The employee ID card I got when I started working here 1.3 years ago lasted only as long as the employment visa in my passport, which lasted until March 2023. My visa was extended and then yesterday I received a new employee ID card. Note that the two photos of me look different (Fig. 1a,b). …
Author Archives: Saskya
Travel, family, work and no evidence of cancer
I have been reflecting some on the subjectivity of being from someplace. We are from the address or city or country where we are born, or from around the corner or from the other room, or any place or time in between, depending on context. I am in a writing group that is based in …
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Fruit, butterflies and Kannada
Last time I wrote from Jerusalem with mild covid. I have been back in Bangalore now for a couple of months. This blog entry is to give you an idea of what it has been like. The last month has been warm 90-95 F (~32-35 C) and dusty, but now there are starting to be …
11 Biet Hakerem
As we go through life, as I go through my life, mostly what happens follows more or less from what happened before. I am rarely inexplicably someplace doing something without understanding how it came to be. But occasionally there is so much change and confluence of new things that it feels incomprehensible. Such a moment …
Pumpkin pie, deities and claustrophobia
As someone who grew up and has lived a long time in the US I am on pretty firm ground thinking and writing about Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, at least the Hanukkah that manifests in the US given that Christmas is what it is. I know their histories and I have opinions about them. When special …
Life around Gulmohar Marg
I have been waiting over the last couple of weeks for inspiration to write about what it is like to begin to live in Bangalore. That inspiration hasn’t come yet. But some of you are curious about things here so I have assembled some photos and videos for you to look at. They are all …
Travel to Bangalore during Covid times
I left Ithaca Monday at noon by bus to New York. I took an Uber to JFK, flew to London, and then flew to Bangalore, arriving here at 5 am on Wednesday. In order to do this I had to take two covid tests so that I would have evidence of a negative test within …
The birthday gift I didn’t know I got
I wrote my last blog entry, about the loss of a half a thyroid along with its cancer, the morning after the surgery. That was during a calm moment similar to right now. I had no idea how short that moment was going to be. An hour later I was chilled, and soon I was …
The left lobe of my thyroid’s last day
Last week Dr. Lee, the endocrine surgeon, drew this handy diagram of my thyroid, showing the thyroid cancer, the nearby nerves and windpipe, and the four parathyroid glands. And she listed the possible things to do about it (fig. 1, pink labels added). Then Monday this week I met …
Not done yet
I admit that I was thinking that this blog had run it’s course and would fade off. Or if I were energetic it would reconfigure as a blog about my move to India, which is of interest or potentially entertaining to some of you. It will eventually fade away or transform into a blog about …