Word: varma
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...cultures, or as decoration. (Although the international trade in tigers and tiger parts is illegal, few countries have taken steps to actually enforce the ban.) "Unless we can crack down on the illegal trade and on poachers in the wild, tigers have very little chance of survival," says Keshav Varma, the program director of the World Bank's global tiger initiative. (See a cheapskate's guide to Valentine...
...ballooning human populations in Asia have chased tigers out of their native habitat. Yet the health of the tiger means the health of the planet. "If there is a tiger in the forest, it's a sign that the forest and the other animals in it are healthy," says Varma. "Tigers are the face of biodiversity." Hopefully, then, 2010 will truly be the tiger's year...
...Months after my return to the States, I encountered my first Varma painting while flipping through my high-school art-history textbook. (My class never got to the section on Indian art, which wasn’t covered on the AP Exam.) I would come to blame artists like Varma for the exaggerated deference I’d witnessed firsthand in India. In a country with such a rich artistic tradition, I found myself asking: What compelled a Keralite to adopt a European vocabulary to produce something meaningful and aesthetically pleasing...
...returned to India this past summer, four years after my first, fleeting glance at a Varma painting, in a cliched attempt to reconnect with my roots. (The journey of self-discovery included a trip to the Government Museum.) At the same time, New York Times columnist and similarly second-generation immigrant Anand Giridharadas was completing a four-year tour of the country. Determined to steal my thunder, Giridharadas wrote about a transformation of the Indian population’s psyche. “They don’t crave our mayonnaise and khakis anymore... Indian accents are now cooler than...
...country would be better off today if globalization hadn’t been forcefully thrust upon it are ultimately pointless. The real show of strength for India is not, as I once believed, to pretend that Western influence doesn’t exist, but to incorporate that influence, as Varma did, into a distinctly Indian story. For the first time in modern history, the world is listening...