tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-127389852024-03-15T21:09:28.597-04:00Lotus Reads<b>Welcome to "Lotus Reads",a mostly social and cultural take on books.</b>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.comBlogger375125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-1219299383473836652012-04-07T12:18:00.000-04:002012-04-07T16:18:58.995-04:00Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">Published By: </span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">Random House</span></b></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">DOP: Feb7, 2012</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">Genre: Narrative Non-Fiction</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">Helloooo Everyone! It's been ages, I hope so much you are all doing well. I'm really sorry I haven't been updating this blog, but life's been busy oft late and horror of horrors, I haven't been doing much reading! I think I've read all of 2 books in 6 months. A truly awful record for someone who used to read a book a week. Anyway, I have come to the sad realization that even if I make the time to read, I may never have enough time to write an in-depth review, so I've decided to introduce mini reviews, or maybe, just the title of the book I am reading or one I hope to read. This way, we can all still stay in touch. Like the idea? I sure hope so!</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">A few weeks ago I read Katherine Boo's "</span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">Behind the Beautiful Forevers</span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">". To be honest, I wasn't really looking forward to reading one more book about life in a Mumbai slum, after all, I've had them as neighbours for years and I thought I knew everything about the folks that live there...but, I was happy to be proved wrong. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Katherine Boo spent three years( 2008-2010 )in a Mumbai slum called "Annawadi" situated on the fringes of the city's international airport. In 1991 labourers were brought in from the villages of Tamil Nadu to work on the runway and once construction was completed, instead of returning to their villages they decided to stick around in the city of dreams and thus the slum "Annawadi" came to be. Why anyone would want to live in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Book Antiqua', Garamond, Palatino, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">“a sodden, snake-filled bit of brushland across the street from the international terminal" </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">is a baffling question to many, but because rural poverty is bleaker than urban destitution, many rural migrants choose the latter. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"> Over the years Annawadi has undergone many changes, not just cosmetically but also demographically and many of the Tamilian labourers, have since moved elsewhere leaving room for new migrants from all over the country making it a microcosm of India-on-the-margins.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">Through the lives of several protagonists the reader is able to get a glimpse into what life may be like in a Mumbai slum. </span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">Abdul Hussain</span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">, the bread winner of the only Muslim family in the slum is a garbage picker/sorter and seller. It's the only thing he has ever done and so naturally he is somewhat of an expert at it, and as a result of his long, daily slog his family is perhaps the most prosperous family in Annawadi. Abdul and his family are highly resented in Annawadi, not because they are Muslim, but because economically they are doing better than most of the neighbours. Caste may be the main cause for discrimination in rural India, but Boo finds that in the slums, economic envy is the new discrimination.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"> Then there's</span><b> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">Fatima</span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"> or "One-Leg" as she is better known. Because she is disabled and a woman, Fatima has virtually no standing in the slum but she is determined to have a good time, even if society deems she should not. While she may possess a couldn't-care-less attitude Fatima also has a violent temper and it's one of her rages that leads to some of the most riveting events in the book which allow Boo to access government hospitals, the criminal justice system and the enormous web of corruption that much of India is enveloped in.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"> Another fascinating person character is </span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">Asha</span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"> who is married to a good-for-nothing drunkard but thankfully she has enough ambition for the two of them. By latching herself onto a small-time politician she becomes a "fixer" (someone who is able to grant favours in the slum for a fee) and in that way, she is able to send her daughter to college to become the first female college graduate in Annawadi.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">And finally, there's </span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">Kalu</span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;">, who braves the barbed wire of Mumbai airports to get at the recycling bins, the contents of which he sells to Abdul; </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">and </span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;">Sunil,</span></b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;"> a smelly and courageous scavenger with a head for heights. It is in knowing these two scavengers that the reader realizes that no matter how tough the lives are the kids of Annawadi are, they </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">never stop dreaming. Their dreams aren't big ones, many a time their dreams don't even involve leaving the slum for a better place, all they want is to better themselves, to climb that next rung on the ladder. And yet, despite the dreams, hopelessness is sometimes rife, the rate of suicide in a slum is quite high.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000;">It is through these remarkable protagonists that Boo manages to paint a lively,colourful and yet poignant (depressing too) picture of slum life. Sometimes I found the narrative read like Alaa Al Aswamy's "Al Yacoubian Building" where each resident family had a stand alone story to tell and yet contributed to the bigger story of Mumbai, but more fascinating to me was how globalization impacts the slum dwellers, their fortunes rising and waning along with the price of certain global commodities. Most of the people in this Annawadi slum rely on garbage as a livelihood. When the economy is strong, construction is booming and the demand for aluminium, copper, iron, steel etc. is high, so is the value of the commodity-related waste. Similarly, when there's a worldwide recession and builders run out of money forcing constructions to come to a stand still, it hits the rag pickers like a tidal wave. In this way Boo gives the butterfly effect of globalization a human face.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #cc0000;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;">This video above, filmed in collaboration with some of the children of Annawadi, gives a glimpse into the daily lives of the people she encountered there.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Now all that remains is to allow you to pick up the book or the audio book (which is what I used) and allow Katherine Boo to take you along with her into Annawadi, where tales of treachery, comedy, heartbreak, betrayal and resilience make this a mesmerizing read.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #660000; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-39629228672603987392011-10-03T17:25:00.001-04:002011-10-03T18:34:42.421-04:00Barcelona Diary (Sep 2011) Las Ramblas <b> Las Ramblas</b> in Barcelona is a large pedestrian street lined with restaurants, cafes, souvenir shops, flower kiosks and bustling with tourists, locals, hustlers and performing artists from almost every genre.<br />
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Depending on whom you ask, you will be told that the promenade is either a "must-see" or "to be avoided at all costs". I tend to fall in the former category. While Las Ramblas abounds with pickpockets, Pakistani men wanting to sell you their Chinese-made toys and over- priced restaurants with bland food, it's a MUST for people-watching! And that's not all, Las Ramblas is dotted with some beautiful turn-of-the-century buildings like the <b>Liecu Opera House</b> (our apartment was right next door to the Opera) and the <b>Boqueria Open Market,</b> it also has some amazing art deco sculptures. <br />
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<b>The very crowded Las Ramblas, tree-lined Las Ramblas, the nerve centre of Barcelona</b>. </div>
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At one end of Las Ramblas is the huge Place de Catalunya and at the other end, the old port. It would take you no more than 20 mins to walk the entire length of the promenade from end to end.</div>
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As I mentioned, some old and beautiful buildings line Las Ramblas. This patisserie here is called "Escriba" and every morning I would step inside for an almond croissant for breakfast, although Escriba is better known for their life-size chocolate models of famous personalities!<br />
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<b>Human Statue 1 - Las Ramblas</b></div>
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<b>Human Statue 2 - Artist - Las Ramblas</b></div>
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<b>The human statues</b>, on their little homemade plinths, are a huge attraction on Las Ramblas. People constantly want to pose with them. Some can stand absolutely lifeless (in the most difficult poses) for hours together and some are constantly entertaining. Many are waiters, or actors that wait while they look for the perfect acting part. Las Ramblas simply wouldn't be Las Ramblas without these human statues.<br />
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One of the highlights of Las Ramblas was its open air market, <b>Mercat de la Boqueira</b>. After I was done buying my croissants at Escriba I would dash into Boquiera for some fruit juice. Boqueira is home to every conceivable fruit, sea food and ham and is an absolute feast for the senses. And if you understand Spanish it's an ideal place to eavesdrop on recipes! I was watching people buy mussels, it was so funny how everyone seemed to have his or her own way of cooking the mollusc!<br />
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Boquira photos courtesy my good friend, Anjum Poonawalla.</div>
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Remember when I said a walk down Las Ramblas yields unexpected surprises? Well, here's one! A modernista dragon designed either by Joan Miro or Gaudi ( I can't remember) for a former umbrella shop. Las Ramblas is full of little gems like this one...but you have to look for them...a veritable treasure hunt!<br />
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<b>Modernista Dragon</b> designed for a former umbrella store. Las Ramblas is full of excellent finds like this one.</div>
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Another interesting building on Las Ramblas, the <b>Eglesia de Betlem</b></div>
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...notice the beautiful green-capped portals and relief.</div>
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<b>La Riera Baxia, El Raval. </b> </div>
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El Raval is a neighbourhood bordering Las Ramblas. Unlike Barri Gothic or the "Old Town" which still maintains its medieval charm, <b>El Raval</b> is an edgier neighbourhood with artists and immigrants from Pakistan, Indonesia, East Europe and Morocco filling the apartment blocks down its streets. La Riera Baxia (image above) is a street in El Raval well known for its vintage stores. I was lucky enough to buy a Valentino bag here.</div>
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The streets of El Raval are very colourful both literally and figuratively. Throw a stone and it's bound to land on a graffiti-splattered facade. This is a really great neighbourhood to explore if you enjoy street art!</div>
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<b>Housing project El Raval</b></div>
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El Raval, because of its proximity to the City Center is destined for greatness. Infact, it's a district in the throes of transformation. However, at the moment, it is a barrio of great contrasts. Turn in to El Raval from Las Ramblas and you're suddenly accosted with high end boutiques, restaurants,cafes and art galleries..but walk to the other end and you see crumbling housing projects or dilapidated buildings in narrow alleyways.</div>
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<b>Barri Gothic Square</b>. Close by and housed in five adjoining medical palaces is <b>Museu Picasso </b>which is well known for its collection of Picasso's early works. The image above is a reprint of Picasso's "Self Portrait with a Palette" from 1906. (Unfortunately, you don't see the palette in this print )</div>
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<b>Monument to Christopher Columbus</b>: At the Port or Harbour end of Las Ramblas is the impressive Columbus monument. Although still debated by some, most scholars are convinced that Columbus was a Catalan. The monument marks the spot where Columbus stepped ashore in 1493 after returning from his voyage to the Caribbean bringing with him six Caribbean Indians. Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-72619904326261385002011-09-26T14:33:00.001-04:002011-09-26T14:39:05.941-04:00Barcelona Diary (Sep 2011) Bullfighting<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Yesterday ( Sep 25, 2011) more than 600 years of history came to an end in Barcelona as the city hosted its last ever bullfight. It delights me to know that after this, no Spanish fighting bull or "toro bravo" as the breed is known, will be killed in the name of sport, art or tradition again, at least in Barcelona.</div>
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The Catalonians are understandably proud to be the first region in Spain to ban bullfighting. Supporters of the sport claim that they (Catalonia) did it just to have one more thing to differentiate them from the rest of Spain, but activists insisted that it was voted out because it was a barbaric sport and had no place in an enlightened society.</div>
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Above: Barcelona's only remaining Bullfight arena, the <b>Plaza de Toros Monumental</b>. A very striking building made of bricks in the Mujedar (Moor) and Byzantine style. The ban will only affect "bullfighting" and not other sports in which the bull is involved, like <b>"correbou</b>" where the public chase bulls through narrow streets, or "<b>bouembolat</b>" where festivities involve attaching mini fire torches to the bull's horns.</div>
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Correbou (not my own picture)</div>
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<b>Bouembolat : </b> is a tradition that was first started in the Valencia region of Catalonia. In days of old it was not uncommon for people to be fatally charged by bulls as they walked along poorly-lit streets. To prevent accidents like that from happening, it was decided that bulls would be fitted with fire torches and that way, not only would they light up the streets but it would also warn people to their presence.<b> </b>Nowadays the lights aren't necessary but the tradition continues<b>. Photo courtesy: Josep Llouis Sellart</b></div>
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<b>Arenas de Barcelona</b>, with its beautiful neo-mujedar architecture, used to be a bullfighting arena but has now been converted into a shopping plaza which houses an excellent <b>Desigual</b> store. For the uninitiated, Desigual is a Spanish clothing store, known for their colourful, ultra-urban fashion with their headquarters and flagship store in Barcelona. More on Desigual when I post about shopping in Barcelona.</div>
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<br />Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-38283116668095229442011-09-21T13:56:00.001-04:002011-09-21T14:04:25.844-04:00Barcelona (Sep 2011) Gaudi's Casa BatlloWhat's the first thought that comes to your mind when I mention Barcelona? If you thought "Gaudi" you would be with the majority for Gaudi is synonymous with Barcelona. Everywhere you go in the city, you're never too far away from a Gaudi casa or sculpture. Infact, the road we lived on in Barcelona, Las Ramblas, has several little Gaudi sculptures, photos of which I will include later.<br />
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Gaudi's work, which has been described as "Catalan Modernisme" is supremely original. Apparently he was inspired by a nationalistic search for a romantic medieval past and there are elements of medieval and surreal styles in a lot of his work.<br />
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Below are pictures of Casa Batllo. I fell in love with this Casa the minute I laid eyes on it because it looked like a house out of a fairytale. Later when I was reading up on the house I discovered that this apartment block was designed to symbolise the legend of St. George killing the dragon, whose scaly back arches above the main facade.<br />
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<b>Facade:</b> It is said that when Salvador Dali saw the curving walls and windows of Casa Batllo he observed them as "representing waves on a stormy day". Because the spindly columns were sometimes compared to tibias, Casa Batllo was also called "House of Bones"<br />
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<b>Dining Room: </b>The bulbous forms in the ceiling of the Batllo family's dining room are thought to represent the splash caused by a drop of water.<br />
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<b>The Main Drawing Room</b>: "One side of this room is formed by stained-glass windows looking out over the Passeig de Gracia. The ceiling plaster is moulded into a spiral and the doors and window framed undulate playfully."</div>
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The interior skylight at Casa Batllo...you can't tell from this photo but the blue gets more intense as you travel upwards. This is so that the intensity of light is equal no matter which floor you go to. Gaudi was a genius!</div>
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<b>Attics:</b> Don't the arches give one the sensation of being inside the skeleton of a large animal? </div>
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Some people say Gaudi created Casa Batllo after reading Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" and wanted the house to appear as though it were under water. In this case, the mosaic pattern could easily pass for a colony of brightly-coloured molluscs.</div>
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One of the most talked-about features of the house is the<b> Dragon's Back and Cross</b>. The Cross was made in Mallorca but was damaged in transit . Gaudi apparently liked the cracked facade and refused to send it back for repairs. </div>
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Another view of the cross but this time with the <b>chimneys.</b> Chimneys were usually an unseen, hidden part of the house but Gaudi liked to show them off.Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-33756365740085020462011-09-20T08:25:00.000-04:002011-09-20T08:25:26.963-04:00Barcelona Diary (Sep 2011) The Catalans, Barcelona Harbour and Montjuic CemeteryToday I'm going to take a break from the Paris Diaries and visit Barcelona (by special request.)<br />
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Everyone's heard of the friendly, fun-loving, fiesta-mad Spaniard so it is with great excitement that we boarded our plane for Barcelona, but as we found out in Paris, stereotyping can be dangerous and misleading. The Parisian, we found out to our relief, is not rude as everyone, including travel writers, would have us believe, but it was time to put the Spanish people to the test!</div>
