booklist

The list is about halfway read with the top priority being the Fulbright recommended reading. These books were sent to us last week as the topics will be the focus of our pre-departure seminar July 1-3 at the South Asia Institute at the University of Texas, Austin. I am looking forward to meeting several of the authors.

Fulbright Booklist:
Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone
In Spite of the Gods
Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India
The Gujurat Series
Everyday Life in South Asia

Personal Booklist:
Eat, Love, Pray
Planet India
The Namesake
The Space Between Us
A River Sutra
Wolf Girls
Roller Birds of Rampur
Tales from India
Interpreter of Maladies
Culture Smart! India
Ghandi
Indian Fairy Tales
The Sari Shop
Holy Cow
A Fine Balance
Homeless Bird
The Magic Flute
The Room on the Roof
Vagrants in the Valley
The Conch Bearer
Jahanara, Princess of Princesses
Daughter of the Mountains
The Mirror of Fire and Dreaming
East West Traditions

Brenda’s Booklist:
Untouchable
The Painter of Signs
Third Class Ticket
Nectar in a Sieve
A Handful of Rice
Train to Pakistan
Chemmeen
Pather Panchali
Godan
I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale
A Life Full of Holes
Learning about India Through Indian Eyes

Related to Sri Lanka:

Running in the Family
Anil’s Ghost
When Memory Dies
On the Fifth Day
Buddhism in a Nutshell
Explorations and Excursions

trite but true

It IS a small world after all…

Yesterday I enjoyed breakfast at the home of a new friend here in Kennebunk who has her doctorate in Indian studies. (Coincidentally, I had Brenda’s grandson in Language Arts two years ago!) Brenda has been in love with India since she was a little girl, and took her first summer Fulbright tour in 1986. Her area of study was the Open University system – a way to offer a more universal higher education to the masses, instead of to the just to the top 10% scholars. She’s kindly lent me a satchel full of books and totebag full of salwar kameez outfits!

At breakfast Brenda introduced me to her friend Sharada, a former India Fulbright Director, who is in the US from New Delhi for a few weeks to visit friends. I brought the bundle of books the Fulbright Commission sent to us last week including Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka by Sandya Hewamanne (2008). Sharada knows Sandya well and had just spoken to her on the phone a few days earlier! Sandya will make a presentation to us in Austin next week about Stitching Identities - an ethnographic study of mostly rural women who work in the garment factories of Sri Lanka. Again – small world – Sharada is also writing a book about Sri Lanka as her father was the Raj Agent for the Indian Tamil population during the British Commonwealth’s rule. She has oodles of primary sources including letters written between her father and one-day-to-be Prime Minister Jwarharial Nehru.

What a lovely morning of conversation and pancakes with fresh strawberries and real Maine maple syrup!

india itinerary

These are the cities I’ll be visiting soon…