Word: dhoti
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...such man does pipe up: a half-blind tea seller named Gopal Pandey. Like Zelig in a dhoti, he has a walk-on part in every major upheaval of the past two decades. Eventually, Kartar Singh's party tries to capitalize on Gopal's iconic ordinariness by running him for Parliament. "Symbols," a jealous opponent observes, "are all some people have to eat and drink...
...London and Bombay, the book limned the early history of photography while foreshadowing the advent of the moving image. Strange by name and nature, Sixty Lights risked alienating readers but ultimately dazzled with its precise image-making, from a gentleman's top hat set aflame in gaslight London, a dhoti-flapping Indian impaled by a shard of mirror glass, to the birth of Lucy's daughter: "She was irrefutable, glistening, a kind of absolute light." The novel was long-listed for London's Man Booker Prize...
...Eight films and more than 30 years later, Adoor has evolved from fiery-eyed New Wave revolutionary to wise old cineast. When I first meet him at his home outside Trivandrum, he's wearing a traditional white dhoti, blue plaid shirt and square glasses that make his black eyes look like marbles in a bowl. He has cocoa-colored skin and wavy white hair that seems to uncoil as the humid Kerala day wears on. The architecture that surrounds him is classically Keralite: the roof is low-slung and pyramidal, and the tiles are red terra-cotta. Egyptian hieroglyphics hang...
...that sometimes came near to killing him. He eschewed all spices as a discipline of the senses. He napped every day with a mud poultice on abdomen and brow. He was so insistent on absolute regularity in his daily regimen that he safety-pinned a watch to his homespun dhoti, synchronized with the clock at his ashram. He scheduled his bowel movements for 20 minutes morning and afternoon. "The bathroom is a temple," he said, and anyone was welcome to chat with him there. He had a cleansing enema every night...
...semi-retired. He dresses in a simple white dhoti and lives frugally. "I only need money for the barber and occasionally the tailor," he says, laughing. He rises at 4:30 a.m., milks his cow and prays until breakfast time. Only then does he resume his ongoing effort to improve the Jaipur foot and create new artificial limbs that will be as real and useful as humanly possible...