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I guess our first mistake was to think that all Spanish people are alike. Spain is made up of many distinct regions and Barcelona is the capital of the Catalonia region of Spain and thus home to the Catalans who do not like being called "Spanish". They have a distinct culture and language and following the death of Franco, the region was granted political autonomy by the new democratic government. Going by the Spanish stereotypes it would be safe to say that Barcelona is probably the least Spanish city in the country.</div>
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Sadly, the Catalans do not get very good press in the rest of Spain. The Spanish people see them as being fiercely nationalistic, mean and unfriendly. When we asked a Catalan friend to explain why this may be so, he said that Catalans were a reserved people who took time to make friends and that reservedness is often mistaken for being unfriendly. He seemed to think the Spanish habit of embracing anyone and everyone as a new best friend was tacky and superficial! :)</div>
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We weren't there long enough to make an accurate observation on the Catalan character but I will say they seemed very reserved - they would speak only when spoken to and at times seemed rather abrupt, but their dedication to style, looks, aesthetics and so on is admirable! Barcelona is, without a doubt, a confident, progressive city - one that preserves its past proudly but which is also tirelessly self-inventive. If you read its history and observe its architecture it's plain to see this is a region of proud, confident people who are not afraid to think outside the box. I'm going to post pics of some of the buildings we saw around Barcelona and you can judge for yourselves.</div>
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The drive from the airport into the city was quite interesting with the thriving port on the right and the beautiful Montjuic cemetery in the hills on the left. The cemetery seemed to run for acres and acres (I read later that it was 57 acres of cypress forest) and is a resting place for some of Barcelona's most elite citizens and also a fabulous place wherein to observe architecture of many different styles and periods. However, what's challenging is the lack of information on this cemetery in most of the guide books. Turns out the Catalans don't like to take tourists to this place because they consider cemeteries morbid and the idea that a cemetery can be a tourist attraction is rather distasteful to them. Still, if one has the time, I think it might be a great place to visit for the art (the mausoleums are truly wonderful) and also for the beautiful sea views. Unfortunately I only saw fascinating glimpses of it from the taxi.</div>
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For more photos of the Montjuic Cemetery go <b><a href="http://www.secretsofbarcelona.com/en/special-places/hidden-corner/montjuic-cemetery.html">here</a></b></div>
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Today Barcelona has a truly awesome waterfront, which wasn't always the case. Until a few years ago, the city had turned their backs on the water (literally) with all the development taking place away from the sea. As a result, the beaches were grimy and areas of bad repute and the harbours were home to cargo and container trade only. <br />
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Over the past two decades dramatic changes have taken place along the waterfront. Cargo ships have been moved to the south of the city and old dockyards have been given facelifts and now serve as promenades or parks. Beaches have been cleaned up and landscaped. </div>
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Beach in Barceloneta. </div>
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Barceloneta was once a scrappy fisherman's village but it is now furnished with landscaped beaches, boardwalks, terraced outdoor cafes specializing in seafood, fountains and so on. I took this picture just to get a glimpse of the original Barceloneta.<br />
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Standing on a hill in Montjuic with the harbour behind me. Cruise ships are a common sight at the harbour here.<br />
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Another view of the harbour</div>
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One of the nicest things to do in Barcelona is to grab a funicular from Montjuic and take an aerial tour of the city. </div>
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Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-73392523226931428472011-09-16T12:05:00.001-04:002011-09-16T12:14:42.677-04:00Paris Diary (Aug-Sep) Page 3 Grand Mosque of ParisIt's possible that one of Paris' best kept secrets is its Grand Mosque. Open up any guide to Paris and you will be floored and impressed with write-up's on the Louvre, the Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and so on, and so should you be because they are marvellous sights, but after our trip to Paris my family and I have unanimously decided the Grand Mosque is a "must-see".<br />
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Built in the Hispano-Moorish style this mosque is a splendid showcase of North African architecture which stands out even more because it is planted among rows of French-style buildings. The minaret is about a 100ft high.</div>
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You have to pay to enter the Mosque but it's all so worth it. I could star at this intricate mosaic work for hours.</div>
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This is the entrance to the Courtyard, Hammam and Tea shop.</div>
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The Courtyard, with its fig trees, fountains, hookahs and mint tea, is the perfect place to relax.</div>
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It all began with the tea shop selling North African delicacies like Turkish delight, almond cakes, baklava and so on. The tea place got so popular that a full-fledged restaurant serving Couscous, Tagine and so on, followed suit very quickly.</div>
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Some fried chicken, Tagine and Couscous with a glass of very sweet, very nice green mint tea. Bon Appetit.<br />
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The only off-putting thing about the visit was the number of beggar women outside the Mosque. I guess it's the same of any place of worship, but these women, many of them in sunglasses to protect their identity (?) were a little intimidating!!! </div>
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Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-50823289039968137592011-09-15T14:53:00.001-04:002011-09-15T15:44:08.303-04:00Parisian Chic: A Style Guide by Ines de la Fressange<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEistUBLZ9M4yf9ytWuzYRJD9HbKEpCRUwnjGLIcwNPwfUm4B3skw6RNvNA0vGGzih2iUfkGH-desUM2hj9vKIze1JnaJMwAqht-IhxCOdGKg9RIB70tXJYaEqQX8fqpqiNeA4IB/s1600/Parisian+chic+Ines.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="484" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEistUBLZ9M4yf9ytWuzYRJD9HbKEpCRUwnjGLIcwNPwfUm4B3skw6RNvNA0vGGzih2iUfkGH-desUM2hj9vKIze1JnaJMwAqht-IhxCOdGKg9RIB70tXJYaEqQX8fqpqiNeA4IB/s640/Parisian+chic+Ines.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">As a woman preparing for a trip to Paris one of my most invaluable reads was Ines de la Fressange's <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">"Parisian Chic: A Style Guide"</span>. Parisian chic is legendary and so is their intolerance for sartorial sins. I didn't want my vacation getting off on the wrong foot so I invested in Fressange's book and what a good decision that turned out to be. Fressange, Karl Lagerfield's muse and supermodel in the 80's, lays out in a very easy-to-read manner all the DOs and DON'Ts of Parisian style. Among her many invaluable tips are these ones:</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">1) <b> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">Never look rich</span></b>. Bling, glitter and logos are absolute no-no's when it comes to the Parisian woman. She is uninterested in sporting labels just for the sake of it. Her definition of luxury? <i>"A brand that guarantees good taste, rather than an all-too-obvious price tag. </i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">2) Like the Parisian,<b> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">be a fashion icon in your own right</span>,</b> worship no idols. <i> "The secret of good style is to feel good in what you wear."</i></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">3) NO Fishnet T-shirts, flip-flops, running shoes and Hello Kitty nightgowns. </span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTcfO0OcPqOE9Zk9467vfT0bJfmO4CG3dUZDO4FybjxBTWXDYSH9aq1p4_-xWtTaqd6UUCoHaN0XLBR6amvW9vumX6ejaes7GIl-TtEQOlV6_bf8LnAcDa8s3xoXRAF5MOl0Ti/s1600/11.03.13+Parisian+Chic+-+image1.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTcfO0OcPqOE9Zk9467vfT0bJfmO4CG3dUZDO4FybjxBTWXDYSH9aq1p4_-xWtTaqd6UUCoHaN0XLBR6amvW9vumX6ejaes7GIl-TtEQOlV6_bf8LnAcDa8s3xoXRAF5MOl0Ti/s640/11.03.13+Parisian+Chic+-+image1.PNG" width="498" /></span></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">4) And don't you ever wear bras with a transparent bra straps or you will make a Parisian woman's toes curl with disgust. A stylish, visible bra is far sexier...also...no matter how big or small your bust,<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;"> <b>not wearing a bra is always a mistake.</b></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">5) <b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">Forget Botox and don't dress like a teenager - trying to look young is the quickest way to look old!</span> </b> </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">6) <b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">The Little Black Dress</span></b>: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;">"The little black dress is not simply an item of clothing, it's a concept. It's abstract, it's universal — which means there's one that's perfect for everyone ... Today the Parisian has several little black dresses, just as she has several pairs of jeans: each is a variation on a theme."</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">7) Here are Inez's 7 key pieces for a magnificent wardrobe (print and paste to your closet door like I did)</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">a. Men's Blazer (fitted, fitted, fittted)</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">b. Trench Coat</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">c.Navy V-neck sweater (pref. cashmere)</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">d. Tank Top</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">e. Little Black Dress</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">f. Jeans (straight-leg are the safest)</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;">g.Leather Jacket</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"> </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Ines de le Fressange</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">9) And finally, the<b> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000;">GOLDEN RULE</span></b>: Never follow convention; never be bland; never neglect yourself.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><b>Here are my impressions of the Parisienne:</b></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">She is not good-looking in the way we have come to define good-looking - symmetrical features, big eyes, full lips, defined nose, high cheekbones and perfect teeth. But when you see her you just know this is a woman who is confident in the way she looks and doesn't need to resort to trends to be considered attractive. She possesses a certain something - call it an innate style if you will - that always sets her apart from everyone else.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">In my observations I found the Parisienne to be conservative by nature. No ultra mini skirts or low necklines for her and the make-up is very subtle too. She is not fond of artificial talons, infact, gel nails which are so popular here are considered vulgar in Paris. She wears her nails short and usually varnished in a pale pink colour. Natural is in and perhaps that is why you don't find Parisians rushing off to get lasered and botoxed. Infact, in the time that I was there I didn't come across a single clinic for cosmetic surgery, I'm not saying they don't exist, just saying they aren't that popular or lucrative perhaps.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The women (and men) do like to be slim though...if I were to wager a guess I'd say the average dress size would between a 4 or a 6. Apparently they don't like to work out (they call it an 'American pastime', but they love to walk and cycle. They are also very heavy smokers and appear to start young.</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 20px;">Oh and how they love their scarves!!! There were three items of clothing I saw almost every Parisian don - a scarf, a blazer and a pair of ballerines. They seem to favour vintage scarves and each woman has her own favourite way of tying it. Olivier Magny who wrote <a href="http://www.o-chateau.com/about-us/stuff-parisians-like-the-book">"Stuff Parisians Like"</a> said this about Parisians and their scarves,<i> </i></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 20px;"><i><br /></i></span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #990000; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 20px;"><i>" The choice of scarf is a determining social qualifyer of both style and 'class sociale'. So is the way someone chooses to tie his scarf. Parisians know their scarf will characterize them, identify them, position them, rank them, classify them, distinguish them. There can therefore be no messing around when it comes to choosing a scarf" pg 217.</i></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 20px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 20px;">Ofcourse, my observations here are just generalizations, meant simply to provide a general snapshot of the beautiful women of my new favourite city. Sure, there are exceptions, but not too many so if you're a Parisian who doesn't enjoy wearing a scarf, or ballet flats for shoes, I'd love to hear from you! :)</span></span><br />
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</span>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-8440791670159918372011-09-15T10:01:00.000-04:002011-09-15T10:02:34.890-04:00Paris Diary (Aug-Sep 2011) Page 2 The Seine and the Notre Dame When anyone says the word "Seine", the first image that comes to mind is "bridge", and that's because no less than 37 functional bridges can be found over this beautiful river. The best way of admiring these bridges, some of which are extremely ornate and beautiful is to take a cruise down the river in a Batobus. If possible try to do it at night so you can see the "City of Light" in all her glory.<br />
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One of the oldest bridges in Paris "Pont de Neuf"</div>
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The beautiful Alexandre Pont III Bridge (above and below) is perhaps the most ornately decorated of all the Paris bridges. The beautiful detail took my breath away. The bridge was built to commemorate the friendship between France and Russia and was named after Tsar Alexander</div>
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"Love padlocks" on the Pont des Arts Bridge (one that links the Notre Dame to the Left Bank). Each of these locks bears the name of a couple in love..it was really fun to see some of the names and read the messages of love eternal! :) When your river boat passes under this bridge you will be asked to make a wish and to kiss the person to the right of you....apparently your wish will come true if this is your first visit to Paris. Needless to say I did it!!! <br />
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I once read that every Parisian is in a relationship. To be single is to be a loser. I guess that tells me every Parisian is an eternal romantic...perhaps that also will explain why it is so common to see so many kissing couples all around the city!<br />
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Getting ready for the night cruise on the River Seine...Paris is absolutely gorgeous at night with just about every building all lit up.</div>
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<b>La Conciergerie:</b> The building where Queen Marie-Antoinette was imprisoned while she awaited execution. </div>
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The Notre Dame at night and a group of Parisians spending their evening on the Seine. Look</div>
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to the left of the picture and you will see one of them waving to us. Little groups of people hang out</div>
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by the Seine all through the day but it is at night when the area comes to life with little bonfires, guitar playing, cook outs....we even saw a Tango dance competition taking place. This is where all of Paris seems to come to for a little R &R.</div>
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<b>The Notre Dame from the Pont des Arts Bridge</b>. Of all the buildings in Paris I was most excited to see the Notre Dame ( I suppose you could blame Victor Hugo and his "Hunchback of Notredame" for that). The day we visited this ornate church was a very rainy day. The sky was perpetually overcast and grey and the colours of the pictures reflect the weather...sadly.</div>
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The famous South "Rose Window" facade of the Notre Dame...the darn thing is 43ft high!<br />
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Notre Dame detail...can you spot some of the gargoyles? These gargoyles are actually rainspouts! Stay tuned for the gargoyles made famous by the Hunchback of Notredame.<br />
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Voila, here are the famous Notre Dame gargoyles (some of them at least). I must be honest and tell you this not my pic (courtesy Euro travelogue) but I borrowed it because what is a photo blog about the Notre Dame if you don't have gargoyles in them? I could have had my own picture if I was prepared to walk up the 387 steps to the top of the South Bell tower but after walking 10 kms all around Paris on a daily basis,believe me I had no energy for the climb. They are beautiful, aren't they? The next time I will get up close and personal with them!<br />
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Well, this concludes page 2 of my Paris Diary. I hope you're enjoying the walkabout through Paris with me. Most of the photos were taken by my daughter but with two different cameras. One was a regular 'point and click' and the other, a Nikon D5000.Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-84504673905738372522011-09-14T11:29:00.000-04:002011-09-19T06:49:38.387-04:00Paris Diary Aug-Sep 2011 (Page One)This year I thought I'd do something different with my vacation photos. Instead of cramming them into an album and posting them to FB which is what I usually do, how much better to write a blog post and post some of them here instead. <br />
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Like most of us do, I read a lot of books in preparation for our trip to Paris and each one left me feeling more despondent than the other. No, it wasn't the food and it certainly wasn't the fashion that had me troubled...what left me quaking in my boots was dealing with the Parisian!!! You see, in almost all the books I read, the Parisian was made to sound like an evil character from a Grimm's fairytale. Over and over I'd read about their rudeness, their impatience with foreigners, their agile ability to jump queues and then pretend to be deaf when you protest. Also, I wasn't looking forward to shopping in Paris because I had been warned that once you touch something in their exquisitely-laid out stores you may as well have bought it. I wasn't even looking forward to eating in one of their drool-worthy restaurants because the rudeness of their waiters is legendary. However, the appeal of the land of Rodin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Claude Monet was strong enough to overcome any trepidation I might have had an off I went, the brave little soul that I was!<br />
