor, the rice paddy, the city wall, the rickshaw stand -- all the places where they happened.

In his own words:

"The intention of this exhibit, was therefore not to present documentary evidence. There was plenty of that around and it had failed. The show attempts to reach out at an emotional level. I aim to get under the skin. To walk those cold streets. To hear the cries, see terror in the eyes. To sit quietly with the family besides a cold corpse. But every photograph is based on in-depth research. On actual case studies. On verifiable facts. A fragment of the story has been used to suggest the whole. A quiet metaphor for the screaming truth."

Bangladeshi police prevented the public from viewing "Crossfire" by blocking the entrance to Drik Gallery in Dhaka. But Drik won its case in court and people can once again freely view Alam's important work. It's vital that people see through Alam's lens. it's vital for Bangladeshi democracy,

Check out Alam's work on the New York Times site:
http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/31/behind-42/

And thanks to my friend John Trotter (another brilliant photographer) for bringing the court ruling to my attention.

Vanishing

2010-03-30T07:05:00.008-04:00

It's holy week for Christians and Jews. Easter. Passover.

I grew up in a place where it was holy week almost every month of the year. A bit of an exaggeration, I suppose, but India, with its myriad religions, bows down in prayer -- often.

Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Christians, Zoroastrians -- and yes, Jews.

They were an integral part of India. Jewish families erected majestic buildings, launched landmark businesses. The synagogues were oases in the middle of mayhem. Their food defined fusion long before that word was attached to any American establishment. They came from the Middle East and found peace and tolerance in my homeland. And now they are vanishing. A dying breed on the subcontinent.

I wrote a story about the Jewish community in Kolkata for CNN. That it ran on the holiest of weeks compounded the sadness in my heart.

We fight wars in the name of religion. But it can also be the greatest display of our diversity. To lose that, can never be good,

Read about India's Jewish community: http://bit.ly/aPY9tf

Tallahassee

2010-03-27T15:01:00.007-04:00

I graduated from high school in 1979. Never been to any of my reunions. I earned a master's degree in 1983. Never attended any college alumni functions either. But last week, I drove down to Tallahassee to see old friends from my first newspaper, The Florida Flambeau. (see post below)

A few of those people are my best friends and I see them often. Others, I had not seen in more than 20 years.

Some looked just the same. Some had changed quite a bit. It was lovely to see everyone again, though it served as yet another reminder of how fleeting time is; how fleeting our lives really are. Two decades, gone like that.

I got in my car on a sunny afternoon and drove past my old house, campus watering holes, restaurants, shops. Past Live oaks and Spanish Moss. On Park Avenue, Tennessee Street, Magnolia Avenue, Lake Ella, the Miracle Theater, Governor's Square Mall, Chez Pierre, Maclay Gardens.

My father, a professor of statistics, settled our family in Tallahassee in 1976. We arrived there from Perth, Australia and cried for three months. A town in the Deep South was a tough adjustment after having lived in cosmopolitan cities around the world. But I ended up living 14 years of my life in Tallahassee. It became home.

It was where I grew to womanhood, married and divorced, committed all of life's mistakes. It was the place that shaped me, helped make me whom I am.

There were memories swirling in my head that made that time feel like it was just yesterday. And yet, some sights felt so distant, as though it were almost someone else's life.

The reunion weekend flew by. But now I have fresh memories of a time, a place and people to cherish -- as life keeps whizzing by.

At Week's End

2010-03-22T14:16:00.006-04:00

In 1983, I began working for a newspaper called the Florida Flambeau. It was run by Florida State students mostly but was not affiliated with the university and had established itself as a strong, independent, progressive voice in the Tallahassee community. I had never taken a journalism class (there was no J-school at FSU). I only knew how to write academic papers and had just finished my Master's thesis.

The Flambeau opened my eyes to a whole new world. My mentors there -- Michael Moline, Eileen Drennen, Curt Fields, Michael McClelland, Steve Watkins (to name just a few) -- taught me to ask tough questions and write with clarity and punch. Most of all, I learned that journalism was always about seeking truth. Our motto was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. We wrote about the world around us -- the university, the legislature, executions, migrant workers. We wrote about music and film that was edgy and off the mainstream radar and published a great entertainment section called At Week's End.

This past weekend, some of us Flambeau alums attended a reunion in Tallahassee. Though we had our differences, though we screamed at each other, we have a bond that no one can ever take away.

