Word: shiva
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High up in the stunning Kashmir Valley lies a natural cave called Amarnath, where stalagmites form during the summer months. Devout Hindus believe this cave to be one of the holiest sites of their religion, and that the largest of the ice formations is a Shiva Lingam, the symbol of Lord Shiva. Hindu mythology has it that Shiva - the destroyer in the Hindu Trinity that includes Brahma the creator and Vishnu the preserver - imparted the secrets of creation to his consort, Parvati, in Amarnath. Each year, during the months of July and August, hundreds of thousands of Hindu pilgrims from...
Young lovebirds can be ingenious, particularly those for whom privacy is in short supply. No big shock to readers of Manil Suri's new novel The Age of Shiva, then, to find hormonal Delhiites Meera Sawhney, 17, and hunky songster Dev Arora, not much older, on the floor of a Sufi mystic's decaying tomb in flagrante delicto. The only surprise comes for the two paramours, whose rendezvous has been espied by a nearby stationmaster's son. Word quickly reaches both their homes, which shudder with the news. "You may not realize this now," Meera's father scolds...
...title suggests, though, the novel's intended allusion is to India's legendary past. In this case, it's the cosmic myth of Shiva, the Hindu god of annihilation. But the deity's link to Meera (and to India as she self-destructs and regenerates) is labored. If anything, Meera more closely resembles, even fantasizes about being, the goddess Parvati, Shiva's spurned consort and the mother of Ganesh, the elephant...
...Shiva is Suri's own pachyderm of a child. It's a huge and lumbering novel that took seven years to write and leaves hardly any ground unfurrowed. But Meera's growth from narcissism to selflessness is too slow, and her core epiphany - what it means to be a parent - is a cliché. Suri's cyclorama of a newborn, metropolitan India, where streets are clogged not with carts but cars, can be engrossing. Too bad a prima donna stands center stage, blocking the view...
...making sure its children are immunized against measles, polio and other life-threatening illnesses. But immunization rates in India are significantly lower than in other developing nations such as Bangladesh, China and Indonesia. Just 43.5% of very young children are fully immunized. "It's shameful," says A.K. Shiva Kumar, an economist and public-health expert who consults to the United Nations Children Fund in India and was a member of the government's recently disbanded National Advisory Council. "All this high income, this growth of the past few years is well and good, but numbers like this show...