Word: shrined
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...Davidar's narrator Vijay, a journalist, recounts the story of the first few years of his career working for the Indian Secularist, a tiny journal in Mumbai. After the bloody anti-Muslim riots of 1992, Vijay is sent by his editor to a mountain tea town where a religious shrine threatens to become the rallying point for another bout of violence. The novel is both artful rhetoric and page-turning thriller. Davidar, the former head of publishing giant Penguin's India operations (and now Penguin's top man in Canada), keeps the story rolling on even as he sketches wonderful...
...Vassanji's The Assassin's Song is a more complex but ultimately less satisfying examination of similar turf. The central character, Karsan, is destined to be the latest in a centuries-long familial line to inherit the Shrine of the Wanderer, an important place of Sufi worship in India's Gujarat state. But as a young man he falls out with his father and loses his faith, escaping to North America instead. When he returns, after the riots that ripped apart Gujarat in 2002, Karsan is forced to re-examine his beliefs, his family and himself...
...these problems cost his party control of Japan's upper house, and yet, like their fallen predecessor, both Fukuda and Aso preferred to highlight their foreign policy differences - Fukuda called for open talks with Japan's neighbors, while the hawkish Aso took a conservative stance on the Yasukuni war shrine, a sore point in Asian relations. Both favored postponing a general election until next spring; both have also inherited Abe's insistence on continuing Japan's support of coalition forces in Afghanistan through its refueling operations in the Indian Ocean...
...Japan to rely on American military protection so it could focus on developing an export-led economy. Fast-forward half a century and Aso, a former Foreign Minister, staunchly supports the U.S.-Japan security alliance, while antagonizing China by defending visits of Japanese statesmen to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, where war criminals are memorialized. Meanwhile, Fukuda's father was an LDP stalwart who while PM promoted diplomatic relations with Asia through "heart-to-heart" dialogue. And guess what? That's what Fukuda, a former Chief Cabinet Secretary, peddles himself as today: a consensus-driven political insider who opposes Yasukuni visits...
...pilgrimage, Pope Benedict XVI insisted, not a political outing. The pontiff's just-completed stay in Austria was built around a visit to Mariazell, an 850-year-old shrine to Mary in the foothills of the Alps, just over two hours south of Vienna. And though Benedict used his three-day trip to touch on some familiar hot-button issues both inside and outside his Church - abortion, euthanasia, the so-called "de-Christianization" of Europe - he did so in a context and spirit that matched the humble "just-a-pilgrimage" billing he announced just before takeoff from Rome on Friday...