Category: Writing
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Gandhi at 150
It’s been 150 years since Gandhi’s birth, initiating a circle that goes round today. This year Gandhi Jayanti falls on the fourth day of Navratri, and so we’ve made his iconic ashram part of our annual display. It’s nearly finished, this replica of his simple home on the banks of the Sabarmati River in Gujarat.…
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Holidays Upon Us
It’s that time of year! The lights are out and the home is warm. For the next weeks and months we’ll enjoy the soft glow of string lights. Here in Western India Navratri begins tomorrow. It lasts nine nights. Throughout the period, in this part of the country, we’ll recognize the victory of good over…
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Cube Farm
BOGIE, or Why I Wrote Patchworks My second novel addresses gun violence in America. It didn’t start out that way. Patchworks‘ protagonist, a millennial grad student interning for peanuts within a government bureaucracy, didn’t appear until several months into writing. And, angry as I felt to see America shredded over and over again by episodes of massive…
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War Novels and the War on Terror
More than 16 years ago, standing beneath a massive banner, George W. Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq: “Mission Accomplished.” What followed this publicity stunt—he arrived on an aircraft carrier off California’s coast riding in a Navy jet—were years of insurgency and bloodshed in pursuit of a Dick Cheney figment: Saddam…
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Again
While we sit idly by No longer dumbfounded Just dumb Numb Gunman kills 7 in a rampage that started with a West Texas traffic stop
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Poetic Feminist Rant
I talked with a group of poets yesterday. Poetry operates at a level beyond my ordinary grasp; often it reads like an excuse for lazy incoherence rather than stabs at truth. In yesterday’s case, the writers had forged their art around efforts to ensure equal rights and legal protections for women. The event rose above…
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Rain
The monsoon retains a grip on Mumbai. Heavy storms blow in today, sideways, slashing bellows of water from the sky. Socked in on the 14th floor, we overlook only mist and cloud, the teeming city obscured. Twenty-five million people hunker beneath this umbrella of rain. Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain storms…
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Thoreau’s First New Yorker Cartoon
The wordless cartoons of Nurit Karlin. The sketched illustrations of R.O. Blechman. Turns out these staples from The New Yorker have an antecedent in Henry David Thoreau. Had The New Yorker been around, how might Thoreau have captioned this sketch from Journal XVII, kept February 1854 to September 1854? Certainly not as follows: At the steam-mill sand-bank was…
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Thoreau, Hold the Joe
Noble and wise, Henry David Thoreau also could be irascible, judgy, and temperamental. In Walden, we learn why: a conspicuous absence of coffee. Take his list of supplies: Rice….. $ 1.73½ Molasses….. 1.73 Cheapest form of the saccharine. Rye meal….. 1.04¾ Indian meal….. 0.99¾ Cheaper than rye. Pork….. 0.22 Flour….. 0.88 Costs more than Indian meal, both money…
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Toast
All is quiet. Both sons, sound asleep. Dad enters and taps the top bunk. Top: Why are you waking me? Dad: Shhh. You’ll wake your brother. Bottom: Zzzzz…. Top: Why are you waking me? It’s Saturday. Bottom: Zzzzz…. Dad: You have land training. Top: Uhhhhhhh… Dad: [brightly] I’m making eggs and toast. Bottom Bunk: Toast?!
Ben East Books 