Falguni Nayar and Nykaa: The beauty and the beast of the market. UK outlines plans to save iconic red public phone. Is e-sport coming to the Olympic Games? As distrust of China grows, Europe may inch closer to Taiwan.
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While watching it the other day, I found myself crying during the scene in which Ashima learns her mother has died in India, as Gogol stands at the door in the darkness watching his father comfort his mother.
This scene has undoubtedly transpired in countless Indian American homes, as parents are woken in the middle of the night by telephone calls notifying them that their parents and siblings, last links to their original homes, have died.
The drama comes in the form of political forces at work in both the United States and India. Schopenhauer believed that the present moment is all there is — both past and future are simply concept. He pictured time as an eternally revolving sphere, in which the part of the sphere that is sinking is the past and the part that is rising is the future.
The point that touches the tangent of these is the extensionless present, and it is always our reality, all that we have. Under this outlook as it is commonly understood, the world and our choices within it are emptied of any intrinsic meaning. Another mother, spending the time with her, might not have considered it a waste.
How, at the height of the crackdown, the bodies of party members were left in streams, in fields close to Tollygunge. They were left by the police, to shock people, to revolt them. To make clear that the party would not survive.
The moment, the horror of the attempted revolution, is always with her. Married twice in two years, her new life in Tollygunge is met with more silence and nostalgia while she is struggling to keep traces of her first husband out of her life. Compromising for a few years, she takes a drastic step in the later part of her life, severing all ties with her husband and daughter because she could not make them a part of her existence.
Her inability to cope with the unpredictability of life and its courses, and much because a part of Udayan was still alive in her, somewhere, refusing to die, leads to this step. The author's strength undoubtedly lies in creating a fluid visual imagery that transports the reader into a world she wishes them to live in, breathe in and get completely absorbed by.
The reader is given the liberty to sketch these characters, as not much effort has been wasted in describing them, but a great detail of effort has been put into dealing with complexities of situations, human actions and reactions and our irreparable memory that refuses to detach itself from attachments we all have in life.
These are not larger-than life characters but everyday mortals who are driven by emotions and can be weaker, selfish and naive while dealing with circumstances they are not prepared with. Estranged relations are a result of unhappiness but also because of the lack of compromises one refuses to make till one gets into the shoes of others.
It's a your's and mine story. It's our story. Reading her work is like learning to ride a bike: you wobble a little in the beginning, maybe take a fall or two, before finding your rhythm and learning to relax in the cadence of her prose.
From the sedate Calcutta of the s, we move into the turbulent s and s, when the Naxalite movement unleashed violence and mayhem in the city. Hundreds of men and women, suspected of sedition, were rounded up, tortured, killed, or forced to disappear, a version of which continues to happen in modern India, maybe more discreetly. With life in Calcutta being violent and volatile, Subhash, the pragmatic elder son, decides to move to Rhode Island, in the US, for higher studies, while Udayan, driven by youthful idealism, decides to shun the beaten track.
He joins the rebels, gets married to the girl he loves, and is dead by the age of 26 in a freak encounter with the police. Think of the siblings Elinor and Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, in a context that could not have been more apart from 19th-century England. With just 15 months between them, Subhash and Udayan share a bond that extends, with a wrenching irony, to the woman, Gauri, they both get married to, and the child, Bela, they become fathers to.
That these affinities and alliances are forged out of exigency, Lahiri never allows her characters, or her readers, to forget.
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