They Are Staring At Me And My Aunt Gold Teeth By Vidia Naipaul

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.

My favorite book is “Smile” by Raina Telgemeier. It is an autobiography about a girl who trips, and loses 2 teeth and has a long journey to correct her teeth while struggling to fitting in during middle school and finding her the true friends in high school. WHat I found most compelling about this story is the message of perseverance. Raina had to persevere when she had to get all of her orthodontics done like getting her braces and wearing headgear.She also had to persevere when she was left without any friends during middle school high school. They became mean to her and abandoned her. With all of her effort, eventually she got a great new smile and a bunch of new, better friends. BYthe end of her journey, she would happy to smile with confidence.,

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”.

The book Interpreter of the Maldives is a collection of short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri that examines the relationship between Indian and American culture. Lahiri does this by using motifs, patterns and themes that recur throughout the short stories. The relationship between the two cultures is not only evident in romantic relationships of Indian-Americans, but in Lahiri’s description of clothing. Lahiri's description of clothing in the short stories, Sexy, This Blessed House and the Third and Final Continent, show how well a character is adapting/accepting American culture.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “This Blessed House” is one of many stories in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Interpreter of Maladies and follows a newlywed Indian-American couple, Sanjeev and Twinkle, settling into their first suburban home together. As Twinkle begins to find and admire Christian objects scattered around the house, Sanjeev wants to throw them all away, underscoring that Sanjeev deeply cares about how they will look if they display these Christian symbols as Hindus, while Twinkle simply wants to have fun in presenting her discoveries. More deeply rooted in the situation is that Sanjeev wants to look good in front of his coworkers; he does not get along with Twinkle; and the house he is supposed to show off in an upcoming housewarming party only troubles him with the Christian objects. Sanjeev’s earlier phone calls with his mother put these three variables of work, spouse, and home together as a formula, when she says that because he has enough money in the bank, he needs “a wife to look after and love,” and that his money is supposed to go toward raising a family (Lahiri 148). Sanjeev is taught to perform this role of success, and despite it not making him truly happy, his continual pursuit of it emphasizes that he is attempting to perform a fixed role that he does not fit into well. Sanjeev’s actions and mentality in “This Blessed House” reflect upon his performance and acting to fulfill a character of the American

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.

The book points out many different attacks on Indian culture. John’s adoption, legal or not, by his kind but misguided parents demonstrates the tragedy that can come from cross-cultural adoption. The experiences of Marie’s cousin Reggie, who has the tapes of his family’s stories stolen and co-opted by Dr. Mather (who has convinced himself that he is doing the right thing because the find is anthropologically valuable) demonstrates the wrongs done by intellectuals who only view other cultures in terms of what they can learn from them. Truck Schultz and the three enraged college students demonstrate how quickly the underlying distrust of

Iron Jawed Angels, by Katja von Garnier, is a non-fictional drama about a group of women who do everything they can and will do in order to the women’s right to vote during the years between 1912 and 1920, as it was started by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and many others in 1890. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, two of the younger women suffragists, join the NAWSA (the National American Woman Suffrage Association) to try to push for the constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage. Carrie Catt and Anna Shaw allow Alice Paul and Lucy Burns to take over the Washington D.C. NAWSA committee, but Alice and Lucy would have to raise their own funds for the committee. When Alice and Lucy first get to Washington D.C., Alice and Lucy go around recruiting a team of volunteers, including Mabel Vernon, Ruza Wenclawska, and Doris Stevens.

The plot in the short story “Hindus” demonstrates how a certain sequence of events can help people better understand themselves. Leela meets many different and unique people on her journey throughout

In “The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie tells the authors story, represented by the main character Junior. The main character is referred to by many names throughout the book. The author focuses on how extremely poor, and the strict line between the “whites” and the “indians”. Most struggle with finding their “identity”. A concept that Junior faces throughout the book. There is a lot of loss, and death throughout the book, yet it is categorized as a story full of joy and hope.

In ‘The Tribe’ Michael Mohammad Ahmad and Lucy Treloar in ‘Salt Creek’ show a major role in their lives through their perspective in recognising gender norms in The Tribe and historical narratives in Salt Creek. In contrast, the difference between gender norms and historical narratives is that gender norms are what men or women are determined to do because of their sex body parts. Gender norm contain a variety of behaviours, beliefs, values and traditions based on the knowledge of what men and women think they should do that are identified as women or men. Historical narrative is a theory that traditional or modern events are story-based written in historical form that is beyond the control of humans. Throughout, this essay states gender norms in The Tribe, which demonstrates violence against women when Bani and his male family members are physical towards women and women are obedience due to traditionalism. In Salt Creek, historical narratives is established through Papa’s movement to an agricultural area where land is owned by ‘no one’ and furthermore Hester’s historical romance with Charles. These two texts state the behaviour of men and the return of colonial settlers and independence.

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

Through her tasteful selection of contemporary Indian influenced prose pieces, Jhumpa Lahiri traces the unique journey of Indian families established in America. Focusing on the intergenerational aspect of traditional households, Lahiri conveys the emotional rollercoaster that accompanies a person who is branded as a foreigner. In America, there exists a common misconception that immigrants who arrive in this country fully assimilate or seek to assimilate as time progresses. The category I chose was "The Dot of true Happiness." The dot which signifies the bindi, a traditional red mark worn by Indian people, is the source of true happiness among these immigrants.

Bharati Mukherjee is one of the accomplished diasporic writers. Her writing focuses mainly on women’s suppression, struggle to overcome the problems and attempt to attain identification. Bharati Mukherjee also depicts the cultural conflicts between the East and the West. When a person enters into a new culture from the old one, the conflict arises between the two cultures in the alien land. This paper explores how the female character, Jasmine is portrayed as protagonist in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine. Bharati Mukherjee portrays Indian woman as protagonist in all her novels and the character takes brave decision to emigrate which is the first major step of heroism. The character is portrayed with the capable of facing adventures and creates own happiness and identity, unyielding by conventionality. In Jasmine (1989),

R[asipuram] K[rishnaswamy] Narayan (1906-2001) is unusual among Indian authors writing in English in that he has stayed contentedly in his home country, venturing abroad only rarely. He rarely addresses political issues or tries to explore the cutting edge of fiction. He is a traditional teller of tales, a creator of realist fiction which is often gentle, humorous, and warm rather than hard-hitting or profound. Almost all of his writings are set in the fictional city of Malgudi, and are narrowly focused on the lives of relatively humble individuals, neither extremely poor nor very rich.