January 6th, 2009 at 12:42pm
I’ve been slowly realizing it’s January and 2009. I find it’s hard to get oriented in a new year. Add to that the fact that it was about 70 degrees this afternoon and the confusion of which days constitute a weekend and I feel a little lost.
Today I had a batch of Christmas Cards show up and all of a sudden it Christmas again. It was really nice to get them. To those of you who sent me a card… Thank You.
December 29th, 2008 at 2:01am
This is a fairly common question. Now I’m no linguist, but I think the response is quite interesting. In Bangla there are many compound verbs where a noun is added to a verb. So in the case of marriage, the word biye is added to a verb. The interesting thing is that the verb added depends on your gender. Men respond with a conjugation of biye kor and women with biye hobe. Kor translates as to do and hobe as am. The observation is that men do marriage and women are married. From a grammatical standpoint, men respond with an active form and woman have a passive form. As one coming from a “proactive” society where gender inclusiveness is valued, the knee jerk reaction is that everybody should use the active tense–Marriage should be active not passive. However, in Bangla, active refers to a single point in time passive is a general state the implication being that for men, marriage is an act that happens a single time while with women it’s a continuous state.
December 25th, 2008 at 9:21am
I went out to Bogra and on the way out of Dhaka we passed the brickyards. The brickyards are as the name leads you to believe where they make brick. They sit on the mud flats of the rivers and appear to an uninitiated observer such as myself like rows and rows of bricks spreading outward from a giant smoke stack. The smoke stack is maybe 20 feet in diameter and tapers slightly as it rises up to a height of 100 feet. On the day I passed, it was a little hazy and the brickyards started at the road and covered the world as they disappeared into the haze in the distance. I have never seen such a desolate scene and the only image I can compare it to is from the Lorax.
