Word: ashram
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...contributions here are lively and accessible. Madhu Kishwar, the legendary Indian feminist, rejects as "naive" the idea that bride-burning can be linked to Sita's popularity. In the story, Sita eventually leaves Rama and raises her children alone in an ashram, believing that a husband who does not treat her well is dispensable. Sita may be the model for the long-suffering women of Indian TV and film, but novelist Ranga Rao argues that she also influences the strong-minded females in the beloved stories of R.K. Narayan...
...infamous. There are unremarkable people who write about a remarkable thing that happened to them. And there is the 21st century memoirist, who makes him- or herself interesting in order to write about it, usually through a time-centric gimmick, like spending a few months at, say, an ashram. Powell belongs to this last category, and cannily the movie lets us see how the wheels turn in her head. Ephron includes Child's real-life reaction to Powell's blog and lets it stand; she doesn't try to turn the two women into soul sisters, an unusual move...
...BEATLES MADE THEIR guru famous when they visited his ashram in 1968, but in the end, Transcendental Meditation founder Maharishi Mahesh Yogi may have regretted the association. The maharishi brought TM--the practice of exploring consciousness through meditation and chanting--to the U.S. in 1959, and with the cachet of star followers like the Rolling Stones and Mia Farrow, it became a multimillion-dollar global business. But the gray-haired guru was said to have become uncomfortable with its drug-using, counterculture fan base. After the Fab Four's celebrated visit, the band and its guru famously split. The maharishi...
...thing it says on that tin is "baked beans." Ringo never liked fancy foreign food, and in 1967 went off with fellow Beatles to see the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, carrying with him a suitcase full of baked beans. He left the ashram when he'd eaten the last can. He grew up in poverty. ("I was so poor," jokes Ringo, "that I had to hop to school. We only had one shoe.") He hasn't been back to Merseyside since his stepdad's funeral 11 years ago. Ask Ringo if he's English and he answers...
...three long stories that make up The Elephanta Suite all deal with New Englanders who settle into the lulling comfort of an Indian sanctuary - a spa, a luxury hotel, an ashram - only to be drawn out of it by their conflicting desires. All three of them start slipping away from their cozy images of themselves, and begin going native on the dark side of town, even as the Indians around them are becoming more like Americans. The fact that the title refers both to a room in a fancy hotel and to a set of movements in a musical sequence...