Kathmandu kina najane
I don't want to go back to Kathmandu permanently because ... kathmandu (Nepal)will become an actual battlefield again within the next seven years. I dont wanna go back because people who look like me, who are related to me are being threatened away from their houses, the security of their daughters and businesses imperiled, and no one will talk for them. I don't want to go back because the syndicates will rule it in the forseable future, and i don't want to be the syndicate. I don't want to go back because the earthquake will kill hundreds of thousands and i dont want to be one of them.
Ghanian names
If you meet any Kofi, Kweku, Nana or Kwame (amongst others, but I forget the three remaining) anywhere in the world, call them 'Charlie' and ask them what kind of soup they like with their fufuo, and if Fante Kenkey and Banku are really better than Ashanti Kenkey and Banku. Do not ask for travel advice to Nigeria because he will unfailingly tell you that you will be kidnapped and taken for murder, or killed, there.
The drink culture that is Ghana
I had what was probably my seventh ginger-based drink in Ghana today. It wasn't as bad as a lot of my American friends imagined it would be, and I was secretly hoping it would be the secret to easy weight loss. One wonders at what point a culture decides that it needs more ginger in its drinks that leads to a massive home-grown and industrial production industry. The best ginger-based drink that I've had is arguably the ginger-beer that I had had at Republica-- my choice is probably biased by the home-brewed sugarcane-based nature of the drink though.
Idea for a future post --someone remind me if I get lazy with the posts : how Americans find the idea of any other flavor for drinks except sweet/alcoholic disgusting.
Idea for a future post --someone remind me if I get lazy with the posts : how Americans find the idea of any other flavor for drinks except sweet/alcoholic disgusting.
Project galore: twitter data visualisation
I've been working on a project to visualize data extracted from 400,000 (char lakh) tweets from Nepali tweeters in the last month. It'll be bearing fruit tonight, but wow, how time flies. This has been quick. A part of the project will be helping a yet-to-be-disclosed non-profit show the trend of public conversation of Nepali tweeps on twitter. Fingers crossed.
Blog housekeeping
I will soon be removing this blog from search engines. It was amusing at first when the 'fillers' I tagged my posts with (sex, free sex, nepali sex download, nepali hot girls free, naked, nepali naked, kathmandu naked, kathmandu free naked sex, baneshwar sex, kakani sex, ku sex, bhaktapur sex etcetc) were the ones that had the greatest hits. Now it seems just stupid that my target audience mostly doesn't come here and instead a bunch of sleazeballs who don't know anything about google flood it. The posts will remain but I'll be harder to reach here.
There were times, back when I was on facebook, when a post averaged 60 hits (sometimes in a day). Now, the average hit for my posts is between 3-4, in total. Maybe less. It's important to put things into perspective. If you're into linkbaiting, gofb yourself.
There were times, back when I was on facebook, when a post averaged 60 hits (sometimes in a day). Now, the average hit for my posts is between 3-4, in total. Maybe less. It's important to put things into perspective. If you're into linkbaiting, gofb yourself.
Reality show idea
Since they're so popular already, why not make a reality show out of it?
Contestants pitch their 'ideas' and 'projects' to a panel of judges, a-la aid-funding proposals. They're asked about assessment (the first round), implementation, sustainability, scalability, you-got-it. They have to prove their ability to implement the ideas through demonstration of their resourcefulness, social-consciousness, the way they handle risk and uncertain events, and accountability. The winner's project is funded.
Buuuut. That's just the beginning. The implementation of the project is filmed too, and winners from several seasons are judged on how well they implemented their projects and so on (assessment too!), and the winner gets the finale prize.
Everything should be outsourced to a reality show, including the WFP model. All the ideas that'll be up will be better than the actual model.
