Application 6.2 Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Application 6.2 - Assignment Example the university level, there was a consideration of a proposal to make alterations to the job designs of staff of the MSOD program (Cummings, Thomas, and Worley 116). The composition of the staff at MSOD program comprises of a faculty director, an administrative assistant and a program administrator. The main pint of focus of this application is on the roles and responsibilities of the Program Administrator of the MSOD program. The holder of the particular office is charged with the responsibility of recruitment of n students while conducting marketing for the said educational institution, the management of logistics delivery pertaining the off-site program, foreseeing the student registration process, managing the financial payment procedures of students and finally keeping close links with the MSOD alumni. Under the marketing docket, the Program administrator is supposed to work in collaboration with the Marketing Director and the Program Director to come up with clear cut initiatives for marketing such as advertisements, conference support an marketing and the designing an issuance of brochures during various exposures (Cummings, Thomas, and Worley 116). Moreover, the office is also charged with the overseeing of the recruitment process through explaining to the eligible cand idates on the modes of applications and the expectations. The functions of the Program administrator of the MSOD program was influenced by the increment of the tuition fees, the corporate policy on tuition reimbursement was restricted and the economy also played a difficult note for the program and its prospectus to suit (Cummings, Thomas, and Worley 116). The main reason as to why the institution had overtasked the Program Administrator was that it was trying to enrich the position through allocation of vital roles without the measurement of the magnitude and possible completion of the tasks allocated. The institution had tried creating of different but elated programs to increase its

Higher education Essay Example for Free

Higher education Essay Ancient philosopher Confucius, who was considered the first professional teacher in China, opened an old-style private school in his hometown. The school enrolled more 3,000 students, and those students just paid a symbolic tuition fee as some crops and meat. The old-style private school has been followed for more than 2000 years. Therefore, the simplest and best way to disseminate knowledge is free education. China had a nine years’ compulsory education but it is not advance with the times now. China should extend years for the compulsory education that free education to senior high school students. With high school free education, students will have equal opportunities to be educated, focus on learning and improving, and improve the standard of living. Let’s look at those benefits of high school free education. Provide equal opportunities Free education of senior high school can also provide equal opportunities as the normal kid to the poor. In the past time, only wealthy people had chance to receive education, but some poor people could not. Now, everyone has right to get knowledge. Free education is a key to open the doors of hope for some smart and poor teenagers. They can have the equal opportunity as the riches to be educated. In the article, â€Å"Free education provides equal opportunities† reported that the government of China had released a newly plan of education that providing equal opportunities in education. The government will expend more power to resolve ingrained problems as extend free education. In many Chinese parents’ mind, if their children have a good and equal beginning in education, it will have a lot of means and benefits for a child’s future (Zhang Jingya, 2010). We can assure that some intelligent and poor students can gain the equal chances through free education. Free education provides some advantages to those people who deserve it and cherish it. In today’ society, everybody wants to have a brighter future, so it is not humanized to lose the better future because of the economic problem. Everyone has the chance to have a comfortable life and the only way to make it come true is to have enough knowledge. If the society can provide an equal chance for the teen that do not have the condition to be educated, they will offer society a better tomorrow. Focus on learning and Improving Free education of senior high school will help the teenagers focus on learning and improving. China promulgated the law on compulsory education in 1986. The government should provide a nine years compulsory education that school should be free of tuition fees and other expenses for all young people. If China extends years for the compulsory education to high school students, it will help some students without worry about the payment of tuition fees and other expenses. They should focus on learning and receiving more knowledge. For example, in the article â€Å"China pledges elimination of rural compulsory education charges in two years†, author says that in some places that particularly in the impoverished rural regions, the law of compulsory education didn’t executed because local government couldn’t cost. Many schools are forcing for continue to collect expenses and charge various miscellaneous fees on their students as voluntary donations, fund-raising for school construction, and after-school tutoring fees (March 5, 2006). Free high school education will help students to pay more attention to learning not the economic hardship of their family. Furthermore, teenagers in senior high school age are about the puberty. That means they are not mature enough in their body and mind. They can’t distinguish the right or wrong in a very advisable way like the adult. As the reason of that, if they give up attending high school because of the economic problem and entering society too early they may lose their way. It is so easy that they make a mistake which will influence their entire life, like involved in a crime. The free education of high school can change this situation. It is better to keep the teenagers in school so they can learn more knowledge and mature their outlook on life. Improve the standard of living Free education of senior high school can improve the standard of living. Francis Bacon said â€Å"Knowledge is Power†. This kind of power should make people’s life more wonderful and colorful because knowledge can produce many things. Free high school education would help more people have higher education. In the article, â€Å"Knowledge Changes Fate†, the author said that knowledge becomes the most significant content of human’s life. It contributes a lot in the economic, welfare and culture of the society. The foundation that supports the movie â€Å"Knowledge Changes Fate† wants to express the theme that the only way to change your fate is to be educated and get more knowledge (Li kasheng, 1999). When people are high educated, they would have more chances to achieve their dreams and plans. Obviously, higher education can help people to win the fierce competition and earns more money. They can live the life better by being successful. When people have higher education, people will think about to improve their personal cultivation after eliminate the struggle for basic needs. As they feel satisfied about their own life, they will do some society works and volunteering and concern more issues which like the society problems and environment problems. Therefore, more free education would have positive and upward influences for the overall quality and minding in the society. Conclusion As all of the content of the essay states, free education of senior high school can advantage our society by many different ways. It can provide an equal opportunity to the teen that cannot bear the cost of education, help the teen to focus on learning and improving, and improve the whole living standard of the society. Although China is a powerful and prosperous country today, our education system still has many leaks need to improve and the most urgent is the free education. If the expectation of free education comes true, China will step in a brand new future. The ancient philosopher Confucius enrolled almost 3000 students and he only charged the tuition fee of some crops and meat as the free education. How the ancient can do this kind of free education, but we cannot? The knowledge is invaluable because it help people to change their whole life. On another hand, senior high school education should be free in China. References China pledges elimination of rural compulsory education charges in two years. (2006). Retrieved March 5, 2006, from http://english. peopledaily. com. cn/200603/05/print20060305_248042. html Jingya, Z. (2010). Free education provides equal opportunities. Retrieved August 6, 2010, from http://english. cntv. cn/program/china24/20100806/100804. shtml Kashing, L. (1999). Knowledge changes fate. Retrieved from http://www. lksf. org/en/project/education/knowledge/main01.

