Word: thackeray
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...General R.K. Hooda, an army officer who was the commander for today's military operations, hinted that their accents might have been Pakistani.) So far, there have been little more than hints and platitudes from the steady stream of high-profile visitors to south Mumbai: the local strongman Raj Thackeray, Maharashtra state chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, Member of Parliament Milind Deora. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi are said to be on their way to the city, as is opposition BJP leader L.K. Advani. The question is, Will they do anything to better prepare this city...
...half their original size and advertising them as great books “in half the time.” The goal is to trim away all excess verbiage, jettison any pointless asides, and streamline prose so that it follows a more straightforward narrative. With a few judicious strikeouts, Thackeray can become Hemingway...
...least because we have all been in her position, desperate to impress our betters. Moreover, director Mira Nair has created a pretty panorama--populated with solid actors like Bob Hoskins and Gabriel Byrne--of English life in the Georgian era for Becky to master. It is more exotic than Thackeray's, more laden with the booty of a burgeoning colonial empire, but Nair, Indian by birth, is entitled to her opinions about the exploitations on which England's wealth was based...
...there's something about her Vanity Fair that doesn't quite work. There is no depth beneath its bright surfaces, no potent emotional undercurrents. One thinks of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, also based on a Thackeray novel about an ill-born social outsider on the rise. It too was a beautiful film, but it did not merely record a lost world; it peered at it--as if the fold of a dress or the knot of a cravat might possibly contain the secret of life. Or at least a useful clue to correct behavior...
Then, too, it was touched by an ineffable sadness. Its vanities were all in vain. Thackeray said he was writing about pompous, self-satisfied people trying to live without God or humility. It makes no difference if you see their furious scurryings existentially or traditionally. You must impute some larger resonance to them. Otherwise you are left with only a twittering among the teacups--or a vanity fair. --By Richard Schickel