The novel Delhi penned by Khushwant Singh is a story that compasses both the loftiness and messiness of the city that it tries to reveal through an irrational sentiment. A city that has seen no less than seven rounds of complete decimation and amusement, Delhi, the capital of India, is a city of society and disaster, of pomposity and ability, of journalists and aggravations, of legislators and examples of piety. To catch the show and unmanifest appearances of Delhi obliges a canvas that delights and disgusts in equivalent measure. Maybe Khushwant Singh knew of this part of his dearest city, when he made a ribald, old, delinquent hero, in veneration with a hijra (enunch) prostitute, as the individual attempting to depict his friendship detest association with that whore and this city. While the important storyteller busies himself with curious sexual acts with his half-man, half-lady accomplice …show more content…
These characters, skimmed a few eras of possible results, talk with a dependability normal for Khushwant's arrangement: the wanton is as inevitable as is the consecrated. There are numerous verses from real specialists (tallying Mir and Zafar) that show up in interpretation. It was Mir who once said: "Dil ki basti bhi shehar dilli hai/ Jo bhi guzra usi ne loota." (Delhi alone is a city of warmth; every one of those that have passed through have looted it). While Ghalib is not said out and out as a storyteller, his times are depicted well as he was contemporary of Zafar, and befittingly, the novel begins with a saying from Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib: "I asked my soul: What is Delhi?/ She replied: The world is the body and Delhi its
While it may be easier to persuade yourself that Boo’s published stories are works of fiction, her writings of the slums that surround the luxury hotels of Mumbai’s airport are very, very real. Katherine Boo’s book “Behind the Beautiful Forevers – Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity” does not attempt to solve problems or be an expert on social policy; instead, Boo provides the reader with an objective window into the battles between extremities of wealth and poverty. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” then, exposes the paucity and corruption prevalent within India.
Kothari employs a mixture of narrative and description in her work to garner the reader’s emotional investment. The essay is presented in seventeen vignettes of differing lengths, a unique presentation that makes the reader feel like they are reading directly from Kothari’s journal. The writer places emphasis on both her description of food and resulting reaction as she describes her experiences visiting India with her parents: “Someone hands me a plate of aloo tikki, fried potato patties filled with mashed channa dal and served with a sweet and a sour chutney. The channa, mixed with hot chilies and spices, burns my tongue and throat” (Kothari). She also uses precise descriptions of herself: “I have inherited brown eyes, black hair, a long nose with a crooked bridge, and soft teeth
...ry religious, it would seem, because he owns a huge copy of the Qur'an which he keeps safe in a fancy box covered in velvet. Atiq doesn't like his job, he doesn't feel that it is respectable, and the more he thinks about it the angrier he gets. He also feels that the war will never end. Atiq is losing health, sleep, and weight in this desolate environment. Kabul is even more depressing while he watches a young poor practice for his future by killing animals in the street. Atiq doesn't want to go home to face his sick wife and messy home. Atiq prays for his wife's death while looking for a remedy for her disease of the blood. He meets with Mirza Shah who tells him to divorce her. Atiq refuses, he speaks of her loss of family and the fact that she saved his life, but maybe he just loves her. Mirza has a bleak outlook on women, they are suspicious propery and slaves.
There is something to be said about learning a concept through reading compared to learning from experience because through one’s experiences, the concept is fully grasped and understood. This novel is multi-dimensional as we view the initial endogenous culture of Nazneen who was raised in rural Bangladesh, and can just barely read and write. Nazneen was always taught to accept her fate and not going against it and it is resembled by the quote, “What could not be changed must be borne. And since nothing could be changed, everything had to be borne. This principle ruled her life,” (Ali 4). Nazneen is accepting of her fate because this is what she was raised to believe, and when she is sent to London for an arranged marriage to Chanu, she must accept this as reality as well. Her husband Chanu, an educated man in his forties is constantly boasting his higher education, and the fact that he will receive a promotion from his job with the city council. Although Chanu is an educated man, he never receives the promotion, and this is because he constantly feels that he deserves better, and is never content with what he has. Chanu’s privileged mindset is a sort of character flaw because even though he is educated and should move up in society, he never really acts upon this to make the necessary
In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo tells the stories and struggles of families living in a slum adjacent to the Sahar Airport in Mumbai, India. Boo details the ways in which the residents of this slum, Annawadi, attempt to escape their poverty, but fail to do so. Despite numerous initiatives sponsored by the Central Government of India to improve the lives of the many individuals living in Annawadi, these programs are ultimately unable to do so due to deep-rooted corruption in the city of Mumbai. Regardless of this, the residents of Annawadi seem to accept corruption as a fact of life, and do little to fight it. As illustrated over the course of Boo’s narrative, this results from the fact that many Annawadians recognize the ways in which the laws of their society allow for the unfair treatment of certain groups of people, especially the poor and religious minorities, and are also cognizant of the fact that they have no real power to change a system that
In order to understand why Whitty’s argument is effectively communicated it must be noted that this article was published in the politically progressive magazine, Mother Jones. The audience of Mother Jones mostly consists of young adults, mostly women, who want to be informed on the corruptness of the media, the government and the corporate world. In order to be fully effective in presenting her points, Whitty starts her article by creating a gloomy imagery through her story of the city of Calcutta and the hard lives which its citizens live. Through her use of words such as “broken down…. Smoky streets” to describe the scene at Calcutta, she is able to create this gloomy image. She ties this gloomy story to how the population of Calcutta is the reason for the harsh living environment and how immense its population density is when compared to cities like New York. Additionally, she discusses how the increase in population has caused harsh lives for individuals in the Himalayas, the rest of India and the rest of the world. Through these examples she ties the notion that the root causes of such hard lives are because of the “dwindling of resources and escalating pollution,” which are caused by the exponential growth of humankind. She goes on to
Chapter Sixteen begins by altering Amir’s point of view to Rahim Khan’s. By the author doing this, it is reasonable to suspect that there is a story of Rahim’s that is in need of more words than a quote; suggesting something serious is about to divulge. By Chapter Seventeen, Rahim Khan exposes the death of someone Amir had grown up with; Hassan. Rahim Khan exacerbates the conversation by explaining Hassan’s death in detail, in which Amir repeatedly said, “‘No, … No. God, no… No… No’” (219). Amir could not believe that Hassan; the boy he read his stories to, the boy he was jealous of, the boy he “fed from the same breasts” (11), is dead. Rahim Khan then goes on by saying that the Taliban's had also shot his wife, Farzana. Amir remembers the “day in 1974, in the hospital room, just after Hassan’s harelip surgery. Baba, Rahim Khan, Ali, and I … Now everyone in that room was either dead or dying. Except for me” (219). This quote shows how with each and every event in Amir’s life, he continues to lose the people who were once his family. However, Rahim Khan does not stop there. Rahim Khan reveals that “‘Ali was sterile’” (222), so he could not possibly have any children with Sanaubar. Which declares Ali, not the father of Hassan. Rahim Khan says, “‘I think you know who’’ (222), and
Nanda, Serena. Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub., 1990. Print.