Challenging the Identity of the Family in What Maisie Knew by Henry Jam

Challenging the Identity of the Family  in What Maisie Knew   Ã‚  Ã‚   Although Henry James did not confine himself exclusively to the scope of literary themes facing America, in his novel What Maisie Knew, he did challenge the changing identity of the modern family.  Ã‚  At the turn of the century, the dynamics of the family institution became an important theme in American literature due to such issues as the increased social mobility of the industrial age, the new emerging independence of women, and a modern view that lent itself to challenging tradition.  Ã‚  For many of James' contemporaries, Edith Wharton, for example, a colleague and friend of James, this theme became the focus of works like "The Other Two."  Ã‚  In this work, the new situations facing the family illustrate themselves through the central agent of the child, who remains the focus for bringing these circumstances to light.  Ã‚  While the child never enters the action of the story, she becomes the catalyst that brings about the adult confrontations that shape, not necessarily for the better, the identity of the family.  Ã‚  In James' novel, though set in Europe and intended to present an extreme case, the same type of situation remains.  Ã‚  The focus for this work, however, targets the psychology of the child.  Ã‚  James proves more interested in the effect that the dynamics of the modern family have on the children than on the issues themselves.  Ã‚  The situations that the members of Maisie's "family" create force her into a number of roles that strip the innocence of her youth and quickly introduce her to the corrupt reality of adulthood.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Although Maisie must encounter situations that, at first, are apparently beyond her control, she quickl... ...lues given by the narrator and the other characters in the novel, as well as Maisie's own actions, we can trace her understanding and her ability to affect her situation throughout the novel. Her own understanding Maisie never entirely reveals until the end of the novel, but we can see that she deserves more credit than she receives. What Maisie Knew. Ricks, Christopher (ed. and introd.). New York, NY: Penguin; 2010.

Aryabhatta Biography Essay

While there is a tendency to misspell his name as â€Å"Aryabhatta† by analogy with other names having the â€Å"bhatta† suffix, his name is properly spelled Aryabhata: every astronomical text spells his name thus, including Brahmagupta’s references to him â€Å"in more than a hundred places by name†. Furthermore, in most instances â€Å"Aryabhatta† does not fit the metre either. Time and place of birth Aryabhata mentions in the Aryabhatiya that it was composed 3,630 years into the Kali Yuga, when he was 23 years old. This corresponds to 499 CE, and implies that he was born in 476. Aryabhata was born in Taregna (literally, song of the stars), which is a small town in Bihar, India, about 30 km (19 mi) from Patna (then known as Pataliputra), the capital city of Bihar State. Evidences justify his birth there. In Taregna Aryabhata set up an Astronomical Observatory in the Sun Temple 6th century. There is no evidence that he was born outside Patliputra and traveled to Magadha, the centre of instruction, culture and knowledge for his studies where he even set up a coaching institute. However, early Buddhist texts describe Ashmaka as being further south, in dakshinapath or the Deccan, while other texts describe the Ashmakas as having fought Alexander. Education It is fairly certain that, at some point, he went to Kusumapura for advanced studies and lived there for some time. Both Hindu and Buddhist tradition, as well as BhÄ skara I (CE 629), identify Kusumapura as PÄ Ã¡ ¹ ­aliputra, modern Patna. A verse mentions that Aryabhata was the head of an institution (kulapati) at Kusumapura, and, because the university of Nalanda was in Pataliputra at the time and had an astronomical observatory, it is speculated that Aryabhata might have been the head of the Nalanda university as well. Aryabhata is also reputed to have set up an observatory at the Sun temple in Taregana, Bihar. Other hypotheses Some archeological evidence suggests that Aryabhata could have originated from the present day Kodungallur which was the historical capital city of Thiruvanchikkulam of ancient Kerala. For instance, one hypothesis was that aÅ›maka (Sanskrit for â€Å"stone†) may be the region in Kerala that is now known as Koá ¹ ­uá ¹â€¦Ã¡ ¹â€¦allÃ… «r, based on the belief that it was earlier known as Koá ¹ ­um-Kal-l-Ã… «r (â€Å"city of hard stones†); however, old records show that the city was actually Koá ¹ ­um-kol-Ã… «r (â€Å"city of strict governance†). Similarly, the fact that several commentaries on the Aryabhatiya have come from Kerala were used to suggest that it was Aryabhata’s main place of life and activity; however, many commentaries have come from outside Kerala. Aryabhata mentions â€Å"Lanka† on several occasions in the Aryabhatiya, but his â€Å"Lanka† is an abstraction, standing for a point on the equator at the same longitude as his Ujjayini. Works Aryabhata is the author of several treatises on mathematics and astronomy, some of which are lost. His major work, Aryabhatiya, a compendium of mathematics and astronomy, was extensively referred to in the Indian mathematical literature and has survived to modern times. The mathematical part of the Aryabhatiya covers arithmetic, algebra, plane trigonometry, and spherical trigonometry. It also contains continued fractions, quadratic equations, sums-of-power series, and a table of sines. The Arya-siddhanta, a lot work on astronomical computations, is known through the writings of Aryabhata’s contemporary, Varahamihira, and later mathematicians and commentators, including Brahmagupta and Bhaskara I. This work appears to be based on the older Surya Siddhanta and uses the midnight-day reckoning, as opposed to sunrise in Aryabhatiya. It also contained a description of several astronomical instruments: the gnomon (shanku-yantra), a shadow instrument (chhAyA-yantra), possibly angle-measuring devices, semicircular and circular (dhanur-yantra / chakra-yantra), a cylindrical stick yasti-yantra, an umbrella-shaped device called the chhatra-yantra, and water clocks of at least two types, bow-shaped and cylindrical. A third text, which may have survived in the Arabic translation, is Al ntf or Al-nanf. It claims that it is a translation by Aryabhata, but the Sanskrit name of this work is not known. Probably dating from the 9th century, it is mentioned by the Persian scholar and chronicler of India

