Word: mehtas
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...INDIA by Ved Mehta Viking; 174 pages...
...India, a collection of articles he wrote for The New Yorker, Ved Mehta traces the corrosive effect of unchallenged political power during what he calls an "Orwellian passage of time." Mehta, who was born in India but has lived in the U.S. for many years, recognized from the beginning how dangerous a path Mrs. Gandhi had chosen. By her action, he wrote, "she risked making it possible for politicians, much more ruthless and power-hungry than she, one day to dislodge her and perpetrate abuses of power previously unimagined...
...Indira and Indira is India." It is clear that she came to believe it too. But as a dictator she was hopelessly flawed, a lonely woman who turned more and more to her own family, particularly her zealous younger son Sanjay. "She could not escape her Nehru heritage," writes Mehta, "including her Nehru conscience." Incredibly, she did not realize, or perhaps refused to believe, the extent to which the enforced sterilization campaign and the behavior of petty officials had inflamed North India. And so she made the political mistake of her life, calling the elections that summoned her defeat...
Even for the city of stars, it was a cosmic event at the Hollywood Bowl. On the program of "Music from Outer Space-a Star Wars Concert," was the Los Angeles Philharmonic, under Zubin Mehta, playing excerpts from Gustav Hoist's The Planets and Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra, better known as the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey. For special effects, each instrument stand in the orchestra had been hooked up to a microphone controlled by sound engineers, and stabbing rays of laser light began crisscrossing the bowl. As the music changed in intensity, the laser...
From 1970 to 1972 Mehta often commuted from Cambridge to Hawaii, and in 1972 he left his post at the University of Hawaii because he found the atmosphere at Harvard "more challenging...