Contestants pitch their 'ideas' and 'projects' to a panel of judges, a-la aid-funding proposals. They're asked about assessment (the first round), implementation, sustainability, scalability, you-got-it. They have to prove their ability to implement the ideas through demonstration of their resourcefulness, social-consciousness, the way they handle risk and uncertain events, and accountability. The winner's project is funded.
Buuuut. That's just the beginning. The implementation of the project is filmed too, and winners from several seasons are judged on how well they implemented their projects and so on (assessment too!), and the winner gets the finale prize.
Everything should be outsourced to a reality show, including the WFP model. All the ideas that'll be up will be better than the actual model.
Motos in Ghana
George tells me that Ghanians are ashamed of moto(rbikes) or god forbid, bicycles, because they are symbols of poverty. "I wanted to get a moto, because traveling from home to office specially in the evenings would be so much easier. My sister and my friends were very much against the idea. My sister told me I should save money for a car instead," he tells me. Five years later, he still takes the evening TroTro(microbus) home.
The absence of motorbikes and bicycles is striking and specially ironic, considering Accra has a bikepath along the ringroad, and has bicycle path in general. The heat is not an explanation -- places with warmer climate have different attitudes. Besides, as George told me and I have observed, people would rather walk for half-hour in the sizzling Sun than ride a bike for ten minutes. Also important is the fact that both motorbikes and bicycles are rather cheap here relative to everything else.
I ask if the expats of US and UK colleges ride bikes... Bike-riding is an elite thing in some places. He laughs at at the suggestion and tells me getting a big SUV is their top priority after they return back.
Question for discussion: what factor(s) can explain the difference in cultural attitude towards bikes and motorbikes in South Asia/China and West Africa(Ghana, not sure about Nigeria)? One could argue that the price difference between cars and bikes is so high in Nepal, people would rather get a bike than wait for many years for a car. That still does not explain India, though. Could it be related to religion? Maybe differences in attitudes of young people?
Last point of observation: on weekend evenings, sportsbikes can be seen around the campus, being ridden at speeds that would make any sensible human fear dearly for her life.
The absence of motorbikes and bicycles is striking and specially ironic, considering Accra has a bikepath along the ringroad, and has bicycle path in general. The heat is not an explanation -- places with warmer climate have different attitudes. Besides, as George told me and I have observed, people would rather walk for half-hour in the sizzling Sun than ride a bike for ten minutes. Also important is the fact that both motorbikes and bicycles are rather cheap here relative to everything else.
I ask if the expats of US and UK colleges ride bikes... Bike-riding is an elite thing in some places. He laughs at at the suggestion and tells me getting a big SUV is their top priority after they return back.
Question for discussion: what factor(s) can explain the difference in cultural attitude towards bikes and motorbikes in South Asia/China and West Africa(Ghana, not sure about Nigeria)? One could argue that the price difference between cars and bikes is so high in Nepal, people would rather get a bike than wait for many years for a car. That still does not explain India, though. Could it be related to religion? Maybe differences in attitudes of young people?
Last point of observation: on weekend evenings, sportsbikes can be seen around the campus, being ridden at speeds that would make any sensible human fear dearly for her life.
Beach
For the first time in my life, I went to a (beach) resort, on my own, on my initiation, and had a blast of a time there tanning(!) and listening to local music and patronizing the local food and drink outlets, without for a moment feeling a smidgen of guilt for any reason whatsoever. The trip also included a reggae festival festival inside the resort.
Point of interest: the house we rented had no room for privacy: we had two bedrooms, connected by an arch, and a private bathroom, also connected by an arch, with curtains on it (no door). The idea of an 'open' bathroom with nothing to hide is not as emancipating as it sounds, let me tell you that.
Point of interest: the house we rented had no room for privacy: we had two bedrooms, connected by an arch, and a private bathroom, also connected by an arch, with curtains on it (no door). The idea of an 'open' bathroom with nothing to hide is not as emancipating as it sounds, let me tell you that.
