However, if you look at the gorgeous little Dame in the picture and dwell on her geographic, demographic and cultural surrounds, you might get the drift of the headline and the context in which it is written.

Snehal Sinha is a GenY Bishnupriya Manipuri kid, born and brought up in the United States of America. At her age, Snehal is already living the great ‘American Dream’ of 'availing the opportunity of making an individual choice without the restrictions of class, caste, religion, race or ethnic group.’ And how!
As I mull over, Snehal compels me to draw an analogy between her photograph and the iconic photograph of the Woodstock couple that made it to the cover of the Woodstock album in 1970.

While Nick and Bobby dissipate the surrounding crowd and its chaos through their timeless embrace in their own solitude, Snehal’s attire reflects a strange purity that’s hard to define. Both the photographs have significant statements to make.

At one level Nick and Bobby’s cult photograph can be termed as an honest raconteur of their generation, a fact endorsed by the couple and many others of that era. At another Snehal’s photograph proposes a beautiful philosophy – the philosophy of co-existence.
It demonstrates how two individualities, two cultures can co-exist in harmony within one human being. It also dumps prevalent theories of compelled cultural digress as a result of a geographical shift. To be an American, being an American, Snehal isn’t disconnecting her roots. She seems to be a perfect American and a perfect Bishnupriya Manipuri at the same time. The Dame seems to be playing both the roles with incredible finesse. A perfect 10 to her parents, Bimal Sinha (a software engineer in California, USA) and Shila Sinha for teaching all of us a great lesson through this cute little package that,  it is your  WILL that decides your cultural connect and not the number of kilometers that divides you from your state, your country, your town or  your village.

The more I look at Snehal’s picture the more I wonder how some people staying just 40 kilometers away from Patherkandi or a flight away from Agartala cannot speak in Bishnupriya Manipuri, their own mother tongue!

Million thanks to Santosh Singha, for sending us these wonderful pics.