Eriksons Stages Essay

This experiential learning activity will give you an opportunity to apply basic psychological principles to learn more about your own behavior. The project will be conducted over a 9 week period. By week 3, you will choose a behavior that you would like to change and come up with a behavior change plan. In weeks 4-10, you will work on changing that behavior and record your progress. In weeks 11-13, you will reflect, analyze, and interpret your behavior change and outcomes. A 5 page write-up (double spaced) of this behavior change activity covering the points described below is due the week of presentations at the beginning of the class period. Here are the steps: 1. Select a behavior that you would like to change, one that you’d like to increase or decrease or modify in some way (Examples: eating junk or high-fat foods, chewing gum, smoking, getting angry, studying, exercising, spending money, worrying, etc). 2. Define your specific goal, consider the benefits and barriers, and choose a behavior modification plan. 3. Design a method of tracking your daily progress. This could be a tallying form, a data table, etc. This device should allow you to record the frequency and/or duration of your behavior on a daily basis. (if your behavior is something that is done several times a day, you might want to create a data tracking device that you can carry along with you). 4. Record your behavior, following the procedures you have developed, throughout the semester. Write a 5 page report that includes the following points and be sure to include theories and concepts we covered during class in addition to these sections. **Use at least 2 journal articles related to your topic and give a brief description of the articles in the introduction** Goal-Setting and Monitoring †¢ What behavior did you try to change? What was your precise goal? (for example, to increase/decrease the frequency and or duration) †¢ What were the benefits that you perceived to changing your behavior? In other words, why did you want to change your behavior? †¢ How did you keep track of (record) your daily progress? Very briefly describe the type of tallying sheet (or recording device) that you used. Motivation †¢ Where do you think your goal would fall on Maslow’s hierarchy of motives and why? What types of counter-motives made it difficult for you to accomplish your goal (example; hunger, pleasure, etc.) Where would these counter-motives fall on Maslow’s hierarchy? †¢ Did you feel more intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to change this behavior and why? †¢ Did your goal involve the behavioral activation system (BAS) or the behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and why? Was your goal more approach- or avoidance-oriented and why? †¢ Do you think that your motives contributed to your outcome? How and why? Learning †¢ How did you go about trying to change your behavior? Did you use any of the behavior learning strategies that we discussed in class such as classical or operant conditioning? †¢ How did you use these strategies? Did they work or not? Emotions, Barriers, and Social Support †¢ What types of emotions did you feel when trying to change your behavior? How did you feel along the way and how were these emotions related to the amount of effort you invested in trying to change your behavior? †¢ What were some of the barriers that you encountered while trying the change the behavior? Did you expect these barriers when you started or did they surprise you along the way? What did you do to overcome these barriers? †¢ Did you enlist the help of family and friends in trying to change your behavior? Was this helpful or harmful? Conclusion †¢ Did you reach your goal or not? How do you feel about the outcome? What could you do differently in the future to be even more successful at changing your behavior? Outline of written report †¢Introduction †¢Description of topic †¢Explanation of why this is an important area of study †¢Reason for picking this area to write about †¢Literature review †¢Description of theory †¢Previous research on topic (Use at least 2 journal articles related to your topic and give a brief description of the articles) †¢Citations of all work mentioned in the paper †¢Statement of hypothesis †¢Methods section †¢Description of process in reaching your goal (recording behavior, keeping track, etc) †¢Description of materials used (tally sheet? recording device?) †¢Results †¢Conclusions †¢Goal-setting & Monitoring †¢Motivation †¢Learning †¢Emotions, barriers, and social support †¢Conclusion paragraph (see assignment sheet) †¢Applications (how will these results be useful to individuals and society as a whole?) †¢References †¢APA style †¢Citations in the body of paper should appear in the reference section

