Article Critique on “Black Hair” Essay Example for Free

Article Critique on â€Å"Black Hair† Essay This story discussed the life of a sixteen year old man who wanted to become independent in his life but does not know how to start. The protagonist of the story was the narrator. He showed his life in a blurred path where he could not able how to distinguish the facts and fictions of life. It means that he is still incapable of being a productive individual in his society because he himself could not understand how his life works in the general perspective of human nature. Though he knows how things work, he could not manage these things in normal and proper way. Because of this, the protagonist still need to learn from what is true, right, and wrong from everything that is beyond his reach so that there would be greater knowledge and self-esteem that would grow in his identity. Based on my reading in the whole story, I can say that the whole setup of the story tackles the issues and personal identity of the persona. He pitied himself because he did not know what he is doing in his surroundings. He does not know how to look for a right job, right home, and right place to go in his everyday living. This became the conflict of the story. Everything was focused in his ways and perspectives as neophyte in his journey of life. At the end of the story, he remained clueless with those things that he encountered even the coke machine where he could not find one when he is thirsty. The implication of the story is that the author showed the angst of a young man who seeks independence in the world of real life. When we are with our family, we could not feel the pressure of having a life. We always think of the better things that we could manage but through this story, we tend to realize how things work when we are already alone. It shows that life is always a cycle and a chosen ground. When we choose to ignore the things that we encounter during our early days, it would not give us the privilege to know what true life is because we are incapable of living – to understand and to learn things around us. Reference Soto, G. Black Hair pp. 296-302

Supernatural in Shakespeares Macbeth - Witches as Heroines :: GCSE English Literature Coursework

The Witches as the Heroines of Macbeth Traditionally, the witches of Shakespeare's Macbeth have been treated as symbolic manifestations of the potential for evil. Many students and critics of Macbeth enjoy blaming the witches, along with Lady Macbeth, for Macbeth's downfall. Regardless, it may be argued that the witches are the heroines of the play. One eminent modern literary critic, Terry Eagleton, has addressed the issue of the witches as heroines directly: To any unprejudiced reader--which would seem to exclude Shakespeare himself, his contemporary audiences and almost all literary critics--it is surely clear that positive value in Macbeth lies with the three witches. The witches are the heroines of the piece, however little the play itself recognizes the fact, and however much the critics may have set out to defame them. (William Shakespeare, p. 2) For Eagleton, the social reality of the witches matters. They are outcasts, much like feminists they live on the fringe of society in a female community, at odds with the male world of "civilization," which values military butchery. The fact that they are female and associated with the natural world beyond the aristocratic oppression in the castles indicates that they are excluded others. Their equality in a female community declares their opposition to the masculine power of the militaristic society. They have no direct power, but they have become expert at manipulating or appealing to the self-destructive contradictions of their military oppressors. They can see Macbeth's destruction as a victory of a sort: one more viciously individualistic, aggressive male oppressor has gone under. This suggestion is not entirely serious (Eagleton observes that the play does not recognize the issue he is calling attention to), but it underscores a key point in the tragic experience of Macbeth, its connection to a willed repudiation of the deep mysterious heart of life, the place where sexuality and the unconscious hold sway. This aspect of life is commonly associated with and hence symbolized by women, for complex reasons which there is not time to go into here (but which would seem to be intimately bound up with women's sexuality and fertility, contacts with the irrational centres of life which men do not understand and commonly fear). In seeking to stamp his own willed vision of the future onto life, the tragic hero rejects a more direct acquaintance with or acceptance of life's mystery.