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As we arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport I noticed a plane-load of chic, scarf-wearing French students who were apparently just returning from a weekend trip to London. They seemed no different from teenagers anywhere else in the world...or so I thought, but as I continued to observe I realized they seemed friendlier and more touchy-feely than most other groups of teenagers that I have watched, and when they were ready to part ways, all the French boys gently kissed the girls three times on their cheeks and said goodbye. Ofcourse, this is the City of Love, and so I shouldn't be surprised, but hadn't I read that Parisians were impatient and rude, I was certainly seeing no sign of that here. <br />
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I booked our family into an apartment in the heart of the Marais district. This was the first time we were opting for an apartment over a hotel and I was both nervous and excited. Most apartment buildings in the heart of the city are built around a courtyard the entrance to which is usually a big brightly-coloured door on the main road like in the picture below.<br />
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I cannot recommend apartment living in Paris nearly enough...it's the closest thing you'll ever feel to being a real Parisian! <br />
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I'm glad I chose the Marais arrondisement to live in....we found it to be a chic, fashionable district with lots of upmarket clothing stores, parks, boulangeries and restaurants. It is known to the center of Parisian gay life and is also home to one of the oldest Jewish Quarters in Paris.<br />
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Rue de Rosiers, in the Jewish Quarter of Le Marais is well worth a visit for its marvellous falafel shops. As you walk along the famous cobblestone paths of Rue du Rosiers, you will be called out to by the falafel shop owners asking you to taste their wares. Oh, and speaking of cobblestones, the French seem to love them, they're EVERYWHERE, even their new roads seem to be built like the roads of medieval Paris. How do the women of Paris walk these roads in their high heels? I tried and failed miserably!<br />
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At a Cafe/Brasserie in La Marais. Sitting at a cafe with a cafe creme and a brioche watching people as they go by is probably one of the nicest things to do in Paris and believe me, with the amount of walking we did, I made sure to make a cafe stop once every 3-4 hours. Wish the coffee was worth the stop though. We've travelled almost everywhere in Europe and take it from me, Paris has the worst coffee!!!<br />
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The Fred Perry store in the Marais. I took a picture of the store simply because it had at the window the clothing line that Amy Winehouse had finished designing for them just before her unfortunate demise. Seeing her designs in the window was a poignant reminder of the great talent she was. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij6WruY8eutMVhVstc4w2YgVMEuOKKUMNNmDHdcageB2RFYCkmBnKnCyvER3Up-vEvo0FFlnfPVojtx6IgdNOhuAEQHs4i_jx-vkl7Vv-nGCBagFe9I0JW6-HkIQv5SPBxKMgp/s1600/DSC_0017.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="424" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEij6WruY8eutMVhVstc4w2YgVMEuOKKUMNNmDHdcageB2RFYCkmBnKnCyvER3Up-vEvo0FFlnfPVojtx6IgdNOhuAEQHs4i_jx-vkl7Vv-nGCBagFe9I0JW6-HkIQv5SPBxKMgp/s640/DSC_0017.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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Shopping in Paris is a great experience and NO you do not have to buy anything you touch! This is one city where window shopping is a real treat because people go to great lengths to make their display windows fun, quirky and a work of art! By law shops are required to display the prices of everything displayed at their windows, so it's easy to get a sense of whether you want to step inside or not. The picture (above) is of the flagship Louis Vuitton store on the Champs Elysses. I did step inside only to be shocked at the number of Chinese customers!!! They seem to be on a buying spree in Paris. I also saw a whole lot of them lining up to buy Longchamps bags at Galeries Lafayette.<br />
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But don't let your fondness for window shopping stop you from going into the department stores. Here we are the Galeries Lafayette...it has got to be one of the most beautiful department stores I have ever been in, so eat your heart out Dubai, your malls don't hold a candle to this classy store! And, surprise, surprise, the shopping was pretty good too (price wise). Galeries has an excellent epicerie on the topmost floor and after you have bought French mustard, pate and bon bons, you can walk up to the roof top terrace for a breathtaking view of Paris!<br />
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Oooh, that lovely Belle Epoque style! Apparently the store was modeled after a Middle-Eastern bazaar. Wish I had more details. </div>
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The beautiful dome at Galeries Lafayette...it's truly worth a visit.</div>
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And the lovely view from the roof top. Spot the Eiffel Tower in the distance.</div>
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This is the first page from my Paris Diary 2011....I hope to have a few more pages before we head for Barcelona, I hope you will stay with me.<br />
<br />Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-35843763859508725472011-09-12T18:22:00.001-04:002011-09-12T18:47:44.943-04:00Beautiful Thing: Inside The Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars by Sonia Faleiro <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6rLXd6q9Y_cCRTK9K48XqyRopQzqCZDVs2PcOY7Mt7ykxORxGkvgDJV2NbtsCoVot6AzpOMWbyPFe0at6nXAfVUA4tDYacL-GHVBD47amwXU6FNPsE6EFUXzsFGJ8-eZ41Mrk/s1600/BeautiFull_Thing.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6rLXd6q9Y_cCRTK9K48XqyRopQzqCZDVs2PcOY7Mt7ykxORxGkvgDJV2NbtsCoVot6AzpOMWbyPFe0at6nXAfVUA4tDYacL-GHVBD47amwXU6FNPsE6EFUXzsFGJ8-eZ41Mrk/s400/BeautiFull_Thing.JPG" width="260" /></a></div>
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Publisher: Penguin House, India</div>
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Genre: Non-Fiction</div>
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Published 27 OCT 2010</div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"></span><br />
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174642" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174844" style="color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_17_1315753428983394" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_131569972563952 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174546" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_131567556260754" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"> <span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639132 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174146
yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174644" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_131567556260782" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;">In 2005, as part of a "Morality Drive", the government of Maharashtra (India) banned bars from featuring dancing girls. As a result of the edict some 75,000 girls lost their jobs. The government accused the bars of being "brothels" and the girls of prostituting themselves, however, in reality </span></span></span></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;"> while the girls did sell sex, they didn't do so inside the bars. On the bar premises the girls always danced fully-dressed and customers were never allowed to solicit the girls while they were working. They could watch them dance and throw money at them, but that was all. If the girl did want to service a customer she was to do it outside the bar premises and in her own time.</span><br />
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<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_131569972563952 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_131573649617456 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174548" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_131567556260754" style="text-align: left;">
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</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;">
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174558" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639146 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174658" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607605" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;">The ban, instead of </span><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174660" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;">being a move for the good, actually deprived the women (many of them single mothers or victims of rape)</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174560" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639150 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174662" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607137" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;">of a regular job, one in which they felt protected, and threw them into the clutches of unscrupulous brothel owners or pimps. Some ended up having to walk the sidewalks alone, with no protection - a surefire way of getting raped, kidnapped or even killed.</span></span></div>
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_131573649617476 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174566" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_131573649617476 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174568" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639154 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174670" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;">I'll be honest, like most people, when I read about the ban I wasn't too perturbed as I bought into the "reasons" given for shutting</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174570" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639156 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174672" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607137" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;">down the bar, but I had always wondered about these dancers - who were they? Where did they come from? Why did they choose such a career? Did they ever fall in love? Get married? </span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174572" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607196" style="line-height: 15px;">So when I read Sonia <span class="yiv308389664" id="yiv308389664misspell-0">Falerio</span> had written a book on these <span class="yiv308389664" id="yiv308389664misspell-1">bargirls</span>, I knew it would satiate my curiosity and I asked my sister to send me a copy from India ( I don't think the book has had its US release yet).</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174574" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607196" style="line-height: 15px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174576" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607196" style="line-height: 15px;"> Leela, the protagonist of <span class="yiv308389664" id="yiv308389664misspell-2">Faleiro's</span> book <b><a href="http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/category/Non_Fiction/Beautiful_Thing_9780670084050.aspx">"Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars"</a></b>, like most of the other bar girls, had been sold to the local policemen for sex by her own father when she was only 13. Uneducated and young she many have been, but she was smart and she soon</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174578" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607196" style="line-height: 15px;">figured out that for as long as she stayed in her father's house her body</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174580" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607196" style="line-height: 15px;">would be his to do with as he pleased. Since she had already been "defiled" she reasoned she could continue with the same occupation but keep her</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174582" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607196" style="line-height: 15px;">earnings for herself and so she ran away from home and</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174584" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607196" style="line-height: 15px;">ultimately made her way into one of Bombay's famous dance bars.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174586" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607196" style="line-height: 15px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174588" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607196" style="line-height: 15px;">Again, at the bar she lived by her wits, she befriended the bar owner and enjoyed quite a cushy means of existence thanks to him. As long as she made money for the bar and kept an eye on the other girls, he was prepared</span></span></div>
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">to turn </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;">a blind eye while she solicited the occasional customer outside of the bar. The relationship seemed to suit them both</span><div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174594" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607288" style="line-height: 15px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174596" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;">But after the ban came into force, even her bar-owner boyfriend could do nothing to save Leela who was 19 at the time and she soon found herself on the streets and at the mercy of people who exploited her. This continued</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174598" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;">until she was able to get to a shelter.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174598" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174602" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;">As I read the book, I kept looking for Leela to curse her fate..I kept waiting to hear her cuss her mother and father for the predicament she found herself in, but I don't think I ever saw her do that, infact, she was a great believer in destiny:</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174604" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174604" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: center;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174604" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: center;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"> <i> "Bad luck is in my blood. It is true what they say - destiny us as strong as iron, it is tougher than steel;</i></span></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174604" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: center;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><i><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_17_1315753428983479" style="line-height: 15px;"> nothing can change what is written for you"</span></span><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639226 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174240 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174742" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_17_1315753428983471" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"> </span></i></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174604" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: center;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639226 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174240 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174742" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_17_1315753428983471" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174604" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639226 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174240 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174742" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;">Perhaps that is what purged her of any bitterness and gave her the will to go on. Also, a lot of the bar dancers came from families that has always been </span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174112 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174606" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639226 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174240 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174744" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;">involved in the business of dubious entertainment - like street dancers or acrobats, trapeze artists in the circus, dancers at private parties and so on,</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174112" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;">so in Leela's mind, she actually believed she had done quite well for herself.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174112 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174610" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639226 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174240
yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174750" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174112 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174612" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639226 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174752" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;">I kept reading to see if the book would reveal what </span><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174754" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;">Leela wanted for her future for while all the girls hope to get a good man/boyfriend who will be their ticket out of that profession, the truth is, few ever get away.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174614" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;">In the end, the most lofty goal a dancing girl can have is getting a job at a <span class="yiv308389664" id="yiv308389664misspell-4">Mujra</span> bar in</span></span><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span
yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639236 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174760" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639295" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"> Dubai where she can hope to make more money and receive more gifts. Youth is highly prized in this industry and once the girls</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174616" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174768" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;">reach their prime (early 20's perhaps) many will move on from dancing to keeping dancers (if they have saved up enough money), or if they have a daughter they will probably introduce her to the profession and live off her earnings!</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174618" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174620" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174622" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;">"Beautiful Thing" puts a very human face on a profession most of us wouldn't touch with a disinfected bargepole. Sure, these girls are seducers, liars, cheats, addicts and everything else we have read about them in the media,</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174624" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;">but this book helps us see why they are that way.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174126 yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174626" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;">Most have been sexually abused as children and exploited beyond belief as young adults and, as a result, have developed these coping mechanisms to ensure they don't get hurt over and over again. The book also reveals to the reader how much crime and corruption envelope the industry</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174628" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;">and how close the link between <span class="yiv308389664" id="yiv308389664misspell-5">bargirls</span> and the underworld dons are.</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174630" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174632" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319" style="line-height: 15px;"><br id="yui_3_2_0_16_1315862850181477" /></span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174634" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607319"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639373" style="line-height: 15px;"><span class="yiv308389664" id="yiv308389664misspell-6">Faleiro</span> gives <span class="yiv308389664" id="yiv308389664misspell-7">centre stage</span> to her subject Leela, unobtrusively asking questions of her and letting her speak </span></span><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_14_1315699725639368" style="line-height: 15px;"> - hallmark of a good reporter<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_17_1315753428983511" style="font-size: small;">. </span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 15px;">The novel has a lot of dialogue and I enjoyed the author's reproduction</span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174136" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: black;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_17_1315753428983514" style="line-height: 15px;">of Leela's Bombay vernacular full of bawdy wit, cuss words and a rough tenderness that may make some readers blush! </span></span></span></span></div>
