Word: woodenness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...police chief of Haswah is on the verge of tears. Alone, out of uniform and lighting cigarettes one after another, Captain Abdul Rahman Kudhair Madloom Al-Timemi sits behind the large wooden desk of his dark office and ruminates on his imminent departure from this town of 30,000, about 25 miles south of Baghdad. He was fired, he says, for sectarian and political reasons. "I have done what I was hired to do," he says, his voice shaking. "I enforced the law. I was fighting for my country, but the government is filled people who fight for other motives...
...They are reassuringly banal. There are paintings of sand-dunes, palm-dotted horizons, tranquil seas; 'Detainee Z,' an Algerian engineering student detained without charges, then released on bail under supervision, after London's July 7 bombings, built a cherry-red wooden toy train for his son. A boat called the Allahu Akbar, its sail adorned with cut-out photos of Mecca and Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa mosque, is made out of matchsticks. So too is a model of an Andalusian Mosque, complete with arches and pillars, and a jewelry box embossed with 'Najat,' the name of some prisoner's beloved...
...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...
...There is no official population count for Kathputli, but residents estimate there are 2,200 homes, about 70% of which are occupied by a collection of street-performer castes, each defined by their talent. The colony, named for the Hindi word for wooden puppet, began a half century ago with seven tents housing an extended family of puppeteers - gypsies from Rajasthan. Next came the magicians, nomadic Muslims from South India. They were joined, in the 1970s, by acrobats from Mumbai. Today, the children and grandchildren of these pioneers work New Delhi's weddings, birthday parties and the five-star hotel...
...look behind me to see whom I was running away from. But China's leaders have a long tradition of using sports as a spur to national pride. Consider the country's decades-long dominance of table tennis. This supremacy had little to do with a national passion for wooden paddles and plastic balls. China decided to develop star paddlers largely because the International Table Tennis Federation was, in 1953, one of the first sports organizations to drop ties with Taiwan in favor of the mainland. In 1959, Rong Guotuan made history as China's first world champion...