My friend Kalpana, a newspaper columnist in Mumbai, told me once about a speech she had given to a group of students at a women's college. She's been asked to talk to them about the ways women's lives were changing in India and instead found…
Monday, June 29, 2015
Saturday, June 27, 2015
By Taste and Smell
Parvati had little in common with Rahda other than her preference for traditional home-cooked vegetarian food. She and Vijay would happily "take whiskey" at the Delhi Press Club, but rarely would they eat there, because they considered restaurant…
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Delhi Press Club
The Delhi Press Club, Vijay's favored drinking joint, attracts a rather less exclusive crowd: Indian journalists, almost all of them male and as hard-drinking, chain-smoking, and cuss-mouthed as American newspapermen of the 1950s. They throng…
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Language Imperialism
Although Parvati's father had learned English in high school, her mother's education had ended in the fifth grade, when she was expected to prepare for marriage by mastering domestic skills. You wouldn't know it from educated middle-class circles…
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Bollywood stayed Bollywood
In India, the movies mean Bollywood, the film industry whose name conflates Hollywood with Bombay, where the first Hindi-language film was made. Even after Bombay was renamed Mumbai in an effort to free the city of its colonial legacy, Bollywood…
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Saturday, June 6, 2015
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