Word: lanka
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...serious craftsmen are being massed under the Orientalist tent. Abraham Verghese's vision, full of the earnest self-inquiry of a foreigner taking America to his heart, might seem as alien to Romesh Gunesekera as Gunesekera's wrenching, elegiac tales, fragrant with the sea air of his lost Sri Lanka, might be to Verghese. Yet the two of them, an Ethiopian-born Indian Christian now living in Texas and a Sinhalese exile based in London, owe something to South Asia as each produces one of the moment's strongest works of fiction and nonfiction...
Gunesekera's first novel, Reef, became a Booker Prize finalist in 1994, thanks to its meticulous evocation of the marketing of paradise (symbolized by a coral reef in Sri Lanka). His new one, The Sandglass (The New Press; 288 pages; $21.95), sweeps that theme up into an even ampler examination of how independent Sri Lanka devolved into bloody anarchy and its people got scattered around the globe. Its protagonist, essentially, is twilight, and its brief sections, following the hours of the day ("Late Morning," "Quarter to Five," "Darkness"), tell us, unequivocally, that time is running...
...trying to represent all South Asians. It doesn't mean just being from India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka...but also the immigration experience or [an individual's] cultural heritage," Upadhyay said...
...Beijing insists that only two teeth survived the Buddha?s cremation, one of which is in Beijing, the other in Sri Lanka, and says the 2,000-year-old tooth presented to Taiwan by Tibetan monks is nothing more than old dente. But Beijing?s demand that the tooth be returned to China takes the bite out of its protests over the tooth?s authenticity. Taiwan?s premier will likely flash his pearly whites when he greets the ?third tooth? on its arrival Thursday. Beijing?s leaders are more likely to be gnashing theirs...
...with individuals like Saddam, whose priority is to build weapons and not feed Iraq's children. What can the U.N. do to halt such endeavors by power-hungry autocrats, when the five Security Council members are the world's only declared nuclear-weapons states? MAYURA K. WIJESINGHE Colombo, Sri Lanka...