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174136" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174814" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"> In order to write this book <span class="yiv308389664" id="yiv308389664misspell-8">Faleiro</span> had to spend a lot of time, not only with Leela and her friends but also with the other groups </span><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174816" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;">that make up this industry, like the <span class="yiv308389664" id="yiv308389664misspell-9">hijras</span> (eunuchs), the pimps, brothel owners, bar owners, men who frequented the bars and last, but not least, the thugs that bought and sold these girls to the various bars and clubs - I salute her for being so brave!</span></span></div>
<div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174136" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174816" style="color: #333333; line-height: 15px;"> </span></span></div>
</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: white;"><div class="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174134" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315675562607132" style="color: black; font-family: 'lucida console', sans-serif; text-align: left;">
<span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 20px;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_1315736496174998" style="color: black; line-height: 15px;"><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_13157364961741004">Even though this is a book is a work of non-fiction, it is a breezy read and in this day of "India Shining", where never a day goes by without reading a newspaper article wax lyrical about India's booming economy, this book is </span></span><span class="yiv308389664Apple-style-span" id="yiv308389664yui_3_2_0_16_13157364961741019">a good reminder of those sections of society which have been totally left out of India's economic miracle. </span></span></div>
</span>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-55829931233197921482011-09-09T19:28:00.002-04:002011-09-09T19:28:49.500-04:00Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away by Christie Watson<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_oEpAeUd2iXBBvjdK3M5rs775MlMlkOh8a83c96Sr1u6oCeX2Klfa0MjP-HGaYxp4zhUxWW4AxINkKIspL6_kq3lJDAwFrPLBKh5hHWYrVQkuNfXrdYJJXVUMvQET0saLgLyI/s1600/cover-tiny-sunbirds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_oEpAeUd2iXBBvjdK3M5rs775MlMlkOh8a83c96Sr1u6oCeX2Klfa0MjP-HGaYxp4zhUxWW4AxINkKIspL6_kq3lJDAwFrPLBKh5hHWYrVQkuNfXrdYJJXVUMvQET0saLgLyI/s400/cover-tiny-sunbirds.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
<dd class="publisher" style="color: #555555; font-family: 'Droid Serif', 'Liberation Serif', serif; font-size: 0.85em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 5px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><br /></dd><dd class="publisher" style="color: #555555; font-family: 'Droid Serif', 'Liberation Serif', serif; font-size: 0.85em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 5px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;"><br /></dd><dd class="publisher" style="color: #555555; font-family: 'Droid Serif', 'Liberation Serif', serif; font-size: 0.85em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 5px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">Publishers: <a href="http://www.forewordreviews.com/books/publishers/other-press/" style="color: #014f80; text-decoration: none;">Other Press</a></dd><dd class="genre" style="color: #555555; font-family: 'Droid Serif', 'Liberation Serif', serif; font-size: 0.85em; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 5px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;">Genre: <a href="http://www.forewordreviews.com/books/genres/fiction/literary/" style="color: #014f80; text-decoration: none;">Literary</a></dd><br />
<br />
After a long drought where the only books I read were about Paris, in preparation for our vacation in the City of Light, I was finally able to sink my teeth into a novel that gripped me right away and refused to let go. I'm sure as readers we all go through a non-reading phase, but mine was particularly painful because I cannot remember going a day without reading a book since I was six years old! At first, when I found myself having difficulty concentrating on a book, I didn't let it worry me too much, I thought my reading mojo would return in a few days...it's been close to six months! Phew!<br />
<br />
Anyway, back to the book. I'm not attempting a review here, but I cannot let the book that saved my reading life go by without a mention. <a href="http://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/tiny-sunbirds-far-away/">"Tiny Sunbirds, Far Away"</a> by Christie Watson is set in the Niger Delta, the oil-rich region of Nigeria. Its protagonist is a 12-year old girl who has to move from the big city of Lagos to her grandparents' house in the Niger Delta after her parents got a divorce. Not only was it difficult for her and her brother to come to terms with the change in their geographic status, but also, they went from being considerably well off to hovering just above the poverty line and from a Catholic household (their father was Catholic) to having to pray in the mosque as her mother's family were (Ijaw) Muslim.<br />
<br />
Blessing, our protagonist, soon gets caught up in the politics of a big family: a polygamous and patriarchal grandfather; a grandmother who practises midwifery; a brother who gets involved with the Sibeye boys (young, misguided local boys who are given arms with which to sabotage an oil pipeline or to kidnap a foreigner working with one of the large oil companies.) Central to the story is how oil (first discovered in 1956) is ruining the lives of the people of the Delta. Where it should have been a blessing, it is now a curse. Read <b><a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/02/nigerian-oil/oneill-text">this</a> </b>article in the National Geographic for greater insights into the curse of the black gold.<br />
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This book has a lot to recommend it: not only is the storytelling spectacular but also, it's set in an area most of us rarely get to read about (sure, there is a lot of literature coming out of Nigeria these days but not too many stories are based in this volatile area of the country which is rich in oil-deposits and yet its people are among the poorest in the land. Casting Blessing's grandmother in the role of a midwife was a clever strategy because the reader gets to learn all about female circumcision, another evil that plagues Africa. The medical details are interesting to read and let me tell you why: Ms. Watson is a nurse by profession so she certainly knows how to keep it accurate and at the same time her lyrical storytelling ensures we are never bored. All is not gloom and doom however. Her novel celebrates the happy and gregarious Nigerian spirit in a way few books have done before...it was a delight to read.<br />
Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-70774699379474879812011-03-05T07:39:00.000-05:002011-03-05T07:39:32.718-05:00Blog Hiatus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3fNKPMF1k4bmmMZ5xgdkCqzIYYdn3rSdUm09mfy7vvuhN8wJVDOUd00bc0xOjB_FTRmRmwRkZFp-t1daSSiEcgetN9Mx1GtK7_zJTRHxamlAQSndfaF1DEBerAj29TDiVC6s/s400/vacation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="276" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3fNKPMF1k4bmmMZ5xgdkCqzIYYdn3rSdUm09mfy7vvuhN8wJVDOUd00bc0xOjB_FTRmRmwRkZFp-t1daSSiEcgetN9Mx1GtK7_zJTRHxamlAQSndfaF1DEBerAj29TDiVC6s/s320/vacation.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
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Hello everyone! This blog is going on a short holiday...hopefully I will have some reviews to share after the 19th of this month. Many thanks and see you soon!Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-6081924845450272962011-02-15T14:44:00.001-05:002011-02-16T13:55:39.125-05:00On Black Sisters' Street by Chika Unigwe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://belindaotas.com/wp-content/uploads/On-Black-Sisters-Street-pbk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://belindaotas.com/wp-content/uploads/On-Black-Sisters-Street-pbk.jpg" width="417" /></a></div><ul style="text-align: center;"><li><b><span style="color: purple;">Paperback</span>:</b> 304 pages</li>
<li><b><span style="color: purple;">Publisher</span>:</b> Vintage </li>
</ul><br />
That Nigeria is a failed state is no longer in question. However, a major consequence of that is the organized exodus of Nigerian girls and women to Western Europe, where they are promised exciting jobs but end up trapped in brothels run by their own nationals - Nigerian “Madams”.<br />
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<b style="color: purple;">"Black Sisters' Street"</b> by Chika Unigwe is a fictional account of four such women - Sisi, Efe, Ama and Joyce - each of whom left Nigeria for Belgium, with dreams of a better tomorrow, only to find themselves working as prostitutes in the red light district of Antwerp, or "Black Sisters' Street" named for the inordinately large number of African woman that work the street. To tell you that none of the four went to Belgium voluntarily or that they didn't expect to be prostitutes would be to mislead the reader...however...what makes one angry is the fact that these girls felt it necessary to leave their homes, parents (in some cases, children) and enter this sordid industry only because they could barely make ends meet in their home country. It is sad these girls had to take up a job that stripped them of all self-respect just so that they could be respected back home in Nigeria.<br />
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The character sketches of the four girls are detailed and intimate and yet, at the end of the book, none of them feels like a 'best friend', for despite the tiny details - how they dressed, their family lives, their thoughts, dreams and so on - one really doesn't get to "know" them well. For that matter, even though the girls live togther, they are strangers even to each other until one tragic event brings them together. <br />
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Unigwe's prose is clear and calm - although some terrible things take place in the book, the reader doesn't feel weighed down by it. Unigwe is also skilled at introducing into the narrative issues that are typical to Nigerian society like polygamy,sexism, belief in superstitions, tribal divisions and so on, using just a single reference or a passing comment, leaving the reader with a fleeting but precious sort of cultural snapshot.<br />
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I also love her descriptions of Nigeria - from the chewing-gum pink walls of the sitting room in Ama's house (and yes, I know they have them, I've seen them in just about every Nigerian house in a Nollywood movie!) to the streets of Lagos in Joyce's story- her writing with its rich detail, truly entertains and informs.<br />
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</div><div style="color: purple; text-align: center;">"Lagos streets were rutted,gutted and near impassable,yet they were jam-packed with cars: huge air-conditioned jeeps driving tail to tail with disintigrating jalopies whose fault exhaust pipes sentout clods of dark smoke making the air so thick with pollution that a constant mist hung over the city and the bit of sky that one could see was sullied with dirt."</div><br />
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We get to know some of the girls better than the others. The story mostly revolves around Sisi, a college graduate who was unable to find a job in Nigeria because she didn't have the right "connections", however, it is Joyce's story that moved me the most, perhaps because it was the saddest and also, of the four girls, she was the only one tricked into going to Antwerp. To tell you more would be to give much of the story away and I certainly don't want to do that. <br />
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When Chika Unigwe was asked why she wanted to write about Nigerian prosititutes in Antwerp, she had this to say:<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><i>Curiosity. The first time I saw the girls in lingerie behind their windows, I was stunned. Coming from Nigeria where prostitution is very much underground, it was a cultural shock on a massive scale. I had never seen anything like it before. Then when I was told that a great majority of the African prostitutes in Antwerp were Nigerian girls from Benin City, I knew I had to write about it. The statistics are mind boggling.<b> There is a new crop of middle class families cropping up in Benin City, mostly headed by women whose daughters are in Europe</b></i><br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">I'm so glad she did (write about it), the novel does much to make us pay attention to that society that we do everything to ignore, also, it was interesting to see Europe - the destination for so many people's hopes and dreams - through the eyes of these four Nigerian girls. I appreciated that while Unigwe reveals to us that three of the girls did indeed travel to Antwerp while fully aware of what the job entailed, the background stories ensure we don't blame them...it's easy to see how girls like Ama, Sisi and Ete are pressured into taking up these jobs, if anything. it makes you angry at a society that sits back and allows these girls to sacrifice their bodies in order to put meals on the table.<br />
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Lastly, but not importantly, I noticed a few digs against Ghanaians in the book...would someone be able to tell me if there is friendly rivalry between the citizens of these two countries?<br />
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<div style="color: purple; text-align: center;">"Ama spied two Ghanaian guests going back for a second helping rice and smirked to Sisi that surely, surely Nigerians cooked better, made tastier fried rice than Ghanaians. (People who threw whole tomatoes in sauces couldn't really cook, could they?) And both women agreed that Ghanaians were just wannabe Nigerians."</div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.wasafiri.org/assets_cm/files/Image/chika_by_rocio_motty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://www.wasafiri.org/assets_cm/files/Image/chika_by_rocio_motty.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><br />
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</div></div> An award-winning short story writer, Chika Unigwe, 34, was born in Enugu, Nigeria, and now lives in Belgium with her husband and four children.Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-66069754488584915582011-02-03T07:27:00.001-05:002011-02-03T07:28:13.433-05:00Chinese Literature Challenge<div style="text-align: center;"><b>Hello fellow-readers and bloggers!</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Just signed up for </b><b>the</b></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://chineseliteraturechallenge.blogspot.com/"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgttiFda_T_26p3nZIAAtEAtfwgvkTZ84XLpXRmi65EojCgCDg26kNmFSyx-bsE3w3UYAAJhD8Bna4LlP-0J7Atjw5uP8MpfV1b7MqgufF6UUlJoU3B14lP9oZI05w4zH5nM5mC/s1600/clc_button3.png" /></a><a href="http://chineseliteraturechallenge.blogspot.com/"> </a></div><br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><b>So excited! </b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Please click on the button to read more!</b></div>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-86624641924850919612011-01-29T19:53:00.002-05:002011-01-29T23:10:55.468-05:00"TheJapanese Lover" by Rani Manicka<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n67/n336635.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n67/n336635.jpg" /></a></div><div class="row">Paperback, 328 pages</div>Published May 13th 2010 by<b style="color: #b45f06;"> Hodder &Stoughton </b><br />
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<b style="color: orange;">"<span style="color: #b45f06;">The Rice Mother</span>"</b>, Rani Manicka's fabulous debut novel was one of my favorite novels for many years and still is, and so,it was with great excitement and expectation that I picked her third novel, "The Japanese Lover". The novel started nicely enough with the birth of a daughter in a poor man's home in Vathiri, North Ceylon in 1916. Because the man was extremely poor, but cunning and lazy too, when the astrologer predicted that this newly-born daughter would marry a fabulously wealthy man, he decided that <b>"Parvathi"</b> was his ticket out of servitude and into comfort.<br />
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When the time came for Parvathi to marry her father deceived the prospective groom by sending him a picture of a beautiful maiden, not Parvathi, and in this way managed to secure an alliance between his daughter and the wealthy <b>Kasu (Money) Marimuthu</b>, a 42-year old widower of Sri-Lankan/Tamil origin in Malaysia,then known as Malaya. However, when Parvathi arrived in Malaya after her arduous journey from Colomba and the bridegroom realized he was cheated,he is determined to send Parvathi back to her father's home, but that night as he lay spent and drunk, an apparition came to him instructing him never to get rid of his wife.<br />
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<blockquote style="color: #660000;">"If you could see what I see in your wife," the vision said quietly, "you would fall to your knees in awe. Know that she is an aodred soul who has incarnated to experience love in the most unlikely circumstances" pg 31</blockquote><br />
It is at this point in the novel that I realized that Rani Manicka's new novel, has, at the heart of it, characteristics and characters that would fit very nicely in the genre of magical realism - a similar theme ran through "The Rice Mother".<br />
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Anyway, although her husband decides to keep Parvathi, their marriage, while civil, is without passion or excitement. Parvathi works hard to become the sophisticated woman her husband wants her to be,but in her heart she is deeply unfulfilled...until, on page 183, when the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Invasion_of_Malaya"><b>Japanese invade Malaya</b></a> (1941) the Japanese lover, which is also the title of the book, comes into her life.<br />
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Although this novel is nowhere near as enjoyable as "Rice Mother", it is immensely readable in parts. Manicka is still a wiz at describing both, the exotic and the mundane and I absolutely devoured the pages where she describes marriages and deaths and even everyday scenes like lunch at her daughter's place or even a regular coffee morning with the mamis (Sri Lankan women in Malaya). One of the most fascinating characters in 'The Japanese Lover' is the wise medicine woman, Maya, who while she prophesises and dispenses medicine to the people in the neighbourhood also looks after Parvathi's kitchen. Manicka uses Maya as a vehicle for her metaphysical musings and while I found them wise and ponderable at first, they diffuse into airy pulpiness after a while - because it overstretches the reader's concentration.<br />