My Vision of Future Essay

Reimagining India’s Present most of us have a massive psychological barrier against looking seriously at the future. Many nurture the not unnatural, latent fear that any engagement with the future will turn out to be an acknowledgement of their mortality and the transience of their world. Different cultures handle this fear differently. In India’s middle-class culture, attempts to look at the future often end up as tame, defensive litanies of moral platitudes or as overly dramatic, doomsday ‘propheteering’. Even those who avoid these extremes usually view the future either as the future of the past or as a linear projection of the present. If one is a fatalist, one sees no escape from the past; if not, one often desperately tries to live in the instant present. Those who see the future as growing directly out of the present also often narrow their choices. When optimistic, they try to correct for the ills of the present in the future; when pessimistic, they presume that the future will aggravate the ills. If one views the future from within the framework of the past, one arrives at questions like ‘Can we restore the precolonial village republics of India as part of a Gandhian project?’ or ‘Should we revive Nehruvian nonalignment to better negotiate the turbulent waters of India’s inter- national relations in the post-cold-war world?’ If one views the future from within the framework of the present, one asks questions like ‘Will the present fresh water resources or fossil-fuel stock of the world outlast the twenty-first century?’ Important though some of these questions are, they are not the core of future studies. No environmentalist can claim to be a futurist by only estimating, on the basis of existing data, the pollution levels in India in the coming decades. Exactly as no economist can claim to be a futurist by predicting the exchange value of the Indian rupee in the year 2005. The reason is simple. The future—that is, the future that truly intrigues or worries us—is usually disjunctive with its past. Defying popular faith, the future is mostly that which cannot be directly projected from the present. Actually, we should have learnt this from the relationship  between the past and the present. The present has not grown out of the past in the way the technoeconomic or historical determinists believe. I often give the example of a survey done exactly hundred years ago, at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was done mainly as an exercise in technological forecasting during the Paris exposition. The respondents were the best-known scientists of the world then. In retrospect, the most remarkable result of the survey was the total failure of the scientists to anticipate scientific discoveries and changes the world would see in the twentieth century. Thus, for instance, the scientists thought the highest attainable speed in human transportation during the century was 250 miles an hour and among the innovations that they thought would not be viable or popular were the radio and television. Indeed, novelist Jules Verne’s fantasies often anticipated the future of science and technology more imaginatively and accurately. For a novelist’s imagination is not cramped by the demands of any discipline or the expectations of professionals, not even by hard empiricism. The present too is disjunctive with the past, though we love to believe otherwise. The past nowadays is available to us in packaged forms, mainly through the formal, professional narratives of the discipline of history. We feel that we have a grasp on it. History monopolises memories and offers us a tamed, digestible past, reformulated in contemporary terms. It is thus that 17 History monopolises memories and offers us a tamed, digestible past, reformulated in contemporary terms. No. 123 history fulfils its main social and political role—it gives a shared sense of psychological continuity to those living in a disenchanted world. You cannot do the same with the future, for the future has to be anticipated and it is more difficult to turn it into a manageable portfolio. Ultimately, Benedotte Croce’s aphorism—’all history is contemporary history’— can be applied to all genuine futuristic enterprises, too. All visions of the future are interventions in and reconceptualisation of the present. My quick  peep into the future of India, therefore, can only be a comment on India today. I offer it in the spirit in which my work on India’s pasts, too, has all along been an attempt to ‘work through’ or reimagine India’s present. The future of India in my mind is intertwined with the future of diversity and self-reflection, two values that have been central to the Indian worldview, cutting across social strata , religious boundaries and cultural barriers. I believe that during the last two hundred years, there has been a full-scale onslaught on both these values. Even when some have upheld