Posts Tagged ‘ Expat Family Life ’

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 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

By the time the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel opened, I’d practically memorized the trailer. Who can resist Judi Dench mistaking a gin and tonic for a glass of water, or Maggie Smith refusing to eat something she can’t pronounce? So, hooray, last weekend, I saw the film, a gentle comedy about seven British retirees who travel to what they think is going to be a luxury retirement hotel in Jaipur, India. I loved it, just loved it. I …Read More

At age ten, if you’d asked me what were the essential ingredients of the diplomatic life, I would have said, “clothes.” My family arrived in India a few months before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, an event that touched off celebrations in Commonwealth countries across the globe. India, then six years independent, was no exception. My mother found she needed at least half a dozen extra ball gowns for the parties in then sleepy Madras (now bustling Chennai.) …Read More

Growing up overseas, my sisters and I may have had a sketchy idea of what big ambassadors did, but we were pretty well drilled in the role of “little ambassadors,” to use my mother’s phrase. She had got it into her head that the world regarded American children as brats, and she wanted to reverse that opinion. So. No chewing gum in public. No running in airports. No screaming at the swimming pool. Shake hands with the grown-ups …Read More