Pompeii - Our Link to the Past essays

Pompeii - Our Link to the Past essays  ¡The cloud appeared to come out of the top of the mountain that was a long way away. The best way to describe it is to say it looked like a pine tree. It shot straight up like a very tall trunk. At the top of the trunk, the cloud spread out like branches. Parts of the cloud were very bright, and parts were quite dark. The different colors were caused by the amount of cinders in different parts of it." Pliny the Younger wrote these words as he observed the beginning eruption of the volcano that loomed over his city. As this continued, the citizens of Pompeii watched as the cloud came closer, engulfing the city with ashes and cinders, the volcano soon began producing sheets of lava and flames. Days later, the once prosperous city of Pompeii lay in ruins. Perhaps one of the richest sites of archaeological history, Pompeii provides a valuable insight into the life of first century Romans. From excavations that first began in 1748, much has been discovered about the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire. Pompeii was first settled by the Oscans in 600BC, but didn ¡t become a Roman colony until 89BC under the direction of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Pompeii played a big role in ancient Rome. First of all, Pompeii was a chief center of trade. It had prosperous trade in wine, oil, millstones, fish, sauce, perfumes, and cloth. In addition, because Pompeii was located in such a prosperous and beautiful area, at the mouth of the Sarnus River, it made it a perfect place for leisure. During the time of the Roman Empire it was a desired place for the wealthy to build summer villas or homes. Destroyed in 79 AD by the eruption of Mt Vesuvius, Pompeii lay buried beneath layers of volcanic debris for more than 1700 years before being discovered by a farmer in the late 1600 ¡s. It wasn ¡t until 1763, 15 years after excavations first began, that the name of Pompeii was discovered. An inscription was found; it read  ¡rei ...

Eco 561 Week 3 Essays

Eco 561 Week 3 Essays Eco 561 Week 3 Essay Eco 561 Week 3 Essay Market Structure Denise M. Minor ECO 561 Week 3 Individual Assignment Professor John Lindvall November 11, 2010 Market Structure Thomas Money Services started out as a consumer finance company granting small loans for household needs. Over the years, the company expanded by issuing business loans, financing acquisitions and commercial real estate loans. The company also became involved in financing equipment through a subsidiary named Future Growth Inc. (FGI). Thomas Money Services acquired a lot of lucrative business opportunities over the years. However, the fall of the economy has caused profits to decrease resulting in layoffs. This proposal will provide recommendations on increasing revenue, achieving normal production levels, and ways to reduce cost. First, in order for Thomas Money Service to increase revenue, the company should produce enough quantity until their marginal revenue equals marginal cost (MR=MC). Currently, marginal costs are above marginal costs, causing a decline in profits. Equilibrium was determined through graphing both marginal revenue and marginal costs. The equilibrium occurs when the company produces an output of 7 with marginal costs of $88 and marginal revenue of $14,000. It is apparent that the company is not a monopoly because marginal revenue would always equal marginal costs (Perloff, 2007). Another way that the company can increase revenue without changing the price is through advertising. Advertising could assist the company by providing consumers with information regarding the products and services provided through the company. Information provided suggested that at an output of 1 the product’s elasticity of demand at -26. However outputs of 7 and more became less elastic, causing the product to eventually become inelastic after outputs of 13. This inelasticity suggests that consumers purchasing behavior did not change because the price changed. Therefore, in order for the company to increase revenue, they should produce quantities that sustain equal levels of marginal revenue and marginal costs. Thomas Money Services is a competitive firm and should therefore set their quantity to maximize profit because they cannot affect market price (p. 76). In order for the company to achieve normal production levels they must produce at quantities that will keep marginal revenue and marginal costs at equilibrium. By graphing both marginal revenue and marginal costs, Thomas Money should produce at an output of 7 in order to achieve normal production levels. Average total cost for an output of 7 = 203. 3, which is the average fixed cost plus the average variable cost. In determining how much the company should produce in or to maximize profit, both total revenue and total cost were graphed. Profit is the total revenue minus the total costs (Output Decisions: Revenues, Costs, and Profit Maximization, 2010). When graphing total revenue and total costs, we can determine how much should be produced. There was a large difference between the total revenue and total cost curve, at a quantity of 7. Therefore, the company should produce an output of 7 in order to maximize profits and increase normal production levels. In order for the company to increase revenue and achieve normal production levels, fixed and variable costs may need to be determined. Fixed costs cannot be adjusted to maximize profits because they have no affect on price or output. Variable costs can be adjusted according to the amount of output produced. Therefore, the company can adjust variable costs upon changing the technology used for production. This can be done through innovative machines that could produce products without having to pay more laborers to get the job done. The variable cost should be decreased, which will cause marginal costs to decrease, thus causing the profit maximizing quantity to increase (2010). In conclusion, the economic downturn has affected Thomas Money Services monetarily. Understanding ways of increasing revenue in times of economic crisis is important for the company to maintain and even maximize profits. Achieving normal production levels is also important because the company should be aware of maximizing profits without spending a lot of money on production. Furthermore, understanding fixed and variable costs help make decisions regarding both increasing profits and decreasing costs. Therefore, understanding economic concepts help to understand how to make executive decisions and recommendations which help organizations maintain profitability in times of economic turmoil. References Output Decisions: Revenues, Costs, and Profit Maximization. (2010). Retrieved November 11, 2010, from Pearson Education: http://wps. pearsoncustom. com/pcp_90734_uop_casefair/109/27997/7167399. cw/index. html Perloff, J. M. (2007). Microeconomics. Boston, MA: Pearson Addison Wesley.

