Word: indianized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...journey that ought not to have been made. It had broken my life in two." So wrote V.S. Naipaul, the West Indian novelist (Guerrillas, A House for Mr. Biswas) of East Indian heritage, after his first visit to India in 1962. And so it seemed. He visited the ravaged village in Uttar Pradesh from which his grandfather had migrated to Trinidad as an indentured servant more than 60 years before, and fled in horror. He raged and fussed about the Indian bureaucracy. He was appalled by the emaciated bodies and starving dogs, by the filth and public defecation...
...point of departure, as always, is the immigrant Indian community of his childhood: where the first bit of cooked food was sacrificed to the fire; where only a male hand could cut the pumpkin because (as he learned decades later in West Bengal) the pumpkin was the vegetable substitute for a living sacrifice. He remains the outsider-as indeed he is in most of his literary locales-but through his travels he has come to understand that "Indian memories, the memories of that India which lived on into my childhood in Trinidad, are like trapdoors into a bottomless past...
...Naipaul's fiction, the landscape, mental as well as actual, has grown ever more terrifying. By contrast, he approaches India with a calm, almost religious detachment. The narrative is often mordant as it describes the dissonance of Indian life: the mutilated beggar children and the fashionable holy men, complete with pressagents; the landless peasants fleeing the villages for the city pavements, the infuriating smugness of the privileged...
Since he made his Marc, Howard has made two significant changes in his lifestyle. "The first one is that I can walk into the office looking like this," he says, waving at his jeans, the American Indian jewelry hanging from his neck, and the Coyote T shirt bought at the Second Annual Hookers' Ball in Manhattan this year. The other major change: "The freedom to do things without regard to what they cost." The things include frequent trips abroad with his wife Monique, a twelve-cylinder Jaguar and a new-found taste for Laphroaig, a Scotch malt whisky that...
...those 95-ton Bucyrus steam shovels that gnawed their way across Panama. Facts are turned up by the cubic yard, sorted and arranged into a smooth, efficient narrative. Statistics sometimes tend to overwhelm the reader, but there are moments when numbers become all too human. Said one West Indian laborer about the frequent dynamite accidents: "The flesh of men flew in the air like birds many days...