Word: dabbler
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...when he was 31. Brahman-born and British-bred, Nehru had returned home to provincial Allahabad with his sense of innate superiority re-enforced by seven years of upper-class education at Harrow, Cambridge and London's Inner Temple, where he qualified for the bar. Already a romantic dabbler in the independence movement, Nehru agreed to accompany some oppressed peasants to their primitive village. What he saw there filled him "with shame and sorrow -shame at my own easygoing and comfortable life, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India." He saw his homeland as "naked, starving, crushed...
...living with a dull married sister, and her experience of life is a dreary vacuum. It is almost like liberation when Dr. Montague takes her on as one of three assistants to check psychic phenomena at a haunted house in a grubby small town. Author Jackson, a self-confessed dabbler in magic, sets her scene with professional care. The big old house is a crazily built warren of odd rooms and twisting corridors. For 80 years it has witnessed a variety of human disasters, and now it is deserted by its owners; the caretaking couple refuse to stay beyond...
Such early dancing-school training suggests that Shirley was shoved toward the stage by ambitious parents. Not so. Her mother, Canadian-born Kathryn MacLean Beaty, was a dabbler in amateur theatricals, and her father, Ira O. Beaty, a scholarly Virginian, was a part-time musician, but the dancing lessons had a practical explanation: Shirley had weak ankles...
After 2½ years of court fights to force a passport from the State Department, Artist Rockwell Kent, 76, longtime dabbler in odd-hued causes, prepared to leave for a tour of the Soviet Union, where a studio has just finished a documentary film on his work. Still applying a rare shade of pink to his world picture, Kent seemed worried about his warlike homeland, but the U.S.S.R., he assured reporters, "desperately desires peace...
Happy was the Interior Department last month when Stanford W. Barton offered to undertake the biggest Indian land development of all time. The friendly Missourian, a dabbler in uranium and alfalfa, was a godsend to the Indian Affairs Bureau officials. They signed him up just one day before expiration of an act enabling Interior to lease 67,000 parched Arizona acres with the expectation of turning them into a desert garden for some 1,500 Mojave and Chemehuevi tribesmen, who would get the land back in 25 years. As first installment on the $28 million deal, which promised handsome profits...