Tag Archives: education

How Wild Boars Wreak Havoc in Cane Fields in Anniqua Rana’s telling

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Book Review by Namrata

Cover page

Title: Wild Boar in the Cane Field

Author’s Name: Anniqua Rana

Publisher: Amazon, 2019

‘My mothers found me a week after I was born.’

And so, begins the poignant story of Tara’s birth, her survival and her death. Anniqua Rana’s Wild Boar in the Cane Field is a testimony to the old adage — survival of the fittest. Her observations of life of women in rural Pakistan combined with her knack of storytelling, ensures a reader is left enthralled.

Anniqua Rana lives in California with her husband and two sons. Apart from teaching English to immigrants and international students in community college, she also writes essays on gender and education.

Rana’s novel, Wild Boar in the Cane Field, journeys rural Pakistan where amidst the cane fields and smell of spices, we are introduced to Tara and her mothers. The prose is evocative and lyrical with descriptions that come alive in every passage. Read more

Short Story: Drinking ‘Kool’

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By A. Jessie Michael

Malacca
Singapore
Jaffna: Photo Credit: Samantha Weerasinghe, Wiki commons

The parcel arrived in a postal van and James’ wife, Doris, put it aside for James to return from work and open it. It was an annual ritual — its arrival and his opening of it. This cardboard box measuring one foot by one foot by ten inches, wrapped in brown paper, with colourful stamps all over the top right hand corner and cross-tied with twine, came all the way from Mathagal, James’ home village in the Jaffna peninsula to the North of Sri Lanka, by sea-mail, to Malacca in Malaysia, and it contained his very own piece of home.

Actually, two similar parcels arrived every year, the other one landing at the house of James’ brother Joseph in Singapore.  Joseph, naturally a little sardonic and less nostalgic about the contents, let his wife Lily open the box. Nevertheless he appreciated the efforts put in by their sister in Mathagal for sending them this parcel, with a whiff of their homeland. He made Lily  list each item in the box so that he would not forget them when he got Lily to write his sister a thank you letter in Tamil. His written Tamil was pretty rusty after near fifty years of disuse.

James came home at about 5.00 pm exhausted from office, saw his parcel and instantly his tiredness lifted. He hastily cut through the twine, tore off the brown paper and pried the box open, a boy-like delight showing on his face. A treasure-box of edible memories — fruits of the earth and sea! Read more

Will Books Replace Guns in Darra Adam Khel?

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Three Cups of Tea
Gun workshop in Darra Adam Khel … Wikimedia Commons

The acclaimed book Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace … One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin propounded that peace could be had through education. That was published in 2007, remained on the New York Times best seller list for four years, won the Kiriyama Prize, given for creating better understanding among people and nations, and then the book was drowned in a flood of controversy.

Perhaps Mortenson’s  is  a voice that can be used to showcase what this new library is doing in Darra Adam Khel, a small town near Peshawar that makes its living by trading and making weapons in Pakistan.

The Darra Adam Khel Library houses 2500 books and was built only last year.  Says the founder of the library , Shahnawaz Zeb : “Times are changing and we should change too…We need to take the guns away from our younger generation and arm them with books instead.” Read more

Short Story: Gandom, Gandom by Farouk Gulsara

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IMG_0468

Half a decade after the Japanese invasion, Malaya was wising up. Malayans did not believe that their colonial masters were their saviours anymore. Everyone was talking about independence and everyone was laughing a lot these days.

People seemed to be in a hurry. Office workers, in long dark baggy trousers and long sleeved starched cotton shirts, wove through pedestrians, scurrying on their shiny new bicycles, ringing their bells. The cyclists appeared to be annoyed by the slow-moving bullock cart with lethargic bulls sauntering along the tarmacadam roads swishing their tails rhythmically in the tropical heat of Penang. Honking in the background on the island’s little street were the Morris Minors and the Austin multi-purpose vehicles, the latest additions to the city landscape. Oblivious to the vexation they were causing, the pullers of the bullock cart batted their lush eyelashes, seemed to mutter something into their chest and continued to drag their load at their own leisurely pace.

Penang Island did not want to be left behind. Penangites of all races — Malays, Chinese, Indians and Eurasians — seemed to be of one heart trying to rebuild their town as they said it had been. The world had modernised and they wanted to keep pace. The men from the East were no liberators but squanderers of wealth. Now, the British had returned to resume pilfering the lion’s share of their loot. Read more

Book Review: Indian Cultures as Heritage – Contemporary Pasts by Romila Thapar

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Reviewed by Dr Madhu Kelkar

Indian Cultures.

Title: Indian Cultures as Heritage – Contemporary Pasts
Author: Romila Thapar
Publisher: Aleph Book Company, 2018
Pages: 222 pages 

 

Culture influences our values, world view, loyalties, behaviour and much more. Very often it is equated with civilisation a term that came to be used to describe societies that boasted of extensive territory, sophisticated language, literature, art and architecture, and above all, a single religion. Under the colonial influence, culture came to be redefined simply as a way of life of elite groups, for instance Aryans in the case of India. Unfortunately, our current understanding of Indian culture is overshadowed by this erroneous interpretation. Heritage, both cultural and natural, consists of ideas, objects and practices; contributes to quality of life, gives us a cultural identity and connects us with our past. India’s cultural heritage has always been subject to debates. While traditional historians favour the ‘unity in diversity’ approach in order to project a homogenised Indian identity and presumably invoke the spirit of patriotism, Thapar, in her latest book, Indian Cultures as Heritage Contemporary Pasts, does exactly the opposite.

