Inspiring Photographers
“Can you get arrested for wearing a thong if you're ugly? Or becoming too familiar with your Halloween pumpkin? Or unknowingly renting a house to drug dealers?
Welcome to the wonderful world of criminal law. The Street Law Handbook answers all these questions. You might be the straightest arrow in town or the black sheep of your community, but either way, The Street Law Handbook is for you. “
This is one book I could have used at Chico State.
Bharati Mukherjee's new novel, “The Tree Bride” is critiqued by Michiko Kakutani in today's New York Times.
“Ms. Mukherjee's efforts to widen her canvas from the personal to the political, from the private to the historical, result in her most maladroit novel yet.”
Don't hold back Michiko!
By Charles R. Larson, Chair, Dept. of Literature
American University, Washington, D.C. 20016
Kamala Markandaya, the Indian novelist, died in London, Sunday, May 18, 2004. Born Kamala Purnaiya in Mysore in 1924, she attended the University of Madras, beginning in 1940, where she studied history. From 1940 to 1947, she worked as a journalist and also published short stories in Indian newspapers, eventually emigrating to England in 1948. There she met her husband, Bertrand Taylor, by whom she had one daughter. Fame and success came with her first published novel, Nectar In A Sieve (1954), a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection and best-seller in the United States. That novel was follow by nine others, including A Handful Of Rice(1966), The Nowhere Man (1972), Two Virgins (1973), and The Golden Honeycomb (1977).
Markandaya was often linked to other Anglo-Indian novelists at mid-point in the twentieth century, including Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Raja Rao, and Khushwant Singh, though she was the only female of the group. That special sensitivity demarcated all of her work, especially Some Inner Fury (1955) and Two Virgins. Readers of her novels, however, were more often struck by the tensions her characters encountered when they left the rural areas for the cities. Her two most popular novels, Nectar In A Sieve and a Handful Of Rice where taught in hundreds of American courses, both in the public shools and the universities.
Always a very private person, Markandaya granted few interviews and intentionally kept out of the limelight. After 1948, England became her home, with frequent trips back to India in order to find the necessary
inspiration for her writing. She is survived by her daughter, Kim Oliver.
My friend Arvind Devalia has written a book called Get A Life. Arvind is a life-coach; someone with whom you can interact to ascertain your purpose on this planet. While he may live in London, I am sure he is still accessible by means of email and telephone. The first session is free, he says. His pleasant demeanor and commitment to his own calling makes for a great combination. Check out the book and connect with him.
Via Sree Sreenivasan
Award-winning writer Githa Hariharan will be in NYC reading from her latest book In Times Of Siege at Barnes and Noble, Upper West Side, on Friday, April 23 at 7:30pm.
Githa Hariharan was educated in Bombay, Manila and the United States. She has written a number of novels, including the winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, The Thousand Faces of Night, and a collection of short stories. In Times of Siege is her first novel to be published in the United States. She has also been included in several collections and anthologies, such as Salman Rushdie's Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997. Hariharan lives in New Delhi where she works as a freelance editor, and is an active participant in movements for communal harmony and women's equality.
IN TIMES OF SIEGE (Pantheon Books/August 10, 2003/ $22.00), Githa Hariharan's first novel to be published in the United States, is a vivid and critical portrait of contemporary India and of the choices an individual must make when confronted with extremism, ignorance and prejudice.
Shiv Murthy is a meek, middle-aged history professor in New Delhi. When a friend's passionate and outspoken daughter, Meena, breaks her leg, she moves into his house, even though they barely know each other and his wife is visiting his daughter in Seattle. Taking care of Meena, and struggling with the feelings this young woman stirs in him, Shiv's life is thrown
into further turmoil when one of his medieval Indian history lessons-an essay on a 12th century reformer-poet who created “a new community, a new ethos, that provoked people to dare to experiment”-is challenged by a group of religious Hindu fundamentalists. The university responds by asking Shiv to apologize publicly.
Shiv asks himself, “Why pretend you are a professor if you can't stand up to someone telling you what to think? How to think? … Do you imagine an ordinary man cannot be a hero?” Influenced by Meena and her political convictions, Shiv responds by taking an entirely unexpected and uncharacteristic plunge into the political world: he defies the university and the extremists. Though not confident he has the courage or strength, Shiv does speak up in times of siege, against a world that knows only black and white, us or them.