I feel immense pleasure that a Reader’s of the library has formed a Readers Group. The purpose of a reading group is to help members keep up-to-date or acquire expertise or knowledge in a specific area of their profession and promote reading habits. Participation in a reading group can help members gain better grasp of the areas of interest through sharing varied viewpoints and promote better networking and self-help among members.
Readers Group will meet of Jan 17, 2014 from 3: 00 pm – 5: 00 pm in the Reference section to discuss the topics on Corruption, Electoral reforms, Telengana and Reservation. All are invited to join the group deliberation.
I
feel immense pleasure that a Reader’s on the library has formed a Readers Group.
The purpose of a reading group
is to help members keep up-to-date or acquire expertise or knowledge in a specific
area of their profession and promote reading habits. Participation in a reading
group can help members gain better grasp of the areas of interest through
sharing varied viewpoints and promote better networking and self-help among
members.
Readers Group will meet of Jan 17, 2014 from
3: 00 pm – 5: 00 pm in the Reference section to discuss the topics on Corruption, Electoral reforms, Telengana
and Reservation. All are invited to join the group deliberation.
The Lowland is a sweeping, ambitious story that examines in intimate detail the intersection of the political and the personal, encompassing nearly 50 years of Indian and American history through the lives of one family. The novel ripples out from the beginnings of the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal in 1967. Two brothers, Subhash and Udayan Mitra, are attracted by the radical communist movement while at university in Calcutta. But Subhash, the more cautious and sensible of the two, quickly perceives the danger involved and withdraws, leaving to study in the US. Udayan, left behind, becomes more entrenched in militant politics, believing that violence against the state is justified in the name of revolution. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that, early on, he is arrested and executed by the police on the lowland behind their parents' suburban house, supposedly for his part in a violent crime.
"Udayan had given his life to a movement that had been misguided, that had caused only damage, that had already been dismantled. The only thing he had altered was what their family had been." The novel pivots on this moment of Udayan's death. He leaves behind a young widow, Gauri, a fellow student already in the early stages of pregnancy. Out of a sense of duty to his brother, and to save her from a life of drudgery in Calcutta, Subhash marries Gauri and takes her back to Rhode Island. There, for the sake of propriety, they maintain the fiction that he is her daughter's father, though the lie slowly corrodes their fragile marriage.
Lahiri structures the novel with exquisite precision, building atmosphere through cumulative detail, parsing out the backstory as Gauri and Subhash allow themselves to revisit memories from their youth, so that it is only towards the end that we learn the full truth about Udayan's death – a truth that asks us to revise our opinions of the characters and their actions.
This is especially true of Gauri, the book's most vivid character. A woman born ahead of her time, unsuited both by temperament and intellect to the conventions demanded by her culture, she reinvents herself most fully in the more liberated climate of the States, but this forging of a new self comes at a terrible cost to her family. Subhash calls her cold-hearted, but Lahiri's insight into the inner conflict of a woman who chooses her intellectual life over the demands of motherhood is unsparing and beautifully rendered.====== The Guardian
Khaled Hosseini, the no 1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page.