We had more wrinkles and gray hair. Some of us were even grandparents. We've all moved on in life. Some are successful journalists -- my dear friend Diane Roberts does commentary for major newspapers, NPR and the BBC. She is a respected author and a professor of English. Others are lawyers, artists, musicians, lobbyists.

But it was almost as though 25 years had not flown by. We were just as we were at the Flambeau. Almost. And I was very glad for it.

Here's to all of you Flam alums. And to the next reunion!

A long journey

2010-03-09T23:22:00.009-05:00

In the world's largest democracy, men are still very much in control.

Even though we've had a woman as prime minister (Indira Gandhi) and the current president is also a woman (Pratibha Patil), women still lag way behind men in many ways. India has only 21 women in the 233-member Rajya Sabha or upper house of parliament. In the Lok Sabha or lower house, women represent 11 percent of the seats. That ranks India 99th in the world in female parliamentary representation - behind neighbors Pakistan and Bangladesh.

On Monday, which was International Women's Day, the United Nations blamed a gender gap for the disappearance of 43 million women in India. Lost because of lack of health care, decent nutrition and proper education (only 55 percent of women are literate in India.

Gender bias leads to the killing of infant daughters. Brides are still burned to death in hopes of securing another dowry.

Those are obvious ways discrimination rears its ugly head. I can remember acts that were more subtle, yet insidious none the same.

The women in my mother's generation cooked all the meals in the house but rarely sat with the men at the table. The men, of course, were served first; the women waited on them and then cleaned their mess.

Women on their periods could not enter a place of worship. I did not understand why when I was a teenager and wanted to join in on the puja festivities at my grandparents' house. Now I am sure a man insisted on that rule.

My great aunt, who lived to a very ripe old age, was married and widowed when she was still in her teens. She lived a life of austerity, wrapped in white muslin, eating strict vegetarian food by herself on the floor of the kitchen. Somehow, she had been dishonored because her husband died on her. If she had been born a few years earlier, she might have had to plunge into her husband's funeral pyre to save herself.

My own mother's marriage was arranged. She left her own family to live with strangers. She gave up her own ambitions, her dreams in life to do what was expected of her. She was not a stalwart feminist. Nor was she one to complain about the way women were treated in Indian society. But I know, from all our quiet conversations, that she endured. And she told me many years ago that she would never wish the same for me.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recognized the uphill climb for women in India.

"Our women faced discrimination at home, there is domestic violence, they face discrimination in equal access to education and health care," he said this week. "There are all these things. All these things have to end if India is to realise its full potential."

A bill was introduced 15 years ago reserving one-third of parliamentary seats for women. The male-dominated Rajya Sabha finally passed the bill on Tuesday. It next goes to the Lok Sabha for approval.

There's a long journey still ahead but the bill is a crucial first step to giving Indian women the voice they so richly deserve.

My mother died nine years ago. But I know she would have been proud of her homeland on this day.

The Hurt Locker: Ouch

2010-03-06T05:19:00.006-05:00

I'll be watching the Oscars on Sunday night, though this year, I am not as excited as I usually am. I've only seen two of the movies nominated for best picture: Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker.

The former is an entertaining movie even though George Clooney is George Clooney solely because he looks like George Clooney and not because of any Oscar-worthy talent.

The latter had the makings of a great movie, but the director lost me on the very first scene when the words "Baghdad 2004" flashed on screen and American soldiers were seen wearing the digital green combat uniforms. Those uniforms, of course, were not issued until May 2005. I know this because I was embedded with the 48th Infantry Brigade, the first unit to receive the re-engineered fatigues.

The camera panned wide to show a neighborhood in Baghdad that I instantly recognized as Amman, Jordan. There are no rolling hills in the Iraqi capital.

From there, other inaccuracies skewed my judgment of good filmmaking. I thought director Kathryn Bigelow perfectly captured the tension and adrenaline rush that goes with war, specifically with the job of a bomb detection specialist. But the lead character, played by Jeremy Renner, is too much of a cowboy. There's no way an EOD team leader would be able to run through the streets of Baghdad in a t-shirt and cammos and make it back to the gates of Camp Liberty and be allowed in without stern questioning and punishment. There's no way, a lone Humvee would leave the gates without a convoy and find itself way out in the Iraqi desert in a showdown with snipers.

My soldier friends agree with me that The Hurt Locker is rife with errors. So do a lot of EOD veterans who have been interviewed by various media outlets including my own, CNN.

