Word: sere
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...glimpsed most often in formal circumstances, at press conferences or speechmaking. NBC set the balance straight with a beautifully photographed color documentary that placed the man in the context of his own countryside. The fabulous hills and by now mythical Pedernales River were reduced to their actual proportions, to sere ranch land and meandering stream. Next to them, the President suddenly appeared lifesize, and shucking both his White House mantle and "jes' folks" delivery, he reminisced about his beginnings with pride, enthusiasm, wit and spontaneity...
...uncovers the temper of Spain among black-hooded worshipers at a religious festival, among whores and homosexuals in the slums of Barcelona, in the face of a proud old taskmaster whose dingy urban cellar houses a school for stripling toreros. In one sequence, the disconsolate Miguelin wanders through a sere, light-washed Spanish landscape while threshers fill the air with a blizzard of pale yellow grain. Such scenes are a needed respite from many matchless closeups at the arena where the hero, his mouth pursed in a kiss of defiance, struts arrogantly before the bulls, finally coaxes his frothing...
Growth on even so small a scale has begun to alter India's ancient ways of life. The change is best symbolized by the Punjabi capital of Chandigarh, which rises from the sere plains of the northwest in concrete convolutions designed by the famed French architect Le Corbusier. Homemade ghee (clarified butter), which villagers not long ago insisted was the only nourishing cooking medium, is giving way to sealed tins of vegetable oil; kerosene-burning hurricane lanterns are supplanting the traditional Aladdin-like mud diva in peasant huts, and well-to-do farmers often buy a second lantern...
Djakarta was all decked out for another political circus. Along the sere, sun-scoured boulevards of Indonesia's capital, the gaudiest splashes of color were billboards showing Uncle Sam stomping a few Negroes, handsome Asians engaged in a fierce tug of war with ugly white colonialists, a fearless President Sukarno hurling Malaysia's cringing Tunku Abdul Rahman into the Malacca Strait. Illuminated fountains tinkled merrily around the unfinished obelisk designed by Sukarno to commemorate 20 years of Indonesian independence. Across from the burnt-out shell of the British embassy, the Hotel Indonesia dispensed hot water, air conditioning...
...French soldiers who opposed him during Algeria's war of independence, Colonel Mohammed Chaabani was "the seigneur of the sands." A tough, canny guerrilla leader, he dominated a sere swatch of the Sahara and the rugged Aurès Mountains of northeastern Algeria. After independence, Chaabani joined Premier Ahmed ben Bella's Politburo and the army's general staff, but quickly grew restive under Ben Bella's heavy-handed Marxist dictatorship. Last June that uneasiness boiled over into open rebellion, and Chaabani took to the hills with a hard core of his veteran troops...