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The personal tragedy of Parvathi's family plays out against a backdrop of the Japanese invasion of Malaya, the local communist insurgency, the anti-Chinese riots and then the inevitable loss of Malaya when British colonies of Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore join the Federation of Malaya to form the Federation of Malaysia. As the geography of Malaya changes so does Parvathi's life. The high society she was used to, no longer exists in which they live was at a dead end, and the lives they are leading seem to have run similarly out of road.<br />
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It seems to me that "The Japanese Lover" attempts to do too much -- combining geopolitics with the everyday life of a plantation owner's wife and telling a human story of loss and recovery whilst throwing in a lot of new ageypreachings and philosophes -- making it a hotch-potch of a read. <br />
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Oh, and I almost forgot...towards the end of the book, Manicka allows Maya to rant against the Indian and how they suffer from an inferiority complex owing to their colour, but yet she makes a prediction that one day they will rise above it all. <span style="font-size: small;">When Manicka was quizzed about why she included that chapter, this is what she said in an interview:</span><br />
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</span><br />
<div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i><span lang="EN-GB"><div align="left">While Parvati’s father – and her husband – never thought she was beautiful enough, other men such as the American Sam, the Japanese general and also the estate worker Kupu saw great beauty in her. In fact, dark-skinned women were looked down upon at that time.</div><div align="left">"For me, this is a message to Indians in this country because they really do have a self-esteem problem and they deny it whenever I speak about it. It is so ingrained in them. </div>"With this book, I am saying it is okay if you are dark skinned." </span></i><i><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></i></span></div>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-67676469190142706382010-12-08T14:41:00.004-05:002010-12-08T14:54:49.145-05:00A Week At The Airport by Alain de Botton<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://www.mcclelland.com/catalog/covers_450/9780771026294.jpg" width="412" /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Category: </b>Travel - Essays & Travelogues; Philosophy; Social Science - Popular Culture</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Format:</b> Trade Paperback, 112 pages</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Publisher:</b> Emblem Editions</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Pub Date:</b> September 21, 2010</div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Price:</b> $18.99<br />
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As I write this I am at London Heathrow's Terminal 5 on a transit stop between Toronto and Bangalore. I have 6 hours before my flight to Bangalore and under normal circumstances such a long wait would have sent me over the edge but today I am actually looking forward to it as I get to explore Terminal 5 with none other than <a href="http://www.alaindebotton.com/"><b>Alain de Botton</b></a>.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqsD1cHaoKKlmxDItPuozu4NAe1H7hpcpWjRbUhFNUwVN5gE2g7K3toGXRAeE6yKjZ8-sbcgIZTN-GbQacsKYcs9utsCx9WAMTIiSgD4dgPWE2-Ym4wDjeoZ0cObcLSGgGpEcb/s1600/DSC_0254.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqsD1cHaoKKlmxDItPuozu4NAe1H7hpcpWjRbUhFNUwVN5gE2g7K3toGXRAeE6yKjZ8-sbcgIZTN-GbQacsKYcs9utsCx9WAMTIiSgD4dgPWE2-Ym4wDjeoZ0cObcLSGgGpEcb/s400/DSC_0254.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><br />
<b>Taken from British Airways Lounge at LHR's Term 5 (photo credit Lotus Reads)</b><br />
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In the summer of 2009, at the invitation of the airport’s owner, BAA, which wanted to showcase its new terminal, Alain de Botton spent a week at Term 5. He was told he could write about anything in the four-football-field-long terminal. Infact, he was even given “explicit permission to be rude about the airport’s activities.’’ The result is a slim volume titled simply, <a href="http://www.alaindebotton.com/a_week_at_the_airport.asp"><b>"A Week At The Airport: A Heathrow Diary"</b></a><br />
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So, book in hand I set out to discover Term 5 along with de Botton. The book begins with a brief introduction, called Approach, which describes de Botton’s decision to accept BAA’s offer to be the “writer-in-residence,’’ and the remainder of the book is divided into three larger sections: Departures, Airside, and Arrivals. Since I can't access "Departures" and "Arrivals" I am going to have to stick with "Airside".<br />
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But fortunately De Botton's book touches very little on the physical geography of the airport and instead devotes a lot of ink to passengers at the airport. Being in an airport, he writes, is an opportunity to observe people, "<i style="color: #20124d;">to forget onself in a sea of otherness and to let the imagination loose on the limitless supply of fragmentary stories provided by the eye and ear</i>"<br />
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Meeting passengers posed no problem for de Botton as most travellers thought he was an airline employee and therefore a potentially useful source of information on where to find the customs desk or the ATM machine. However, those that took the trouble to read his name badge came to regard the desk as a confessional. Each new day brought a density of stores and soon his little notebook was entirely full with anecdotes of loss, desire, expectattion, <i style="color: #20124d;">"snapshots of travellers' souls on their way to the skies."</i><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW8ddyLLhaokyvtFjiO8Q08OLZxz3zsjv2eBtA4cUmRwWJW_bT8iF-Jd5-bhyphenhyphen5JTlqgzLM0VzXZnsXpaeexhpKrQ0wQfVIJhDsWTP1hRHK-M0k-kS2BZQZfIflQxtbK4deR1Hs/s1600/DSC_0245.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiW8ddyLLhaokyvtFjiO8Q08OLZxz3zsjv2eBtA4cUmRwWJW_bT8iF-Jd5-bhyphenhyphen5JTlqgzLM0VzXZnsXpaeexhpKrQ0wQfVIJhDsWTP1hRHK-M0k-kS2BZQZfIflQxtbK4deR1Hs/s400/DSC_0245.JPG" width="400" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>Passengers "Airside" at Term 5 (photo credit Lotus Reads)</b> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br />
One particularly poignant story was of a man embarking on what he (the passenger) wryly referred to as a "holiday of a lifetime" to Bali with his wife who was just months away from succumbing to incurable brain cancer. She was only 49 years old. Another traveller that de Botton encountered revealed that he had two families, one in the UK and the other in Los Angeles and that neither knew about the existence of the other! De Botton muses that the reason he managed to get such personal and moving stories out of passengers is because when we (essentially land creatures) are about to defy gravity and take to the sky it makes us particularly anxious, thoughtful and prepared to share stories about ourselves we may, under normal circumstances, not discuss with a stranger.<br />
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De Botton rues that most passengers rush through an airport, their only intent and focus being to complete formalities and to catch their flight. He thinks it's a pity that more travellers do not stop to enjoy the architecture of the airport building and more importantly, the potential and possibilities that being in an airport can evoke. For instance, take the departurescreens with their long lists of destinations. These screens imply a feeling of infinite possibilities and longing. Where should we travel to? Casablanca in Morocco? Phnom Penh in Cambodia? Anchorage in Alaska? The ticket desk is only a few short steps away and they suggest an ease with which we might buy a ticket for a destination <i style="color: #073763;">"where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses and where no one knew our identities". </i>There is such potential for dreaming and for our imaginations to take flight (pardon the pun) when we're at an airport but most of us are so frazzled from all the airport formalities that we barely have time to relax and ruminate, or so the author concludes. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/09by5Xcgmp80H/610x.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="242" src="http://cache.daylife.com/imageserve/09by5Xcgmp80H/610x.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><b>Departure Screens LHR Term 5 (photo credit Getty Images)</b><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;">I loved de Botton's musings on Airline Security. The training of security personnel is so arduous - they are trained to look at every human being as though he or she might want to blow up an aircraft! They have been trained to overcome all prejudices as to what an enemy might look like: the enemy could be a six-year old with a cute smocked frock and with a juice box in her hand or an eighty-year old grandma with a bunch of Christmas stockings for her grandkids. The levels of alertness that security guards need to maintain is so grueling that they were granted more frequent tea-breaks than any of the other airport employees.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixTtNbD9LPdfY7IlwNd-VSt1GfegL_-jCCOI2PdNqYgXD0DUUZSHsmIrVGKk-F-dwO_hT8YZDlotVlSqyKosRy3Yke0LHYmUg6ad_UvZujTITIaSj4y9-DkQRAVWoEBSmW7NPT/s1600/DSC_0244.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixTtNbD9LPdfY7IlwNd-VSt1GfegL_-jCCOI2PdNqYgXD0DUUZSHsmIrVGKk-F-dwO_hT8YZDlotVlSqyKosRy3Yke0LHYmUg6ad_UvZujTITIaSj4y9-DkQRAVWoEBSmW7NPT/s400/DSC_0244.JPG" width="400" /> </a></div><br />
<b>Security at London Heathrow's Term 5 (credit Lotus Reads) </b><br />
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</div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;">And then no book about an airport could be complete without mentioning the shops and goodness knows, Heathrow's Terminal 5 has an abundance of them...infact, many people initially complained that Term 5 was more like a mall than an airport. De Botton muses that those people that objected to too many shops had probably considered that in the event of a catastrophe, they wouldn't have liked to have spent their last few moments on earth indulging in a vice like consumerism! :)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifXp08T_KC_kL9I16_N8Qbk5XQpEj2yQOe-TRiKEv_HcnOTcHP3YBxDVNpG_q8kdv_sWlPgQa4UZBcK8JGI8bUgKyrgPV0_stEN8iWwt1dgaXXkwMQdnuSzBpKym3vNGA6TV-z/s1600/DSC_0246.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifXp08T_KC_kL9I16_N8Qbk5XQpEj2yQOe-TRiKEv_HcnOTcHP3YBxDVNpG_q8kdv_sWlPgQa4UZBcK8JGI8bUgKyrgPV0_stEN8iWwt1dgaXXkwMQdnuSzBpKym3vNGA6TV-z/s400/DSC_0246.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><b>Shopping at Term 5 (photo credit Lotus Reads) </b><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsKAKzh8k6RGDq8uujpUgFfwGi5_dX-m06AOy0QMYSu2FnY3002udsUwtjrWlwUwhUgfjT7SFWLIYEizjlS1XHaIbj76RgU5gnZe4mCZE2JmE-6TyhcoGytdtT18RrFPQfYi02/s1600/DSC_0250.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsKAKzh8k6RGDq8uujpUgFfwGi5_dX-m06AOy0QMYSu2FnY3002udsUwtjrWlwUwhUgfjT7SFWLIYEizjlS1XHaIbj76RgU5gnZe4mCZE2JmE-6TyhcoGytdtT18RrFPQfYi02/s400/DSC_0250.JPG" width="400" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b>Duty Free at Term 5 (photo credit Lotus Reads)</b></div><br />
The book is dotted with many philosophical musings and makes for a truly enjoyable read. Let me leave you with one last thought of a passenger named David who was taking his family to Greece on a vacation. David had confided in de Botton that his wife was upset at him for putting work over his family. But in David's mind, he worked hard so that he could give his family vacations abroad and other good things. De Botton then observes the very true Jewish saying <i style="color: #20124d;">"Wherever you go, there you are"</i>...in order words, David will be bringing himself with him on this vacation, would he be able to leave his irritation with his wife behind and enjoy the holiday? Unlikely. One's surroundings might change but unless we change the way we think and feel nothing truly changes. This is an important truth of travel. <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu6tQ-rOzhiw0P4GkQ-FGvCeiglp1lYn0fjoF4HV4r1Ory1sk9DGm-4v6_QlIM09ASbDj7CLLiz3ZGJcl0AE0D2BOniBwiDfEvnYKaBpeRYLRkbUZr2CAb0lXtQH8KWB_8x0JN/s1600/DSC_0249.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu6tQ-rOzhiw0P4GkQ-FGvCeiglp1lYn0fjoF4HV4r1Ory1sk9DGm-4v6_QlIM09ASbDj7CLLiz3ZGJcl0AE0D2BOniBwiDfEvnYKaBpeRYLRkbUZr2CAb0lXtQH8KWB_8x0JN/s640/DSC_0249.JPG" width="424" /></a></div><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Christmas Tree in Term 5 Departure Lounge (photo credit Lotus Reads)</b><br />
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</div>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-53449784397723249182010-11-27T16:20:00.001-05:002010-12-04T07:57:50.390-05:00Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. Edited by Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz7zHvJfYYL42jXd7sBXzsKiHhF7dTja9CvJebbOTuvrpZ4RAXfkmE25jDvi3eWBCRpPupRlC7PvIDvQGCcfw22aiiQ4eheUyxWN76Ibx0izHDbnboRKzwYJjmiJPCa1xCqAtl/s1600/9780061997402.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz7zHvJfYYL42jXd7sBXzsKiHhF7dTja9CvJebbOTuvrpZ4RAXfkmE25jDvi3eWBCRpPupRlC7PvIDvQGCcfw22aiiQ4eheUyxWN76Ibx0izHDbnboRKzwYJjmiJPCa1xCqAtl/s1600/9780061997402.jpg" /></a></div><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody>
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</div><div class="row" style="text-align: center;">Paperback, 224 pages</div><div style="text-align: center;">Published November 1st 2010 by Harper Perennial</div><br />
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<div style="color: #660000; text-align: center;"><i>"It's not the word made flesh we want in writing, in fiction, and in poetry, but the flesh made word."</i></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">- <b>William Gass</b>, On Being Blue</div><br />
What a great quote to use as an introduction to a book featuring atleast 100 images of tattoos inspired by works of literature.<br />
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According to a recent Pew Research Center survey, 36 percent of people in the United States between the ages eighteen and twenty-five, and 40 percent between the ages of twenty-six and forty, have at least one tattoo. From what I see around me, they (tattoos) appear to be mainstream now and are as acceptable/common as pierced ears, in other words, tattoos have lost their "badass" image! <br />
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When people pick tattoos they generally try to pick something that is meaningful to them or something that celebrates a milestone in their lives. So is it then logical to suppose that a lover of literature would pick a word, quote or phrase from a favourite work of literature? I think so and so did Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor, for they set about trying to compile a catalog of bookish tattoos which then came to be known as <a href="http://www.harpercollins.com/books/Word-Made-Flesh/?isbn=9780061997402"><b><span style="color: #660000;">"Literary Tattoos" from Bookworms Worldwide</span>."</b></a> Bookworms Worldwide refers to the group of people who submitted tattoos - photos, testimonies and the stories behind their particular tattoos - to the book.<br />
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In these pages you'll find favourite lines from novels, illustrations, portraits and passages of verse; you'll also find the inspirations behind the tattoos: favourite childhood books, commemorations of triumphant (or tragic) moments in lives; affirmation of friendship; drunken whims; a phrase or an image that were just too cool not to keep forever and so on.<br />
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Here are some of my favourites:<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia2KWvQPsDRR9s9U96FMaRLpIHylfNdg9lSIE27dCTELIWAY4eARTz6o70XpgB6HRLpJeeOk34ei_5eAccbbNL8sxgfry4x_b_ElAlLcWLwJmxCHTnoC2s4it5u80bTMsvTUaC/s1600/6a00d83451c45669e20134888989bb970c-550wi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia2KWvQPsDRR9s9U96FMaRLpIHylfNdg9lSIE27dCTELIWAY4eARTz6o70XpgB6HRLpJeeOk34ei_5eAccbbNL8sxgfry4x_b_ElAlLcWLwJmxCHTnoC2s4it5u80bTMsvTUaC/s320/6a00d83451c45669e20134888989bb970c-550wi.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><b>Tess Adamski</b> : Toronto, Ontario</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">Kerouac at his typewriter with the closing lines of <b>"On The Road"</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4DyTo5NSPSVj3ezbL-xoN1amnf06qWoqB8g8j4hcYVHrhL3fXqcj_qnmA385zte003y_WtZqxquHyXNvEbgVgB9ss3rfVKf5eBh5q962Hp2GY-IRAPHGW5Sp0V3a7oM7EyNso/s1600/slide_11719_154201_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4DyTo5NSPSVj3ezbL-xoN1amnf06qWoqB8g8j4hcYVHrhL3fXqcj_qnmA385zte003y_WtZqxquHyXNvEbgVgB9ss3rfVKf5eBh5q962Hp2GY-IRAPHGW5Sp0V3a7oM7EyNso/s1600/slide_11719_154201_large.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Stanza from<b> "Auguries of Innocence"</b> by William Blake<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnEwjF5CZPMWZo_PZgJjPR6ZAdWa2G_wiwe23piY_Z2ANebaTjf8EJq4qZBFEr2UidR4kOcY-77I8V3WnFogp7zZGCAes-rPSs-gWyvg6c0AOcdfLsCelmXuDC2e87wX2ByQxe/s1600/literary+tattoo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnEwjF5CZPMWZo_PZgJjPR6ZAdWa2G_wiwe23piY_Z2ANebaTjf8EJq4qZBFEr2UidR4kOcY-77I8V3WnFogp7zZGCAes-rPSs-gWyvg6c0AOcdfLsCelmXuDC2e87wX2ByQxe/s400/literary+tattoo.jpg" width="395" /></a></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.expressnightout.com/content/photos/20101027-literarytattoos1-450" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://www.expressnightout.com/content/photos/20101027-literarytattoos1-450" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6daZqGgkq8-7eCMJXYqiv2AmVsmWX8ie_nX0fv-MAK-sae-28LBFhYMt82EmYNZw2f3KN316GMoFUzm_FB7xpomGpnM6A_g4nBcZE2MFF58GZNPFWdwJctCjppot15_ev1NiN/s1600/IMG_10833-480x492.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6daZqGgkq8-7eCMJXYqiv2AmVsmWX8ie_nX0fv-MAK-sae-28LBFhYMt82EmYNZw2f3KN316GMoFUzm_FB7xpomGpnM6A_g4nBcZE2MFF58GZNPFWdwJctCjppot15_ev1NiN/s400/IMG_10833-480x492.jpg" width="390" /></a></div><br />
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I guess all that remains is for me to ask: if you planned to get a literary tattoo, what would yours say?Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-49195012000879134352010-10-23T08:04:00.003-04:002010-10-24T17:51:04.929-04:00Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal by Conor Grennan<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPmInE7BKKPxtsdS6GTijeoQwX4uhYgfkAxiUMXmhq8_npmlhDnXhuvIMz7LL6Lz4OugGDW_QZ55c4ahyHS9csh4sRTq6ANm1s6kiXHSnfrRJIVE3hKInaerZhSPt3WeWdIPxA/s1600/9780061930058_0_Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjPmInE7BKKPxtsdS6GTijeoQwX4uhYgfkAxiUMXmhq8_npmlhDnXhuvIMz7LL6Lz4OugGDW_QZ55c4ahyHS9csh4sRTq6ANm1s6kiXHSnfrRJIVE3hKInaerZhSPt3WeWdIPxA/s640/9780061930058_0_Cover.jpg" width="424" /></a></div><br />
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<tr align="center"> <td><b><span style="color: magenta;">Publisher</span>:</b></td> <td><img alt="" height="1" src="http://www.netgalley.com/images/1x1trans.gif" width="11" /> </td> <td>HarperCollins</td> </tr>
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<tr align="center"> <td style="color: magenta;"><b>Imprint:</b></td> <td><img alt="" height="1" src="http://www.netgalley.com/images/1x1trans.gif" width="11" /> </td> <td>William Morrow </td> </tr>
<tr align="center"> <td style="color: magenta;"><b>Pub Date:</b></td> <td style="color: magenta;"><img alt="" height="1" src="http://www.netgalley.com/images/1x1trans.gif" width="11" /> </td> <td>01/25/2011</td></tr>
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<tr align="center" valign="top"> <td style="font-size: 11px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Author Website : <span style="color: magenta;"> </span><a href="http://www.nextgenerationnepal.org/" style="color: magenta; font-weight: normal;" target="_blank">click here</a></span> </td> </tr>
<tr valign="top"> <td style="font-size: 11px;"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Publisher's Website : <span style="color: magenta;"> </span><a href="http://bit.ly/cIkuik" style="color: magenta; font-weight: normal;" target="_blank">click here</a></span></div></td> </tr>
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<tr><td><span style="font-size: small;">NONFICTION - ADULT: Biography/Autobiography</span></td></tr>