In order to raise awareness of the staggering injustices, oppression and mass poverty that plague many Indian informal settlements (referred to as slum), Katherine Boo’s novel, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, unveils stories of typical life in a Mumbai slum. Discussing topics surrounding gender relations, environmental issues, and corruption, religion and class hierarchies as well as demonstrating India’s level of socioeconomic development. Encompassing this, the following paper will argue that Boo’s novel successfully depicts the mass social inequality within India. With cities amongst the fastest growing economies in South Eastern Asia, it is difficult to see advances in the individual well-being of the vast majority of the nation. With high
Moreover, I realized that he thought the firework celebration was for him but it was not as it was a celebration of India’s independence. Yet, the next page middle paragraph I did not understand Rushdie when he said “One Kashmiri morning in the early spring” (Rushdie,1132). I could not imagine where was Kashmiri until the next page which is a State in northern India and also did not include details of how the climate is which
The corruption in hospitals, where “doctors can keep their government salary and work in private hospitals”, sees people like Balram’s father die of horrible deaths every day. Dismayed by the lack of respect of the government for its dying citizens, Balram is corrupted by the fact that in the “darkness”, there is no service, not even in death. Balram also claims that “the schoolteacher had stolen our lunch money”, which was for a government funded lunch program. However, Balram doesn’t blame him, which justifies that Balram, from such a young age gives into the idea of corruption saying that “...you can’t expect a man in a dung heap to smell sweet”. In addition to his father and the school teacher, Balram is corrupted by his childhood hero Vijay. Growing up, Balram idolises Vijay for having escaped “the darkness”. However what he is ignorant of is that even though Vijay is in “the light” he is still corrupted by “the darkness”. Balram explains that “Vijay and a policemen beat another men to death”, yet he doesn’t see it as a problem, because he understand that one cannot become successful in such a corrupt system without becoming as corrupt as the system itself. It is here that Adiga asks the question of how are impoverished Indians are expected to refuse to engage in corruption when they live in such poor conditions. Thus, the reader is able to sympathize with Balram’s corruption,
Kubla Khan contains an overabundance of descriptive language that creates a vivid, yet simultaneously fragmented picture within the reader’s mind; th...
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy tells the story of the communist state of Kerala and the forbidden love between two castes, which changes the lives of everyone. In the novel an ‘Untouchable’, Velutha is a carpenter and works at Paradise Pickles and Preserves for much less than he deserves because of his status as an Untouchable in the caste system. Velutha falls into a forbidden love with a divorced woman, Ammu who is associated with an upper caste Syrian Christian Ipe family. Marriage was the only way that Ammu could have escaped this life, but she lost the chance when marrying the wrong man, as he was an alcoholic and this resulted in them getting a divorce. Ammu breaks the laws that state ‘who should be loved, and how and how much’, as their affair threatens the ‘caste system’ in India, which is a hierarchal structure and social practice in India in which your position in society is determined and can’t be changed. Arhundati Roy portrays the theme of forbidden love within the caste systems and shows how they are t...
...shown through Lenny’s point of view. Prior the partition, Lahore was a place of tolerance that enjoyed a secular state. Tension before the partition suggested the division of India was imminent, and that this would result in a religious. 1947 is a year marked by human convulsion, as 1 million people are reported dead because of the partition. Moreover, the children of Lahore elucidate the silences Butalia seeks in her novel. The silence of survivors is rooted to the nature of the partition itself; there is no clear distinction as to who were the antagonists. The distinction is ambiguous, the victims were Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims, and moreover these groups were the aggressors, the violent. The minority in this communal violence amongst these groups was the one out-numbered. This epiphany of blame is embarked in silence, and roots from the embodiment of violence.
Riot (2001), Shashi Tharoor’s third novel is set in the context of a fictitious riot that has resemblance to the riot that rocked Uttar Pradesh in 1989 as an aftermath of the Babri Masjid- Ram Janmabhoomi controversy. Tharoor unravels the history of communal India from the fictional context of the investigation of the death of a twenty-four year old idealistic American girl, Priscilla Hart, who was slain in India in the riot. From its premises, Tharoor also communicates his ideas “about ownership of history, cultural collision, religious fanaticism and the impossibility of knowing the truth” (