Word: bengalis
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Thirty years after the war in which they fought together, Archie is reunited with his best friend, the Bengali Muslim Samad Iqbal. “White Teeth” follows the Iqbal and Jones families before and after the reunion. Samad and his feisty wife Alsana raise their twins, Magid and Millat, while Archie and Clara raise their daughter Irie. The children attempt to eke out their place in English society, not really belonging to the culture of their parents or the place where they were born: “Millat was neither one thing nor the other, this...
...Indian writers working in English live in the States or visit often, and they usually have the political freedom and socioeconomic means to innovate. Classmates in Jhumpa Lahiri’s creative-writing workshop at Boston University envied her for never having to cast about for topics, her own Bengali heritage lending her exotic source material every week; they should have criticized her for taking the easy path in merely penning realist snapshots of the immigrant lifestyle. Magical realism, stream of consciousness, science fiction: The number of roads not taken by the South Asian novelist boggles...
...cannot imagine Kolkata without Mother Teresa." Rajib Chakraborty, a lecturer in a Kolkata college, says, "She based her work on an ideology and institutionalized it. She has influenced many people all over the world to spare a thought for the poor and the afflicted." The prized possession of prominent Bengali author Nabarun Bhattacharya is the Mother's blessings, which reached him almost, he says, by a miracle itself. "I found an original blessing signed by Mother Teresa in an old book that I had bought," Bhattacharya says, holding a yellowish postcard with Mother Teresa's blessings in her writing...
...more frugal world, it's all about getting more bang for the buck. Consider Puaramita Acharji, a West Bengali woman who joined Unilever's Shakti program several years ago and now earns about $14 a month selling items in her village door-to-door. Small as that sum might be, Acharji says it has changed her life. Instead of being dependent on her husband, Acharji says, she now commands respect in the village. "It is enough to stand on my own two feet," she says. Increasingly, CSR programs will have to do the same...
...there was significant disagreement. Finally, one man spoke. "Some people call us Rohingya," he said cautiously. I realized they were afraid to be identified as Rohingya because the very word carried with it the likelihood of so much discrimination. The man's name was Muhammad - he gave me his Bengali name, not the Burmese one that Rohingya are also required to have - and he left Burma two years ago on a crowded wooden boat filled with wannabe migrants. Eventually, the vessel drifted to India's Andaman Islands, from which he and others were repatriated. Would he try his luck abroad...