Word: bamboos
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...rain-soaked Eastern Hills of India, the bamboo forests flower only about once in 50 years. And to the wiry little mountain men of the remote Mizo Hills district, the flowering is a dread omen of approaching famine. They believe that the tender shoots and the seeds encourage a vast overbreeding of jungle rats. Once this food supply is exhausted, the rats-many as big as young house cats -assemble and, like a disciplined army, march across paddies and vegetable gardens, eating everything. The broadest and swiftest rivers do not deflect them; as if hypnotized, they plunge into the water...
Eighteen months ago, when the Mizo Hills burst into spectral bloom, the frightened tribesmen-70% of whom are Christians, mostly Baptist converts-frantically appealed to the Assam state government for help. When the bamboo last bloomed, in 1910-11, and before that in 1860-62, they said, the rats came. Assam's bureaucrats dismissed such prophecies as superstition. But the prophecies have come true: thousands of rats have left the jungle, attacked the clearings, and stripped everything bare. Too late, the state government sent in rat poison; what was not "lost in transit" fell into the hands of profiteers...
...Instead of welcoming publicity, he consented to only one press conference, at which he curtly told newsmen to write whatever they pleased, and then walked out. Last week, with the country in better moral, economic and political shape than ever before, some 10 million Burmese went happily to woven-bamboo voting booths to elect Ne Win's civilian successor. It was just as the general himself had promised three months...
...traffic patterns, with 200 mounted police and 3,000 other lathi-wielding cops to enforce them. On every road there were medical teams to inoculate them against cholera (though many needle-shy peasants managed to slip past). The festival area itself was sectioned off like the Chicago stockyards with bamboo fencing to keep crowds from clotting. Posted in special watchtowers, police tirelessly kept track of the human mass with binoculars and blared directions through 300 loudspeakers...
Despite such interruptions, which come frequently in Affandi's bamboo cottage in Djokjakarta, he produces a dozen or so pictures each year. He does them in less than a day each, dancing before the canvas, squeezing his lines straight from tube to picture, and smearing the colors into place with his bare hands. The results are not expressionistic abstractions but brilliant and vibrant emotional renderings of the world around...