Interpreter of Maladies

I finished Winter Street, but did not find anything interesting to write about.  The book ended with a small cliffhanger that did not add to the plot and there was no real action hat progressed throughout the book.  It was a great free read, but not the best for blogging.  I moved onto Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri and I am loving it so far!

Each chapter is a different short story about Indian culture and people who are living in the United States in the 1990s.  These stories are fiction, but they evoke racism, discrimination, and new Indian culture that are true and prevalent in the Untied States.  I finished the second mini story and prefer the second story, so I am going to focus this blog post on it.

Lila lives with her parents in New England and her parents invite an Indian nature observer from Dacca in East Pakistan to have dinner with them a few nights a week while he is studying at a nearby college.  This man has seven daughters and a wife that home and is worried about their safety because of the religious conflict in East Pakistan and India.  The controversy and war is fascinating to me because we have never talked about it at schools, even though it is so important to the history and culture of Indians and Pakistanians.  Lila is also fascinated by her heritage and the controversy in India, but her school does not share the interest.  Here is an interesting video on the Partition, Overview of East Pakistan India Partition.  She is constantly sheltered and scolded for being interested in the war and reading about it at school.  She writes about her history work at school, "I could do it with my eyes closed"(27) and she also writes that every year she learns about the Revolutionary War, but never gets anything out of it.  When she becomes interested in Pakistanian culture, she is prohibited from reading it in the library at school (33).  Her teacher shows disrespect and took the book on culture in Pakistan and "lifted the book by the tip of its spine as if it were hair clinging to my sweater" (33).

This book is making me rethink how school teaches students.  We do not get to choose what we read about and sometimes the most important current events and topics go untaught because they are not in the curriculum.  I think that Lahari is sending a message about public education and that students need to learn about their interests so they can develop passions and try to build a career by helping topics they believe in and things that effect them.  I am excited to see what the next short story will say about education and racism in America because that was only briefly discussed so far.