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Of all the countries in the sub-continent Nepal is probably one that impinges least on world consciousness. You would have thought that being the proud keeper of the Everest , it would be better known, but statistics show that a large majority of people wrongly perceive the Everest as belonging to India ,or even China! Very little Nepalese literature has made it into English, nor is there a good selection of travel or memoir writing set in the country, so when I chanced upon<span style="color: magenta;"></span><b> <span style="color: magenta;">"Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal"</span></b> by Conor Grennan, I knew I had to read it.<br />
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Twenty-nine-year-old Conor Grennan left his secure home and job in the USA in Nov of 2004 intending to travel the world. He decided to make Nepal his first stop and chose to volunteer at an orphanage during his stay, which, by his own admission was engineered to impress people. When he arrived in Nepal the mountain kingdom was in the middle of a <b>civil war</b> with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Nepal_%28Maoist%29" style="color: magenta;"><b>Maoists</b></a> vowing they would not drop their arms until the King abdicated his throne and a People's Republic of Nepal was established. <br />
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The Orphanage was called "The Little Princes Children's Home" and had come together under the watchful and caring eye of a young French woman called Sandy. Sandy was a keen hiker and once, trekking up in a mountain village in Nepal, she learned that the Maoists were kidnapping children who lived in remote and isolated mountainous villages and putting them to work in the rebel army. Parents terrified that they might lose their kids to the rebel army, fell prey to a man called <b>"Golakk"</b> who promised these parents that for a fee he would take their children to Kathmandu (the capital city of Nepal) where he would feed, house and send them to school. The gullible parents sold everything they had so that their children could leave with Golakk to what they naively presumed was a "better life". Instead, Gollack pocketed the money and dumped these kids on the streets to fend for themselves. Sometimes he sold them to rich Nepalis to work as domestic servants and sometimes these kids were trafficked across the border into Nepal as sex slaves. Sandy was so distraught upon hearing this, she immediately set out to establish a shelter for these abandoned kids which she named "Little Princes" after Antoine de Exupery's novel titled "Le Petit Prince". <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_n2k7PLYVIAGb5JbtpvewTNF_9kCT8VEagxoTkHh-h4NEYGA3KG_MUt-8gj_YD3GHg6EgqvEPZN_8Aw_TMrB7n12M9VB9NoGiqsqciDjT_OiB-kHT7rIkjed8pk3q9XTau3ZA/s1600/nepal-peoples-liberation-army.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_n2k7PLYVIAGb5JbtpvewTNF_9kCT8VEagxoTkHh-h4NEYGA3KG_MUt-8gj_YD3GHg6EgqvEPZN_8Aw_TMrB7n12M9VB9NoGiqsqciDjT_OiB-kHT7rIkjed8pk3q9XTau3ZA/s400/nepal-peoples-liberation-army.jpg" width="266" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">An armed Maoist soldier</div><br />
When Conor arrived at "Little Princes" the eighteen kids were so delighted to see him they completely swarmed him. They used him as a human jungle jim, hanging from his neck, his shoulders and wrists. Any trepidation that Conor felt about not having any experience with children completely dissipated in that moment and over the next few days he actually enjoyed waking up to them, helping them to get ready for school and looked forward to playing soccer and carom with them in the evenings. <br />
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The children often shared stories of their remote and mountainous village home, <b>Humla</b>, with Conor and he in turn told them much about the outside world - about submarines, the solar system and how man had walked on the moon. Sometimes his stories could get him into a little trouble like the time the boys wanted to know what sort of food Americans ate. <i>"Pork, chicken, beef"</i> replied Conor to which the shocked response was <i>"Americans eat God?"</i> Nepal is a predominantly Hindu country where the cow is worshiped and never, ever eaten!<br />
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Soon it was time for Conor to leave Nepal and set out on his world trip. Every one of those kids asked Conor if he was going to return to the "Little Princes" home and although he was advised against answering in the affirmative he gave them his word that he would be back.<br />
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And he DID return! Not only did he return to the orphanage but he vowed to set up another orphanage where other trafficked kids could have a chance at a normal life, he also vowed to travel to <b>Humla</b> to find the kids' parents so that they could be reunited with each other. With his few savings and some small donations from friends and family he set up a home which they called<b> "Daulagiri"</b> (after the seventh-tallest mountain in Nepal) and he set off with a translator and two porters (carrying rice and supplies) for Humla to look for the parents. It is this mission to Humla that predominates the second half of this fine book.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjM_XHyi9gZVGPhshMzaOWsNV3NTEN1ZqTDlfxWbw0Wni6iGZpJScjKsx2F3vexaioM4RAOvXSupq8dynIO1S5UJTjHmnwNQAQCL8yGwpR88nIG51swgpPqxRJ3Mmluvl0W7aT/s1600/0702_feature_altruist_village.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="299" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjM_XHyi9gZVGPhshMzaOWsNV3NTEN1ZqTDlfxWbw0Wni6iGZpJScjKsx2F3vexaioM4RAOvXSupq8dynIO1S5UJTjHmnwNQAQCL8yGwpR88nIG51swgpPqxRJ3Mmluvl0W7aT/s400/0702_feature_altruist_village.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> HUMLA (Nepal's Back of Beyond)</div><br />
Humla, the region the Little Princes came from, is an impoverished village on the border of Tibet. You could say it is a remote region in the remotest part of Nepal.<br />
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In his own words: <br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><i>"Humla is the most remote part of the country, and one of the poorest, which is saying something in Nepal. There are no roads, and the guerrillas (Maoists) had blown up all the bridges. You had to cross the river on rope pulleys, with people on either side pulling you. Trekking in this region meant "climbing straight up and straight down" jagged peaks and pinning yourself against cliff walls when a herd of sheep or water buffalo came barreling around a bend" </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
As Conor entered the hard-to-reach villages he gave village elders the names of families they were looking for and as the families were brought out to meet him, he presented them with photos of their children. Grennan's beautiful narration of the parents' reaction to finding out their kids were alive is so beautifully rendered, it will make you cry, I know I did! The first parents to arrive brought a bag of walnuts and honey to give to the stranger who had news of their son. Knowing that they were dirt poor and that a gift of walnuts would have set them back quite a bit, brought a lump to Conor's throat and it made him even more determined to facilitate more such reunions.</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVYSth6KpOIITmUvRdFWsAV4aADIj5lYQJPfIU8_fggrV2ZxeXePMi-2-Oxfdvh6rpJXx4ztazHBZ4J-Q0CAGpGymnbtzEoiHQEzaBS4uHdVpP7f6BpnUm8JhP3y3RC-M8Mbsv/s1600/9-interview-small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVYSth6KpOIITmUvRdFWsAV4aADIj5lYQJPfIU8_fggrV2ZxeXePMi-2-Oxfdvh6rpJXx4ztazHBZ4J-Q0CAGpGymnbtzEoiHQEzaBS4uHdVpP7f6BpnUm8JhP3y3RC-M8Mbsv/s400/9-interview-small.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"> <b>Conor interviewing a family with the aid of a translator. Later he would read back all his notes to the children at "Little Princes" so they each knew exactly what their parents had said.</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">So Conor Grenan ended up being an <a href="http://www.uvamagazine.org/features/article/the_accidental_altruist/"><b style="color: magenta;">"accidental altruist"</b></a> as one article fondly calls him and I would say he is an accidental writer too and I mean that in the nicest possible way. He hadn't set out to write a book on Nepal, heck, he only intended volunteering for a few months in order to justify his hedonistic trip around the world, and yet, here he was three years later setting up orphanages and rescuing children from the clutches of child traffickers. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I see this book as being an inspiration to many who might have thought of volunteering in impoverished countries but didn't feel like they had anything to offer - as Conor himself says, </div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>"Volunteering, whether it is in an impoverished third world nation or in your hometown, requires only that you show up. Don’t worry how little of your time or resources you may have to offer—just offer it, and see what happens." </i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">I loved the narration...it is like a breath of fresh air. Conor's writing style is informing but oh so companionable. Each of those kids had a story that read like a tear jerker, but there's also plenty humour and a dash of silliness, for that's what happens when you work with kids! For the lover of culture, there is a lot of Nepal in there...you read about its scenic beauty, its lovely and warm people, its festivals, food and so on, but he also talks about the issues that hold the country back - the poverty, corruption, the caste system, the trafficking, but to his credit at no time does the narrative degenerate into a "woe is Nepal", instead, he seeks gently to draw from the reader a sympathy for the poor and destitute villagers caught between the rebel army and the government.</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;">Today Conor Grenan lives in the US with his wife and young son but he continues to oversee the<b> <a href="http://www.nextgenerationnepal.org/">Nepal Next Generation</a></b> organization which he founded. If you desire to know more about the foundation or want to assist Conor Grenan in his work, do visit their site. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyckRwPWkUPDuvL1ZI76KZ194-roCHvHnHE1qJfq4PDZf986Jrh6UAytLv8qcLIWCKAKhAmdKIVEeGFHlOif7NTeR8ZugLxvQrV9_fMtpiNbQ6ZjmdLLE6HRWyyJ4o7Ajwo3OT/s1600/03.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyckRwPWkUPDuvL1ZI76KZ194-roCHvHnHE1qJfq4PDZf986Jrh6UAytLv8qcLIWCKAKhAmdKIVEeGFHlOif7NTeR8ZugLxvQrV9_fMtpiNbQ6ZjmdLLE6HRWyyJ4o7Ajwo3OT/s1600/03.jpg" /></a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i></i></div>This book will be released by Harper Collins in January 2011. According to the author a portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book will go towards buying food, provisions, educational supplies for the orphanage and for finding more families of trafficked children in Nepal. <br />
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</tbody></table>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-54283637355527836472010-10-13T18:06:00.000-04:002010-10-13T18:06:23.834-04:00'My Favourite Female' contest <strong>Like to read? Enjoy books with strong, interesting female characters? Women's Web 'My Favourite Female' is just the contest for you!</strong><br />
<br />
<img align="left" alt="ffccontestad.jpg" height="160" src="http://www.womensweb.in/images/stories/Ads/ffccontestad.jpg" width="220" />Welcome to the Women's Web's 'My Favourite Female' contest, where all you need to do is write about a fictional female character that really appeals to you. (For purposes of this contest, we're defining 'fictional' as a character from a novel).<br />
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<strong>What? </strong>Pick any female character from a novel, that made you sit up, that made you go wow, that made you laugh or cry, that got you angry, that got you thinking, that made you fall in love - in short, a character that made you feel, <em>'I wish I had written that!' </em><br />
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<strong>How? </strong>Tell us what you liked about this character in a blog post. If you don't blog - drop a note in the comments here, or mail us at <a href="mailto:contests@womensweb.in">contests@womensweb.in</a> <span style="display: none;">This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it </span>. Remember, the character herself doesn't need to be likeable, so long as you can talk about why the character appealed to you - actions, qualities or anything else.<br />
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<strong>Rules</strong><br />
- Stick to 500 words or below<br />
- Choose a <u>fictional</u> character - in other words, someone from a novel, who did not exist in the real world <em>(sorry, historical novel characters based on actual people won't qualify!) </em><br />
- Your entry must be dated between <strong>12th Oct and 22nd Oct, 2010</strong> (or reach us between those dates)<br />
- If you're submitting a blog post, include a link to this page - we'll track your entry that way. (<a href="http://womensweb.in/top-level-documents/favourite-females.html" target="_blank">http://womensweb.in/top-level-documents/favourite-females.html</a>)<br />
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<strong>THE PRIZES</strong><br />
The best written entry a.k.a 1st prize wins a Rs. 500 Flipkart voucher (or a $10 Amazon voucher if you happen to live outside India). The next two best written entries (2nd and 3rd prizes) get Rs. 250 worth Flipkart vouchers each (or a $5 Amazon voucher if you live outside India).<br />
All 3 winning entries will also be published on the <a href="http://www.womensweb.in/index.php?Itemid=129&option=com_lyftenbloggie&view=lyftenbloggie&category=0" target="_blank">Women's Web blog</a>.<br />
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<strong>And the Judges?</strong><br />
We have two people from the world of words, who've very kindly agreed to act as judges for the My Favourite Female contest. They are: Devaki Khanna, Freelance Writer and Editor, who is fascinated with literature and history and Nivethitha Kumar, who, along with two friends, runs <a href="http://www.thebanyantrees.com/" target="_blank">The Banyan Trees</a>, a literary magazine featuring a variety of creative content. Nivethitha is passionate about writing and blogs at <a href="http://www.nivispace.com/" target="_blank">Nivispace</a>. (A preliminary evaluation of entries may be done by Women's Web, if we have a whole of entries - which, we hope we do!)<br />
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Go on then - remember, entries close on <strong>22nd Oct 2010,</strong> so get your entry in before thaLotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-46638889653700167732010-10-10T15:44:00.000-04:002010-10-10T15:44:08.012-04:00OUTLAW: INDIA'S BANDIT QUEEN AND ME by Roy Moxham<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLMz1HLu9HWqw7CvnLyxGH59tyRp5zjwrark4zGMLjVtA1Hcf7bcTtRLtYD5lgsHwioOj9e-s_fR9G_dPZWyKZEYiIl2sOnrRjLXXMe_Yx6TOkFuf6Sf35r8vgw9q4RyQ_v3LE/s1600/9781846041822.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLMz1HLu9HWqw7CvnLyxGH59tyRp5zjwrark4zGMLjVtA1Hcf7bcTtRLtYD5lgsHwioOj9e-s_fR9G_dPZWyKZEYiIl2sOnrRjLXXMe_Yx6TOkFuf6Sf35r8vgw9q4RyQ_v3LE/s640/9781846041822.jpg" width="398" /></a></div><div style="color: black; text-align: center;">Format:Hardback<br />
Publisher: <b style="color: #660000;"><a href="http://www.eburypublishing.co.uk/publisher.asp?imprint=Rider">Rider</a></b><br />
Published: 3/6/2010</div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">India has seen any number of truly remarkable women over the years - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rani_Lakshmibai" style="color: #660000;"><b>Rani of Jhansi</b></a>, Indira Gandhi, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiran_Bedi" style="color: #660000;"><b>Kiran Ahluwalia</b></a><span style="color: #660000;"> </span>- just to name a few, but none have been so fiercely loved or hated as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoolan_Devi" style="color: #660000;"><b>Phoolan Devi</b></a><span style="color: #660000;">,</span> India's Bandit Queen.</div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">Phoolan was born into the lower <i>mallah</i> (boatman) caste, in the small village in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttar_Pradesh" title="Uttar Pradesh">Uttar Pradesh</a>, India. When Phoolan was ten years old, her cousin, <b>Mayadin</b>, became the head of the family. Mayadin arranged to have her married to a man 20 years her senior and who was already married. Phoolan, as the younger wife, was relegated to household labour. It all became too much for the 11-year old when her husband sexually molested her even though she had not yet reached puberty and she ran back to her village. Sadly, because she left her husband, she was forever treated as a social outcast and even her family was forced to reject her.</div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">A few years down the road Phoolan became embroiled in a conflict with some richer relatives over family land. The relatives arranged for her to be kidnapped by dacoits that lived in the local ravines around the village. The gang was led by one <b style="color: #660000;">Babu Singh</b> who raped Phoolan, but he in turn was shot by his deputy, <b style="color: #660000;">Vikram Mallah</b> who then became Phoolan's lover. Together, Vikram and Phoolan participated in the gang's activities, which consisted of looting high-caste (Thakur) villages and kidnapping landowners for ransom. </div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">Sadly, the Vikram, Phoolan partnership was not to last. Vikram was shot dead by a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thakur" style="color: #660000;"><b>Thakur</b></a> member of the gang (who wanted Phoolan for himself) . They (the Thakurs) locked Phoolan away in a place called <b style="color: #660000;">"Behmai"</b> where she was gang-raped mercilessly. After three weeks, she managed to escape and gathered together a gang of Mallahs (men from her own caste) that she led with <b style="color: #660000;">Man Singh</b>, a member of Vikram's former gang.</div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">In 1981, seventeen months after her escape from Behmai where she was raped, Phoolan and Man Singh returned to the village, to take her revenge. The Thakurs in the village were preparing for a wedding. When Phoolan's gang failed to find all the kidnappers/molesters even after an exhaustive search, they lined up twnety-two Thakur men in the village and shot them. Sadly, most of the men shot and killed were not involved in her kidnapping or rape. Later, Phoolan Devi claimed that she herself didn't kill anybody in Behmai – all the killings were carried out by her gang members. <span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">After the killings the police launched a huge manhunt using helicopters and thousands of men, but Phoolan Devi' evaded capture by hiding out in the ravines. Finally Prime Minister Indira Gandhi authorised the Madhya Pradesh government to negotiate a surrender deal. In February of 1983, with most of her gang dead and her health failing, Phoolan surrendered.</span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.outlookindia.com/images/phoolan2_010725.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="http://www.outlookindia.com/images/phoolan2_010725.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div style="color: black; text-align: center;">Phoolan Devi at her surrender with her lover, Man Singh</div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