India the 'dada': The rewards of big neighbours
Despite everything else, Nepal reaps one significant benefit of being next to India-China. Since both the countries are poor and yet have a massive population, most major brands have affordable products targeted at those markets that eventually seep into the Nepali market. Compare that to a country like Ghana, which imports its 'cheap' coconut biscuits from Sri Lanka (despite being a tropical country itself), its chocolates from Turkey, Middle East, and South Africa (the irony was observed), its fruit-juice boxes from Spain, the marmalade from Italy. The list is long, and the point stands: without the 'buffering' effect of India's/China's poor, prices in Nepal for imported goods would be much higher than they are now.
The best photo
Is this the best photo I've taken?
We were at the beach at night, and the kids of the resort staff wanted to wrestle on sand. Since we didn't show any interest, they started wrestling each other. Here, J falls on the ground, defeated, as I tell him to smile for the camera.
No photoediting whatesoever.
We were at the beach at night, and the kids of the resort staff wanted to wrestle on sand. Since we didn't show any interest, they started wrestling each other. Here, J falls on the ground, defeated, as I tell him to smile for the camera.
No photoediting whatesoever.
The Trotsky
The Trotsky
is the movie to watch if you feel jaded by Hollywood flicks and/or
indies. It's a cute comedy – not a romcom – that takes place in
Quebec.
What's
most amazing about the movie is how quickly the viewer can connect to
one of its plethora of its characters. They are complex and often
opaque, which makes them more real than Hollywood. You never quite
figure out the motives of the character, or 'figure' them out as you
would characters in Hollywood. You know
what they are doing and why, but you never quite figure them out.
It's good, go watch.
My
guilty pleasure from the movie were the Russian Revolutionary
war-songs that the movie has as background scores. They're there for
humor, but instead they got me up and excited.
Coding as a Solitary Activity
Good coding is not a solitary activity.
It seems like it should be – but
the more one codes the more one realizes that coding involving
discussion on algorithms and data-structures and everything your
program is about with one's fellow programmers are a lot
productive than ones done in pure isolation.
I
never realized the importance of discussions in coding till I was
here. Perhaps it was taken for granted – with Cy and Wi open to
talk to about any idea or topic under the Sun I didn't realize how
crucial they were to my programming. Now that SaDa has put me in
touch with Va, who is apparently also coding/interested in the topic
I'm working right now, but much experienced and learned, things are
getting back on track. It's not the most original epiphany, but you
can learn from people and you can teach people .
Dancing Music
If you have ever danced to a traditional Nepali dance music, you know what it like. It's about love, separation, teasing, nostalgia, first sights, little girls trying to figure out how they should fill the pitcher with water, married women missing their home, soldiers/workers missing their families -- the old mothers and the hardworking wives and the innocent sons, and so on. Once in a while, you'll get a martial tune about nationbuilding or patriotism.
West African dance music (Ghanian and Togoan, and Nigerian possibly) has more friendship and camaraderie. Between men and men yes but more generally in sex-neutral terms (because West African societies have traditionally been maternalistic and matrilinear even though men don't help with the Kitchen). There's little talk of patriotism but more of loyalty to your people, because of the still-existing pre-Westphalian notions of nationhood (which I prefer). The men and women will flirt and dance, but it's more vigorous, more physical, less shy than Nepali-dance flirting (as in, you stare at butts a lot and pretend to slap them playfully). I have found the dances here a lot more vigorous than those at home.
I don't know if that says anything about anything.
West African dance music (Ghanian and Togoan, and Nigerian possibly) has more friendship and camaraderie. Between men and men yes but more generally in sex-neutral terms (because West African societies have traditionally been maternalistic and matrilinear even though men don't help with the Kitchen). There's little talk of patriotism but more of loyalty to your people, because of the still-existing pre-Westphalian notions of nationhood (which I prefer). The men and women will flirt and dance, but it's more vigorous, more physical, less shy than Nepali-dance flirting (as in, you stare at butts a lot and pretend to slap them playfully). I have found the dances here a lot more vigorous than those at home.
