Word: broom
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...India's 56 million untouchables, the badge of their social inferiority is often the implement of their trade-a handleless broom made by binding together a bundle of twigs. Stooped over this broom, the lowly outcast daily sweeps India's streets and village squares, its courtyards and bedrooms. Not only does this lead to agonizing backaches, spinal curvature and a characteristic cringing posture, but also years of inhaling the clouds of dust stirred up contribute to an alarming pulmonary tuberculosis rate. Yet generations of foreign travelers, "asking why India's sweepers do not use a stand...
...another part of the embassy with the doors closed, she began coughing when an embassy servant began sweeping. She reasoned that the sweeper himself must be inhaling a lethal quantity of dust-and could not be doing a very good cleaning job besides. Grabbing a long-handled, American-made broom, the ambassador's wife showed the sweeper how to use it so that the dust, instead of flying into the air, stayed in a tidy pile. Then, discovering that such brooms were not available in India, Mrs. Bunker marched off to an Indian handicraft cooperative, displayed her broom...
Putting aside the cares of state, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru addressed an extraordinary letter to his chief ministers. "I am writing you about the humble broom," he began. "The normal Indian broom can be used only if one bends down to it or sits. A broom or brush with a long handle, which can be used while a person is standing, is far more effective and less tiring. All over the world these standing brooms are used. Why then do we carry on with a primitive method which is inefficient and psychologically wrong? Bending down to sweep in this...
Three weeks ago, Sukarno, refreshed from his tour of Asia, the satellites, Africa, South America and the U.S.. ordered a final drive to clear the Chinese from the countryside. At the mountain town of Tjimahi, police looking for Chinese holdouts got into a scuffle with broom-wielding housewives, shot and killed two of them. Leaping to denounce this "shocking atrocity," Peking organized mass protest meetings all over China, recited a list of other atrocities against the Chinese, blamed the police, the "reactionaries," and even the U.S. Continued persecution, it solemnly declared, would "poison the friendly relations between China...
...many as six wild pitches in a row, broken one hitter's arm, torn the lobe off another's ear, and sent an unsuspecting umpire to the hospital with a stray fastball that popped him flush on the mask, knocked him 18 ft., chest pad over whisk broom. At Aberdeen, S. Dak., in 1958, Dalkowski pitched a one-hitter and lost, 9 to 8. Against Reno's Silver Sox this summer, he whiffed 19, still lost...