Word: indianness
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...Listening to Grasshoppers is powered by a thorough critique of Indian democracy. Free elections, she writes, have failed to challenge the rich and powerful. "The hoary institutions of Indian democracy - the judiciary, the police, the 'free' press and, of course, elections - far from working as a system of checks and balances, quite often do the opposite." But there is more passion than reasoned argument here. Urbanization, for example, may be destroying rural communities, but it also liberates people from the appalling restrictions of village life. Roy couldn't care a whit for such subtleties - yet to fault her for that...
...Pakistani embassy. "My parents' generation were immigrants, who nobody noticed, and who didn't want to be noticed," he says. "Then came my generation." The boy who was called "Pakistani Pete" by a teacher for whom all South Asians - even those, like Kureishi, born in Britain to an Indian father and an English mother - were Pakistanis, and whose friends went out on weekends looking for brown-skinned people to beat up, spun his anger into art. While other children of immigrants tried to create an identity through cast-iron faith, Kureishi forged his through rebellious fiction. His works were...
...very pleased and flattered" by his CBE and extols a recent stint teaching at Yale as "very comfy." But his spot in the cultural establishment is proof that his revolution succeeded. He's about to start on the screenplay of The White Tiger, the Booker Prize winning novel by Indian author (and occasional TIME contributor) Aravind Adiga. That a story about a poor Indian hustling his way in Bangalore sold millions of copies all over the world, notes Kureishi, shows that post-colonial fiction has reinvigorated the novel. (See Aravind Adiga's Summer reading list...
...champion for the poor, in a church that tells the story of the city over the years. It anchors a neighborhood once known for crime and drugs and violence, now a fizzing mix of college kids and old Irish and new immigrants and young families and stores that offer "Indian, Pakistani, Middle Eastern, Asian, Spanish, and American Groceries." In the days before, many thousands had come to pay their respects...
...including Jawaharlal Nehru, India's much-admired first Prime Minister. But it also serves as a reminder that the BJP is the Congress' only real competitor at the national level, and the only likely foil to Congress' national dominance. For decades, the Congress party was the lone player in Indian national politics, a status quo which led to political stagnation. Until the BJP gets its act together, India could teeter down that path once again...