Personal NYer

Anyone who has studied in country X (eg., India) and moved to country Y (e.g., US) for graduate school, has a story -- of triumph, hard work, luck, or entitlement. In my case, I have been asked many times why I went to grad school at the Courant Inst, NYU. I remember reading the New Yorker magazine --- issues several months late --- when I was in college in India. I loved the writing, sketches, font and even the discreet ads on the right. When I had to choose graduate school, I chose NY, which I thought was like in the NYer, mainly darkened sketches and outlines with a manageable geometry.

The NYer continues to thrill me. The Jan 12th edition has many gems. One a quote from Hilary Clinton about Bill, "He's never met a sentence he couldn't fool with." Another, a review of the film Defiance about the survival of a group of Jewish people in a forest during World War II, says: "The farmers or workingclass men who could shoot, gut an animal, and build a shelter were sought out as protectors by the women, including the educated, upper-class women; the formerly desirable scholars of Hegel, Marx and the Talmud were not." It is a time of reversals.