A Time To Dance Door, By Padma Venkatraman

Individuals should learn to accept themselves for who they are, not what society wants them to accept. As we continue to evolve, we build up our own characters, and they are typically a mix of the ethnicity and culture we inherit from our family, various encounters in our life, distinctive identity and personality we have. Our character and identity is not something that we get easily, it's an intricate process. The story “The Other Family” by Himani Bannerji is based on a mother and a daughter who immigrates to Canada. They belong to a black family, but after the immigration they are living in the dominance of the white society.The school is considered as the hegemony of Canada and teacher is considered as the mainstream, it is a sort of social institution that a hegemony shape but they does not know the awareness of marginalized groups. The mother feels anxious when she sees a drawing of a white family by her daughter. It was the misperceptions of the kid that lead to forget her identity or she was too small to identify it. So to examine about the identity of the marginalized individual the beginning is to focus on the quality of the education. It is necessary for every school system to teach equality and inclusions of every group status so that the marginalized group are not left isolated from the society. Secondly, the fear of the marginalized parents from losing their kids in the mainstream society shows their lack of confidence in their own cultural pride. Since

“I’m Nikhil” (Jhumpa Lahiri 96) these are the words that Gogol uttered for the first

By looking at Benjamin Franklin’s use of metaphor in comparing the attempt at perfection in a human to that in an axe, it is evident that he believes perfection is a laborious task, which proves that, in explaining the difficulty of fulfillment, he is attempting to persuade people to adhere to his lifestyle, as it will produce the desired results. Benjamin Franklin, throughout his life, wrote many articles about his ideas regarding the achievement of perfection in all aspects of life. Immediately succeeding one such article, he explains the difficulty of obtaining said superiority by using the metaphor of a man grinding a speckled axe upon a stone repeatedly to make its surface flawless before conceding that an imperfect axe is easier to attain and therefore best.. To illustrate the cause of the man’s failure, Franklin says that “...this may have been the case with many who, having, for want of some such means as I employed, found the difficulty of obtaining good... have given up the struggle, and concluded that a speckled axe was best…” He states that many people who do not have the instruments for perfection that he himself wields, have found that obtaining it is too challenging, which leads to capitulation.

Some may confine to societies expectations, rebel, or even enforce them; however, Alice Walker “dances” over the categories that society has believed she should be placed in to find something more meaningful and significant about herself. Alice Walker, known for her numerous awards and 1983 Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Color Purple, is an American novelist, poet, and activist. Her essay, Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self, is an autobiographical account of an incident that caused her to go blind in one eye when she was eight years old. Walker’s thoughts, feelings, and emotions, which were cultivated by the standards and pressures of society, are described in her story. While some may overlook its purpose, the metaphor of dance is significant because it represents her individual liberation of societal standards and categorization, which in turn influences readers to consider their oppressors and realize their self-worth.

Values are an important aspect of life. Having values is a representation of the individual of not only who they are but what they believe as well. Someone who does not have any values cannot have any respect for themselves These lack of family values are progressive, and have become a part of the postmodern. In both stories “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri and” The Storm “by Kate Chopin, the plot sets upon the characters having a lack of values, and as a result may encounter negative consequences.

A Native American girl was gifted with the ability to dance. At four years old she started lessons on ballet. She was determined to be a great ballerina. Everyone in her tribe saw her as “naturally gifted”. She saw herself as a typical Indian girl and spent part of her childhood on an Osage reservation in Oklahoma.

In India love is often forbidden due to the caste systems upon the people living within the country. A caste system is class structure that is determined by birth; if a person in India is born with poor parents than they are going to be poor as well, the same distinction goes for a person who is born with rich parents. In Mahasweta Devi’s short story Dhowli, the main character Dhowli is referred to as an untouchable which is of the lowest caste. She becomes involved in a relationship with a very wealthy Misra boy. Dhowli gets pregnant from the Misra boy and becomes an outcast even more so than she already is, due to her involvement in a relationship that is forbidden in India.

An analogy has been drawn about how she was in the past and how is she now. She was a carefree person, demanding love in her life, wanting to take care of her children and become a house wife and now she works as a schoolteacher, has become a responsible person concerned about her husband and child, struggling for her son’s life, bearing tantrums of her sister-in-law and living in a small house in a small city. On the other hand, Komal, sister-in-law of Anjali is a character shown who seems to be frustrated from her life from the time she has lost her husband. The book has depicted another face of an Indian woman, who lives her entire life following the customs that the society has decided for a widow. Anjali tried to make her first marriage successful by taking care of small things like making her husband, his favorite cardamom chai and best of meals while Prakash’s second wife Indu was never concerned about any of his likings and gave priority to her own personal

Adversity can be seen in many different ways. Some people look at adversity as a learning experience, while others view adversity as a situation marked with misfortune. When a person is faced with adversity, rather than viewing it as something to hate, they should see it as a opportunity to grow. In the stories by Doris Lessing, W.D Wetherell and Alice Walker, they all show different types of challenges each character had to over come and their journey to do so. These stories all shared similar outcomes, they demonstrate how each character used an obstacle they were faced with, and turned it into a beneficial experience and how it shaped them into the person they are today.

Throughout world history women have been treated abysmally. Societies with male-dominance have abused and used women and continue to do so today. Women have been made vulnerable to a man due to the spread of cultural values and beliefs in society that condemn them from power. In Khaled Hosseini's novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, the two main characters Mariam and Laila develop an unconditional bond in which they become each others protectors. The immense inner strength of women from adversity has been exemplified through the growth of Mariam and Laila's contrasting relationship, the pain they endure from Rasheed which strengthens their bond and the courage within them that ultimately resolves their conflict.

A person’s heritage and cultural identity may be lost when moving to a new country where the culture is different and other cultures are not easily accepted. In the short story “Hindus”, Bharati Mukherjee uses setting, characters and the plot to discuss what it is like to lose your cultural identity while being a visible minority in America. Mukherjee uses the plot to describe the events that take place in the main characters life that lead her to realize how different the culture and life is in the America’s. She also uses the characters as a way of demonstrating how moving away from one’s culture and heritage can change a person’s perspective and ways of thinking. Mukerjee also uses setting in her story to identity the physical differences in culture between living in India and America. Alike the setting and characters, the plot helps describe the loss of culture with a sequence of events.

Khaled Hosseini presents the struggle Afghan women go through every day by discussing honour, marriage and the place of women in society in Afghanistan.

In Privilege, Shamus Khan examines how the once exclusively prestigious boarding school, St. Paul’s, is now open to a more diverse influx of elite students. This includes lower income individuals, nonwhites, and women. Even with this newfound openness, there is still a persisting inequity present. One prominent type of inequality at the institution is the gender differences displayed. These gender inequities are evident through the double standards of academic achievement and the portrayal of sexuality of the girls at St. Paul’s.

One of the main ideas conveyed in Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman is that equality between genders is extremely important, breaking tradition to get to the point where everyone has equality is imperative. Vidya is a 15-year-old girl whose family has just suffered a tragedy, because of this and because she lives in India during World War II Vidya and her family must move in with her injured fathers, extremely tradition relatives. Before her father's accident, Vidya had many freedoms including going to school, reading and going wherever she wanted in her house. In this new house, Vidya is no longer allowed to go wherever she wants, she is stuck on the first floor, but the library is on the second floor and Vidya's only escape

In the play the themes of economic exploitation, reification (=commodification) and acculturation are presented through the mercantile as well as surgical metaphor of body-parts transplantation. The Donors and the Receivers in the play represent the natives of the Third World and the First World respectively. Om, his wife Jaya, and Om’s