Meaning talk in the lofty sense serves as laudatory gloss on behaviours one or one’s community is anyway disposed to practice and encourage. This explains both why meaning making is an inside job requiring personal negotiation between individuals’ and society’s abilities and constraints, and why one man’s meaning tends not to mean quite the same thing to everyone.
Spelled out more concretely, with the inconvenient specificity of actual locales, cultures, and ethnic identities the praise heaped on travel as a beneficial transformative experience becomes untenable. Few well-intentioned people—though there will always be some—will encourage well-heeled foreigners to tour the slums of Uganda, imbibe warthog anuses with Namibian bushmen, or see themselves as fundamentally the same as Djiboutians, Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalians, and Sudanese who practice female genital mutilation after attending one of the ghastly ceremonies. And those who would do so would struggle to demonstrate how any of these exercises could even in principle educate and broaden one’s mind, or expand one’s circle of empathy. If the cures boasted of on travel’s behalf are illusory what then to make of the illnesses diagnosed in those immune to its charms?
There are 250 extant owl species known today though there is fossil evidence for a hundred species that have come and gone. Surprisingly, scientists keep finding new species and the…
"Focusing on iconic dishes from Paris, Naples, Tokyo, Seville, Oaxaca, and Istanbul von Bremzen attempts to bring light rather than the usual heat to the concept of a national dish in a globalized world where surprisingly nationalism is resurgent. She doesn’t to her credit pretend that stories about a few dishes from six countries provide a comprehensive account of the productive tension between national and world cuisine, although a sequel covering other national cuisines is acknowledged as a live possibility. A first principles approach to the question of theorising the national dish shows even a book covering every existing national cuisine is not up to the task. This is because—as von Bremzen acknowledges—the constitutive concepts of nation and national culinary identity are themselves of recent vintage and subject to ongoing negotiation; they are open to influence from actors at home and abroad."
In the final section Pampa Kampana, coming to terms with the decline of the Vijayanagar empire, reflects that “words are the only victors.” Rushdie is alive to that scruple and will not let the moralising impulse detract from the power of words. Let those who want to learn something from fiction be content to be entertained and edified. Those who, like humourless ayatollahs, can’t manage this are ineducable.
Anybody can be a storyteller and a humourist because interesting things happen to everyone, and there is humour to be found in almost every indignity. “Everything’s funny eventually” says Sedaris, and he must know as he’s able to laugh about having a flexible metal tube inserted into his urethral meatus as part of a medical screening for cancer.
Novices and accomplished writers alike seem to agree that writing is hard. One would be a fool, then, to pass up on hard won insights from an author of twenty…
For her meteoric rise to be a satisfying story the rags-to-riches-heroine needs to start from a position of complete destitution. Put her in a middle class home with its usual opportunities, joys, disappointments, and brushes with tragedy, and then even her rise to the presidency of the United States is immediately less interesting. This story arc can only be rescued from narrative indifference if she’s a colourful personality, someone perpetrating incredible hijinks, always getting into capers which strain our moral muscles but from which we come away with her stronger rather than broken. None of this true of the story of Indra K. Nooyi’s life; it has neither a rags to riches trajectory nor the emotional heft of a tale worth the telling. It is fitting that this stylized ledger of Nooyis deeds, personal and professional, is delivered in a monotone, grocery list, register. The troughs and peaks are equally unremarkable in the treatment they receive, and the ending is clear right at the start. Indra Nooyi was born, she worked hard, and with a little luck she succeeded.
Marcus du Sautoy talks about mathematics as the art of the shortcut, promoting his latest book at the Jaipur Literature Festival Toronto 2021.
A home within needs to be a 5 room independent house with a garden, Zebian says; this is a floor plan for what you deserve not what you can afford. In a world saturated by manuals for washing your penis, Bhat’s fables seem less propagandistic.