Today since morning, I woke up thinking stillness. I looked outside my balcony and the trees were still, the sky was cloudy, as if pregnant with thousands bolts of lightning inside, waiting for the right time to explode. I paused and looked outside. I switched on my computer but couldn’t get myself to sit at home and work. So I decided to walk down to the cafe.

Right now, I am sitting at the New Deal Cafe. The cafe has big windows and when you look outside, you can see beautiful flowers of different colors – yellow, pink, white. There is greenery all around. The weather is perfect, you really don’t need air-conditioning. The walls are painted orange and blue. The tables are covered with red linen. The chairs are antique. At one end of the cafe there is a raised stage which comes alive usually in the evenings when there are musical performances. A man sitting behind the wall is playing away on the keyboard, filling notes in an otherwise quiet afternoon. The sun plays hide and seek, the leaves swaying gently as if dancing to the rhythm of this beautiful sunny perfect restful afternoon.

On a restful afternoon, I experience a perfect symphony. Harmony that is so missing from our lives. At this time, my fingers flow on the keyboard, words waiting to be written. Sometimes life just becomes effortless, as it does now. Life is in the pauses, we might run and hurry… but what we really need are the pauses… to immerse ourselves in this beautiful symphony and experience the harmony.

Sometimes the little things add such an interesting twist to a very mundane, routine life…..

Today, in my class a student made a presentation on Fareed Zakaria. Although I have known about him for a while, I don’t know much about him. The student said, that she totally idolizes Zakaria and one day hopes to be what he is. She specifically quoted him from his article, The Power of Personality which appeared in NewsWeek on Dec 24, 2007.

But when I think about what is truly distinctive about the way I look at the world, about the advantage that I may have over others in understanding foreign affairs, it is that I know what it means not to be an American. I know intimately the attraction, the repulsion, the hopes, the disappointments that the other 95 percent of humanity feels when thinking about this country. I know it because for a good part of my life, I wasn’t an American. I was the outsider, growing up 8,000 miles away from the centers of power, being shaped by forces over which my country had no control.

When I hear confident claims about liberty and democracy in the Third World, I always think about rural India, where I spent a great deal of time when I was young, and wonder what those peasants struggling to survive would make of the abstractions of the American Enterprise Institute. When I read commentators fulminating about women wearing the burqa—which I don’t much like either—I think about one of my aunts, who has always worn one, and of the many complex reasons she keeps it on, none of which involves approval of misogyny or support for suicide bombers. When I talk to people in a foreign country, no matter how strange, they are always, at some level, familiar to me.

I couldn’t do my job well without the expertise. But any insights I have are thoroughly informed by the perspective and judgment that I’ve gained from being first a foreigner, then a foreign student, then an aspiring immigrant and now an American. My biography has helped me put my book learning in context, made for a richer interaction with foreigners and helped me see the world from many angles. So I understand what Obama means when he talks about his life and its lessons.

These words got me thinking about the importance of both education and experience. I truly agree when he says that our experience puts our education in perspective. Because if we discount our experience, then probably we will be building an insular world.