Word: bengalis
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...feel closer to people here than at home--but I'm not at home here either. I guess I'm somewhere in between. Rahman, whose mother is a biochemist with a Ph.D. from Yale and father holds an M.S. as an engineer from lowa, grew up speaking four languages (Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and English)--although the most technical discussions were reserved for English. His school, like that of every elite student I talked to, made a practise of sending its graduates out of the country; Rahman says that out of around 40 graduates 25 went abroad his year--although most...
Schwester Selma of Jerusalem cherishes a poem by Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet of Calcutta, that perhaps says it best...
...then Teresa had fallen into the academic life at St. Mary's High School in Calcutta. There she taught geography to Bengali girls from comfortable homes, later became principal. But the school was hard by Calcutta's Moti Jheel slum, and the contrast between the horror outside and the genteel world within the convent walls must have motivated her decision to work for the poor, though she claims that it did not. What did change her she remembers vividly...
...same time, there are fears in India that China, which has given arms and guerrilla training to rebellious Naga and Mizo tribesmen in eastern India, may be tempted to do the same for Bengali Maoists, thus creating tension along India's long eastern border...
Distant Thunder has the deliberate, unadorned reality of a folk tale, a fable of encroaching, enlarging catastrophe. The thunder of the title refers directly to the war planes that Bengali villagers see flying overhead. More important, the thunder is the sound of the second World War. To the villagers it seems, at first, remote. They speak wonderingly of "the flying ships," trade rumors of Japanese advances on Singapore and Burma, and live very much as they always have, just skirting absolute deprivation. The war seems mysterious and alien. Then the rice starts running...