Word: gandhi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...central puzzle of A Writer's People, in the end, is the unimportance of people to the author of it. The pages are littered with names (Kingsley Amis drinking in London's Fleet Street, or Aldous Huxley watching Gandhi make a speech in India, or Naipaul discussing the Greek playwright Menander with former British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan) but names are all that most of them remain - two-dimensional also-rans in Naipaul's literary one-upmanship. The laughing, exuberant and fleshed-out characters that were such a feature of his earlier work have got up from the table...
...needn't worry too much. The Airbus is not flying over water today. It isn't going anywhere. Jammed into a suburban backyard near Indira Gandhi International Airport, its nose and tail hanging over the property's walls and one wing almost nudging the front gate, the plane offers the adventure of air travel without the cost - or even the travel. Its passengers, most of whom have never been on a plane before, pay up to $4 each to join the jet set for a couple hours. India's skies may be busier than ever these days - new airlines, including...
...tiger whodunit featured local farmers who had plowed deep into the tiger's habitat and faraway medicine makers in China and Southeast Asia who paid extravagant bounties for tiger bones and genitals. He introduced his father Fateh Singh Rathore, a former director of the park who collaborated in Indira Gandhi's tiger-conservation project in the 1970s. "Between 2003 and 2004 half of the tigers at Ranthambhore were killed," the son said gravely as the father lamented the current lack of government support. Local officials had tried to cover up the missing tigers, and detectives were hired...
...grown surreal enough that TV channels, and even respectable newspapers, have started calling Sanjay Dutt "Munnabhai," after a character in one of his recent hit movies - a gangster who discovers Gandhi's philosophy and transforms his life. Just as in America, the controversy seems to have only stoked Dutt's fame, and at this point his fan base rivals the Britney Spears fan club. With the controversy around the nuclear deal threatening the close ties between Washington and New Delhi, perhaps the two countries' shared celebrity obsession is just what's needed to keep the strategic partnership going...
...What may be most revealing about the moment is that on the 60th anniversary of India's independence, many see Gandhi's sacrifice in pursuit of communal harmony as more moving than the triumph of expelling the British. Poverty and communal tensions still trouble India, and cloud its future. As the country's economy booms, hundreds of millions like those gathered around Gandhi's humble dwelling are on the outside looking in. It's reported that on August 15, 1947, West Bengal's newly appointed administrators came to the Mahatma in Beliaghata to seek his blessings. He responded ominously. "Today...