January 2008 Most Popular Posts

January 2008 Most Popular Posts January 2008 Most Popular Posts January 2008 Most Popular Posts By Daniel Scocco Below you will find the most popular posts of this month. Check them out if you missed any. Give me an â€Å"A†: a vs. an: The indefinite articles a and an both mean the same thing. The definite article the refers to a particular thing (†Give me the ring! The wedding ring!†) while a and an refer to any item of a certain type (†Please hand me a nail, any nail.†) But when do you use a and when do you use an? You were probably taught in school that, preceding a vowel (†an apple†), you use an. Preceding a consonant, you use a. Continuous or Continual?: Many writers use continuous and continual as if they were exact synonyms, but my English teachers taught their students to distinguish between them. A Man is Not a Widow: Last night, not for the first time, I heard someone refer to a man as a â€Å"widow.† Not only did I hear this usage, I saw it headlined across a Powerpoint slide at the presentation I was attending. The Yiddish Handbook: 40 Words You Should Know: The Yiddish language is a wonderful source of rich expressions, especially terms of endearment (and of course, complaints and insults). This article is a follow up on Ten Yiddish Expressions You Should Know. Jewish scriptwriters introduced many Yiddish words into popular culture, which often changed the original meanings drastically. You might be surprised to learn how much Yiddish you already speak, but also, how many familiar words actually mean something different in real Yiddish. Celtic: /sel tik/ or /kel tik/?: What is the â€Å"correct† pronunciation of the word Celtic? Boston Celtic fans prefer the soft c sound, but Irish dancers tend to go with the hard c sound. The Generalist vs. The Specialist: One of the biggest problems facing modern day freelance writers is whether to spread out and write on a variety of subjects, or whether to specialise in markets they are able to â€Å"expert† in. Caesar, Kaiser, and Czar: To begin with, â€Å"Caesar† was a family name. Now, in various forms, it is a generic term for â€Å"ruler† or â€Å"emperor.† Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the General category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:50 Idioms About TalkingIn Search of a 4-Dot EllipsisWhat the heck are "learnings"?

World Music Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

World Music - Essay Example It requires the breath of the player to play it efficiently. The cultural history of aero-phones is found in Latin America. There are many artifact evidences available for aero-phone usage in historic times in Latin Amercia (Kuss, 2004, pp.263-264). Ductless, Duct, Lip suction aero-phones and reed made aero-phones all are the musical cultural identity of Latin America. Other cultures use aero-phones in form of Mizwid and Nay in Arabic music (Arab Music, 2009), Mouth organs like Shakuhachi in Japan (Musical Instruments, 2000) and flutes in Indian culture. Chordophones have a huge emergence from Arabic, Latin America, India, West Africa and Chinese culture. It is used abundantly in Arabic Music in the form of ud, buzuq, qanun and rababah also in Pakistan, India, Turkey and Greece (Arab Music, 2009). Laud, a Latin American pear shaped instrument is descendant of Ud from Arabic musical instruments (Torres, 2013, pp.228). They create sound of music with strike, shake or pluck. In Arabic music, sijat and mihbaj used and can be categorized in idiophones (Arab Music, 2009). Zill is an example of idiophones used by musicians and belly dancers. Xylophones, Gong-chimes, and Cymbals and Metallophones, are used widely in Asian culture and hence are the most prominent culture for idiophones (Musical Instruments of the Indian Subcontinent, 2013). These are chiefly drums. They use stretched surface to create voice. Membranophones are used commonly in African, Arabic and Asian cultures. The most prominent use of these is in African culture in form of drums. In Asian culture, tabla is a membranaphone used in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India etc. In Chinese culture Tsuzmui made up of deer skin is used (Musical Instruments, 2000). In Arabic music, the instruments are tabl, darbukkah and riqq (Arab Music, 2009). Master players of riq include Mohamed El Arabi , Adel Shams Eddine , Hossam Ramzi from Egypt (Arabic Musical Instruments,