The agreed terms were that her family be given a plot of land; that she not be hanged; her gang must have prison quarters that were separated from the rest and that all charges must be dropped once they had served eight years in prison. Sadly, the Indian government reneged on all deals. Instead of eight years, Phoolan served eleven years and would have languished in prison longer had a mass movement by the coalition of socialists and "Untouchables" in Uttar Pradesh in 1994 not forced her release. </span></div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; text-align: center;"></div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">It is while Phoolan was serving prison time that <b><a href="http://www.roymoxham.com/page2.htm" style="color: #660000;">Roy Moxham</a>,</b> first contacted the Lady Bandit.</span></div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">In his own words:</span></div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: #660000;"><i>“In June 1992, I did a very strange thing. I wrote to a bandit in an Indian jail,”</i></div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">After reading an article in the British newspapers about Phoolan Devi and her troubled past, Roy Moxham ( a book and paper conservator living in the UK) was moved to write to her. Initially he just wanted to lend her a listening ear, but as he got to know Phoolan better he was also compelled to send her a little money, dole out advice, and given that Phoolan spoke no English, write to influential people on her behalf...you could say he was to Phoolan, both, a kindly friend and an agent. As the years went by he and Phoolan got even closer and she referred to him as her brother.</div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; text-align: center;"><a href="http://randomhouseindia.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/pd-and-me-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://randomhouseindia.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/pd-and-me-1.jpg" width="258" /></a></div><div style="color: #660000; text-align: center;"><b>Phoolan Devi with Roy Moxham, Holi 1994</b></div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">Whenever Moxham made his annual visit to India he would stay at her house in Delhi. Sharing such close space with Poonam and her family allowed Moxham to see and share a side of Phoolan that most of us had never seen. He tells us how she was loathe to hire househelp and loved to cook and clean the floors herself. Also, she was passionately fond of kids and spent any number of hours looking after her sisters' children, but that same family also tried to use her - wanting a share of her new-found wealth and prosperity. He also shows us what life was like for her when she joined politics, how she almost embraced Buddhism and how, as she got wealthier, she simply gave stuff away to people. She barely tolerated the security that was given to her and as the years went by she used fewer and fewer bodyguards. Moxham is sure that had she had more security she would not have lost her life prematurely.</div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">When Moxham was asked why he wrote this memoir, <a href="http://www.eburypublishing.co.uk/viewbook.asp?isbn=1846041821&searchtxt=roy%20moxham&searchopt="><b><span style="color: #660000;">"Outlaw: India's Bandit Queen and Me"</span>,</b></a> he claimed it was to set to the record straight on Phoolan. According to him, people's impressions of Phoolan have been shaped mainly by Shekhar Kapur's movie <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandit_Queen" style="color: #660000;"><b>"The Bandit Queen"</b></a><span style="color: #660000;"> </span>(based on the book by <b style="color: #660000;">Mala Sen</b>). Now while the movie is sympathetic to Phoolan, there are scenes in the movie that she vehemently protested. One was the depiction of the brutal rape scene and the other was how Kapur had the actress that plays Phoolan, paraded naked around the village well. Phoolan thought it was cruel and insensitive to depict her that way. She made Moxham write to Channel 4 several times to stop the movie from being released in the UK, but his pleas fell on deaf ears. Moxham, the true friend that he is, supported her dislike of the movie and could never bring himself to watch it, until he set out to write the memoir, that is.</div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">Another reason Moxham wanted to write this book is because it's the only account of the former MP's life after her release from jail in 1994. The book is based on extensive correspondence between the two, even though Devi did not know English. The correspondence led to an unlikely friendship that lasted till the time Phoolan Devi was assassinated in 2001. </div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div style="color: black;">What can I say about Moxham's writing? Well, it's basic to say the very least, but this is an entertaining read and you can tell, right from the get-go that his interest in Phoolan's welfare is kindly and honest. When he's not visiting her in India he is travelling the country, usually little towns and villages in the North and his descriptions of these little towns made for welcome reading. More importantly, reading about Phoolan's life drives us to ask: would she have become a bandit had she not been an uneducated woman, in a backward village with so few choices? I think the answer is NO!!! She was spirited, charismatic, but poor and uneducated. To make matters worse she was born into the wrong caste and in the wrong gender. All these factors conspired to make her who she became. Her story is truly one worth reading.</div><div style="color: black;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; color: black; text-align: center;"><a href="http://microcosmpublishing.com/catimages/image_2386.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://microcosmpublishing.com/catimages/image_2386.gif" /></a></div><span style="color: black;"> </span>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-2895353222261071172010-09-25T16:28:00.000-04:002010-09-25T16:28:37.497-04:00The Beauty of Humanity Movement by Camilla Gibb<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/covers_450/9780385663229.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/covers_450/9780385663229.jpg" width="443" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="color: #990000;">Category</span>:</b> <a href="http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/results.pperl?cat_id_ex=Fiction:3688">Fiction</a><br />
<b style="color: #990000;">Format:</b> Hardcover, 304 pages<br />
<b style="color: #990000;">Publisher:</b> Doubleday Canada<br />
<b style="color: #660000;">ISBN:</b> 978-0-385-66322-9 (0-385-66322-6)<br />
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<b><span style="color: #990000;">Pub Date</span>:</b> August 17, 2010<br />
<b style="color: #660000;">Price:</b> $32.95</div><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><b style="color: #990000;">The Beauty of Humanity Movement</b> by Camilla Gibb takes its fictional name from an actual group of idealistic communist writers and artists in Hanoi. In the early 1950s, this group wrote and spoke out against the excesses of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh"><b style="color: #660000;">Ho Chi Minh's </b></a>policies, in particular, the<span style="color: #990000;"> </span><b><span style="color: #990000;">Land Reform Act</span> </b>in which hundreds of thousands of people (peasants mostly) accused of being landlords were executed or tortured and starved in prison.<br />
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<div><div style="background-color: transparent; border: medium none; color: black; overflow: hidden; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;">Because they were vocal in their denouncement of this "land reform," and also because they refused to act as a mouth-speaker for government propaganda, the artists and writers of the Beauty of Humanity Movement suffered a fate similar to the unfortunate peasantry. Sent to so-called re-education camps, they were tortured, indoctrinated, killed or maimed. Punishments meted out were cruel and usually specific to the occupation of the prisoner. Artists lost their hands, poets their tongues.<br />
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The pivotal character in this novel is <b style="color: #990000;">Old Man Hung</b>, who formerly owned a restaurant famous for its pho and frequented by some of the country’s leading poets and visual artists (this while the French were in power). After angering the newly-formed Communist regime (the French were defeated in the early '50's), who withheld a restaurant license from him he was forced to operate outside of the law, selling pho illegally from a cart he pushed around the city. He'd have to find a new spot almost every other day and yet the crowds would throng his stall, bringing their own bowls for a taste of his magnificent Pho. Among his customers were <b style="color: #990000;">Binh</b> and <b style="color: #990000;">Tu</b>, the son and grandson of his best friend, <b style="color: #990000;">Dao</b>, a poet and member of the artist group the Beauty of Humanity Movement who was killed by the Communists on his way to a re-education camp.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeau-NZH_Xup5wxuyC2JO69oA2Bc8HDxeBW88rnXuY9m_Z05f-WZQMtdD-Lv8BgJSBO_ZEOZS710SSpWNG_FZsjXFNhOu8o3ITYEUv7IpjtqdFeoYnmu3hSGstAc9ggC4afaMt/s1600/hanoi-pho-048-10w.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeau-NZH_Xup5wxuyC2JO69oA2Bc8HDxeBW88rnXuY9m_Z05f-WZQMtdD-Lv8BgJSBO_ZEOZS710SSpWNG_FZsjXFNhOu8o3ITYEUv7IpjtqdFeoYnmu3hSGstAc9ggC4afaMt/s400/hanoi-pho-048-10w.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />
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Pho may just be a humble soup made from beef broth, but it is the blood that flows in the veins of the streets of Vietnam. Infact, Old Man Hung says that the history of Vietnam can be found in a bowl of <b style="color: #990000;">Pho bac </b>(the pho that Hanoi is famous for). The rice noodles it contains is symbolic of the thousand years of Chinese occupations and the beef is symbolic of the French occupation that came later (the taste for beef was introduced by the French who turned the people's cows away from ploughs and into 'bifteck" and pot-au-feu.) The clever Vietnamese took the best the occupiers had to offer and made something uniquely Vietnamese from it.<br />
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One day a Vietnamese-American curator, Maggie, visits Old Man Hung at one of his mobile stands. Maggie was five years old when she was rescued by the Americans at Saigon airport (after the<span style="color: #660000;"> </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Saigon" style="color: #660000;"><b>fall of Saigon</b></a>) . She wants to learn more about her artist father, who also disappeared during the war. She asks Hung if he can help her (after all when Hung had his Pho shop in the '50's it was the meeting place for a lot of radical artists and writers) . Hung's memories are the perfect vehicle to take the reader through Vietnam's past - from the intellectual age of the 1930's when Hung was sent to the city to work in his uncle's pho shop (he was an unwanted child...the ninth child...so unwanted his parents didn't even give him a name, calling him simply, Nine), through to French colonization, Japanese occupation and, of course, the Vietnam War.<br />
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While Hung provides a look back into Vietnam’s past, a 22-year-old tour guide named <b style="color: #990000;">Tu</b> offers readers a glimpse into the country’s current era of economic freedom and its entrepreneurial youth, so many of which were born after the war, so it's not a direct memory in their lifetimes. Tu' specializes in offering guilt-ridden American veterans "war tours" through his city, but he soon starts to realize their version of his country's history is deeply flawed. There is an encounter with Tu' and an American Vet at a Buddhist temple which is especially poignant. <br />
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Camilla Gibb's novels fall in the sub-genre of literary fiction that I like to call Anthropological fiction (her previous novel was "<b style="color: #990000;">Sweetness in the Belly</b>" which was set in Ethiopia.). These are novels set in different countries and whose readers relish learning about foreign cultures (their history, diet, traditions, rituals and so on) in a fictional setting. Reading novels like these makes one realize how different and yet how similar we all are. No matter where the characters come from or are based, there are certain human traits that are universally recognizable and this is why these books resonate with us so much.<br />
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Gibb's writing is very clear, clean and precise. In this novel she explores both,present-day Vietnam and the forces that shaped it. Many novels on Vietnam focus mostly on the war and the aftermath but in doing so one neglects the vibrant, bustling Vietnam of today. I think Gibb's novel gives the reader a very balanced and overall view of the country and I appreciate that.<br />
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What was interesting to me was Maggie's reception in Vietnam. The Vietnamese are very hostile to foreign-returned Vietnamese <b style="color: #660000;">"<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Vietnamese">Viet-Kieu</a>"</b>, and she was greeted suspiciously wherever she went. Her morals and intentions were questioned and I am sure her loyalty was too. I have never found this in India...I come and go as I please and yet my countrymen will always treat me like one of them. However, I have a Korean friend who tells me such a thing is very common in Korea too.<br />
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To sum up, the book plunges the reader into the borderlands between opposing forces: youth and age, exclusion and privilege, war and peace. Hanoi's 1000th anniversary is to be celebrated from October 1 to 10, this book would be a perfect celebration of it.</div></div>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-10206844786334645292010-09-13T14:09:00.002-04:002010-09-13T14:12:02.772-04:00Tishani Doshi's "The Pleasure Seekers"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n68/n342266.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n68/n342266.jpg" width="428" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">September 2010<br />
$15.00<br />
320 pp</div><div style="text-align: center;">Bloomsbury USA </div>From the Publishers: <br />
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<div style="color: #990000;"><i>Meet the Patel-Joneses—Babo, Sian, Mayuri, and Bean—in their little house with orange and black gates next door to the Punjab Women's Association in Madras. Babo grew up here, but he and Sian, his cream-skinned Welsh love, met in London. Babo's parents disapproved. And then they disapproved unless the couple moved back to Madras. So here they are. And as the twentieth century creaks and croaks its way along, Babo, Sian, and the children navigate their way through the uncharted territory of a "hybrid" family: the hustle and bustle of Babo's relatives; the faraway phone-line crackle of Sian's; the eternal wisdom and soft bosom of Great-Grandmother Ba; the perils of first love, lost innocence, and old age; and the big question: What do you do with the space your loved ones leave behind?</i></div><br />
I have been waiting to read Tishani Doshi's <b>"The Pleasure Seekers" </b>ever since it first came out and now that I've read it, I would love to be able to wax poetic about it, I'd love to be able to tell you to rush out and pick up a copy, but sadly, the book did not live up to the publishers' message, nor did it live up to Salman Rushdie's gushing blurb on the front cover. I wouldn't call it a bad book, no, far from it, it's just a pleasant read...nothing to get excited over and definitely nothing to write home about.<br />
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You may ask me why I was so excited to read this book...well, it's a book set in Chennai (one of the places I have lived in) and focuses on a large Gujarati family. Those of you who know me well know that even though I am a Punjabi by birth, culturally I am a Gujarati because I grew up amongst them. Also, <b>Babo</b>, one of the sons in this large family marries a Welsh girl (<b>Sian</b>) who comes to live with him and his family in Chennai and I was very curious to see how this interfaith, interracial marriage plays out in the book (incidentally, Doshi has a Gujarati father and a Welsh mother and has called her book "a love letter to my parents")<br />
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This is a novel about family and about home, or more precisely it asks the question, where is home? It is also about identity, love across the seas,displacement, family bonds and so on. I guess these are all themes that have been used often in Indian immigrant stories and it could be one of the many reasons the story didn't quite worm its way into my heart.<br />
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The prose is flawless, but a little too "cutsie" for me in parts. Intercourse is referred to as "shabang shibing" and sex is described as as a boy putting his “Whatsit” into a girl’s “Ms Sunshine”! Fortunately for the reader however, Doshi is a poet, so every now and again we are treated to bursts of poetry in the writing, but despite those sunshiney bursts of poetry I found the narrative structure too ordinary and the characters, pleasant, but cozy caricatures at best. Also, in the first half, you are given a tour of almost everyone in<b> Prem Kumar's</b> family (he's the patriarch), and then in the second half, Doshi seems to dismiss most of them as she settles down to only Babo's story along with his Welsh wife,his younger daughter <b>Bean</b> and<b> Ba</b> - Babo's esoteric grandmother who “smells” people approaching her house “from over the hills” - . Ofcourse, that doesn't take away from the novel being a good read, just that some characters seemed to show promise and then they were dismissed.<br />
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And then, there's this unpardonable sin of using oh too many cliches - especially the caricatures of Indians abroad and a reliance on stock cultural jokes and scenarios. But aside from these quibbles I've listed "The Pleasure Seekers" is a pleasant enough read - not memorable by any means - but a nice diversion.Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-67684367444447857462010-09-02T15:16:00.001-04:002010-09-02T21:08:02.683-04:00The Ghost Brush by Katherine Govier<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.govier.com/assets/images/GhostBrush.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.govier.com/assets/images/GhostBrush.jpg" /></a></div><table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody>
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<tr id="ctl01_ContentPlaceHolder1_trOnSale"><td class="bookBuyInfo" width="70"><b>On Sale:</b> </td> <td class="bookBuyInfo" width="280">05/05/2010 </td><td class="bookBuyInfo" width="280"><b>Publisher:</b> Harper Collins</td><td class="bookBuyInfo" width="280"></td><td class="bookBuyInfo" width="280"></td></tr>
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Today I place in your cupped hands <a href="http://www.govier.com/" style="color: orange;"><b>Katherine Govier's</b></a> sumptuous novel, <a href="http://theghostbrush.com/" style="color: orange;"><b>"The Ghost Brush"</b></a>, set in 19th century Japan or Edo as it was called then. Edo was under the rule of the Shogun, or more specifically the <b style="color: orange;">Tokugawa Shogunate</b>. Society in the Tokugawa period, unlike the shogunates before it, was based on a strict class hierarchy. The <i>daimyo</i>, or lords, were at the top, followed by the <i>samurai</i> (warriors), with the farmers, artisans, and traders ranking below. Outside the four classes were the <i>eta</i> and <i>hinin.</i> Eta were butchers, tanners and undertakers. Hinin served as town guards, street cleaners and executioners. Other outsiders included the beggars, entertainers, and prostitutes.<br />
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Although prostitutes and entertainers were considered "Outsiders", an art emerged during this period that focused on the lives, fashions and aesthetics of courtesans and entertainers. So, ironically, although prostitutes and their craft was looked down upon, people were interested in what they wore, how they spent their leisure time, their mannerisms etc. hence all the leading artists of the day could be found in Yoshiwara (the Pleasure District) painting away like their lives depended on what the courtesans did and indeed such was the case.<br />
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One of those artists was <a href="http://www.katsushikahokusai.org/" style="color: orange;"><b>Hokusai</b></a> ( best known for his woodblock print series <b>Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji</b> which includes the internationally recognized print, <b>The Great Wave off Kanagawa,</b> created during the 1820s. Ofcourse, these works came later and when the book opens Hokusai is a simple painter and a frequent visitor to the red light district where he takes his 10-year old daughter Oei for company and also to help him mix the paints he needs.<br />
