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Tag: India

  • The Other Turkey


    photo by Steve Voght

    It’s Thanksgiving (more or less) and what’s most commonly associated with Thanksgiving are two things. Naming the things you’re thankful for and turkeys, because what better way to say thanks than to feast with friends and family on bird corpse! Exactly.

    I’ve been asked how to say “turkey” in Turkey. The bird, not the country. I mean, the former being the bird, the latter the country. Why did we ever give these two the same name? Anyway, in Turkey this bird is called “hindi”. They didn’t leave this bird without a country however; India is named Hindistan here.

    As for the consumption of dead bird flesh, here are ten reasons not to eat turkey this Thanksgiving (the bird, not the country. On second thought, don’t eat the country either. Not with me in it.). Let’s let the turkeys have a happy Thanksgiving also! Here are some recipe’s to try out instead:

    In my country the turkey’s not even called something remotely close to the way we call Turkey. How about in yours? Jeez, what interesting questions can one ask their readers about turkeys and Thanksgiving? I really don’t care that much about the tradition. 😉

  • The Inheritance of Loss

    I got tagged by a dear StumbleUpon friend, shpongolina. Usually I don’t participate in this type of things, but because it offers something interesting and it comes from a great person, I’ll make an exception. 😉

    The rules are as follows:

    1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
    2. Open the book to page 123.
    3. Find the fifth sentence.
    4. Post the next three sentences.
    5. Post a comment and then tag five more people.

    The Inheritance of Loss

    by Kiran Desai

    Gyan was twenty and Sai sixteen, and at the beginning they had not paid very much attention to the events on the hillside, the new posters in the market referring to old discontents, the slogans scratched and painted on the side of government offices and shops. “We are stateless,” they read. “It is better to die than live as slaves,” “We are constitutionally tortured. Return our land from Bengal.”

    I wrote about this book a while ago. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m still reading it. Worse yet, I’m not even halfway through, even though it’s a great book. My excuse is that I’m an expat in Istanbul and there’s just so much to see and do here. 😉

    I love this book, because it talks about life in India at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the north-eastern Himalayas around the time of the Nepalese independence movement in the mid-80s. This is something I knew nothing about in terms of facts, let alone in terms of experience. That’s the awesome thing about books; they let you experience something like you’re there. It’s the power of writing. It’s a very moving story and has many elements in it. Classes/castes, love, freedom, happiness, travel, work, study, war, conflict, poverty – many things which I either have never been in contact with, or that I have always taken for granted.

    You can read more about the author, Kiran Desai, on Wikipedia. Check out the book, including reviews, at Amazon.

    I would like to tag Dori (From A Yellow House In England), Chris (Beyond Taiwan), PJA64X, Emm (Emm in London) and lala (Coastal Commentaries).

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