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...Like his creator, the novel's central character Ritwik is gifted and from Kolkata - and desires above all to leave it (Mukherjee's loathing of his birthplace is on record). Thanks to an Oxford scholarship, our protagonist absconds to England - so far, so autobiographical - but, as in all good novels of identity and redemption, he is hotly pursued by his past, or what Mukherjee calls "the gratuitous tyranny of memory." In this case, it's more than a literary device. Flashbacks of Ritwik's dreadful childhood - hallucinations of his late abusive mother terrify him in his college room - animate...
...nostalgia. There is little romance or Proustian yearning here (although a childhood storybook fills Ritwik with "a strange longing"). But if Mukherjee is scathing about Ritwik's history in a city "that had leaped out of the pages of Dante and transposed east," he also refuses to extol Oxford as the site of Ritwik's apparent freedom. Ritwik ignores the university town's prettiness, fixating instead on the "s___-brown door" of the toilet cubicle he favors for his risky liaisons. And London, while offering the superficial promise of multiculturalism, is fundamentally plagued by racism...
...examples go on. A request for allowing restaurants to sell alcohol this Valentine's Day in Oxford, Miss., was rejected without comment. In Connecticut, which is the only state in New England to still have a blue law prohibiting Sunday alcohol sales, mayors of the state's three largest cities petitioned unsuccessfully to have the law repealed - citing a 2009 study that suggested Connecticut was losing millions in tax revenue to its neighbors...
...graduate of Stanford University, where he majored in history and mathematics, and Oxford University, where he earned a Master of Philosophy in Modern Middle Eastern Studies, Schauf said he ran because he has enjoyed being a part of the Law Review’s “very special community of talented people...
Another hurdle to a consensus on how to deal with sex ambiguity is the fact that there is very little scientific data on whether DSDs confer any real advantages to athletes. In the 2008 paper "Intersex and the Olympic Games," Robert Ritchie, a urological surgeon at Oxford University, noted, "There is no evidence that female athletes with DSD have displayed any sports-relevant physical attributes which have not been seen in biologically normal female athletes...