The Isle of Manhattan

was purchased by Peter Stuyvesant from Native Americans for the equivalent of $24 in beads.

Good deal? Only time will tell.

i spent the last three days with my family ducking in and out of various subway stations and "seeing the sites" of the big city. And according to my little sister, "seeing the sites" sometimes meant "getting a picture in front of Tiffany's" or "going in the NBC store," which was, to say the least, a bit superfluous.

But at least i got to be in the city again. i think i decided that this was my sixth time there, and i still love it. i love the madness, the frenzied energy, the exotic and diverse people, the attitude: basically the bustle of New York.

Unfortunately, however, i think i also found myself attracted by what i'll call the glitz of its materialism; i wanted to be the suave businessman, suit and tied executive with a cell phone on his ear and an itinerary at all the big hotels. i used to mentally chastise India for its money-hounding and grubbing, but in the couple of weeks since i've come back it's seemed to me that Americans have just been at it a lot longer and are a lot better at it.

What also struck me was the lack of English that i heard: my native tongue seemed almost a foreign language, and was definitely a minority among the samples i heard on the subways and streets. i like that.

We got to go to Ellis island where a third of America's ancestors entered the "Land of Opportunity. " They had mostly restored the place to the way it was 80 or 90 years ago when millions of people were pouring through there. The floors were tiled and the rooms were bare and cold. The bunk-"tarps" were piled three high and stretched down the center of a white room.

After seeing what i've seen in India, i'd have to say that the conditions, at least as they've been reconstructed, were pretty good. They had tons of hospital space, gave out free meals, and had lots of other kinds of staff support, and over 90% of the immigrants stayed less than a few hours.

Even with all this, however, it must have been a terrifying experience: being in a new land, not knowing the language, the roads, the people, the culture, the food, the diseases, etc. So my hat's off to the bravery and durability of a people long gone. i guess as i walking through the museum, i just got this sense that i was looking from non-reality to reality. Like i was outside experience looking in at real life. All of life had happened and passed before already, and i was just watching. But i guess that's the way of these "museums."

So when does life begin?