these values during the period, they have mostly done so instrumentally. Thus, even when they have talked of unity in diversity, the emphasis has been on the former; the latter has been seen as an artefact or a hard, somewhat unpleasant, reality with which we shall have to learn to live. A modern nation-state loves order and predictability and its Indian incarnation is no different. Sankaran Krishna’s brilliant study of Indian intervention in Sri Lanka, Postcolonial Insecurities, shows that, even when the Indian state has gone to war in the name of protecting cultural identities and minority rights, its tacit goal has been to advance the hegemonic ambitions 18 of a conventional, centralised, homogenising nation-state. In response to the demands of such a state, modern Indians too have learnt to fear diversity. That fear cuts across the entire ideological spectrum and is ever increasing. Most Gandhians want an India that would conform fully to their idea of a good society, for they have begun to fear their marginalisation. The late Morarji Desai was a good example of such defensive Gandhism. But even some of the more imaginative Gandhians, the ones who cannot be accused of being associated with the fads and foibles of Desai, have not been different. They have absolutised Gandhi the way only ideologues can absolutise their ideologies. The new globalisers also have one solution for the entire world, though they sometimes lazily mouth buzzwords like ‘multiculturalism’, ‘grassroots’ and ‘alternative development’. The goal of their pluralism is to ensure the transparency and predictability of other cultures and strains of dissent. Likewise, I have found to my surprise that attempts to protect religious diversity in diverse ways is not acceptable to most secularists. They want to fight the monocultures of religious fundamentalism and religionbased nationalism, but feel aggrieved if others  do so in other ways. They suspect the tolerance of those who are believers and trust the coercive apparatus of the state. Secularism for In response to the demands of a centralised, homogenising nation-state, modern Indians too have learnt to fear diversity. such secularists serves the same psychological purposes that fundamentalism does for the fundamentalists; it becomes a means of fighting diversity and giving play to their innate authoritarianism and monoculturalism. Things have come to such a pass that we cannot now stand diversity even in the matter of names. Bombay has always been Mumbai, but it has also been Bombay for a long time and acquired a new set of associations through its new name. Bombay films and Bombay ducks cannot have the same ring as Mumbai films and Mumbai ducks. Nor can Chennai substitute Madras in expressions like bleeding Madras and Madras Regiment. Many great cities like London happily live with more than one name. Indeed, in the Charles De Gaulle Airport at Paris, you may miss a plane to London unless you know that London is also Londres. Until recently, we Calcuttans used to live happily with four names of the city— Kolikata, Kolkata, Kalkatta and Calcutta. Indeed, the first name is never used in conversations, yet you have to know it if you are interested in Bengali literature. In recent years, the city has been flirting with a fifth name, thanks to former cricketer and cricket commentator Geoffrey Boycott—Calcootta. But the Bengalis have disappointed me. Many of them now are trying to ensure that there is only one name for the city, Kolkata. The gifted writer Sunil Gangopadhyay has joined them, because he feels that the Bengali language is under siege from deracinated Bengalis, Anglophiles and Bombay—or is it Mumbaiya?—Hindi. I am afraid the change will not provide any additional protection to the Bengali language. It will only fuel our national passion for sameness. MANUSHI It is my belief that the twenty-first century belongs to those who try to see diversity as a value in itself, not as an instrument for resisting new monocultures of the mind or as a compromise necessary for maintaining communal or ethnic harmony. ‘Little cultures’ are in rebellion everywhere and in every sphere of life. Traditional healing systems, agricultural and  ecological practices—things that we rejected contemptuously as repositories of superstitions and retrogression have staged triumphant returns among the young and the intellectually adventurous and posing radical challenges to set ways of thinking and living. More than a year ago, in the backyard of globalised capitalism, the US citizens for the first time spent more money from their pockets on alternative medicine than on conventional healthcare. The idea of the diverse is not merely expanding but acquiring subversive potentialities. India of the future, I hope, will be central to a world where the idea of diversity will itself be diverse and where diversity will be cherished as an end in itself. By its cultural heritage, India—the