I realize that the movie is a work of fiction. But the Iraq war is so fresh that I felt the film lost credibility by not getting things right. It wouldn't have taken much to correct those errors.

So while The Hurt Locker beautifully captures the addiction to war and what happens to soldiers who return to lives that seem mundane, the movie missed the mark with me.

I cannot hope that it trumps its contenders Sunday night. For the sake of truth. That's just the journalist in me, I suppose.

For Chile

2010-03-01T13:33:00.002-05:00

This weekend, as Chile suffered the wrath of an enormous earthquake, I reread one of my favorite poems by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.

Ode to Broken Things

Things get broken
at home
like they were pushed
by an invisible, deliberate smasher.
It's not my hands
or yours
It wasn't the girls
with their hard fingernails
or the motion of the planet.
It wasn't anything or anybody
It wasn't the wind
It wasn't the orange-colored noontime
Or night over the earth
It wasn't even the nose or the elbow
Or the hips getting bigger
or the ankle
or the air.
The plate broke, the lamp fell
All the flower pots tumbled over
one by one. That pot
which overflowed with scarlet
in the middle of October,
it got tired from all the violets
and another empty one
rolled round and round and round
all through winter
until it was only the powder
of a flowerpot,
a broken memory, shining dust.
And that clock
whose sound
was
the voice of our lives,
the secret
thread of our weeks,
which released
one by one, so many hours
for honey and silence
for so many births and jobs,
that clock also
fell
and its delicate blue guts
vibrated
among the broken glass
its wide heart
unsprung.

Life goes on grinding up
glass, wearing out clothes
making fragments
breaking down
forms
and what lasts through time
is like an island on a ship in the sea,
perishable
surrounded by dangerous fragility
by merciless waters and threats.

Let's put all our treasures together
-- the clocks, plates, cups cracked by the cold --
into a sack and carry them
to the sea
and let our possessions sink
into one alarming breaker
that sounds like a river.
May whatever breaks
be reconstructed by the sea
with the long labor of its tides.
So many useless things
which nobody broke
but which got broken anyway.

It's never too late to be what you might have been

2010-02-16T15:19:00.005-05:00

I met Mariot a few days after I arrived in Port-au-Prince. He was one of several drivers retained by CNN.

Mariot spoke English well, and often, on our long days out, we'd carry on conversations. About his life -- before and after the earthquake. I quickly figured out that he was special.

His full name is Jean Mariot Cleophat. He was born in 1983 in Bainet, a town in southern Haiti. His father was killed in 2000 in a burglary; Mariot lived with his mother, a brother and two sisters in the Haitian capital.

Life was not easy before tragedy struck January 12. He never attended schools, he told me. When he was nine, his grandmother began teaching him to read and write. He is fluent in his native Kreyol. He learned French and said he wanted to perfect his English. One day, he said, he wanted to write a book in English, one that would make it on the New York Times bestseller list.

He told me he owned more than 2,000 books and once things had settled, he planned to dig under the rubble of his house to find them. It was the second time his family had lost their possessions. A hurricane wiped out their house in Gonaives in 2004. That's what brought them to Port-au-Prince.

Mariot considered himself lucky to have landed a job, albeit temporary, with CNN. He liked acting as our guide, our translator. He met people he would have otherwise not met, saw places he had not seen before. In this photo of him, he is standing inside Gallerie Nader, one of the best known art galleries in Port-au-Prince.

He said he felt thankful to God that his family had survived the earthquake. He saw dead people in his dreams and when he was awake, he thought about the many friends he would never see again.

Still, he never gave up his will to succeed.

"It may be stormy now, but it can't rain forever," he wrote in an e-mail this week.

One day, as we drove back down to central Port-au-Prince on a winding hillside road, Mariot told me that reading was what sustained him through everything. He was upset that the library had collapsed and he could no longer check out books there. He liked history and philosophy. He read about Abraham Lincoln and Benjamin Franklin. He admired Mahatma Gandhi and asked me about my native India.

"It's never too late to be what you might have been," he said, quoting Gandhi.

"The past is behind you, learn from it," Mariot continued. "The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here. Live it."

"Do you know that quotation?" he asked.

I nodded my head, in awe that a Haitian man who had never gone to a single day of school could quote Gandhi this way. I don't know that many Indians who could do the same.

Mariot dropped me at the Plaza Hotel and I knew he would be going back to his family, surviving in a makeshift tent nearby. I knew that he would arrive again the next morning, in a freshly laundered shirt and a big smile on his face.