Word: brahmin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...story is nice, contrasting elitist Brahmin Harvard with the egalitarian upstart Stanford—which in a little more than a century has risen to be one of the most esteemed universities in the country, and is now commonly considered an Ivy of the West...
DIED. ASHOK KUMAR, 90, Indian actor who appeared in some 250 films over 60 years; in Bombay. A law school graduate, Kumar rose to stardom in the megahit Achhut Kanya (1936) playing a young Brahmin who falls in love with a low-caste woman...
...World, he has evolved a signature blend of autobiography, artifice and journalism that tests (even by today's liberal definitions) the limits of conventional fiction. Half A Life (Knopf; 211 pages), the latest hybrid, begins in colonial India with a droll anecdote. The son of a Brahmin family marries a low-caste woman and forfeits his social standing. He is a maharaja's tax clerk who, influenced by Gandhi's politics of poverty, makes false account entries in favor of poor landowners. Unwelcome at home and in danger of prosecution, the upstart takes cover as a mute beggar. A touring...
...Wideman, a two-time PEN/Faulkner Award winner, is too old for playground basketball, the game he loves. He is the perfect age, however, to drift back and examine his rise from ghetto prodigy to Ivy League hoops star to literary Brahmin. At all phases playground ball is there, teaching creativity, the difference between "solo triumph" and group participation, and other life lessons. There are too many basketball-is-like-jazz musings, but at its best moments, Hoop Roots brings a touch of Proust to the blacktop...
...narrative, broken into three thinly-connected chapters, begins with an explanation of Willie’s name. His Brahmin father narrates the twisted trajectory of his own adolescent rebellion in India. To spite his family and his caste, Willie’s father becomes a sadhu, or ascetic holy man. By chance, the English writer W. Somerset Maugham meets him while researching The Razor’s Edge. Maugham’s influence on Willie’s father is strong enough that, once a proper wife is found, the son gets Maugham’s first and middle names...