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Starting in markets in 1991, he opened his first store in the Sydney suburb of Newtown in 1994. I gave up my own career as a government scientist to join him in 2000 and soon convinced my partner Ian to join us in what was to become the Family Business. It’s a subtle thing, freedom. It takes effort; it takes attention and focus to not act something like an automaton. Although we do have freedom, we exercise it only when we strive for awareness, when we are conscious not just of the content of the mind but also of the mind itself as a process.’ Take Kolkata, for example. Bengali, Hindi and English are three of the world's six most widely spoken languages -- there are millions who are trilingual. Surely there must be a large enough audience to make it worthwhile to publish more books using elements of all three languages. Hopefully, some of Kolkata's many writers and poets will take what Selvadurai has done by sprinkling his Canadian English with Sinhala and Tamil to the next level by writing books the way they speak in daily life. We see that substance addictions are only one specific form of blind attachment to harmful ways of being, yet we condemn the addict's stubborn refusal to give up something deleterious to his life or to the life of others. Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict, when as a social collective, we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations?”
Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein: Summary and reviews Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein: Summary and reviews
When we flee our vulnerability, we lose our full capacity for feeling emotion. We may even become emotional amnesiacs, not remembering ever having felt truly elated or truly sad. A nagging void opens, and we experience it as alienation, as profound as ennui, as the sense of deficient emptiness…” Being cut off from our own natural self-compassion is one of the greatest impairments we can suffer. Along with our ability to feel our own pain go our best hopes for healing, dignity and love. What seems nonadapative and self-harming in the present was, at some point in our lives, an adaptation to help us endure what we then had to go through. If people are addicted to self-soothing behaviours, it's only because in their formative years they did not receive the soothing they needed. Such understanding helps delete toxic self-judgment on the past and supports responsibility for the now. Hence the need for compassionate self-inquiry.” This novel also portrays the difficulties faced by Sri Lankans who tried to start a new life in western countries, after fleeing the motherland due to the unsavory political situations. We may say, then, that in the world of the psyche, freedom is a relative concept: the power to choose exists only when our automatic mechanisms are subject to those brain systems that are able to maintain conscious awareness. A person experiences greater or less freedom from one situation to the next, from one interaction to the next, from one moment to the next. Anyone whose automatic brain mechanisms habitually run in overdrive has diminished capacity for free decision making, especially if the parts of the brain that facilitate conscious choice are impaired or underdeveloped.” What's up with these brilliant novelists from the subcontinent who emigrate to Canada and freeze after 3-4 novels? Rohinton Mistry is similar to Shyam Selvadurai in this aspect.Shyam Selvadurai’s novels are sad. They’re difficult to read. However, they are beautiful and heart-wrenching stories that portray realistic situations and people’s reactions to these events. I've never been to Sri Lanka, but I know that on the street in Kolkata, people speak in a mix of languages -- Bengali, Hindi and English -- tangled together in various proportions, depending on the preferences and abilities of the speaker and listener. I suspect it's the same in Colombo. It would seem only natural then, to find thriving code-switching or creole literatures in these places. The Hungry Ghosts" is a gem of a novel centered around an uncommon theme for English literature: making personal concessions to correct the transgressions of others. Selvadurai takes his readers on a tense journey of forgiveness and family ties, juxtaposing how two different cultures, Canadian and Sri Lankan, approach these two notions in very different ways. I can feel a sense of things never being enough, the more and more money I earn never fills the spot once I obtain what I want it feels like it didn’t happen and I’m constantly searching for more.
HUNGRY GHOSTS | Kirkus Reviews HUNGRY GHOSTS | Kirkus Reviews
Be at least interested in your reactions as in the person or situation that triggers them.’... In a mindful state one can choose to be aware of the ebb and flow of emotions and thought patterns instead of brooding on their content. Not ‘he did this to me therefore I’m suffering’ but ‘I notice that feelings of resentment and a desire for vengeance keep flooding my mind.’... ‘Bare Attention is the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception,’... ‘It is called ‘Bare’ because it attends just to the bare facts of a perception as presented either through the five physical senses of through the mind without reacting to them.” In Buddhism, hungry ghosts are often seen as a metaphor for those individuals who are following a path of incorrect desire, who suffer from spiritual emptiness, who cannot see the impossibility of correcting what has already happened or who form an unnatural attachment to the past. Hungry ghosts are also sometimes used as a metaphor for drug addiction. Shyam Selvadurai writes about Love, be it Filial, romantic or otherwise, intertwining the Sri Lankan political landscape from 1983 to 1994 , and trials and tribulations of an immigrant's life. For a person who grew up during the mentioned years , the situations and characters in the story evokes nostalgia. One suddenly gets reminded about the real News , that dominated the headlines of newspapers. I actually started thinking of Richard De Zoysa , when reading about Mili Jayasinghe. Intuitively we all know that it’s better to feel than not to feel. Beyond their energizing subjective change, emotions have crucial survival value. They orient us, interpret the world for us and offer us vital information. They tell us what is dangerous and what is benign, what threatens our existence and what will nurture our growth. Imagine how disabled we would be if we could not see or hear or taste or sense heat or cold or physical pain. Emotional shutdown is similar. Our emotions are an indispensable part of our sensory apparatus and an essential part of who we are. They make life worthwhile, exciting, challenging, beautiful and meaningful.A form of hungry ghost called the Grigori is found in Christian mythology. Mentioned in the Book of Enoch, the Grigori and their offspring, created by the union of Grigori and humans, wander the earth endlessly yearning for food though they have no mouths to eat or drink with. In China, hungry ghosts include the spirits of dead ancestors who are compelled to return to the earthly realm during the seventh month of the Chinese Lunar Calendar in August. These ghosts can eat human food, and offerings of cake, fruit and rice are commonly left out for them, while amulets are worn and incense is burnt to protect against those with evil intent or insatiable need. The arguments between Shivan and others seem interminably petty, leave a bitter aftertaste, and (can I say again?!) remain totally unresolved. The setting of Sri Lanka and its unrest feels remote and rarified from the characters. And while the prospect of Buddhist karmic redemption seems possible, the author presents almost all of the characters as unable to shake their negative patterns and rather they succumb to its weight and their shortsightedness. The results are tragic again and again. The characters were all so alive, they were breathing, living people. I felt like they weren’t fictional at all, and I was very invested in Shivan’s (MC) life and also in his mother’s and sister’s lives. Shivan and his grandmother have a very intricate and elaborate relationship, which is influenced by cultural and family values, as well as the fact that Shivan is multiracial (Sinhalese-Tamil) and gay. The Hungry Ghosts is a story about karma, the burden of it, and a family whose particular burden is that they always seem to destroy the things they love. The only way to break the cycle, the stories say, is to freely offer kindness to those who need it. Filled with Sri Lankan folklore and allegorical Buddhist stories, The Hungry Ghosts paints a vivid picture of life in Colombo and the immigrant experience in Canada.
