<Begin Segment 30>

AI: Well, so then, as you were saying a little while ago, you felt it was time to move on. And how, when and how did you start thinking about going to India, going back to India, and how did that come about?

PJ: Well, I also wanted to go and write. I have always, the English literature thing, I pushed it to the background 'cause of my dad, and, but I, I won a children's writing competition when I was young, when I was seven, seven years old, I think, and the silver medal that Indra Gandhi was gonna present to me. And we were living in India and we were too poor for me to fly back. I remember being just devastated that I couldn't go and get this medal, but I've always had that thing of wanting to write, and so it was just this feeling that I wanted to, I wanted to go back to India, because I was working in all these countries -- and I was working in India as well -- but I kept thinking, "Why am I working in Africa when I don't even really understand India? And that's my home, and if I'm gonna make a contribution somewhere, maybe that's, maybe I need to go back and explore that first." And so that was there, and then all of the stuff around the, just the hierarchy within the development sector and feeling like I was getting to a more and more senior level, and just felt like I was becoming a little too much like everybody I was seeing around me, and I didn't want that. So, and then personally, having gone through this, I just felt like I needed to go back and figure out who was it and what was India in my life, and all of those things that sound almost trite but are so central to the human existence in this day and age when migration is at the highest level that it's ever been in this, in the world. And I think all of us have it, and maybe we think about that struggle in different ways, but it's more and more an issue, I think. And it was very central to me, and working in those countries made me think about it more and more. Like, who am I, and how do I fit and there, the insider/outsider thing, am I an insider or am I an outsider? I would go back to India, and I didn't speak the language. Hindi, I worked mostly in the north, and I didn't speak Hindi.

And so I just felt like I had to go back, and I heard from a friend of mine about this fabulous fellowship where you get to spend two years doing whatever you want. [Laughs] And obviously, you don't get paid for it, but your, all your expenses are paid and everything is paid, and it was like being paid, really, because you could do whatever you wanted for two years, and have a venue to get that kind of discovery out through your writing. So it was called the Institute, Institute of Current World Affairs, and I met a fabulously, fabulous woman named Carol Rose who had gotten the fellowship the year before, who had gone to Pakistan to do women's issues, and she had been a writer for the New York Times and then she ended up at Harvard Law School. Very bright woman, very articulate, capable, and she just said -- 'cause I was going through this thing about, well, I'm not going to save any money, and this is another -- my parents were, "What are you... you gave up the investment banking and then you went to Thailand," I mean, they were just beside themselves. They were finally like, "Okay, now she has a respectable job, she's the director of something." [Laughs] "And now she's gonna do what?" So I applied for this two-year fellowship to go to India to write about societal issues, but my essay was very much about the personal and the professional coming together, and about my belief that they shouldn't be so separate, and that they really needed to be, for me, very integrated, and I didn't know what that looked like, but... so that was my proposal. Modern Indian society, I made it as broad as I possibly could, so that I would have lots of leeway to do whatever I wanted. And the fellowship was literally completely free-flowing. Two years, you go wherever you want, the only requirement is that you have to write once a month, an article that gets published by the institute, and sent out to a wide network of people who were involved in international issues and international affairs. And a lot of them, kind of old-school State Department folks, but a lot of others as well. And so I proposed going and living mainly in the north, because it was the poorest area, and it's called an immersion fellowship. So you're supposed to immerse yourself in the issue or the culture and the language and everything.

So I learned Hindi, which was fabulous. I mean, I think if there's one thing that has given me my sense of connection to the country, in a way, it's being able to speak a language, because you know how quickly you feel out of a country when you go and you can't speak the language, but you look the same. And so I learned to speak Hindi, and I spent two wildly varied years doing all kinds of things. Looking at women's issues, child labor, globalization, the impact of globalization on modern, on traditional Indian society, and then looking at myself and figuring out, this was really, the title of my book, it was a pilgrimage to figure out who I really was.

<End Segment 30> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.