Word: slummed
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...opposition leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki launched the campaign last month under the banner of "imposing the law" and wresting control away from militias operating "outside the law." Similar campaigns in Basra, the chaotic port 100 miles away, and Sadr City, the huge Baghdad slum, initially met fierce resistance from al-Sadr's followers, but the cleric ordered his fighters to stand down in the Amara operation, allowing it to proceed peacefully. "The previous operation that happened in Basra really hurt the fighters," Harbia says. "Now they prefer to flee rather than to resist...
...currently chic for fancy novelists to slum it in the lower genres, the way Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a peasant and milk cows. Sebastian Faulks just wrote a James Bond novel; Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union was a noir mystery set in an alternate universe. Some writers find the discipline invigorating: look at The Road, Cormac McCarthy's fling with apocalyptic science fiction. Some don't: Martin Amis' Night Train was an undercooked attempt at hard-boiled detective fiction. It turns out that trashy books are as hard to write as good ones...
...find magic in the Kathputli slum, if you know where to look. In one of the unlit concrete huts lining this cramped and chaotic warren of alleys, open sewage and dazed beggars, a boy swallows a sword. In another, a string puppeteer makes his wooden princess do pirouettes that send her dress - hand-stitched by his wife - sailing through the air. In a third home, a ten-year-old girl waves her hands over three flowers and - poof! - a bouquet...
...cobbler. Although the caste system was outlawed in India's founding constitution 60 years ago, caste still shapes the lives of millions of people who continue to live in close-knit caste communities throughout the country. Such clans are especially common among India's rural poor and urban slum dwellers. Many urban dwellers, like the people of Kathputli, brought their rural traditions with them when they migrated to the cities...
...other end of the slum, two caged doves flutter their wings in the corner of a concrete room where magician Mohammad Hamid and his father, Sayed Hussein, perform a favorite two-man tricks involving two telekinetic pom-poms. "I have learned all the tricks from my father," says the smiling 18-year-old. He spent years perfecting his favorite, called the Indian basket trick. In that one a boy climbs into a basket, and the magician makes him disappear. And regardless of the changes in the city beyond Kathputli, it is a trick he hopes one day to teach...