Note – sometimes posts and pages on this blog are password protected – if you are interested in reading and participating in those select discussions – email me and I might consider sending you a password.

If not – keep guessing:)

Usually – I leave most posts unprotected for about 5 to 6 hours (sometimes even more hours – sometimes not at all) after I post them before protecting them.

Of course both dana and frank have already detailed their analysis and viewpoints on this… I always appreciate how they blog about the most recent practices and journal their viewpoint and analysis – this becomes useful to me and my advisees as we continue our cyberethnographic explorations.

I have been gifting like crazy – sorta – and have to admit that I am a sucker for one dollar cheapies (besides it’s for a cause as well). To me this is another way in which e-commerce is functioning – perhaps getting what us academics dont always understand that clearly – that online practices are a part of our everyday life. They ARE daily practices – just look at the amount of work and conversation I got through being at home snowed in today – just the same amount (or more) as – if I had driven to my office and gotten back onto the computer…

anyway – here’s to gifting:)

Of course the fact that we had a snow day off made us all feel that being “in class” cheated us out of a holiday so we did not have “class” – but several of us met.

Does that mean I am going to say that my life is enriched by the Internet – hmmm – if you dont know me – you’d probably think that with all my blogging today…

and of COURSE I did not really talk about what I think about the gifting practices – I dont know yet…

you on your gmail chat

me on mine

sometimes finishing each other’s sentences – sometimes just seeing that the other is “available” or “idle”

Its morning for me – snowed in

Its night for you – children probably finally asleep

we sing together

we hum together

we fight
we argue

you sleep happy

I move on with my day happy

these wooden boxes travelled with us

at least my memories say they did

one smelled of the village my parents grew up in

invoking unremembered affective memories of a maternal (farming) grandfather

handing me sweets

and bananas – bananas from his fields

and his sister – my paternal grandmother teaching me to write

on a palaka with balapam

in telugu

[perhaps this is why my father's literacy always reached for his mother
and my mother made fruits and flowers out of earth wherever she had a patch of land]

The screeching of this dark wooden box – as they wove yarn out of cotton
is in chorus

with the humming of the other box that

trying to train my voice to sing melodiously to a beat

a beat I could never quite master

as the screeching of the the balapam

called to me to write in another language

taught to me by a white british lady in a land of very dark-skinned people

as my mother grew mangoes and snake-gourds on that patch of land

and I grew up with playmates climbing trees not knowing color differences

searching for community

trying to connect

it is the weaver in me that allows my child to program computers

it is the poet in my father that compels me to write

it is the singer in her that forces me to seek shruti

always falling out of taalam – missing a beat once too often

the creaking old box with the smell of cotton and wood – the musty rurality connecting

with the patches of earth

It is the weaver in you that teaches you your perfect rhythm

as you sing and seek
It is the musician in him that allows him to lead you to sing

It is her desire for literacy that aids my struggle to write

dialoguing with a community of old men and their ghosts …

Gayathri was here for the Provost Lecture Series – but of course because of the snow storm it had to be crammed in before nightfall.

So I waded through the snow in the Corolla and met her for lunch with V, D, S and M at Cohen and Cooke -and then after that we had the seminar with her and soon after she did her talk amid the cosy group.

I enjoyed meeting and connecting with her on a lot of issues. Looking forward to future conversations.

http://cyberdiva.org/729
to start in March.

see http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2007/02/08/kumaari/

South Indian classical singing and mocking of the figure of the non-modern South Indian Brahmin play out in different ways in each of these clips – but both center around the notion of romancing the heroine and relate to modernity and the image of the westernized woman with “class”…