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Showing posts from November, 2014

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

4/5 rating Behind the Beautiful Forevers | National Theatre Katherine Boo, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist went to a slum in Mumbai next to the airport called Annawadi and spent three years there living and learning with the slum-dwellers who are mostly rag-pickers. After her return to New York, she wrote a book, a non-fiction narrative about the lives of the people. I haven't read it. The book was adapted into a play by David Hare who spent time with Katherine and then in Annawadi. It's playing in London at the National Theatre,  Nov-Apr . I went to it this weekend. The audience was largely non-Indian (not even of origin) and also for some reason the average age was much higher as well, say 50. So the people sitting next to us got an interesting perspective I guess. The first half was very well done. The choice of music was the highlight. The sets were used beautifully to create various effects like a flight landing close by and at one point it literally rains plas

Fighting classroom hunger - Akshaya Patra

The possibilities: I am going to #BlogToFeedAChild with  Akshaya Patra   and   BlogAdda . In ancient India, the gurukula system of education was the most prominent. Most people associate gurukula system with a residential education system and we do have a few now. At school level they are considered expensive because you need to pay for food and boarding as well. But the other thing about a gurukula was that it was a self-sustained unit. It taught children not just science and arts but basic survival skills, including cutting fire wood, cooking food and sharing with everyone. The self-sufficiency comes from their own work. Each student shares responsibility to grow grains, vegetables and to cook and clean. The gurukula makes its owns pots and pans out of clay and they work and live together. I do understand that it is difficult to transfer all those operational features from a forested area abundant with natural resources into today's urban land. But some of it can still b

Going to school...

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I might seem like I am just saying this because I don't like change, but I feel that schools today are a bit over the top, trying to give information to children rather than educating them. I loved school as a child ! I loved it that I could meet all my friends and hang out with them. Classes weren't very difficult and teachers wanted to teach you and guide you and be part of your lives as people. I was trying to remember how I fell in love with school and I remembered I wasn't always like this. I hated school once upon a time. Just as any child made to go somewhere and be told to do things made me hate school to begin with. Well, hate is a strong word, may be more like dislike. So one morning when I was six years old, it was pouring like crazy. My autowalla did not come to pick me up. And surprisingly I was very upset that I was getting late to school and I just had to go to school! My dad got dressed but he said it's raining so badly may be it's not a great

Alone is Berlin

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By Hans Fallada I've never heard of this book before I noticed someone read it when I was travelling back from Berlin , this summer. Later I realised it's one of the classics to describe Hitler's Germany and how people lived in fear of him. It was the first anti-Nazi book after the world war written by a German. So I read it. It is a very strong story. It starts very innocently. And describes slowly but surely how everyone takes sides, and everyone has to, at some point choose a side. Those that feel they can gain an advantage using open support of the führer use it like the Persickes. Those who are cowards are used. Those who can leach onto other people's fears use it to their advantage even if they are not in any way linked to the party, like Enno Kluge and Borkhausen. And then there comes a time where everyone is snitching on everyone else because everyone is afraid. So afraid, even high ranking inspectors of the Gestapo are not safe. Everyone is it som

The Long Song

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Miss July, my dear readers, was a mischievous soul who made the mistress scream till she was so tired that when Miss July finally turned up she would be enraged but in no position to punish Miss July. The mistress, Caroline Mortimer wasn't always so easy to provoke. She used to be a happy soul who loved the idea of going around the plantation under the beautiful summer sun. Soon enough the heat of sun, which is harsh unlike in England, and the dust of the land got into her and settled within never leaving. It had made her annoying. The way Miss July narrates her story, like how there were so many different versions of just her birth, and her condensing voice against all those condensing voices, is an interestingly meandering way of telling a light story. You see, Miss July was born a slave. Though she didn't look it, she had a white father who was an overseer of her slave mother. She was separated from her mother at a very young age and came into her mistress's