Word: varanasi
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...Venice is the same today as it was when he wrote it in 1912. So too, it seems, are the characters consumed by the city's seething Dionysian urges. Nearly a century later, British author Geoff Dyer, in his latest pair of novellas, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, has returned to Venice an updated version of Mann's aging dilettante. Jeff Atman is an art critic sent from London to cover the 2003 Venice Biennale. His four-day stay - a condensed version of Mann's summer - is a heady dose of drink, sex and drugs daubed with pithy observations...
Dyer's second novella is an equally intimate exploration of the psyche of an unnamed first-person narrator whose willful plunge into worldly renunciation is as terrifying as Atman's embrace of hedonism. But after a week exploring Venice with Jeff, I don't feel ready to visit Varanasi with his alter ego. In fact, I'll definitely pack the Fodor...
...imagined, across the strip of land that was experiencing total eclipse, people turning in unison as the sky went dark and the sun billowed out at them around a deep black hole. There may be nothing tangible that can unite every person across that strip of land from Varanasi to Shanghai except, perhaps, the fact that for one instant of total eclipse they all lived where the sun chose to hide itself. I remember learning about how smiles are universal—a particular baring of the teeth occurs similarly across cultures and species even if they haven?...
...intricacy of design, it takes 15 to 30 days to weave one of these saris, which sell for $50 to $60. A Banarasi silk weaver, Abdul Basit Ansari, 37, has been working for the past 20 years weaving these garments, which come from the holy city of Varanasi. "The industry is facing lots of difficulties," he says. "This is primarily because the sale of fake Banarasi saris made in power looms has been picking up and also because of the sale of cheap imports from China. The government is not stopping this, and our trade is suffering...
...masala," says Masand. "They won't care much for this one." For many Indians, the film's subject and treatment are familiar to the point of being banal. A lot of Indians are not keen to watch it for the same reason they wouldn't want to go to Varanasi or Pushkar for a holiday - it's too much reality for what should be entertainment. "We see all this every day," says Shikha Goyal, a Mumbai-based public relations executive who left halfway through the film. "You can't live in Mumbai without seeing children begging at traffic lights...