IMMIGRANT OF THE DAY: JHUMPA LAHIRI - AUTHOR

Jhumpa Lahiri, a British-born author of Indian descent, won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her collection of short stories entitled Interpreter of Maladies. Ms. Lahiri's books and stories explore the lives of Indians and Indian-Americans both in this country and in Bengal. Her third book, Unaccustomed Earth, is set for release this coming April.

 

Comments

[Sid]

The video of the Obama's Q & A session is on YouTube.

In part I, he does mention some of the issues that I've argued about like income inequality and achievement gap in schools. He didn't mention it in the context of low-skilled immigration but as a generic problem that poor American families are facing right now.

Part I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nnj7r1wCD4

Part II

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fgOkh9euBs&feature=related

[Sid]

Slightly unrelated news but one that techies on this blog will have a laugh over. This is about Obama's visit to Googleplex.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/business/02digi.html

Here's the funny part -

The proceedings at Google are not unremittingly serious affairs. Mr. Schmidt asked Senator McCain, “How do you determine good ways of sorting one million 32-bit integers in two megabytes of RAM?” Immediately signaling that the question was asked in jest, Mr. Schmidt moved on. Six months later, Senator Obama faced the same question, but his staff had prepared him. When he replied in fluent tech-speak (“A bubble sort is the wrong way to go”), the quip brought down the house.

[Sid]

Excellent choice Greg! Although she won the Pulitzer for "Interpreter of Maladies" and you can't really compare a collection of short stories to a novel, "The Namesake", in my opinion, was a superior effort. Although she has grown up in UK and the US, she has managed to capture the essence of Bengali culture in her books better than many Bengali authors who write in English.

For those who don't know, Bengali is a language spoken predominantly by people in Bangladesh (Formerly East Bengal -> East Pakistan -> Bangladesh) and West Bengal, a state in India.