So its a new year. But it feels a bit like work in progress if you know what I mean. So the feeling of the passing of time hasn' really affected me this year. If only I couuld settle down this way for my birthdays :p

I've been reading a most marvellous book: Greece in the bronze ages. Its better than all the fantasy and alternative history I read. I really should stick more to the history genre. There is a deep feeling that surfaces through my perusal of the book. I feel drawn to the men and women of the times, their efforts, their migrations. Its amazing. For all my modern thinking and education, and for all of everyone elses, how would we ever bear a life like that? Insecurity, fear of man and animal and love for fertility, growth and renewal. And the cycles that pass, growth and fall, that passing time did not always mean growth.

I wonder how much of what we read and our culture harks back to those times and to what extent the memory lives on. Heroes, Myths, Drama, the well worn plots.

I am so very western in my culture though. Where is the bengali part of me? Where is my cultural memory? I do read about it. I think about the villages, my ancestors (recorded for 17 generations, I feel oddly happy about that. It's not pride exactly. Just a pleasant feeling and knowledge of where I come from.) But even with these, I don't really think of myself as a bengali. Unfortunately I am whatever I feel. I am the matriarch of hominids in africa. I am the woman on the raft migrations to australasia. I am the invader, the migrator, the claimer of new lands. I am the opressed, an enslaved conquered, I secrete traditions to mingle with the new masters'. I am a woman of a village, the life soul binding it and bringer of hope for a new generation to keep the culture memory alive. But now? What am I now? I am just a thinker, an existor. That was quite an accolade in the past. To be intelligent, to survive. It means less now but I will keep the compliment I have paid myself.