Word: servant
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...Mackey may not be one of us either. But he is one of ours. He's a monster who takes down other monsters, in our name. And while the Soprano clan was cozy in a suburban McMansion, Mackey is a civil servant with a crappy paycheck, an ex-wife and two autistic kids who need special schooling. It's not an excuse; he's surrounded by cops who could go the easy route and don't, like Captain Claudette Wyms (the outstanding C.C.H. Pounder), who's investigating Vic but won't cut corners...
...sharp comparisons Aiyar makes between China and her own country. Interviews with Beijing's toilet cleaners prompt her to ponder their Indian counterparts. The former harbor entrepreneurial dreams and say they prefer toilets to farmwork; the latter endure a lifelong stigma as "untouchables." In China, Aiyar observes, the word servant "described a job that someone did rather than defining the essence of who they were...
...Though his Bush credentials made him very unpopular, the Wolfowitz ouster wound up traumatizing many international organizations - and that was before general crisis set in," says a high-ranking French civil servant who worked with Strauss-Kahn before he won the IMF position. "Strauss-Kahn is viewed as accomplished, smart and very capable. Because of that, the prevailing view seems to be, 'Let's hope this turns out to be nothing, because the IMF and the world really needs this guy to come through...
...Indeed, Adiga's book is extraordinarily accomplished. The tale of an Indian servant who kills his boss, it's written with wit and panache and crackles with a kind of joyfully subversive energy. Yet it is also a shocking portrait of Indian corruption and social injustice at a time when the media has tended to focus on sunnier tales of the nation's economic transformation. Sitting beside Adiga in a taxi after the event, he told me that he had initially struggled to write the book in the third person and had then rewritten it in just 40 days...
...goals, but be sure that they are your servant and not your master...