civilisation, not the nation-state—is particularly well equipped to play a central role in such a world. However, the Indian elite and much of the country’s middle class seem keener to strut around the world stage as representatives of a hollow, regional super-power. They want their country to play-act as a poor man’s America, armed to the teeth and desperate to repeat the success story of nineteenth-century, European, imperial states in the twenty-first century. India is also supposed to be a culture deeply committed to selfreflection. During colonial times, that No. 123 commitment began to look like a liability. Many critics of Indian culture and civilisation in the nineteenth century lamented that the Indians were too engrossed in their inner life. Others argued that Indian philosophy had marginalised the materialist strain within it and become predominantly idealistic. Their tacit assumption was that the Indians were given to too much of self-reflection and too little to action. ‘We are dreamers, not doers’ came to be a popular, simplified version of the same lament. Whether the formulation is correct or not, it is obvious that we have overcorrected for it. We have now become a country of unthinking doers. Certainly in the Indian middle classes, any action is considered better than doing nothing. As a result, mindless action constitutes an important ingredient of the ruling culture of Indian public life. Even the few knowledgeable, nongovernmental hydrologists who support mega-dams, readily admit that most of the 1,500 large dams built in India are useless and counterproductive. Their main contribution has  been to displace millions of people in the last fifty years. And even these supporters are not fully aware that the millions displaced by dams, often without any compensation, now constitute an excellent pool for those active in various forms of social violence and criminality. Veerappan, son of a dam victim, is only the most infamous symbol of them. Likewise, even in the Indian army, many senior officers now openly say that Operation Blue Star at the Golden Temple was worse than doing nothing. The price for that gratuitous intervention was a decade of bloodshed and brutalisation of Punjab. For years, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has been ventured as an excuse for every phoney, useless intervention—in nature, society and culture in India. The last time I saw this ploy was when our bomb-mamas justified the nuclearisation of India in the name of Gandhi. The Indian middle 19 classes have always been uncomfortable with the father of the nation and have always believed him to be romantic, retrogressive, and antimodern. They have also probably all along felt slightly guilty about that belief. As a reparative gesture they have now begun to say, given half a chance, that Gandhi was a great doer; he did not merely talk or theorise. This compliment serves two purposes. It allows one to ignore Gandhi’s uncomfortable, subversive thought as less relevant— ‘Bapu, you are far greater than your little books’, Jawaharlal Nehru once said—and it atones for one’s hidden hostility and contempt towards the unconventional Gandhian vision of India’s future. Occasionally, some like philosopher T. K. Mahadevan have tried to puncture this selfcongratulatory strategy. I remember him once saying in a letter to the editor of The Times of India that Gandhi For years, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi has been ventured as an excuse for every phoney, useless intervention—in nature, society and culture in India. went out on the streets only twice in his life; the rest of the time he was thinking. Such interventions are always explained away as esoterica vended by eccentric intellectuals and professional iconoclasts. The dominant tendency in India today is to discount all self-reflection. It has turned India’s ruling culture into an intellectually sterile summation of slogans borrowed from European public culture in the 1930s. Our culture is now dominated by European ideas of the nation-state and nationalism, even  Europeans ideas of ethnic and 20 religious nationalism (mediated by that moth-eaten Bible of the 1930s, V. D. Savarkar’s Hindutva, modelled on the ideas of Mazzini and Herder). Shadow boxing with them for our benefit and entertainment are European ideas of radicalism and progress, smelling to high heavens of Edwardian England. In such a world, it is almost impossible to sustain a culture of diversity, particularly diversity as an end in itself. You learn to pay occasional h omage to diversity as an instrument that buys religious and ethnic peace, but that is mainly to hide one’s eagerness to deploy such ideas of religious, caste and ethnic peace to further homogenise India. I have now learnt to fear the use of any cultural category in the singular. For years, I wrote about ‘Indian civilisation.’ I thought it would be obvious from the contents of my writings that I saw the civilisation as a confederation of cultures and as an entity that coexisted and overlapped with other civilisations. Af ter all, some other civilisations, such as the Iranian and the European, are now very much part of the Indian civilisation. The Islamic and Buddhist civilisations, too, clearly overlap significantly with the Hindu civilisation. However, even the concept of civilisation, it now seems to me, has been hijacked in India by those committed to unipolarity, unidimensionality and unilinearity. Our official policy has been shaped by a vision of India that is pathetically naà ¯ve, if not farcical. It is that of a second-class European nation-state located in South Asia with a bit of Gita, Bharatanatyam, sitar and Mughal cuisine thrown in for fun or entertainment. Those who do not share that idea of earthly paradise are seen as dangerous romantics, Our culture is now dominated by European ideas of the nation-state and nationalism, even Europeans ideas of ethnic and religious nationalism†¦ MANUSHI continuously jeopardising India’s national security. No wonder that even many erstwhile admirers of India have begun to see it as a nucleararmed, permanently enemy-seeking, garrison state. Edward Said will never know that  few Occidentals can be as Orientalist towards India as educated, urban, modern Indians often are. In Indian public life, the standard response to such criticism is to reconceptualise Indian culture as some sort of a grocery store and to recommend that one should take from it the good and reject the bad. This is absurd and smacks of arrogance. Indian culture represents the assessments and experience of millions, acquired over generations. It has its own organising principles. My ideal India †¦ is a bit like a wildlife programme that cannot afford to protect only cuddly pandas and colourful tigers. transparent, because there cannot but be a touch of mystery in the world of cultures. My ideal India celebrates all forms of diversity, including some that are disreputable, lowbrow and unfashionable. It is a bit like a wildlife programme that cannot afford to protect only cuddly pandas and colourful tigers. It is an India where even the idea of majority is confined to political and economic spheres and is seen as shifting, plural and fuzzy, where each and every culture, however modest or humble, not only has a place under the sun but is also celebrated as a vital component of our collective life. That may not turn out to be an empty dream. I see all around me movements and activists unashamedly rooted in the local and the vernacular. They are less defensive about their cultural roots and are working to empower not merely local communities, but also their diverse systems of knowledge, philosophies, art and crafts. Underlying these efforts is a tacit celebration of everyday life and ordinary citizens. Everything in everyday life and ordinariness is not praiseworthy and many of these efforts seem to me harebrained, pigheaded or plain silly. But they represent a generation that is less burdened by nineteenth-century ideologies masquerading as signposts to a new era and at least some of them show the capacity to look at human suffering directly, without the aid of ornate, newly imported social theories. Ashis Nandy is Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. Diversity, to qualify as diversity, must allow those who represent the diversity to be diverse in their own ways, according to their own  categories, not ours. It cannot be used like an array of commodities at the mercy of casual purchasers. Diversity, to qualify as diversity, must allow those who represent the diversity to be diverse in their own ways, according to their own categories, not ours. We shall have to learn to live with the discomfort of seeing people using these categories, even when they are not fully transparent to us. For the true tolerance of diversity is the tolerance of incommensurable multiple worlds of culture and systems of knowledge. In this kind of tolerance, there is always the assumption that all the cultures covered by the idea of plurality are not and need not be entirely No. 123 MANUSHI Handsomely Bound in Maroon Leather in Nine Volumes Price for India, Nepal and Bangladesh : Vol. I Vol. II Vol. III Vol. IV Vol. V Vol. VI Vol. VII Vol. VIII Vol. IX : : : : : : : : : Nos. 1 to 19 (1979 to 1983) Nos. 20 to 37 (1984 to 1986) Nos. 38 to 49 (1987 to 1988) Nos. 50 to 61 (1989 to 1990) Nos. 62 to 73 (1991 to 1992) Nos. 74 to 85 (1993 to 1994) Nos. 86 to 97 (1995 to 1996) Nos. 98 to 109 (1997 to 1998) Nos. 110 to 121 (1999 to 2000) Postage in India : Rs 30 per volume All Other Countries: US$ 60 per volume (including air-mail postage) Send payment by cheque, draft or MO payable to Manushi Trust. : : : : : : : : :

Reflexive Verbs That Change Meaning When Reflexive

