Posts Tagged ‘ Woodman children ’

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

“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