the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
In Buddhist myth, the dead may be reborn as "hungry ghosts"—spirits with stomach so large they can never be full—if they have desired too much during their lives. It is the duty of the living relatives to free those doomed to this fate by doing kind deeds and creating good karma. In Shyam Selvadurai’s sweeping new novel, his first in more than a decade, he creates an unforgettable ghost, a powerful Sri Lankan matriarch whose wily ways, insatiable longing for land, houses, money and control, and tragic blindness to the human needs of those around her parallels the volatile political situation of her war-torn country. The other mind entity is what we call the impartial observer. This mind of present-moment awareness stands outside the preprogrammed physiological determinants and is alive to the present. It works through the brain but is not limited to the brain. It may be dormant in many of us, but it is never completely absent. It transcends the automatic functioning of past-conditioned brain circuits. ‘In the end,...I conclude that there is no good evidence… that the brain alone can carry out the work that the mind does.” From an unforgettable new voice in Caribbean literature, a sweeping story of two families colliding in 1940s Trinidad—and a chilling mystery that shows how interconnected their lives truly areOne of the parables about perethayas is central to the book. In it, a poor woman steals the clothes off some drunken men she finds passed out on the road, and sells them for money. She knows it's wrong, so when a monk stops by later, she fawns over him in an attempt to avoid punishment for her sins in a future life. It kind of works. She's reborn in a golden mansion on an island with plenty of beautiful clothes and delicious food. Boy, oh funny boy, how radically different was this! That's a feat sure but not if you are expecting something specific. This was Arundhati-Roy-in-her-second-novel- level different. Are you sure you are you, Shyam? level different. The rest of the book shifts between Sri Lanka and Canada with this schism leading to an unsettled period for Shivan; his relationships lead nowhere and he is miserable, until he brings himself to make a life-altering sacrifice for his grandmother in the last days of her life. I wondered whether this inconclusive ending leaves the door open for a sequel, as the author continues to document his life via fictional heroes. The Canadian sections were boring in comparison, perhaps indicating how, a safe civilized society, albeit with a few discriminatory practices, can be rather bland compared to a third world country seething with conflict and dysfunction on all sides and providing a writer with rich grist for his mill.
Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein review – lyrical
Tirokudda Kanda: Hungry Shades Outside the Walls (Pv 1.5), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, 8 August 2010.Retrieved on 24 October 2011 . I needed to write, to express myself through written language not only so that others might hear me but so that I could hear myself.” I found the Sri Lankan sections of the book to be well written and dramatic, and they captured the vernacular and the Cinnamon Gardens culture (i.e. the moneyed class) very well. Selvadurai offers no apologies or translations for Sri Lankan words and expressions that litter the text, and I found no glossary to assist the non-Sri Lankan reader. He captures the rudeness, the temperamental natures, the deceits, and the rather coddled behaviour of grown men from the Colombo 7 milieu. The relationships between Shivan and his male lovers are also fraught with petty jealousies, silly arguments and possessiveness, mirroring perhaps the relationship Shivan has with his grandmother.
It was also interesting to hear about the racial conflicts in Sri Lanka, which are described in detail through Shivan's eyes as events unfold. At one point, we even get a peek into the struggles of a human rights group in Colombo. The leader of the group was probably my favourite character of the book, because she was one amazing lady! (Similarly, I really liked Shivan's sister, who would honestly be my favourite grandchild if I were their grandmother. Girl reads Anita Desai and bell hooks, what's not to love?) But it was so relentlessly depressing and bleak and people are just mean to each other ALL the time in this bloody story and of course there are dark dark supernatural mythological stories to ground your bleak story into bleaker planes. Members within the same family inflict so much pain on each other and really there should be more novels about how horrible families are. Despite their extensive sketches, I didn't get under the skins of the characters the way i did in Funny Boy. Some characters were getting under my skin instead.
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