I thought Jhumpa Lahiri's Indian Takeout provided an apt description of a Bengali household's trip back home from USA:
"The most sensational gadget we ever transported was a sil-nora, an ancient food processor of sorts, which consists of a massive clublike pestle and a slab the size, shape and weight of a headstone. Bewildered relatives shook their heads, and airport workers in both hemispheres must have cursed us. For a while my mother actually used it, pounding garlic cloves by hand instead of pressing a button on the Osterizer. Then it turned into a decorative device, propped up on the kitchen counter. It’s in the basement now."
I also loved the following lines in Rudrangshu Mukherjee essay about myth making in Indian history in the Telegraph (Via Indian Writing).
Towards the end of Bertolt Brecht’s play, The Life of Galileo, there is a scene in which his three pupils and his daughter are waiting for the verdict of the Inquisition on Galileo. .... The daughter is praying that Galileo will recant. The pupils are confident that their master will never recant and betray the cause of science. The bells of St Mark’s begin to toll announcing that Galileo has recanted. Galileo enters the stage, completely altered by the trial, utterly unrecognizable. As he enters, he hears one of his pupils declaim, “Unhappy the land that has no heroes.” Galileo sits down on a stool and the dramatist makes him utter calmly the following line, “No. Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes.”
Then there is this advice on how to deal with information overload:
I'm a grad student in literature, so for me 'reading it all' is not just a personal goal, but a professional one too. From a more concrete perspective, here are the actual particular strategies I have employed over the last couple of years to get rid of this anxiety and get a lot of reading done.
1. As others have said, get thee to a library--or, if not to a library, to a quiet place where you can listen to music, read books, watch movies, or whatever. For all you know, this quiet place could be home--or it could be a coffee shop. But it helps a lot to have peace and quiet.
2. It also helps to have no internet. The reason the internet is bad is because most of it is meta-information, though obviously there are exceptions. One of my professors in graduate school told me once that the only way to learn anything was by "sustained attention to primary sources." This is an academic way of saying that, instead of spending thirty minutes reading all of the movie reviews on Metacritic, it's better to go see the movie. ....."
Read the whole thing.