Posts Tagged ‘ Americans in India ’

Hello, all. Here are some more Travancore Sisters pics from my parents’ photo albums. A formal portrait of Ragini and Padmini: A couple more of Ragini: The three informal snaps below are faded and scratched, but I can’t resist posting them anyway. All were taken in Chennai, c. 1954. Ragini with her brother, Chandran: Ragini with my little sister, Jane: Aren’t Ragini’s braids fantastic! Finally, Padmini with Woodmans: Padmini’s got me, and I’ve got Jane. Lee’s on the …Read More

I’m just back from New York City, where I had a great visit with my childhood friend, Deborah Keehn. Debby and I were friends in Delhi, where we took Bharatanatyam dance lessons together. Later, we were Woodstock School roommates. Here we are on a typical Saturday morning, busily cleaning our dorm room. We had to pass room inspection before we could go to “the buzz,” as we called the bazaar in Mussoorie. See? All cleaned up! I had …Read More

Greetings for the Big Day–in other words, Merry Christmas! Christmas Eve in India, we hung stockings in preparation for Santa’s coming, as in this 1958 photo. My sisters Deborah and Jane are standing on three-legged stools that tended to be tippy, but somehow we escaped mishaps. The Nataraj on the mantelpiece (Lord Siva as cosmic dancer) witnessed many such ceremonies. The suitcase-y thing on the right was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, playing “White Christmas” and “let it snow, …Read More

Our house in New Delhi got flooded, in 1958. It was during the monsoon season, and a drainage ditch near our house overflowed its embankments, leaving a foot or so of water on the ground floor of the houses in our neighborhood. I hate to think of what was floating around in that water, but I ended up wading in it as my dad took pictures. You can see the high water mark on the living room wall. …Read More

I was about to throw out a shoebox of cassette tapes the other day, but instead, popped one into a portable cassette player (also retrieved from the dark corners of a closet) and had a listen. The tape was of my sister Lee interviewing my dad in 2002. Most of the lore had been ingrained in our heads, but I’d forgotten exactly how my dad, Everett Woodman, had met his retired schoolteacher friend, P. A. Thiruvenkatachari, “Mr. Patch,” …Read More

As I have mentioned, our next-door neighbors, Lalitha, Padmini, and Ragini, were in and out of our house in Chennai a lot. Left to right: Lalitha, Ragini, Padmini Lalitha and Ragini, alas, died way too young, but Padmini and my parents remained in touch for decades. All three stars live on in their Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Hindi movies. The Travancore Sisters’ cousins, Ambika and Sukumari, were dancers and film actors, too. Sukumari (born in 1941) is still …Read More

Every couple of years, we came back to the United States from India for about three months. Some things my sisters and I loved about home leave: ice cream, television, and magazines to name a few. Other things we were less fond of, including running the gauntlet of inquiring relatives at family reunions. We could predict the questions: Have you ever seen the Taj Mahal? Have you ever ridden on an elephant? My sister Lee and I both …Read More

I’m looking through my dad’s address book. It’s got a worn green leather cover, and is bulging at the seams with stuff he inserted. He obviously copied some items over from an earlier book, but also taped in addresses from torn off corners of envelopes, return address labels, scraps of notebook paper, stickies of every color. Some things, especially notes to himself, he didn’t tape down, so you have to turn the pages carefully or bits of paper …Read More

I was asked recently to list the most striking differences between India of the early 1960s and India today. Oh my! Call in the pundits. For starters, then, there were about 440 million people in India; now, there are more than 1.2 billion. The cities have exploded—greater Delhi, for example, has gone from about 2.6 million to about 17 million. India is now one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. Perhaps most importantly, the communications revolution has arrived, …Read More

Ninety-five percent of Indians marry within their own ethnic, religious, and cultural communities, said Dr. Shashi Tharoor, member of the Indian Parliament, in a recent speech to the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata. It’s fair to guess, also, that a big percentage—probably most—marriages in India are arranged by parents or family elders. Wandering Americans don’t fit into this picture very often, but strange things do happen. A Woodstock School alumna told of an encounter she had in …Read More