Politics & Power Quote by Jhumpa Lahiri

A small domestic ritual snaps into the posture of history. The father raising the volume and fussing with antennas is not just period detail; it’s the choreography of wanting clarity from a world that arrives distorted. Antennas imply imperfect reception, a signal you work for, an anxious proximity to events you can’t control. That physical adjustment becomes an immigrant-language gesture: translate, tune, make legible.

Lahiri’s genius is how she loads power into the ordinary. The narrator “usually” retreats into a book, a private, portable refuge. But the father’s insistence breaks that pattern. He’s not asking for shared entertainment; he’s demanding shared citizenship of the moment. “Pay attention” reads like an alarm and a lesson: to be safe, to belong, to understand where you stand, you must watch what the nation says about itself. The national news is framed as an institution with a start time, a liturgy; for the father it’s a source of authority and threat, especially for people whose relationship to “national” is complicated.

The subtext is generational and psychological. The child’s default is interiority; the father’s is vigilance. He’s training the narrator into his own kind of alertness, passing down the habit of scanning for weather changes in the culture. Lahiri keeps the sentence calm, almost flat, which is exactly why it hits: the quietness suggests the weight is not in the scene’s drama but in its inevitability. This is how big events enter a family - through volume knobs, antennas, and a sudden demand to look up.