Often, the difference in meaning between a simple Spanish verb and its corresponding reflexive verb (formed in the infinitive form by adding the suffix  -se) is slight, even nonexistent. For example, the verb desayunar typically means to eat breakfast, while desayunarse has little, if any, discernible difference in meaning. Sometimes, however, the difference in meaning is substantial—enough so that it is listed separately in the dictionary, and sometimes so that its meaning isnt readily predictable if you know the meaning of the root verb. Following are among the verbs with significantly different meanings in the reflexive form. This list is far from complete, and only the most common English translations are included here. Note also that usage of these verbs can vary with region, and that some speakers may use some verbs in the reflexive form as a way to change emphasis rather than to make a clear change in meaning. Verbs A-M acusar (to accuse), acusarse (to confess or admit) Acusaron a Mà ³nica de arreglar los resultados. (They accused Monica of cleaning up the results.)Me acuso de ser drogadicto.  (I admit to being a drug addict.) aparecer (to appear), aparecerse (to appear, often said of a supernatural event) El hombre mà ¡s buscado aparecià ³ en la fotografà ­a. (The most-wanted man appeared in the photograph.)Muchos creen que se aparecià ³ la virgen Marà ­a en Mà ©xico.  (Many believe the Virgin Mary appeared in Mexico.) cambiar (to change), cambiarse (to switch to a different item, such as changing clothes or moving to a different house) Hay tres libros que cambiaron mi vida. (There are three books that changed my life.)Nos cambiamos de compaà ±Ãƒ ­a telefà ³nica.  (Were switching to a different telephone company.) correr (to run), correrse (to move or to shift; also said of fluids spreading) Sà ³lo corrià ³ dos kilà ³metros debido a que està ¡ enferma. (She only ran two kilometers because she was sick.)Si la fuente de luz se acerca rà ¡pidamente, la luz se corre al color rojo. (If the source of the light is approaching rapidly, the light shifts toward the color red.) desenvolver (to unwrap), desenvolverse (to cope or manage) Ya desenvolvà ­ tu regalo. (Ive already unwrapped your gift.)Mi madre se desenvuelve bien con los turistas. (My mother copes well with the tourists.) dormir (to sleep), dormirse (to fall asleep) Dormà ­a en el interior de un auto de un amigo. (He would sleep in a friends car.)Se durmià ³ una noche escuchando la radio.  (He fell asleep one night listening to the radio.) gastar (to spend), gastarse (to wear out, to use up) Gastà ³ todo el dinero en sus tarjetas de dà ©bito. (He spent all the money on his debit cards.)Las suelas de los zapatos se gastaron. (The soles of the shoes wore out.) ir (to go), irse (to go away) Fue a la cà ¡rcel por lavar dà ³lares. (He went to jail for laundering dollars.)Mi nià ±a se fue a la mar a contar olas.  (My girl went away to the sea to count the waves.) llevar (to carry), llevarse (to take)  ¿Quà © llevaba la doctor Blanco en la bolsa? (What is Dr. Blanco carrying in her purse?)El ladrà ³n se llevà ³ dos obras de Picasso. (The thief took two works of Picasso.) Verbs N-Z negar (to negate, to deny), negarse a (to refuse to do) Una vez negà ³ que era de Uruguay. (One time he denied he was from Uruguay.)El equipo se negà ³ a morir y forzo una prà ³rroga. (The team refused to die and forced an overtime.) ocurrir (to occur or happen), ocurrirse (to have a sudden idea) Nos ocurre exactamente lo mismo que explica Sandra.  (The same thing happens to us that Sandra talks about.)Una idea se me ocurrià ³ mientras estudiaba biologà ­a.  (An idea occurred to me while I was studying biology.) parecer (to seem like), parecerse (to look physically like) La situacià ³n de Bolivia no es lo que parece. (The situation in Bolivia isnt what it seems.)El desierto de Arizona se parece mucho al de Zacatecas.  (The Arizona desert looks a lot like Zacatecas.) poner (to put), ponerse (to put on, such as clothing) Lo analizarà ¡ y lo pondrà ¡ en la categorà ­a correcta. (He will analyze it and put it in the correct category.)No me pondrà © nunca una gorra de bà ©isbol.  (I will never put on a baseball cap.) salir (to leave), salirse (to leave unexpectedly or quickly, to leak) Ernesto salià ³ por los cayos al norte de Cuba. (Ernesto left by way of the keys to the north of Cuba.)Un avià ³n con 62 ocupantes se salià ³ de la pista del aeropuerto.  (A plane with 62 on board unexpectedly left the runway.) saltar (to jump), saltarse (to jump over, to skip an event, or avoid an obligation) Las focas, los delfines, y las ballenas saltan frecuentemente. (Seals, dolphins and whales often jump.Mà ¡s chinos se saltan la ley del hijo à ºnico.  (More Chinese are ignoring the one-child law.) volver (to return), volverse (to turn around, to make an unexpected return) Los secuestrados volvieron a casa.  (The hostages returned home.)Las abejas asesinas de Sudamà ©rica se volvieron mà ¡s fuertes.  (The South American killer bees returned stronger.)