I don't know if that says anything about anything.
Milestone
This is an important day for someone self-teaching himself machine learning/Natural-language processing. I just taught myself my first clustering algorithm ( O(n*n) worst case, O(n) best case, who knows that the average is) and now the world opens for me [as long as the data is not clustered. Because I sweep only once].
For your viewing pleasure
For your viewing pleasure, presenting to you, a picture of a masturbating Smurf, straight from a Turkish restaurant [DNR] in Accra, Ghana.
Ghana and its non-Ghanians
Ghana has a significant presence and
investment of outsiders from the US, Great Britain, India, China,
South Africa, Japan, Lebanon, Turkey and Nigeria. In Accra you see a
South African retailer competing against a British retailer, fancy
Indian restaurants sharing kitchens with fancy Chinese restaurants,
Turkish chocolate selling alongside Lebanese chocolate in public
markets, Indian supermarkets next to Lebanese-run supermarkets,
Indians working for Japanese firms with Nigerians, and so on. Let's
not even get started on the numerous African countries where refugees
come to Ghana from. Is the solution to 'international intervention'
as our leaders so often complain about to make ourselves so open to
international presence that no single country has any significant
influence over other? I ask because Ghanian leaders say great many
things, but never seem to mention the 'hidden foreign overlords'.
As a note of interest, President KA
Busia in 1983 decided that Ghana had had enough of Nigerians and
blamed them for all the problems in Ghana. He deported 550,000
Nigerians. In retaliation, Nigeria stopped export of Wheat, the
staple food-grain, to Ghana. Ghana had to resort to buying Wheat from
the U.S at four times the price. Today, of course, there are many
Nigerians in all sectors in Ghana and Ghana is the top choice for the
Nigerian elite to send their children to study (apart from US and UK)
even though Nigeria is the bigger richer more resource-rich country.
As an uninteresting sidenote, three of
my classes are in the KA Busia lecture hall/building.
Numbers of concern
According to the 1960 census, the
percentage of Ghanians following ATR (African traditional religions)
was estimated to be 40-45%. Today, it is estimated to be 2-5%. The
decrease comes almost entirely as a result of massive Christian
prosetilisation campaigns. The brand of Christianity peddled here is
the most repressive form of the one found in the West, so countries
that had traditionally accepted values such as homosexuality as parts
of their cultures have growing aversion towards them because of
rising conservative Christian values.
In other news, I got a personal
handwritten letter from Jesus (it was signed as 'Love, Jesus')
delivered by a 17-year old shopgirl telling me to convert. It's not
every day that Jesus writes you letters personally saying you need to
listen to what his dad says.
David Foster Wallace Dream
I am a reporter for a newspaper, and I
am to interview the writer David Foster Wallace. The assignment is a
bizarre one – he committed suicide in 2008. A photographer and I
are sent to his house. We knock on the door; it opens. We enter.
In front of us is the late professor
David Foster Wallace. I figure this must be a dream or the most
important day for the world of transcendentalism. The introductions
are short and we segue to interviewing right away. As we talk to him
in the living room, next to us on the carpet is a girl child of seven
playing with her stuffed Mammoth and Whale. That, of all things,
confuses me. The girl, who I know to be his daughter, should be
eighteen in 2013 not seven. The year must be 2002.
Still the depressed moody person he
always has been, DFW is close to his daughter. Our conversations are
interrupted by her demands to be hugged, to ride on his shoulders, or
her snuggling into his lap. She asks us where we are from, why we are
asking hard questions to him. She says she wants to write stories
like daddy; she wants to write stories for little boys and girls. She
shows us her picture book and she tells us what illustrations will go
with her stories. She doesn't like how daddy's stories don't have
pictures.
