First of all, I didn’t see much differences in characterization in this books. Those crowd are highly educated( If you read inheritage of Loss, many immigrants live like a rat because they have no paper, even in other Hindi movies, people from Third world like us have a hard time surviving in the US). The text refer several times to where people have gone to school like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Brown, Sorbonne, Heideburg or jadavpur. For people like them, they can make almost everywhere in the world home. Most people in this book read, read and read.
Reading makes a great people! I guess the act of reading is the act of re-memorization as books contains some kind of experience even though it might not be 100% true experience.
Like other comments people made, their life is comfortable, they were treated with respect but they lost somehow in the " in-between" settings. Something I disagree with some MS member is that I don’t think Gogol rejects his South Asian Identity. The way he tried to retrive the good name Nikhil, the way he know without being told to shave his head when his father died( and say No to Maxime, the girl that I don’t like at all). But the way he was growing up is very very American sytle. He can’t read and write Bengali. In his English class, all the books assigned are nothing related to from his parents came from( in other words, American kids know nothing about the third world’s country). It’s different in California or Minnesota where a lot of non white people learn their non-white stuff in school. I believe in Hawaii too where different languages’s lessons are provided in school. So, when he met Moushumi who masters 3 languages( Moushumi lost her british accent too), I think it’s a first step that he give a time for himself to look at his own spiritual mirror.
Back in March 2007, I had a chance to see the movie in San Francisco and I felt the same way Ashima felt that America is so lonely. I told my parents about how good the cloth dryer machine is but never told them how lonely I am.
I went back to Chaing Mai to complete my dissertation but I can’t find the book in Thailand. Until I went back to America again that now I have 3 library cards, and I just finish reading the whole book. The book adds a lot of thing the movie can’t put in within 2 hours’ length( Mostly about Bengali tradition). In my post-colonial seminar room, my professor had asked me " Raphiphat, What’s the sense of home?", and I told her right away that " home is where my parents are". Therefore, I love the ending of the book that some people to turn back to their old home and negotiate the sense of home and family. Ashima never refer the house on Perberton Rd as a home until 33 years has passed that she realized that home is where how she learnt to love her husband, how to drive and how to be a mother.
I didn’t know the fact that Gogol is not always a home because he lives for 4 hours away by train from where their parents are.
Lastly, I think the core of this text is sense of family. I would say I admire Ganguli people. The way they pass on culture on their children without rigid forcing.