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Growing up in adult company Oei grows to be a precocious (but not unlikeable little girl). She soon strikes up a friendship with one of the courtesans (Shino). Shino is a Lady that has been sent to the brothel as a punishment for insulting her husband. It is through Oei's evenings with Shino that the reader is treated to what brothel life was like in Edo and the traditions, rituals and ceremonies that were a part of a courtesan's life. Reading Katherine Govier's colourful and rich descriptions of life in Yoshiwara took me back to movies by the old Japanese master<span style="color: orange;"> </span><b style="color: orange;">Kenji Mizoguchi</b><span style="color: orange;">,</span> especially his movies "Osaka Elegy", "Sisters of the Gion" and "The Life of Oharu".<br />
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Anyway, so under her father's tutelage, Oei started to work on drawings of women. She illustrated manuals for female behavior-- etiquette, housekeeping, fashion, even childbirth. But even though she did all of that, she herself was a rebel and refused to conform to "appropriate" female behavior. Although she was plain with a rather prominent jaw (not considered beautiful at all), she managed to have a lot of lovers as many men were attracted to her strong spirit. She drank and was addicted to her tobacco pipe, but no matter her flaws, she always remained Hokusai's dutiful daughter, helping her father with his commissions but never taking credit for any of them. This is where the title originates from, <b>Oei was Hokusai's "Ghost Brush"</b>. <br />
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Oei married one of Hokusai's students, and even though her husband doted on her, he just wasn't bright or intelligent enough for Oei. One day she happened to laugh at one of his paintings and he "showed her the broom" which meant, he asked her to leave his home. Oei wanted her freedom back but the only way she could get a divorce was to seek refuge at <b style="color: orange;">Tokeiji Temple</b> aka the "Run-in Temple". It was said that when you saw a woman running in the area, you knew she was on her way to Tokeiji, likely being chased by her husband. When Oei returned home from the temple, a newly-divorced woman, she took over her father's studio because an attack of palsy rendered him unable to communicate via speech.<br />
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The only foreigners in Edo at that time were the Dutch. Xenophobic as ever, Japan took a lot of pains to keep foreigners away. Only a few Dutchmen (from the Dutch-East India Company) were allowed to trade and they were confined to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dejima" style="color: orange;"><b>Dejima</b></a> in Nagasaki Harbor - a de facto prison for the dozen or so men permitted to live and work there. (It is rumoured that the Dutch were the only foreigners chosen to work in Japan because they were the only ones that agreed to stamp on their Holy Book). Coincidentally, the hero of David Mitchell's new book <a href="http://www.thousandautumns.com/" style="color: orange;"><b>"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet"</b></a> features one such Dutchman from Dejima. The book has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010, it will be interesting to see if it wins.<br />
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With Hokusai's speech affected by palsy it was left to Oei to meet with his patrons. So when a Dutchman showed interest in buying some of Hokusai's art, Oei went to meet him and Govier cleverly uses their conversations as a narrative tool to share with the reader how the east and the west perceived each other at that time.<br />
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As the story moves on the reader will find herself or himself rooting for Katsushika Oei to come in to her own...with talent like hers it is unfortunate to have her hiding in her father's shadow and yet that time in Japan demanded that women be completely servile to the men. Perhaps the most puzzling thing is that there was no coercion, women seemed to be willing partners in their own invisibility.<br />
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When a novelist will pluck a hero out of obscurity and tell the world about him or her, I feel as readers we owe them a debt of gratitude, so, Katherine Govier, here's a very big thank you to you! Your novel on the immensely talented Katsushika Oei is a work as exquisitely rendered as it is irresistibly readable.<br />
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If historical fiction, art or 19th century Japan is your thing, please pick up a copy of "The Ghost Brush"... it is a captivating and beautifully-rendered saga of Japan, also, it is so rich with period effect that it makes a great candidate for a screen drama. While it may be historical fiction, let us also not forget that at the heart of it all is the story of incomparable love between a father and daughter.<br />
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Go<span style="color: orange;"> </span><a href="http://theghostbrush.com/" style="color: orange;"><b>here</b></a> for a companion website to the novel, historical background, source material, and images from the work of Japanese printmaker Hokusai and his daughter Oei.Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-65109036442000460192010-08-24T09:51:00.000-04:002010-08-24T09:51:12.543-04:00Saraswati Park by Anjali Joseph<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC-Bbo1PRxAbjiRswyKX_du_E6cLc1OIJM7Qtb1R6t-X6JlirrnTd830Y9WoQBFlTFWScYJnJy1HYLUrzZt4WL1bqRaffO7L-bEAHJz5ERyLrcbkLfDbNFroKSZq23trvZ6MF6/s1600/saras+park.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjC-Bbo1PRxAbjiRswyKX_du_E6cLc1OIJM7Qtb1R6t-X6JlirrnTd830Y9WoQBFlTFWScYJnJy1HYLUrzZt4WL1bqRaffO7L-bEAHJz5ERyLrcbkLfDbNFroKSZq23trvZ6MF6/s640/saras+park.jpg" width="416" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b style="color: #741b47;">On Sale:</b> 10/08/2010; <b style="color: #741b47;">Format:</b> Trade paperback; <b><span style="color: #741b47;">Publishers</span>:</b> Harper Collins; <b style="background-color: #741b47;"></b> Fiction (South-Asian)<br />
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Mumbai with its chaos, complexities, concrete blocks housing hundreds of people, cosmopolitan population and where the richest of the rich and poorest of the poor live side by side, continues to be a very popular city to write about. Infact, in the last decade or so, there's been a spate of books about the city, <b style="color: #741b47;">"Maximum City" </b>by Suketu Mehta, <b style="color: #741b47;"> "Shantaram"</b> by Gregory David Roberts, "<b style="color: #741b47;">Sacred Games" </b>and <b style="color: #741b47;">"Love and Longing in Bombay"</b> by Vikram Chandra...the more recent one to join the list is Anjali Joseph's <b style="color: #741b47;">"Saraswati Park".</b><br />
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Just the title was enough to draw me to this book. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraswati"><b><span style="color: #741b47;">Saraswati</span></b></a> is the goddess of knowledge and the Arts in Hindu mythology and she has always been my favourite deity. In the book, "Saraswati Park" is the name of a housing complex in a suburb somewhere deep in the heart of Bombay. The story revolves around empty-nesters, Mohan and Laxmi Karekar, whose lives are pretty humdrum and unremarkable. Mohan is a letter writer ( one of those quaint jobs which is almost non-existant today) and from his seat under some tarpaulin near the main Post Office he sits and writes letters for those who are illiterate - anything from heartfelt letters to the completion of bureaucratic forms, while Laxmi is a homemaker. <br />
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When we first meet Mohan and Laxmi their days are mundane with set routines and nothing much happens to alter it. Both seem frustrated by this mundane existance. An avid reader, Mohan wishes he could do more than just write letters....his secret desire is to write stories worthy of publication and Laxmi, frustrated by how his dreams make him distant from her turns to the television for company. <br />
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I love how Joseph details Laxmi's frustration with their emotional detachment in this nicely-written excerpt:<br />
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<div style="color: #741b47;"><i>"Four of Mohan's shirts, collected this morning from the ironing boys, lay on the bed. She looked at them in exasperation. It was still there, the mild ring of dirt inside his collars, like a smudged pencil line. It wasn't his fault; nothing could be done. She had scrubbed at some of them to remove the mark, but it had been the collar, not the stain, that had begun to despair and fray. It was in these things, which didn't talk or, strictly speaking, have lives, that her days played out: her relationship with the shirts, neatly ironed and folded, was so much more direct that any other interaction these days."</i></div><br />
One day the couple receive a call from Mohan's sister lamenting the fact that her son Ashish failed his college exams (due to poor attendance) and would have to retake them (unknown to the family, the poor attendance was due to Ashish's dalliance with a fellow classmate called Sundar). Since they (Ashish's parents) were being transferred to a city to the north of India, <i style="color: #741b47;">would it be possible for Ashish to stay with Mohan and Laxmi for the year?</i> Mohan and Laxmi readily agree and soon the focus of the story moves to 19-year old Ashish - his life, his friends, his fears, his relationships, his secrets. Despite there being "secrets" in this novel it has a very calm tone with a quietness and melancholy that emanates like faint perfume from every page, making it linger on with the reader long after the last page has been read and the book closed.<br />
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For those of you who grew up in Bombay (mid '80's) this novel will be especially precious because of the author's wonderful observations and descriptions of this wonderful city I call home. The strength of this novel is its everyday observations of a couple approaching their twilight years; of a youngster just starting to find his feet in this world and discovering his sexuality and last, but not least, of a city that is home to atleast 14 million people and who expands (like a rubberband) to accommodate thousands more everyday.<br />
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It is also a book about family love and obligations; growing old together, about love and loss and goodbyes. All these may seem like heavy topics but they are handled deftly and delicately by Ms. Joseph and there is none of that masala or twists and turns that we have come to associate with other Bombay novels - just an initmate journey into the lives of everyday people who happen to live rather quietly in this bustling metropolis. As much as I liked the other Bombay novels mentioned above, none of those plots seemed real to me. My Bombay was like the Bombay one finds in Saraswati Park...of trees and birds; ordinary people, school, college, the market, weddings, neighbours, old books, corner shops and so on. This novel is a celebration of everyday life and seeing some beauty in it.<br />
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I'd like to close with a beautifully written passage found on page 253. This is when Ashish is getting ready to leave for California for his future studies. This passage resonated so much with me because, I, too, had to bid Bombay farewell around the same age Ashish did and it hurt so much:<br />
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<i style="color: #741b47;">"...he felt melancholic; finally he understood what life was like, the meetings and partings it entailed. It was a thought that only made him more attached to his life and the people in it.</i><br />
<div style="color: #741b47;"><i><br />
</i></div><div style="color: #741b47;"><i>From his window seat he looked with hungry eyes at the dirty worlds next to the tracks: the brigtly painted shacks, the grubby faced children, the ugly concrete tower blocks, the smells...</i></div><div style="color: #741b47;"><i><br />
</i></div><i style="color: #741b47;">It was his city, his world; it might be imperfect but it was home. Yet he knew that only his imminent departure nurtured this sudden passion for Bombay which sometimes was a neutral environment in which he existed, and at other moments felt like a trap he'd never escape."</i>Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12738985.post-53784347310335545272010-08-17T18:14:00.000-04:002010-08-17T18:14:42.194-04:00Pearl of China by Anchee Min<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.litshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/covermin1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://www.litshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/covermin1.jpg" width="418" /></a></div>The month of May coincidentally saw the publication of two books, both of which tell the story of the much-loved American writer, Pearl Buck's life. <a href="http://www.ancheemin.com/"><b><span style="color: #660000;">Anchee Min's</span></b></a> "Pearl of China" is the lighter one of the two and an excellent novelisation of Buck's early- to- mid years in China, but those wanting a more indepth version of Buck's life would likely be satisfied with Hilary Spurling's biography<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Burying-Bones-Pearl-Buck-China/dp/1861978286"><b style="color: #660000;"> "Burying the Bones"</b></a>.<br />
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The story of how Anchee Min came to write this fictional account of Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck’s persecutions during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, is very touching. When Anchee Min was still a school girl in Shanghai, China, she was asked to denounce Pearl Buck. Anchee Min had no idea how to go about denouncing someone she had never met or whose books she had never read (her request to read Buck's "The Good Earth" before writing the denouncement had been turned down). Fast forward to 25 years: at one of Anchee Min's readings in a bookshop in the US a lady pressed a copy of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Earth"><b style="color: #660000;">"The Good Earth"</b></a> into Anchee Min's hands and stated that Pearl Buck had made her love the Chinese. In her hotel room that night, Anchee Min finally got a chance to read "The Good Earth" and was so moved and felt so guilty for denouncing Buck all those many years ago she decided to write this biography as a means to atone for that sin.<br />
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I have always enjoyed anything written by Anchee Min. This lady has such a flair for historical fiction, she makes it fun, informative and so,so real, you never forget a thing. Also, she is a meticulous researcher, so although her work is labeled fiction, chances are that a lot of the details are true. For instance, in the case of Pearl Buck's life, Anchee Min, apart from pouring over public records and Buck's personal correspondence, she also visited Pearl Buck's family home in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhenjiang"><b style="color: #660000;">Chin-Kiang</b></a>, China and interviewed families that had contact with Pearl's family.<br />
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The character, <b style="color: #660000;">Willow</b>, also the narrator of this story, is an amalgamation of the friends that Pearl had in China. Through Willow we learn that Pearl's father Absolam was a missionary to China and that his whole life was spent trying to convert Chinese people to the Christian faith. His long-suffering wife Carie was terribly homesick for America but because Absolam refused to leave China she stayed on too and her work with the Chinese people made them so indebted to her that many of them converted to Christianity just to show Carie their gratitude.<br />
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Ever since she was very young Pearl wanted to be Chinese and not American, so much so, she had her Chinese nanny make her a crocheted, black cap which she would wear all of the time to keep her blonde hair covered. She spoke Chinese like a native and even preferred to eat Chinese food over anything western. Pearl and Willow became friends after Willow's father, a beggar, decided to join Absolam's church for the free food. Later, he was genuinely converted and became a Christian.<br />
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Pearl and Willow remained good friends despite Pearl's various long trips to the US and Willow's unhappy marriage to a man who was several years her senior. When Pearl came back for a longer stay (married and with a mentally-disabled child, Carol) their friendship became even stronger although it was not without its trials. You see, for a while both Pearl and Willow were in love with the same man: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsu_Chih-Mo"><b style="color: #660000;">Hsu Chih-mo</b></a> who was considered to be China's Shelly. When it was obvious that Hsu Chih-mo loved Pearl, Willow decided to let go of him. Part of Pearl's attraction to Hsu Chih-mo was the fact that he was a Chinese man who was unafraid to speak his mind...his passion for poetry and life really appealed to her, but also, her American husband Lossing Buck didn't seem at all interested in their marriage and soon deserted her for a young Chinese woman called Lotus.<br />
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Willow in turn married Hsu Chih-mo's friend and admirer who worked in the Communist party. Those were very trying times for Willow as Mao and especially, Madame Mao seemed to have made it their mission to dishonour Pearl Buck and turn her into an enemy of the Chinese people. Knowing Willow was Buck's friend they asked her to denounce Buck<span style="font-family: arial,helvetica; font-size: x-small;"> as a cultural imperialist</span>, something Willow refused to do and was imprisoned, tortured, starved and set to cleaning sewers (something that is very believable if you've read historical accounts of lives during Mao's rule of China)<br />
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"Pearl of China" provides a quick glimpse into Chinese history in the 20th century. We are taken through 80-plus years of China's history from the Boxer Rebellion to the Japanese invasion; the war between the Nationalists and Communists and the establishment of the Mao era and on to the Cultural Revolution and China's opening to the West and surprisingly none of it feels rushed...I guess that is a testament to the great skill of Anchee Min as a fictional writer of history. Her descriptions of places, people and time are always so engaging, you hardly notice the passing of the years!<br />
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Pearl Buck's life has been the subject of many books but most of her biographers have been Westerners. Anchee Min hopes her book will allow readers to see how Pearl Buck is viewed in China by the Chinese people. You come away from this book realizing the extraordinary hold China had on one of the most influential women of the 20th century, and how much she empathized with the Chinese people (especially the peasants). She was the first author to write about the Chinese peasants and anyone who has read "The Good Earth" knows she did so movingly, empathetically and powerfully. Not only is "The Good Earth" a very moving read, but one could say it was a very powerful force in helping Americans move beyond the bigotry, contempt and ignorance with which they had long viewed the Chinese.<br />
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Had Pearl Buck not been forced to leave China for the US during the Boxer Rebellion I feel certain she would have lived in China for the rest of her life. She always, always wanted to return to China and forty years later she came close to returning (as part of Nixon's entourage on a State visit to China in 1972) but Madame Mao saw to it that Pearl was refused a visa. Pearl died the next year at home in Pennsylvania. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she died from a broken heart.<br />
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If "Pearl of China" whets your appetite for more of Pearl Buck (and I have no doubt it will), I would highly recommend reading Hilary Spurling's " Burying the Bones"....I heard an audio version of the book and was very satisfied.Lotus Readshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02081192215823615529noreply@blogger.com11