Midwifery focused option Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Midwifery focused option - Essay Example In this essay, the role of midwives in facilitating women centered care will be discussed through case analysis of a woman in labour through review of appropriate literature. Review of prenatal care On admission, the midwife taking care of Karen must review her prenatal history and antenatal care provided. Prenatal care is very important in any pregnancy. According to NICE guidelines (2003), all pregnant women who seek prenatal care must be given evidence-based information and allowed to take informed decisions about their care. Issues like "who will take care of the pregnant woman" and "where will the delivery be conducted" should be based on the pregnant woman's choice and after receiving enough information about various options available. Blood tests which merit importance are diabetes screening, serological tests for rubella, cytomegalovirus, toxoplasmosis, herpes, syphilis, hepatitis B and humman immunodeficiency virus, hemoglobin and thyroid function tests. During the antenatal check ups, drugs taken by the patient must be reviewed and in case the mother is consuming alcohol or is smoking, she must be motivated to refrain from them. Infact, these and other issues must be addressed much before the conception of the fetus and it is known as preconception care. One of the important strategies of preconception care is to take folic acid supplements to prevent neural tube defects in the baby (Atrash et al, 2006). Labour Karen is a primigravida mother with term gestation. Karen awaited onset of labour at home. The midwife gave her adequate information as to when to contact the midwife. When Karen was in early labour, she was assessed away from the delivery unit. There is evidence that such a practice results in less number of interventions during active phase of labour (McNiven et al, 1998). The midwife must discuss the plan of birth with Karen and make her comfortable. After Karen gets admitted in the hospital, unnecessary digital examination must be avoided t o prevent infection (Hannah et al 1996). Fetal heart must be monitored using a sonicaid. The descent of the presenting part, color and quality of the liquor and various other maternal observations must be assessed and recorded. There are four dimensions of support which women need to be given in labour and they are informational support, emotional support, physical support and advocacy (Hodnett, 1996). There is enough evidence to point that provision of continuous support in labour shortens the course of labour, decreases the use of pharmacological analgesia and decreases the use of forceps during delivery (Hodnett, 1996). The midwife must help Karen in choosing nonpharmacological methods of pain relief because they are safe for both mother and baby (Watson, 1994). The most commonly used nonpharmacological method of pain relief is exercise therapy which must be taught in antenatal classes. The requirements of pain medications are less in those who are prepared well in antenatal clas ses (Watson, 1994). Karens's progression of labour must be monitored through vaginal examination. Progression of labour involves moving of cervix from posterior position to anterior position, ripening or softening of cervix, effacement of cervix, dilatation of cervix, rotation, flexing and moulding of head and descent of fetus (Simkin & Ancheta, 2000). Vaginal examinations are painful and a source of distress (Simkin &

Medication Errors V.S Bar Coding Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Medication Errors V.S Bar Coding - Essay Example In an analysis of 334 medication errors from II acute care wards, 39 % of the problems were judged to occur during physician ordering, 12% during transcription and verification, 11% during pharmacy dispensing and 38% during nursing administration (Patterson 2002). The intravenous (IV) administration of drug is a complex process and errors frequently occur. For example, in a recent study on 10 wards in the two UK hospitals it was found that errors occurred in almost half the IV drug preparations and administrations, 1% of which were severe and 58% moderate. The main findings of the study are as follows: An error rate of 73% occurred when giving bolus doses (172 errors in 235 observed administrations). An error rate of 14% occurred when preparing drugs that required multiple steps (50 errors in 345 observed multiple step preparations). An ethnographic study was conducted to investigate IV drug errors in two UK hospitals. This research method offers the advantage that the context can be explored at the time of the error and many of the conditions, which contribute to errors, as outlined by human error theory, can be identified in this context. A purposive sampling strategy was used to collect data in different hospital settings. A trained and experienced observer accompanied nurses during IV drug rounds on 10 wards in two hospitals (one University teaching hospital and one non-teaching hospital) in the UK. Information came from observation and talking informally to staff. Human error theory was used to analyze the causes of IV error. Both hospitals operated a typical ward pharmacy service in which doctors wrote prescriptions on formatted inpatient drug charts and nurses used the charts to determine the doses to be given and to record the administration of drugs. IV medication in general was prepared and administere d on the wards by nursing staff, with the exception of cytotoxic medication, which was prepared centrally by the pharmacy department. This disguised, observation method has been shown to be valid for identification of medication errors. Each case of IV medications error was analyzed to identity the main active failure and the factors contributing to this error. Medication was omitted because of failures in communication in 14 errors (16%). This occurred when patients were transferred between wards and information on drug administration was not communicated. Communication problems between doctors and nurses included ambiguous hand written prescriptions. These cases also indicated failures in adequately using and checking patient's drug charts. High workload and distractions when carrying out several tasks at the same time were observed in 13 errors ( Taxis 2003)) A prospective audit was carried out by Cousins D.H (2005) by direct