DFW is a rising start in 2002, not yet
at the zenith of his career. We discuss his writings, the jobs he's
had, the places he's lived at. I tread around the topic of his
depression. Our encounter would have made into his stories if he had
thought about it, he says offhandedly while explaining how dealing
with thin blurry line between the real and the unreal was his forte.
He talks about his love for mathematics. He considers himself a
mathematician at heart who likes to write.
The elephant in the room, the reason I
was sent to interview him, stays an undercurrent throughout the
conversation until he decides to talk about it. He is aware that he's
in a terribly bad place and in six years he will kill himself. He
looks with great pain at his daughter, who is now building a block
tower. He whispers she will will have grown up a bit by then, and he
wouldn't feel as bad.
The absurdities of the encounter are
not lost on us. I am talking to a dead writer 11 years in the past,
who is omniscient – at least inhumanly knowledgeable – about his
future. He is aware of the impossibility of his existence. That he is
likely a figment of my imagination, an ironic contrast to one of his
characters who'd rather be a fictional character than a real person,
is absolutely fine, thank you, with him. He needs to talk to someone
to explain his condition.
We stay over for dinner after the
interview. DFW knows his way around the kitchen well, having lived
alone a considerable time as a bachelor. I play with his daughter
while he is chopping vegetables. She is trying to scare the fish from
across the aquarium walls by making faces. The big fish, she
explains, are so big because they are afraid daddy might forget to
give them food them so they get fat from all the food now so they
don't die when there is no food. She snatches her slipper away from
the jaws of the tiny brown mastiff who was sleeping peacefully but
had decided to go outside with the slippers. She reprimands him and
makes him sit. He lays on the ground ready to go back to sleep. After
DFW is done with chopping the vegetables, we go to the kitchen to
help him, but he has had a head start on three dishes with surprising
agility. As we leave after a sumptuous rather spicy meal, we agree on
the strangeness of the situation. DFW mentions lightly that this must
be one of our dreams because his aren't this happy.
Just as I leave the room, I know I have
to go back. I go back into the apartment, and the scene has changed.
The room is dusty. It looks as if it were a living museum under
construction. Chairs, tables, piles of books, two old computers are
all covered in sheets of plastic. DFW sits nervously on the couch,
waiting for me. He looks paler, older. He smiles a weak but warm
smile, hugging me as one hugs an old friend after a long interval.
The year is 2009, I find out from the
wall-calendar. A year after his death. We make small talk. I ask him
why, when he loved her [his daughter] so much, he had decided to not
be there for her. A long pause; followed by long sigh. He asks me,
irritated, if I'm blaming him for his death. I tell him I want to
know why he killed himself when he had such a good reason to be
alive.
More pregnant pause. His legendary mane
covers his face as he speaks staring downwards perhaps at my knees.
He says that times had been unusually hard on him then. He hadn't
seen his family for a long time and he was dealing with issues that
seemed to be more urgent than his family. He couldn't handle those
issues, he says, they were too much for him. He always knew he would
kill himself, in a spectacular fashion. It was only a matter of time
and it felt right in late 2008, he says. This interview winds down
into sad awkward silence.
Next scene. I am walking into a
cafeteria of a private high school. I just figure out who the girl
beaming at me is before she gives me a long, tight hug. The year is
2013. This is real life. More real than the other parts anyway. My
assignment is about to complete, I am meeting the grown-up daughter.
She talks to me as if I were an old friend. For me it was only hours
ago that I last saw her. Eleven years have passed for her.
The empire that is bollywood
An uninformed informed may not be aware that hindi films and hindi teleserials are incredibly popular in West Africa, as I have observed in Ghana. The movies are titled in English and dubbed in local languages or English, and distributed widely. The teleserials get the same treatment, except that they're divided into 'seasons'. That I found interesting: Indian teledramas don't seem to have seasons. I'll bring photos of the DVD's of 'The young daughter in law' (Chotti bahu)the next time I'm at the markets.
