It's one of those covers where I had trouble matching the characters with the illustration and, after a bit, gave up because I didn't want them to look like that in my mind...
Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as "The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told".
from "National Geographic"-- Alberta Tar Sands
My point is: if you're a writer in Vancouver, there's an obvious temptation to figure out the enigma of a city that's a cross between a multi-ethnic Floating World Shangri-La and a shabby netherworld of boarded-up storefronts, discarded heroin needles, and basket-carts of the homeless rattling through the back lanes. It might be interesting to know how a poet sees this West Coast patchwork...
Only Bollywood does more to unite India than its railways. The statistics beggar belief: every year, Indians take 5.4 billion train trips, 7 million per day in suburban Mumbai alone. New Delhi Station sees daily transit of 350,000 passengers, which is roughly five times more than New York’s LaGuardia Airport, and enough to make Grand Central look like Mayberry Junction. The railways’ total track mileage rivals the length of the entire U.S. Interstate Highway system, even though the United States is three times the size of India. Among human resource problems, the railways of India are an Everest. Its employees outnumber Wal-Mart’s by a figure comparable to the population of Pittsburgh. The world’s only larger employer is the People’s Liberation Army of China...
Old art becomes impenetrable (which is not to say, unenjoyable) when we no longer have the will or the knowledge to re-create the mindset of its makers and audience. The Goddess of Discord hangs high up (and abominably lit) in the Turner gallery of Tate Britain. The figures are hard to read, the colour dim. But mental distance is the real difficulty. The dragon high on the mountainous horizons that defends the Garden of the Hesperides looks absurdly like a huge crocodile – Ruskin estimated its length at about three-quarters of a mile. Thinking geology while retelling mythology, he also points out that the scaly wrinkles of its back are a very good representation of the broken surface of a glacier...
Kebab meat, consisiting of roast lamb and spices, had traditionally been served with rice but in a moment of inspiration Mr Aygun saw that the future lay in putting the meat inside a pitta bread.
That allowed customers who had been drinking to wander off into the night with their food and eat it as they stumbled home.
Mr Aygun once said: "I thought how much easier it would be if they could take their food with them..."
