What is Tara?

I have been absent for quite a while.
I will share with you why:
I turned 20 on January 5. Amazingly, I couldn’t be happier about my life when I flipped the calendar to that date. I feel like the weight of getting through teenage years and becoming what I always hoped to be, is now off my shoulders. I see what I was: the 14 year old immigrant who stepped into a world of agitating dispossessions. And somehow between reading the works of the legendary Iranian writer Sadegh Hedayat and decoding Shakespearian old English at school, I realized I can consciously and attentively select each fragment of the future me. This may sound like a post-structuralist narrative of my growth, but in actuality of it I was perpetuating this image as far as I can remember.

And so, thanks to my Online Journalism class, I was pushed to start writing on this little blog of mine again. This program (journalism at Ryerson University) has been an interesting roller coaster of new uncertainties and old expositions. Since the first day of class, I tried to introduce myself as an ambitious “journalist” with a passion for politics and literature. I say politics, in its purest most philosophical nature. And I realized this is what I am going to do when at the age of seven I rescued 78 ants from drowning in a leak in our basement.
But you must understand, I still think and sing in Persian. I lack the tools to convey to you what I deeply mean inside, in this English-fluent world of today. My weapon is vocabulary, and I have yet to master it.


I am supposed to write about citizen journalism. You can check out its definition on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen_journalism.

There are people in my field of study/work that either want to look good in front of an Entertainment News camera, or take pictures of a 12-year-old abused girl in Oshawa. I am in no place to judge them or their goals but I can say this: I don’t want to write about shifting moments in human history, I want to be an agent of change, or revolutions, and fresh comprehensions. Is this too big of a bite? I don’t know! Only time can tell. But with the drive that I seek in me, with the movement I feel in my mind, I know I possess unique experiences that will lead me to this agency no matter what. However, if I don’t channel this towards something “good” it may become the most destructive force of my life.

Citizen Journalism? Yes. It is a great invention and discovery. If there is one good thing about technology and consumer capitalism it is our opportunity to voice out and record the present as we see it. AIDS, feminism, WTO, post-modernism, homosexuals, terrorism. These are the words defining the length of our insignificant short lives. Let us become politically aware, socially critical, and aesthetically functional.

My dearest reader, I come from a family that many envy and many detest. I come from a background that is the most misunderstood culture of the world. I have been exposed to experiences in such an early age you must never know or question:

Will you be my ant?