Lessons

1. On India: After watching and chronicling equal proportions of sad and happy, ugly and beautiful, I've realized that nothing in India is as good or bad as it seems. And that I have no right to become desensitized to any of it -- not the pain or the joy, the beggars or the Bollywood, because it has somehow come together and allowed me to be here.

2. On Work: The more I work, the more I recognize the signs of a biased system -- from the people I interview thinking I'm a student, to editors discrediting my ability to work independently. If you're a woman you have probably been wired to underrate yourself when it matters most-- I know that I am. But knowing that has only made me work harder, and somewhat more fearlessly, to become better at what I do and unlearn those invisible boundaries.

3. On Men: Just kidding, I've learned nothing about this species.

4. On Money: People always ask me about money when they hear that I'm a freelancer and are surprised when I say that it's hardly an issue. I attribute this to two things -- learning to live simply and happily without too much stuff, and not succumbing to the atmosphere of deprivation and competition that we're told surrounds us all the time.

5. On Being Alone: Last year I walked out of the airport in Hyderabad after one of many trips and had a sinking feeling when I realized no one would be waiting for me, as usual. Then last week I reveled in the liberating luxury of a 20 hour train ride all to myself with a podcast and Caravan. Making friends with solitude is an ongoing challenge, but possibly the most fulfilling of all these lessons.

Eyes On My Body, Rage In My Head

Today there are celebrations across India -- the four rapists that brutally attacked a woman and her partner on a bus last year have been sentenced to death.

My friends are cheering. They post stuff and send me texts that justice is being served. But that euphoria seems more like tiger balm -- satisfying in a strange, tingly way, but only until it rubs off. Then you're just left with the ache.

There are some things that don't wash away. I resonate in part with this widely circulated essay from a an American student in India -- the constant feeling of eyes on your body is a silent, pervasive trauma. It's the kind of thing that turns your wonderment into dull, passive rage, your aimless saunter into a hurried walk.

It's not just an India problem. It's in my backyard and every country I've visited.

The worst moments for me were actually in Italy, where American study abroad kids can be like a drunken scar on the face of a beautiful city. But I wasn't drunk when I was followed for blocks down cobblestone streets, or when some guy pinned me against a wall in a club and stuck his hands down the waistline of my jeans.

I was told these weren't Italians. They were undocumented workers preying on American girls. But paperwork means nothing when you feel unwanted eyes and hands on your body.

In India, the frustration was paired with an experiment. I lived for a short while in the kind of community described in these context pieces about the Delhi rape. But it quickly became home, the stares become curiosity, and I had enough guardians in the families I knew that uneasiness became a thing of the past.

I became human there, in a slow and deliberate way. But only within that one square mile -- there were, of course, other times that shook me to the core.

This is not about  my story, though, it's a collective narrative. We don't get to write the plot through our single blogs and Facebook posts -- it's in the way boys are raised, and what girls see in the mirror. The way they sit together in school, and what it means to hold hands. The true meaning of consent.

Because until that happens, these stirring moments are not tipping points, they are just headlines. And I can safely say that's not justice.

Waking Up The District

Early morning is the same in every city.

My current job comes with a 6:30 a.m. start time, so I've tossed my grad school schedule to the wind and reverted to a schedule that actually fits with my natural cadence.

As I navigate my bike down 14th street, the sky is usually just giving in to daylight. Horns don't honk this early, and bus drivers don't swerve across the bicycle lanes. Even cat calls are subdued.

In the early morning, only people with hard bodies are on the road. Construction workers, cracking jokes and eating egg mcmuffins, pretending to jump out of the road when I coast by their trucks. A laborer on a rusty cycle challenges me to a race, and we tear down the empty street, me in a white pencil skirt, him in faded Lee denim with a dusty hand print on the pocket.

There are runners, determined and unsmiling, their eyes glued to the uneven sidewalks. Women do lunges on the steps of the Masonic temple for their bootcamp session, with matching sports bras and workout pants.

When I get to Metro Center, there is  music. A full jazz band with an open case for money, or a single guy in a wheelchair with a saxophone, tapping out My Favorite Things, waking sleepy commuters.

And there's a woman who sleeps in a box that's woven together with bits of plastic bags. She always comes out when I'm locking up at the stand, the same time each day, and rolls a small red shopping cart out of her home before collapsing the cardboard to the ground.

Sometimes she wakes up another homeless guy stretched out a few feet away. "It's already six-thirty," she says, gently. They sit together, backs to the glass of a shut-down store, until the quarter-to-seven bell rings at  the white church with red windows across G street. 

Facebook/Off

As someone tapped into media both professionally and socially, I've been having frequent discussions about how people portray themselves online.

You know exactly what I'm talking about -- the perpetually drunk college girl tweeting about spirituality and quoting Rumi while posting pics of spring break; people who make their one night off in med school per week look like an episode of the Kardashians.

On the flip side, I read an article reporting that people are more likely to be honest on LinkedIn than in the cover letters and resumes they send for job applications. The fact that your family and friends can call you out when you turn coffee-filling into a leadership skill might keep the white lies at bay.

