By Shekhar Deshpande

We are so close to the pulse of life here, so involved in its rhythms that we are also participants in the tragedies that are American.

Death, they say, is a great equalizer. Everyone is the same in death; there are no nationalities, no class, no riches, no prejudices, nothing at all.
It is such a strong equalizing force that every culture begins to assert its own distinctive identity on the dead. We invent ways to remember the dead, but the rich and poor, white and brown, all are dead when they are dead. It is the memory they leave behind that makes them any different. Given this omnipresent strength of death, the news of the space shuttle Columbia disaster brought the sadness of loss of seven precious lives Sunday morning. Even the early news stories spoke of the deaths of six Americans, which included an Indian born American citizen.
Kalpana Chawla, her name now enshrined in the galaxy of super achievers, was a rare bird indeed.
She never thought of herself as an Indian in space. She was a citizen of the earth, she said. To mourn her death as an Indian, closer to our hearts as it is, is something less than what she desired.
She was an Indian for some of us and for the rest she was an American.
She may well be both.
While she deserves the universality of her identity, for having scaled the heights she did, she is also a hero in her own right, American or Indian. What is important for us to remember is that she was a part of American life. She was an American as well.
And, from that perspective, her death also brings to light another facet of our lives. We are so close to the pulse of life here, so involved in its rhythms that we are also participants in the tragedies that are American.
We have become integral to the flow of American life. It is quite often that we hear of the achievements of Indians, from the Silicon Valley to NASA to the cab drivers in New York City. As we breathe the flow of life here, we are also in the midst of events and tragedies American.
The 151 Indian deaths in the World Trade Center in 2001, even a sniper victim in the crazed shooting spree last year, and numerous other tragedies large and small that we read about in our local newspapers and watch on network TV, simply speak of the integral relationship we have to this culture.
It is testimony to our increasing unity with this culture that we remember Kalpana Chawla. She reminds us that we are Americans too and that we are citizens of the world too, just as we are Indian.
We need to keep that perspective in our minds as a fitting tribute to her role in the universe.

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