In both my personal and political life, I have been, I suppose, on the extreme edge of typical American individualism, focused on civil rights and civil liberties, as well as my own right to independence. Yet even way back in college, I was intrigued by the question of whether freedom or security is more important. And once again, in our American political life, those questions are at the core of foreign and domestic policy (insofar as it is not about the simpler matters of greed and power and chicanery). When I view the issues through an American lens, they seem not so terribly complex. But turning to a South Asian (or American Indian or Latin) prism, the complexities and paradoxes and tensions of freedom/security are writ large.