Word: wands
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Bodh Gaya has benefited the most, but the pilgrim business, like a magic wand, is transforming places all along the Buddhist circuit. Kushinagar, in Uttar Pradesh, appears at first glance to be another no-hope town: many of the sugar mills that employed the townspeople have recently closed, and unemployment is rampant. Yet the town is seeing a real estate boom, roads are markedly better than anywhere around and children go to well-maintained schools. Kushinagar is where the Buddha died, and pilgrims come to see the gilded statue that commemorates the spot where the Buddha attained nirvana as well...
Here is a J.K. Rowling who lives in the hearts and minds of children everywhere. She has a fairy wand and hair of spun gold, and when she laughs her tinkly laugh, tiny silver bubbles come out of her mouth...
...curious fact about Harry Potter's magic that it doesn't really look all that hard to do. You wiggle the wand, you say the words--"Lumos! Expelliarmus! Accio Car Keys!"--and if you're not a Muggle or a Squib, if you've got the right stuff or the midichlorians or whatever, you're in business. How hard is that? And that Hermione Granger is supposed to be some kind of genius...
...Potter series, she weaves a remarkable number of narrative threads into a complex, moving and elegantly balanced whole, without any apparent effort. Rowling loves to wrong-foot readers, and the previous book, Order of the Phoenix, reads like the loins-girding preamble to an all-out, good-vs.-evil, wand-on-wand wizard war. But Half-Blood Prince turns out to be something else: an elegant, fugal tapestry in the mode of Prisoner of Azkaban. "And now," as Dumbledore says to Harry, "let us step out into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure." It's a tribute...
Love is much more important to Rowling than magic. The real mystery, for her, is the human heart. She has always been more interested in the hand that wields the wand, the way the enchantment illuminates the wizard who casts...