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Showing posts from August, 2013

For India's Independence Day & Month, the Freedom Trilogy, Beauty Queens, What We All Need

When a young Indian named Mohandas Gandhi went to South Africa as a fortune-hunting lawyer, he, thanks to an inbuilt sense of fairness and justice, refused to back down when slapped on the face with an unfair law: “No blacks and Indians allowed in First Class railway compartments.” The incident changed his life. A rising yuppie lawyer, he was transformed into a freedom fighter heedless of his personal wealth, and interested purely in battling injustice and gaining freedom for oppressed people. I, who am no saint in most aspects of my life, did, over a longer period, come to a certain discovery that changed my literary career and perhaps my life.  I came to America to study and for the freedom to be who I really was.  American universities were spacious, generous, and open-minded. Until I arrived in America, I did not know how to distinguish between good literature and trash; I had read very few of the great works. In America, at two different universities, one of which has p