Informal report on two career choices Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Informal report on two career choices - Essay Example It can be stated that the development of the businesses of various organizations concerning both in domestic and foreign markets eventually creates better job opportunities to the individuals (Columbia University, 2007). It is in this context that the individuals are required to be qualified, knowledgeable as well as experienced in order to be suitably employed in any organization. Moreover, the individuals should possess certain effective skills with the intention of performing their different activities in an enhanced manner (Columbia University, 2007). This paper intends to discuss about two particular career choices relating to the field of accounting and engineering. Moreover, a recommendation in order to pursue one of the aforementioned career choices will also be presented in this paper. Career Opportunity in the Field of Accounting Qualification in accounting provides ample opportunities for an individual to make a bright career in future. In this similar context, it has appa rently observed that the individuals possessing accounting qualification are provided with better job opportunities in various industries as well as businesses (British Council, 2013). The different sorts of operational functions or services that are involved in the field of accounting comprise audit, advisor and tax. From the perspective of audit service, an auditor evaluates the financial statements of companies and certifies that the statements are relevant as well as valid. In relation to tax service, accountants develop effective strategies with the aim of minimizing tax liabilities for clients. From the standpoint of advisor service, the accountants provide suitable advices on tax laws and prepare tax returns on behalf of the clients (Stephen M. Ross School of Business, 2013). In relation to determine career opportunity especially in accounting field, it has been apparently observed that there are around 46,000 firms that provide services linked with public accounting in the U S. The different services that are involved with public accounting are auditing, international accounting, assurance services, forensic accounting, information technology and management consulting services among others. Additionally, accountants are recognized to be involved with various business as well as industries that range from family business to multinational corporations and perform various operational functions. In this similar concern, the functions comprise delivering services relating to financial management, internal auditing, financial reporting, tax planning and management accounting (State University of New York, 2011). In the government sector, accounting professionals are observed to be performing various effective operations such as advisory services and business process outsourcing among others. In this respect, accountants are involved with the state, federal as well as the local government agencies with the objective of performing the aforementioned operations. It has viewed that apart from the government sector, accounting professional are also involved in educational sector. In educational sector, accountants perform various operations that include financial accounting as well as auditing. Moreover, the accountants provide professional guidance to students with relation to cost and managerial accounting and taxation among others (State

Henry Hill in Film of Goodfellas Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Henry Hill in Film of Goodfellas - Essay Example A crucial example supporting this is the lifestyle that he led, which was full of riches. In addition, he himself claimed that he had always wanted to belong to a gang and it would have been a better achievement than being the President of the United States. In most instances, he had people supporting his actions and encouraging him, which meant that it would not be easy for him to leave the life. In fact, at one time, fully aware of the actions that Hill was involved in, his wife’s mother put up her house as bail so that Hill could leave jail. This is relentless support for crime and heinous actions in the society. This shows a huge difference between the films of the 60s where the gangs had no friends and the family members did not condone their behavior and could even have them arrested. Such actions bring many differences in the films that were produced between the 60s and the 90s. Therefore, Henry Hill is not portrayed as a villain that the audience wanted to see lose but one that was viewed as a hero. In fact, the audience wants them to succeed, when analyzing the storyline critically. Among the motives that prompted him to explore into criminality is money. He always wanted to live a good life and through crime, he managed to make enough to live expensive lifestyles. In addition, he wanted to make a name for himself in a neighborhood that he termed as ‘full of nobodies’. This can be taken to mean that he wanted to enter a social class of the group of people who were rich through the easiest ways available regardless of the morality involved. This depicts a desire for materialism. His main reason was to avoid being poor. This movement into crime seems justified to him because he had very many reasons to justify himself.

Informal report on two career choices Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Informal report on two career choices - Essay Example It can be stated that the development of the businesses of various organizations concerning both in domestic and foreign markets eventually creates better job opportunities to the individuals (Columbia University, 2007). It is in this context that the individuals are required to be qualified, knowledgeable as well as experienced in order to be suitably employed in any organization. Moreover, the individuals should possess certain effective skills with the intention of performing their different activities in an enhanced manner (Columbia University, 2007). This paper intends to discuss about two particular career choices relating to the field of accounting and engineering. Moreover, a recommendation in order to pursue one of the aforementioned career choices will also be presented in this paper. Career Opportunity in the Field of Accounting Qualification in accounting provides ample opportunities for an individual to make a bright career in future. In this similar context, it has appa rently observed that the individuals possessing accounting qualification are provided with better job opportunities in various industries as well as businesses (British Council, 2013). The different sorts of operational functions or services that are involved in the field of accounting comprise audit, advisor and tax. From the perspective of audit service, an auditor evaluates the financial statements of companies and certifies that the statements are relevant as well as valid. In relation to tax service, accountants develop effective strategies with the aim of minimizing tax liabilities for clients. From the standpoint of advisor service, the accountants provide suitable advices on tax laws and prepare tax returns on behalf of the clients (Stephen M. Ross School of Business, 2013). In relation to determine career opportunity especially in accounting field, it has been apparently observed that there are around 46,000 firms that provide services linked with public accounting in the U S. The different services that are involved with public accounting are auditing, international accounting, assurance services, forensic accounting, information technology and management consulting services among others. Additionally, accountants are recognized to be involved with various business as well as industries that range from family business to multinational corporations and perform various operational functions. In this similar concern, the functions comprise delivering services relating to financial management, internal auditing, financial reporting, tax planning and management accounting (State University of New York, 2011). In the government sector, accounting professionals are observed to be performing various effective operations such as advisory services and business process outsourcing among others. In this respect, accountants are involved with the state, federal as well as the local government agencies with the objective of performing the aforementioned operations. It has viewed that apart from the government sector, accounting professional are also involved in educational sector. In educational sector, accountants perform various operations that include financial accounting as well as auditing. Moreover, the accountants provide professional guidance to students with relation to cost and managerial accounting and taxation among others (State