I'll write in greater detail about the Indian influence in Ghana in a future post.
I'll write in greater detail about the Indian influence in Ghana in a future post.
That monthlong posting pledge
On a roll here, so no better time than now to make wild lofty promises.
Here's the pledge:
1. For the next month, I will post at least one post every day.
2. Over the next few days, I will try to cover up for the time I've been in Ghana with a post for every two days I've been here. They will be backposted to average one for every other day. The posts may or may not be related to Ghana. They will probably include some (many many) technical posts.
Here's the pledge:
1. For the next month, I will post at least one post every day.
2. Over the next few days, I will try to cover up for the time I've been in Ghana with a post for every two days I've been here. They will be backposted to average one for every other day. The posts may or may not be related to Ghana. They will probably include some (many many) technical posts.
Update reports re: Projects
Once upon a time a guy dreamed he would use his downtime in Ghana to write a novel. That novel wouldn't be very good, but it wouldn't have to be. He would just have to complete it, get it done, bhayo, over, sakkiyo, now I can go home, khaale, and he would have written a novel. You would have known someone who was a novelist-- an unpublished one but a novelist nevertheless.
That would have been me.
That's not happening. Don't get your hopes high.
My thought-processes have been growing evolving. It's not a conscious action but I can sometime feel it sneak into my consciousness. Say we have a problem that needs to be figured out, and I think of a solution. The first thought that pops up is 'why did I think of that, did I really think that, wow.'
More of life needs to be seen and critiqued to write a novel that's not going to embarrass me. The observations are insufficient and limited to a severely restricted domain. That needs to be worked upon. The world needs to be seen in terms of more than the middle-and upper-middle class lifestyle.
More importantly I have been working on my personal computer science projects. You can look them up online (find them if you can). The thing with that kind of stuff is, you need to put a lot of thought and time in it. It's like thinking math and writing poetry. During my classes I try to come up with less-inefficient algorithms; the first thoughts I have in the morning are those of wonder if the algorithm I thought over the night might work. That has left me with very little time for everything else.
[For those interested, Topic 1: I'm tracking topics of discussion in Nepal through twitter messages. I can tell you exactly when people started talking about Teej, when it reached the peak, and what happened when Maobadies bandaed the darr khane din. Wait I can't tell you that yet. I wrote the algorithm in my Theater notebook and will implement maybe later tonight. Topic 2 is more visual but I'm not ready to make it public yet. Topic 3 relates to ethnomusicology, which is a possible field of my internship. Topic 4 relates to snakes. Topic 5 is my fancy personal website that I want to code from scratch. So on and on.]
Writing is fun though. Despite everything else I have ideas for blog posts almost every day. By the time I'm next to a computer with internet they are all but forgotten. Lots of good ideas lost forever and this semester I also have a traditional West-African Dance.
I wrote a poem the other day during Computer Science class. It was about optimists -- all high up in their puffy angelic clouds--and how pessimistic they are about death. I end with a contrary idea though because I couldn't find rhyming words. Hey don't judge. If your poem rhymes it can also be used as a rap as Sam will tell you and that's quite a moneymaker.
That would have been me.
That's not happening. Don't get your hopes high.
My thought-processes have been growing evolving. It's not a conscious action but I can sometime feel it sneak into my consciousness. Say we have a problem that needs to be figured out, and I think of a solution. The first thought that pops up is 'why did I think of that, did I really think that, wow.'
More of life needs to be seen and critiqued to write a novel that's not going to embarrass me. The observations are insufficient and limited to a severely restricted domain. That needs to be worked upon. The world needs to be seen in terms of more than the middle-and upper-middle class lifestyle.
More importantly I have been working on my personal computer science projects. You can look them up online (find them if you can). The thing with that kind of stuff is, you need to put a lot of thought and time in it. It's like thinking math and writing poetry. During my classes I try to come up with less-inefficient algorithms; the first thoughts I have in the morning are those of wonder if the algorithm I thought over the night might work. That has left me with very little time for everything else.
