Interpreter Of Maladies By Jhumpa Lahiri

According to the Institute of Medicine, “At least 44,000 people, and perhaps as many as 98,000 people, die in hospitals each year as a result of medical errors” (Kohn et al.). Despite the unfortunate consequences, medical errors provide an important foundation for medicine. An immense uncertainty envelopes the medical field, and frequent leaps must be made. Some of these ventures are prosperous; however, many render unsuccessful. In Complications, Atul Gawande crafts an alluring view of the medical unknown using tales of his personal medical mistakes. Through the use of ethos, logos, and pathos, Atul Gawande argues that medicine’s vast uncertainty has beneficial influence upon society.

Survival of the Sickest is a fascinating book that explores why we need disease and how different diseases have evolved from the beginning of time. Author, Dr. Sharon Moalem goes beyond the surface and answers many questions about evolution and disease for example, “Was diabetes evolution’s response to the last Ice Age?” and many others. Dr. Moalem shares how many of the diseases that we call harmful today have actually proven to be beneficial to survival for our ancestors. This book shows how every single thing that our ancestors have done in the past from the environment they lived in to the food they ate can be seen in our genetic code. Survival of the Sickest does not solely focus on the history of disease and evolution, it shows the reader

In an article entitled “The All- Seeing Public Eye” in Berkeley City College, Derek Wallace discusses cameras and recording skills beyond personal experiences. Wallace maintains that it’s necessary to utilize the resources as cameras and videotapes properly, because it has huge power over society, that using in a better way it could collaborate to change weaknesses that this world has. Moreover, he argues that cameras are special tools in political matters that people have the dominions and should be them in a way that it helps themselves and not politicians and media stream. Finally, Wallace concludes that people have a big instrument over their hands, and it good uses could help to transform the world.

The man helps the narrator overcome his “blindness” by teaching him a new way of seeing. The experience of this effective communication transforms the narrator and the way he sees the external world. He is no longer an ignorant and distant

As an illustration it showcased an insight right of the beginning with: “And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movie, the blind moved slowly and never laughed”, this very quote showed me the author did not care this man was blind nor did he have an understanding of blind people. He made his own guess based on watching a movie and this feeling was true to him as this is what he believed. This quote also showed me that he

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.

The second picture I chose called Laxman Singh, Rajasthan, 2002 I felt that this man is a prisoner in his own world because he has no legs to walk but prosthetics. I believe that the photographic approach of contemporary photojournalists have changed with both the idea and the technique since Gardner’s era. There is more history going on every day and there are so many stories that can be told that each photojournalist can use different techniques and ideas to tell that story to a viewer.

John Szarkowski says, "Photography is a challenge between a picture taker and the assumptions of inexact and constant seeing. The challenge can

Photographs are re-collections of the past. This essay is about photography, memory, and history and addresses the relationship between photographic images and the need to remember; it is based on the notion that seeing is a prelude to historical knowledge and that understanding the past relies on the ability to imagine. At the same time, the role of thought and imagination in the production of society--as reflected in the earlier work of Louis Althusser (1970), Maurice Godelier (1984) and perhaps more significantly, Cornelis Castoriadis (1975), suggests yet another role for photography in the construction of a social and cultural reality. Photographs in capitalist societies contribute to the production of information and participate in the surveillance of the environment where their subjective and objective qualities are applied to the private uses of photographic images in the perpetuation of memory.

In the world we live in today, anyone can pick up a handheld video camera and record their son’s soccer game or daughter’s school play, but to really capture the beauty of an event takes true talent. It takes the expertise of a cinematographer or director of photography as they are also known, to capture the true essence of an event and scene. Thomas Edison even once said, “By faithfully reproducing and kind or type of movement, it [cinematography] constitutes man’s most astonishing victory to date over forgetfulness. It retains and restores the things memory alone can’t recover, not to mention its auxiliary agencies: the written page, drawing photography. … Like them, cinematography prevents the things of yesterday that are useful to tomorrow’s progress from sinking into oblivion; amongst these one must count moving things, which only a few years ago were considered impossible to fix in an image” (Neale, 54). A picture, whether it be a photographed image or a filmed image is nothing when it has not been looked at with the proper eyes. When expressed through the proper lens and eye an image can really be worth a thousand words.

"Close all shutters and doors until no light enters the camera except through the lens, and opposite hold a piece of paper, which you move forward and backward until the scene appears in the sharpest detail. There on the paper you will see the whole view as it really is, with its distances, its colours and shadows and motion, the clouds, the water twinkling, the birds flying. By holding the paper steady you can trace the whole perspective with a pen, shade it and delicately colour it from nature."

It creates an illogical connection between ‘here-now’ and the ‘there-then’. As the photograph is a means of recording a moment, it always contains ‘stupefying evidence of this is how it was’. In this way, the denoted image can naturalise the connoted image as photographs retain a ‘kind of natural being there of objects’; that is, the quality of having recorded a moment in time. Barthes stresses that as technology continues to “develop the diffusion of information (and notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning’ (P159-60).

However as the authors stressed, probably more significant than the change in how images are produced, distributed and used, are the ideas to which the changes are giving rise and how digital imaging is challenging and changing traditional ways of seeing and thinking. It seems that our traditional belief that ‘the camera never lies’ has been brought into question. It also appears important to consider who

Susan Sontag said photographs sends across the harmlessness and helplessness of the human life steering into their own ruin. Furthermore the bond connecting photography with departure from life tortures the human race. (Sontag 1977:64)

The present study is based on the idea of displacement as the major theme of the selected short stories of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of maladies”. The book contains nine short stories and each one of them deals with the question of identity, alienation, and plight of those who are physically and psychologically displaced. But I would like to limit my studies to the three short stories from the collection viz. “When Mr. Pirzada came to dine”, Interpreter of Maladies”, and “Mrs. Sen’s”. The migration has become one of the most important issues of the contemporary world. Jhumpa Lahiri is also a diasporic writer like Salman Rushdie, V.S Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee. The characters in the prescribed stories are citizens of more than one country