A fearless, frequent and outspoken critic of our dogmatic and communal interpretations of the past, Thapar’s  book does not to go into the historical aspect of the making of Indian culture but provides glimpses of what is often omitted, marginalized, trivialized or is even considered irrelevant to its understanding. Drawing on her lectures and essays, published in the recent past, this book challenges the idea that Indian culture is the monolithic phenomenon it is often portrayed as in Indian historical writing or what is being currently imposed on the Indian citizens by cultural nationalists. Identification with a single culture, she argues, despite the existence of many in the country, is risky since it tends to dismiss all that does not conform to the mainstream forms, perpetuates inequality and silences all kinds of reasonable resistance. Culture is deeply linked with historical developments and bound to change. But the two differ as well. While history narrates and explains the past, culture can invent the past without any historical evidence. Therefore, one has to guard against spurious history which can be manufactured by culture. Thapar’s argument that we need to subject the Indian culture to rigorous historical scrutiny and juxtapose historical and cultural forms to understand their interface is highly relevant, especially in the present context when cultural forms are being subjected to identity politics due to ignorance and lack of general or intellectual interest in other cultures, within and outside the subcontinent.

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Why We Hate (& Love) The Tiger Mom

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…
Even if you haven’t read the book (or read about the book), this female character should be familiar: She’s the Tiger Mom.
For many Asian Americans, the Tiger Mom is a loaded term. It’s a stereotype that’s been around for decades, but in 2011, Amy Chua, a Yale Law School professor and Tiger Mom-in-chief, sparked a serious national discussion when she published the controversial book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom.
It helped that the book came out at a geopolitical moment when there were fears that China would catch up to the U.S. as a superpower — arguably in part because of the perception that Chinese people were working harder than their American counterparts. The reaction was swift and panicked: op-eds, hot takes, fevered discussion on Chua’s parenting style. Tiger Mom was on TV. She went viral. The book was a blockbuster. It even inspired academic research into whether tiger parenting is “better.”
Chua is well aware of the anger her book caused when it came out, and letters from readers continue to pour in. “Seven years later, everything is so different for me. The response has gotten much more subtle and much more diverse,” says Chua over the phone earlier this week. “For me, I was so shocked. I thought it was so obvious that I was making fun. It’s so hard for me to see how anybody could see it otherwise.”
She has a point: While Chua’s book has no squeamishness about harsh parenting and cultural stereotypes, the book is funny. There are two chapters on how to Tiger parent dogs. She describes her dealings with her daughter Lulu as “faceoffs” and “nuclear warfare.” The book is full of foreshadowing about how she, in turn, was about to be seriously schooled by her American daughters.

Book Excerpt: Do We Not Bleed: Reflections of a 21st Century Pakistani by Mehr Tarar

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Do we not bleed

 

The Story of Shazia Mustaq

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, education in Pakistan faces a catastrophe of unparalleled proportions. According to a 2015 UNESCO report, Pakistan has nearly 5.5 million children who are out of school, the second highest number in the world after Nigeria. Pakistan also has the highest number of illiterate adults in the world, after India and China.

According to the Pakistan Education Statistics Report, 2013–2014, the total number of out-of-school children at primary level in the country has dropped from 6.7 million in 2012–2013 to 6.2 million.

An October 2014 report by Alif Alaan, a campaign to end Pakistan’s education emergency pointed that there are 25 million boys and girls out of school—that’s nearly half of all children in the country. In relative terms, most out-of-school children are in Balochistan. More than half of the country’s out-of-school children live in Punjab. Across the country, it was harder for girls to go to school. Girls made up more than half of all out-of-school children. A majority of the parents of girls did not allow them to study, while boys were mostly unwilling to go to school. Older children are more likely to be out of school. Around 70 per cent of out-of-school children have never been to one before. Girls mostly drop out of school to help with household work. Children from poor families are far more likely to be out of school. The education system is unable to retain enrolled students

Said Shazia Mustaq, ‘My siblings didn’t get a chance to study, and that caused me immense pain. I think that is what got me thinking about education. Sometimes, I wish there was some magic wand that all illiterate people, out-of-school children become educated. I wish it for the whole world, and especially for Pakistan. Bas paadh jaiyan sab. Because of lack of education, Pakistan, my homeland, has divided into all these classes.’

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The case of reading and preserving Indonesian literature

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In March 2016, a study conducted by Central Connecticut State University (CCTU) entitled “Most Literate Nation of the World” placed Indonesia as the 60th most literate nation out of 61 nations on the list, above only Botswana, and below fellow ASEAN member Thailand. A survey by UNESCO in 2012 records that only one out of 1000 people in Indonesia have an interest in reading. It might sound meagre enough, but what if we ask this next question: how many of the 0.1 percent read books that were written by an Indonesian author?

In most developed countries, especially English-speaking countries, high school students are taught to read books, being exposed to the work of English literature greats like Mark Twain and Shakespeare and encouraged to enjoy and find fun in reading literature. However, in Indonesia, this practice is rare or not practiced at all. Yes, we are taught about the history of Indonesian literature and the periods that divide the styles of literature in Indonesia, but we are not given time to read in class nor are we properly taught to read and appreciate the works of our own people.

To find out whether Indonesians are knowledgeable about their own literature, the Aksaranesia (Aku Suka Sastra Indonesia; I like Indonesian literature) Campaign conducted a survey by asking basic questions about well-known Indonesian literary works. The team specifically targeted the younger generation in the age group of 15-25 during Car Free Day Jakarta and in two universities in Jakarta.

Based on those surveys and quizzes, it found that Indonesian youngsters are not entirely aware of Indonesian literature. None of the respondents got a perfect score, and most are not even familiar with some of the names of the writers being mentioned. Even a simple question like “name three Indonesian books” was difficult to answer. On top of that, it was easier for them to answer questions about English books instead.

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