Through our differences, we are all the same

In a huge leap for transgender people in India, Manobi Bandopadhyay became the first person from the community to head an educational institution. Professor Bandopadhyay took over as Principal of Krishnanagar Women’s College in Nadia district of West Bengal on June 9.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/kolkata/bengal-to-have-indias-first-transgender-principal/article7252192.ece

The Kabuliwalas of Calcutta

These people from distant Afghanistan, who have settled down in Calcutta, carry their distinct identity even as they  meld with and become part of Bengali culture. Some have been living here for many, many decades. What holds them together are their customs and traditions.

Today, there are only 5,000 Kabuliwala families in Calcutta, a city of 16 million people. Though officially stateless, the city offers them the dignity of a final resting place.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-32377276

On beauty

Read this in my wanderings through books. Liked the use of words...

The Western conception of beauty – a stylized fantasy constructed by airbrushing reality into a narrow and illusory ideal of perfection.

Whereas,

The zenith of Japanese aesthetics is deeply rooted in the glorious imperfection of the present moment and its relationship to the realities of the past.

Susan Sontag again

Her take on Literature and Television:

Literature tells stories. Television gives information.

Literature involves. Television (with its illusion of immediacy) distances – immures us in our own indifference.

In Literature - stories.....there is always an ethical component. It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the story, and its resolution. Television offers obtuseness, non-understanding, passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling through its glut of unending stories.

Who else but Susan Sontag could have written this

'Literature's essential allure – the comfort of appeasing our anxiety about life's infinite possibility, about all the roads not taken and all the immensities not imagined that could have led to a better destination than our present one.

A story, instead, offers the comforting finitude of both time and possibility.'

I loved this one -

'Endings in a novel confer a kind of liberty that life stubbornly denies us: to come to a full stop that is not death and discover exactly where we are in relation to the events leading to a conclusion.'

Loved this word

describing modern devices...iDistraction

An utterly delicious thought

We are cultural stardust.