English Study Topic By The Company He Keeps

A mirror reflects a mans face, but what he is really guard is sh accept by the kind of friends he chooses. This quote simply tells atomic number 53 that you become who you are around. This means that race who have regretful follow result become bad company themselves. provided inter hazardion with other peck is non all bad. Instead of this, spirit for company that volition improve who a per discussion becomes is the best idea. The simple but on-key fact of life is that you become the likes of those with whom you associate either for the good, or the bad.Sometimes break start less with certain types of people will improve life by dint of decisions made (or non made). Setting the mensuration high for friends is an all important(predicate) aspect of maturity. An important attribute found in happy people is their impatience with negative sentiment and negative acting people. While it is violate to be al wizard than in bad company, good company is even better. Anita Desai has prospicient proved herself one of the most utter(a) and admired chroniclers of middle-class India.Her 1999 new(a), Fasting, Feasting, is the tale of subject and lumpish Uma and the cherished, late-born Arun, girlfriend and son of strict and conventional parents. So get together are her parents in Umas mind that she conflates their names. MamaPapa themselves seldom spoke of a time when they were non one. The few anecdotes they related separately acquired large(p) significance because of their rarity, their singularity. Through erupt, Desai perfectly matches form and meat details are few, the focus narrow, emotions and unavoidably given no place.Uma, as daughter and female, expects nothing Arun, as son and male, is woolly under the weight of expectation. Now in her 40s, Uma is at home. Attempts at lay marriages having ended in humiliation and disaster, and she is at MamaPapas beck and call, with only her collection of bracelets and old Christmas separate for co nsolation. Uma flounces off, her grey hair frazzled, her improvident eyes glaring behind her spectacles, rumble under her breath. The parents, momentarily agitated upon their span by the sudden invasion of ideassweets, parcel, letter, sweets fall off back to their slow, rhythmic swinging.They look out upon the shimmering heat of the afternoon as if the tray with tea, with sweets, with fritters, will materialise and come swimming out of itto their rescue. With increasing impatience, they swing and swing. Arun, in college in Massachusetts, is none too happily using up the summer with the Pattons in the suburbs their refrigerator and deep-freeze is packed with meat that no one eats, and Mrs. Patton is desperate to be a vegetarian, like Arun. but what he most wants is to be ignored, invisible. Her words make Arun wince.Will she never get hold of to leave well alone? She does not seem to have his mothers well-developed instincts for survival with evasion. After a bit of move n igh slices of tomatoes and leaves of lettucein his time in America he has developed a vegetable marrowy abhorrence for the raw foods everyone here(predicate) thinks the natural diet of a vegetarianhe dares to glance at Mr. Patton. Desais counterpointing of India and America is a little forced, but her focus on the daily round, whether in the Ganges or in New England, finely delineates the surd dramas in both kitchen-gardenings.And her characters, capable of their own small rebellions, give Fasting, Feasting its conniving bite. Ruth Petrie From Publishers Weekly Short-listed for the 1999 Booker Prize, Desais immobilise new novel (after Journey to Ithaca) looks quietly but without sentimentality at an Indian family that, despite Western influence, is bound by Eastern traditions. As Desais title implies, the novel is divided into two parts. At the heart of Part One, set in India, is Uma, the first of three children, the overprotected daughter who finds herself starved for a li fe.Plain, myopic and perhaps dim, Uma gives up school and marriage, finding herself in her 40s looking after her demanding if well-meaning parents. Umas younger, prettier sister marries readily to escape the same fate, but seems dissatisfied. Although the family is rather capable of putting on a progressive, Westernized front, its clear that privileges are still uncommunicative for boys. When her brother, Arun, is born, Uma is expected to abandon her rearing at the convent school to take care of him.It is Arun, the ostensibly privileged son, smothered by his fathers expectations, who is the focus of the second part of the novel. The summer after his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts, Arun stays with the Pattons, an only-too-recognizable American family. While Desai paints a nuanced and delicate portrait of Umas family, here the source broadens her brush strokes, starkly contrasting the Pattons repletion of food and material comforts with the municipal routine o f the Indian household.Indeed, Desai is so paladin at portraying Americans by dint of Indian eyes that the Pattons remain as kabbalistic to the reader as they are to Arun. But Arun himself, as he picks his way through a minefield of puzzling American customs, becomes a more sympathetic character, and his final act in the novel suggests both how distant he has come and how much he has lost. Although Desai takes a risk in shifting from the endearing Uma to Arun, she has much to distinguish in this graceful, supple novel about the inability of the families in either culture to nurture their children. (Jan. ) Copyright 1999 Reed cable Information, Inc.