I've started to wonder if the way we project ourselves on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media medium is the way we actually see ourselves, or the way we want to see ourselves. And is this a bad thing? Maybe the person who we strive to look like via Facebook is a manifestation of our personal ideal. Well-read, well-traveled, active in our community, introspective -- those don't sound like bad qualities to aspire to, even if it takes "checking in" at your nearby coffee shop poetry slam to get in the mood.

So I started to look at my own use of social networks to see where the discrepancies lie between what I might be perceived as, and who I am:

Facebook Ankita: Big timeline picture of me backpacking through a rural area on a dirt road. Multiple photos of India or Indian things. Surrounded my nature and lots of beautiful little kids. A New York Times article.

Real Ankita: Yeah, I did that, I loved it, but I've spent more time in American suburbs than anywhere else. I'm really bad at hiking, especially in groups. It's true I'm obsessed with my students. Also, that was my one and only article of many that were pitched.

Twitter Ankita: Last three tweets were about Nick Kristof, famous yoga instructor Shiva Rea, and Indian politics.

Real Ankita: I catch up on Kristof columns but I'm hardly a regular. I started doing yoga regularly after a YEAR LONG HIATUS. I only pay attention to Indian politics during crisis. I actually read the news less than my sister unless I'm writing it.

LinkedIn Ankita: A schizophrenic list of internships in five different states, including Punjab. Not exactly sure where this person is headed, but I know she likes to write.

Real Ankita: Pretty much true, except my time at INSite magazine was short lived and flaky.

See what I mean? It's not that I lie, but the truth about my daily life seems disproportionate to the excitement of my social media existence.

I really value the people who are completely consistent, oscillating fluidly between their online and in person selves.. Our dean of students Sree Sreenivasan has this crazy social media presence with over 20,000 Twitter followers. But it's that same network that has led me to awesome sources, advice and published articles.

My friend Evan has a daring, Vice-like edgy blog that I could never write in a million years without picturing my parents' faces and crawling into a shameful corner. My college roommate and close friend Caity has devoted her Facebook to Teach For America and when I crave stories about her social life, I have to resort to actually talking to her because her passion for education is entrenched in each status update. And I recently went to a bar with my friend Ranjodh and talked about the same sort of philosophical and Gandhian ideas I reflected on his blog and Facebook.

I think social media is a powerful, inevitable tool and I fully embrace its possibilities. But I have to wonder how I can turn the focus on ego, self-branding, and the art of the humblebrag into an actual means of affecting change.

Okay, I'm off to a yoga class to live up to my personal website About Me page.

Awkward Culture

Earlier this week I took a yoga class at a new studio in Hell's Kitchen. In the first 10 minutes I was able to knock down my Klean Kanteen, spill water all over the floor, soak the bottom rim of my pantlegs and create some sort of foamy-suds effect on my mat. The rest of my practice followed suit -- slip-and-slide vinyasa flow, falling out of a headstand, the whole works. By the time we ended with namaste, I was exhausted, and not because of crow pose.

When I was little (no, that person above is not me), I remember visiting relatives in India, dangling my feet off a low bed, while my grandmother told our family I was "overconfident". I was too much of a fan of myself to be embarrassed.

In the past few years I've become more sensitive to little misspeaks, to tension, to bad timing. I freak out when I have to meet new people or interview them, even though I've never had a problem being social. Sometimes if I'm going to a party where I don't know many people, I have to give myself this cheesy pep talk (yeah, I admitted it) before I walk in the door. But thanks to social media, those moments are now chronicled in a mental Twitter account. Trying to network with an aloof editor? #mylifeisawkward Falling on the subway steps? #FML I have a feeling these little labels are making us ignore the fact the life is not meant to be smooth and elegant.

On the flip side, the current entertainment industry embraces awkward, plays it up and makes it okay. As if people got sick of the perfect, the picket fence and the straight blonde hair and presented a counterculture that was, actually, what they normally would have cut off and left on the floor of the editing room. Kind of like Freaks and Geeks, you know, before it was cool. There's that MTV show, "Awkward". There's Lena Dunham, a director/writer/actor you will know when HBO's Girls comes out, who essentially makes insecurity a whole plot line. Awkward Family Photos are pretty much the best thing ever, and make you feel happily normal with your own chaotic kin.

If you look at fashion, especially so-called hipster looks, awkward and beauty mesh together seamlessly in American Apparel jumpsuits. High pants and short sweaters and thick-framed glasses -- things you would never peg as flattering. In film, there's Napoleon Dynamite, Our Idiot Brother, Juno and Superbad. Michael Cera and Zooey Deschanel basically have a career because they play roles with squeaky voices and foot-in-mouth situations, and they do it well.

At the end of the ugly, the weird, the zoomed-in focus on zits and the lumpy bodies and verbal collisions, awkward culture is almost like an homage to the imperfect. It celebrates the lifey-ness, the subtle glamour, the grainy reality of being a human. I'm down with that.