Symbolism In When Mr Pirrzada Came To Dine

This story was written, charmingly, in an unorthodox, yet loving manner. Rich with reality, the novel, led me into the atrocious, but true, glimpse into the world at the time. The phrases and paragraphs, struck me, illustrating the spliced lives of the protagonists, through complex, evocative, at times ethereal, imagery. The plot, progressive, and compelling, is profoundly sad, touching and uplifting. Flowing at a fast-pace, the plot, is a genuine page-turner, of which brought sadness in me when a disaster stroke, or warmth, when the characters embraced their connections to each other. The story covering the effects of hunger, war, prejudice, love, hatred, friendship, deception and growth, through its character development, cleverly stayed faithful to the plot, throughout. The characters, executed flawlessly on the author’s part, though not superficial, were tragic, and believable. The interwoven lives of these characters are complex, inspiring and perturbing. Being memorable, the characters had great prose, and development in the story. In the Book Thief, the use of Death as the narrator, persistent use of unintentional humour, was quite unique. Personally, I enjoyed Death’s utilization of dark, unintentional humour, as it ironically, lightened the saddest of

Culture builds up and shapes how people view the world and the people in it. It determines how we judge and view the way others act, look, and even how they think. In the texts “Where worlds collide”, “An Indian Father’s Plea”, and “Two Kinds”, it is shown that a person’s views of others and the world are solely determined by their culture.

In her essay “My Two Lives,” Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian American, explains the balance between the identities of the two countries inside her heart, as well as her psychological struggle between her bicultural identities. She describes herself as an Indian-American because she moved with her family from India to the United States when she was very young. However, confused with her identity through her growth, she feels that she doesn’t belong to either of the two countries because of its completely different cultures. When she is at home, she deals with her parents in an Indian way, which is strange compared to the American way that she come across outside. She says that she has a distinctive identity in spite of her Indian appearance

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is comprised of eight short stories about different Indian families’ struggles in America, many of them going through the immigrant experience. The conflicts are with friends and family, and also with themselves, as each of them attempt to find their own identity along with fitting in with the rest of society. One of the causes of these struggles that because the families in the stories are mixed in terms of generation. Many of the adults in the stories were first generation immigrants from India, while many of the children were raised in the United States, which is the second generation. This led to blending of culture and at the same time, clashes between the immigrant mentality of living and the American mentality of living. In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri demonstrates to the reader the important influence of environment, specifically culture and how it impacts parental teachings, on the personality and development of an individuals’ identity, and how the actions and development of characters can affect one’s family and friends; the impact of environment and culture is shown especially by the characters and stories “Hell-Heaven” and “Hema and Kaushik”.

A person has always been able to choose to what extent their cultural experiences affect their perspective. Amy Tan’s, “Two Kinds,” Bharati Mukherjee’s, “Two Ways to Belong in America,” and Robert Lake’s, “An Indian Father’s Plea,” all show how the main characters have chosen to let their experiences have an effect on their cultural identity. A person’s cultural experiences shape perception based on their own identifications and they may chose to assimilate to different cultures.

Commonly, culture is considered large and extravagant events and holidays, such as Diwali, a wedding, or the Fourth of July. Each event and holiday have specific traits and rituals that occur to distinguish the event from everyday life, but culture isn’t exclusive to lavish events such as these and include everyday activities such as watching a football game and listening to a speech. Every belief, behavior, and symbolic system that a person shares with another is an example of culture. Authors Anne Fadiman and Joshua Reno explores the different aspects of culture and ethnography in their two books, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, and Waste Away: Working and

In author Cristina Henriquez’s novel The Book of Unknown Americans, the characterization of Alma Rivera is used to convey how grief and misery is magnified when all that a person had ever known has been taken away for some reason out of their control; it is only when they learn to give up control and forgive themselves, that they overcome the feelings of grief and guilt.

Culture affects people’s perspectives of the world and others through their upbringing and how, when, and where they were raised. In the essay, “An Indian Father’s Plea,” Robert Lake writes about how his Indian child’s traditional way of learning is different from those in western education systems and that he's not a “slow” learner but learns in a different way from his peers. In the personal essay, “Two Ways to Belong in America,” Bharati Mukherjee describes her differing views of living in America with her sister, despite both being raised in India. In the poem, “My Mother Pieced Quilts,” by Teresa Palomo Acosta, Teresa how this quilt that her mother made for her involves all these pieces of her past that are stitched together. In the

A symbolic object is a powerful tool that helps communicate meaning. Symbolic objects are created and reused by us humans to help give value to our world. Creating culture and a sense of meaning for humans, a symbolic object is nothing without culture. In other words, culture is a sense of values created through history. This is important because symbolic objects can be used to explain untouched issues settlers of this land created with Indigenous people. Indigenous people are people whom originated from a land, such as Native Americans, that settlers from another country devalue. In the film “Smoke Signals” by Chris Eyre, he expresses how difficult it is being an Indigenous person in the 21st century. In this paper, I will explain how a

While Smith and Anzaldua may define identity through a culture or a voice, Jhumpa Lahiri, herself, had a different experience. Rather for Lahiri, she helps the reader

The dominant idiom of Indian writing today is firmly entrenched in pain, anxiety of displacement, nostalgia, yearning to belong to roots, and so on. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss are two such novels that explore the tragedy of man on several levels using different perspectives. Both the novels are about averted culture-clash tragedies, homogeneity vs. heterogeneity, and about Indian sensibilities.

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.

When adapting to a new culture, many find it hard to assimilate into their new world while still holding on to their past life. Finding yourself in a new place with a new language and unfamiliar faces is challenging for immigrants. Jhumpa Lahiri, an immigrant herself, sheds some light on the Indian culture in her book, Interpreter of Maladies. She conveys many challenges that immigrants face when moving away from their homeland in a myriad of short stories. These short stories introduce similar themes of immigration and adaptation through different experiences. Two of Lahiri’s short stories, “A Temporary Matter” and “Mrs. Sens”, do a great job in showing similar challenges of cultural differences in two different ways. They introduce characters

One way Lahiri shows difficulties that immigrants and refugees experience, is with the theme of displacement. To illustrate the idea of displacement, Lahiri uses Mrs. Sens to show the what immigrants have trouble adjusting to in a new environment. Mrs. Sens is a middle-aged, Indian woman, who is having difficulty adjusting to the differences between India and America. Lahiri emphasizes the awkward attitude that Mrs. Sens has towards driving. When asked about her driver’s licence, Mrs. Sens points out “Yes, I am learning, but I am a slow student. At home, you know we have a driver” (113). To put it differently, Mrs. Sens finds it odd and difficult that she has to learn driving because back in India, she had a chauffeur. Furthermore, when she says she is a slow

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Interpreter of Maladies’ Mr. Kapasi , the main character, seems to be a person with mixed feelings. He does not seem to have fixed stand neither in his job nor on his thoughts. His thoughts and experience are structured by the strict cultural society of India. His hidden wants and desires suppressed by the community rules are looking for way to come out. The consequence is his changing thoughts and desires which at different parts of the story appear differently and brings