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Showing posts from August, 2014

(Such) A long journey

What I started out as a review for the book Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry became a comparative study on stories included in the English text books in school, say class 5. Such a long journey indeed! We had three, Main-course, Workbook and Reader. Later we called them Textbook, Workbook and Non-detail. As I started reading the book, I thought this and other short stories and novels by Rohinton Mistry and Amitav Ghosh should be included in English readers or non-detail. This book particularly, even teaches you a few words like it should. I guess I thought that because the author wanted me to, being suggestive with his tiny bits of mockery of the English reader that we normally use when little Roshan starts thinking of the objects from an English lifestyle that she learnt in her convent school. It reminded me of my earliest memory of such an experience. Banana split. That's what a 12 year old girl wanted when her mother meets a man who tries to sell her an umbrella in T

Paris yet again

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It was as lovely as I remembered and surprisingly less dirty. It was again booked only a week in advance just like my last trip to Paris. But this one was mostly because K needed to get a new passport because he travelled too much and I needed to renew my UK visa and then both of us needed to get new Schengen visas. We flew in this time. Because Eurostar is way too expensive if you don't book ahead and we were getting flights through some points. The flight is so short that the trolley selling food barely made it through the length of the plane; (the flight to Amsterdam was even shorter with a 45min flying time). It was a beautiful hotel we stayed in. Very pretty with decorative walls and traditional French interiors. They had a little room where the entire wall was used as a canvas for a pretty elaborate painting. Our room also had a little balcony and it was in a good location at a walking distance from arc de triumph and tour Eiffel but it's a little less close to the p

Amsterdam

It's interesting. By far the most interesting city I've been to. How is it that everyone in this city is so upright and so correct in this city. Of course, the only way to be always correct is to be truthfully tolerant about life, universe and everything else. Isn't that a lovely thought! The only way to be 'right' is to have an opinion and yet accept all other opinions with equal grace unlike brooding over any opinion to be 'right'! I digress. I think this city is a lesson in timeless tolerance, a lesson in the understanding righteousness, a lesson in drawing your own lines and making sure you don't step on others' lines and ensuring they don't step on yours. The most incredible people Dutch are. It's like Dagny Taggart found John Galt! So this attitude seeps into the entirety of the city. In its many canals where people just sit on boats and float away like the world doesn't matter to them. In its many streets where people bike a

Americanah

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The language was fluent, almost like poetry at times. The content was similar. It's a Nigerian take on Nigeria and on America; a little on England as well but it was constrained to illegal immigration and not cultural observation. The blatant statements with which the cultural differences are explained, subtly give you more insight into the Nigerian culture and how the political change had unveiled a richness in Nigeria for the public that was so unexpected in their life time. May be it's too simplistic to say this: but if Lagos was replaced with Mumbai, Abuja with Delhi, Igbo with Gujarati, the political change with the 1991 opening up of the Indian markets, and changed all the names to traditionally common Indian names except Dike which would be a modernised Indian name, the Nigerian culture is not too different. There would be men who made a lot of money on corrupt real estate deals in Mumbai. Most of them would not have ethics and talk like Obinze's friends.