Posts Tagged ‘ Everett Woodman ’

Greetings for the Big Day–in other words, Merry Christmas! Christmas Eve in India, we hung stockings in preparation for Santa’s coming, as in this 1958 photo. My sisters Deborah and Jane are standing on three-legged stools that tended to be tippy, but somehow we escaped mishaps. The Nataraj on the mantelpiece (Lord Siva as cosmic dancer) witnessed many such ceremonies. The suitcase-y thing on the right was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, playing “White Christmas” and “let it snow, …Read More

I was about to throw out a shoebox of cassette tapes the other day, but instead, popped one into a portable cassette player (also retrieved from the dark corners of a closet) and had a listen. The tape was of my sister Lee interviewing my dad in 2002. Most of the lore had been ingrained in our heads, but I’d forgotten exactly how my dad, Everett Woodman, had met his retired schoolteacher friend, P. A. Thiruvenkatachari, “Mr. Patch,” …Read More

I’m looking through my dad’s address book. It’s got a worn green leather cover, and is bulging at the seams with stuff he inserted. He obviously copied some items over from an earlier book, but also taped in addresses from torn off corners of envelopes, return address labels, scraps of notebook paper, stickies of every color. Some things, especially notes to himself, he didn’t tape down, so you have to turn the pages carefully or bits of paper …Read More

I was asked recently to list the most striking differences between India of the early 1960s and India today. Oh my! Call in the pundits. For starters, then, there were about 440 million people in India; now, there are more than 1.2 billion. The cities have exploded—greater Delhi, for example, has gone from about 2.6 million to about 17 million. India is now one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. Perhaps most importantly, the communications revolution has arrived, …Read More

I did my first official reading and signing of Jana Bibi’s Excellent Fortunes this week, at the Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH. The next morning, I poked around Phillips Exeter Academy, founded 1781. My dad, Everett Woodman, graduated in 1935, and he called the famous preparatory school “the best university in the world.” If he could see the campus today, with its science and art centers, observatories, and Louis Kahn-designed library, he’d be doubly convinced of that. …Read More

Ninety-five percent of Indians marry within their own ethnic, religious, and cultural communities, said Dr. Shashi Tharoor, member of the Indian Parliament, in a recent speech to the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata. It’s fair to guess, also, that a big percentage—probably most—marriages in India are arranged by parents or family elders. Wandering Americans don’t fit into this picture very often, but strange things do happen. A Woodstock School alumna told of an encounter she had in …Read More

By the time the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel opened, I’d practically memorized the trailer. Who can resist Judi Dench mistaking a gin and tonic for a glass of water, or Maggie Smith refusing to eat something she can’t pronounce? So, hooray, last weekend, I saw the film, a gentle comedy about seven British retirees who travel to what they think is going to be a luxury retirement hotel in Jaipur, India. I loved it, just loved it. I …Read More

“Do you people have nicknames for everything?” a friend once asked. It seemed that way. My dad was linguistically very inventive, and his peculiar usages entered the family vocabulary. If he asked whether you’d like a mucket, he was offering you a beer. But, just in case you think his lingo was logical, a mucket was also a hat. “Pop those potatoes in the rototiller” meant stick them in the microwave oven. “Let’s hear a tune on the …Read More

At age ten, if you’d asked me what were the essential ingredients of the diplomatic life, I would have said, “clothes.” My family arrived in India a few months before the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, an event that touched off celebrations in Commonwealth countries across the globe. India, then six years independent, was no exception. My mother found she needed at least half a dozen extra ball gowns for the parties in then sleepy Madras (now bustling Chennai.) …Read More

Growing up in India in the 1950s, we didn’t have TV, and only occasionally went to the movies. My sisters and I staged our own entertainment, including plays we wrote ourselves. One was called “The Abduction of Brenda Brussels;” it must have been pretty scary. Then there was our version of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” complete with headless horseman. We held it in the neighbors’ driveway, so that we could use their pony in the production. …Read More