Word: urdu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...prose style of Harvard's course catalogue can make a literate student pretty drowsy. Most programs are chosen by word of mouth, and among those students who plow regularly through their catalogues, there is a tendency to dismiss whole areas of human endeavor, like Soil Mechanics and Urdu, which appear to the untrained eye irrelevant. Yet a careful reading of the catalogue brings scholastic joy to a small, notoriously uncommunicative group of undergraduates who have effected a virtual monopoly over the University's more exotic, which is to say more enjoyable, selections. Opposing monopoly, we bring this list forthwith...
Logistically, it was a prodigious undertaking. Mangla lies in a hot, dusty plain, some 50 miles east of Rawalpindi, Pakistan's hilly capital. A fully air-conditioned town had to be built to accommodate 2,500 American and European workers. More than 18,000 Urdu-speaking Pakistanis were trained on the job, some learning to operate the most modern sort of earth-moving equipment. A special diet had to be provided for them after the contractors found they lacked the stamina for an eight-hour day. A month before the Jhelum River was to be diverted, war broke...
Citizens of the tiny British crown colony of Mauritius, 1,400 miles off the African coast, take their politics seriously. The island's 32 newspapers and one radio station covered the latest parliamentary election campaign in twelve languages from English to Urdu. Interest ran so high that nearly 90% of the eligible voters cast ballots, and Premier Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam's Independence Party, which campaigned on a platform calling for complete freedom from Britain, won 43 of 70 seats in the legislative assembly...
Donald Barthelme's work creates the impression that something miraculous happened to him overnight-as if, blind from birth, he could suddenly see, or, fluent only in Urdu, he abruptly grasped English entire. The result is quite an explosion, a staccato burst of verbal star shells, pinwheel phrases, cherry bombs of Joycean puns and wordplays. Such a book is Snow White, an amusingly refurbished fairy-tale novel of the absurd-as episodic and pointless as a slow-turning kaleidoscope, yet just as strangely affecting...
Outnumbered 7 to 1 by Hindus, India's 60 million Moslems live largely outside the country's mainstream. They tend to mix little with Hindus, cluster in separate urban ghettos, have a different written language (Urdu), and enjoy immunities from federal laws so that they, for example, may practice polygamy while other Indians must limit themselves to one wife at a time. Worst of all in Hindu eyes, Moslems are beef eaters, and they outrage their Hindu neighbors by slaughtering cows, which Hindus consider sacred. President Husain, whose own wife still wears a veil and lives in seclusion...