[For those interested, Topic 1: I'm tracking topics of discussion in Nepal through twitter messages. I can tell you exactly when people started talking about Teej, when it reached the peak, and what happened when Maobadies bandaed the darr khane din. Wait I can't tell you that yet. I wrote the algorithm in my Theater notebook and will implement maybe later tonight. Topic 2 is more visual but I'm not ready to make it public yet. Topic 3 relates to ethnomusicology, which is a possible field of my internship. Topic 4 relates to snakes. Topic 5 is my fancy personal website that I want to code from scratch. So on and on.]
Writing is fun though. Despite everything else I have ideas for blog posts almost every day. By the time I'm next to a computer with internet they are all but forgotten. Lots of good ideas lost forever and this semester I also have a traditional West-African Dance.
I wrote a poem the other day during Computer Science class. It was about optimists -- all high up in their puffy angelic clouds--and how pessimistic they are about death. I end with a contrary idea though because I couldn't find rhyming words. Hey don't judge. If your poem rhymes it can also be used as a rap as Sam will tell you and that's quite a moneymaker.
B(r)easts of the wild
I am currently reading William Dalrymple's City of Djinns. For anyone interested in history of India or Pakistan or the Mughal period this is a fantastic read.
There's a mention of breasts somewhere in the book, and he writes something like:
Dalrymple is to Delhi what Rushdie is to Bombay, and this is his love-letter to Delhi. Rushdie had Midnight's Children for Bombay and Dalrymple has City of Djinns for Delhi. His writing is not comparable to Rushdie's (he writes non-fiction, and this is his first work, from 1989) but his book(s) are still amazing reads. I wish Nepal had a chronicler of history like him.
Suggested Readings for Dalrymple:
City of Djinns
In Xanadu
PS: I have met and talked to Dalrymple (or 'Will' as Prof. Jalal, a friend of his professor of mine, calls him) and he's as funny and intelligent in real life as he is in his books.
There's a mention of breasts somewhere in the book, and he writes something like:
...her breasts were like ripe(Indian?) Mangoes.I usually don't follow all the imagery I read [it's easier to get through Dan Brown that way] but this one caught me off-guard. It was a treat-- an interesting and accurate way to describe things succinctly without resorting to crude hyperbole. He could have picked avocadoes or --les artistically-- Oranges, Apples, or even (begin eyeroll sequence) Melons. There are fruits which could be have been used to describe women's bosoms. That wouldn't have been as pleasing to read though [or accurate. he's talking of Indian women] -- it had to be mangoes, and that's how it is. Great writer, this.
Dalrymple is to Delhi what Rushdie is to Bombay, and this is his love-letter to Delhi. Rushdie had Midnight's Children for Bombay and Dalrymple has City of Djinns for Delhi. His writing is not comparable to Rushdie's (he writes non-fiction, and this is his first work, from 1989) but his book(s) are still amazing reads. I wish Nepal had a chronicler of history like him.
Suggested Readings for Dalrymple:
City of Djinns
In Xanadu
PS: I have met and talked to Dalrymple (or 'Will' as Prof. Jalal, a friend of his professor of mine, calls him) and he's as funny and intelligent in real life as he is in his books.
A point to be made
I understand the ramifications. Is it a better idea to allow slight violence (eg, slaps, etc) against children from parents, or let them go their way and spend lives in juvies and jails? I'm looking at America, of course. How does America have so many 'criminals' and people in jails? There's something very wrong with the justice system [not an original observation, I'll concede].
Maybe the parenting is not to blame -- if it were, wouldn't the Nordic countries have similar rates?-- there's something that I'm missing then and can't figure it out.
Maybe the parenting is not to blame -- if it were, wouldn't the Nordic countries have similar rates?-- there's something that I'm missing then and can't figure it out.
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