The Ear Cleaner of Delhi
Brad Newsham meets kindly denizens of the park at Connaught Circle. Brad is a San Francisco cabbie and travel writer, organizer of Beach Impeach (spelling out 'Impeach' with hundreds of bodies, photographed from a helicopter). See bradnewsham.com and beachimpeach.org.
lovely story! I will think about it for a long time.
What a touching (and funny) story! I imagine the Japanese woman reading the English (which is most likely not her 1st language) and translating it (or having it translated to her), and how the letter itself was written by a proxy who'd only known the "real author" for a few minutes.
How interesting it is to think about how we communicate with one another, what filters the words go through and yet how much importance we put upon each word (especially as writers), and sometimes perhaps we forget that the primary goal of all that specificity is to clearly convey universal sentiments that are, by their very nature, much more general.
Languages, all their differences and all their similarities, can tell us so much about who we really are, I suppose...
some brilliant lines in this story, makes me want to clean my own ears