Develop and document the scope of a project Research Paper

Develop and document the scope of a project - Research Paper Example They are Marketing and Sales departments. The corresponding departments in the sister company also perform the same function and are highly interdependent. These departments are very essential if not the most important departments for both companies in case of undertaking the project of releasing the new product to the market. This is so because of the strategic role the departments play in the successful realization of the project implementation (Dervaes, 1998). This paper tries to give a brief scope of the project with a clear outline of some important issues that concern the project. Some of the issues that are outlined in the scope include, but not limited to: the deliverables in the project, the specific limitations of the project and its scope together with the specific exclusions and assumptions that come with the project while implementing the project. These assumptions are specific to the operations that are undertaken in the distribution chains in Winsome sales department. Some of the specific deliverables that are expected from the project include meeting the sale volumes that have been set by the sales and marketing departments of both companies. The company plans to double the sales volume in the next fiscal year as a result of an introduction of the new product. This could mean that the Sales department would be required to increase their human resource capacity by contracting more staff to help in the achievement of these targets. Alternatively, Winsome manufacturing would procure the services of its sister company. To choose one among these two options, the company will undertake an analysis to find out which of the two options is a better one concerning the financial obligations that each project requires. If procuring the services of the sister company is the cheapest option, there must be specific terms and conditions that should be agreed upon in order to make sure the company will succeed. The factors that affect the project also include it s limitations and challenges. They must be well addressed in order to help the company successfully meet its targets without obligatory affecting other products (Dervaes, 1998). A steep competition from the other firms in the industry must be considered. Elaborate plans to counter their influence must be adhered to in order to achieve the overall objective of the company which is to double its sales volume in the next fiscal year. There are key elements of the products that must also be addressed like the branding which will help market the new product. Its pricing structure must also be addressed well with intense marketing also done. Some of the specific exclusions that must be identified in order to be certain that the venture succeeds include excluding this particular project from the other products that have been manufactured by the company. This product should be given a lot of emphasis with its features and advantages made known to all the customers who would be as well poten tial buyers of the product. Other existing products that the firm is producing in the market should also be excluded in the general analysis of the firm performance (Mathur, 2006). There must also be proper communication channels between the two companies and strategic customers. These means that all the information regarding the product must be made available to sales representatives of both Winsome and the sister company, and they should be able to pass the same

Team Sports Essay Example for Free

Team Sports Essay A team sport includes any sportwhich involves players working together towards a shared objective. It is an activity in which a group of individuals, on the same team, work together to accomplish an ultimate goal which is usually to win. This can be done in a number of ways such as outscoring the opposing team. Team members set goals, make decisions, communicate, manage conflict, and solve problems in a supportive, trusting atmosphere in order to accomplish their objectives. This can be seen in sports such as hockey,football, American football, baseball, association football, basketball, volleyball, tennis, water polo, lacrosse, rowing, rugby league, rugby union, cricket, handball and many others. Different kinds of team sports * Basketball * Volleyball * Baseball * Football * American football * British baseball * Beach volleyball * Sepak takraw * Airsoft * Ultimate * Underwater rugby Volleyball Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by a net. Each team tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other teams court under organized rules It has been a part of the official program of the Summer Olympic Games since 1964. Objectives of volleyball PUT THE BALL INTO PLAY Every volleyball point starts with one team serving the ball and the other team receiving it. The serving team must clear the ball over the net and in bounds, and the receiving team must return over the net and in bounds before it hits the ground. Before the match begins, the referee will conduct a coin toss to determine which team serves first and on which side of the court each team begins the match. Win the Rally To score a point in volleyball, you must win a rally or have your opponent commit a fault. The rally begins with the serve and ends as soon as the ball hits the ground. If the serving team wins the rally, it receives 1 point and retains service. If the receiving teams wins the rally, it receives 1 point and gains service. Faults occur whenever one team breaks a rule of the game. If both teams commit a fault at the same time, you replay the rally with neither team receiving a point. Win the Set The first team to score 25 points in a set, except for the fifth set, wins that set. You must win a set by at least 2 points, however, so play continues until one team has a lead of two points after reaching 25. Win the Match To win a match, you must win three out of five sets. If each team wins two of the first four sets, your final set will go to 15 points instead of 25. Teams must still win the final set by at least 2 points, so play continues past 15 until one team achieves this. In a tournament, teams will play only three sets, so the first team to win two sets wins the match. If a tournament requires a playoff to determine which team advances, you will play a one-set playoff. Tournament organizers will predetermine whether you play the set to 15 or 25 points and you must win by 2 points. Defense: Rational defense As the name suggests, players rotate into their read position based on how the play is developing. For instance, if the opponent sets to its outside hitter, the middle front and right-side front players block. The outside blocker stays home and covers the rest of the front court. The right back defender edges up behind the blockers to pick up balls tipped over them. The left back is responsible for the deep angle ball. The middle back rotates to the same sideline where the ball was set. The rotation changes if the opponent sets to its right-side hitter or the middle hitter. Perimeter defense In the perimeter defense, players start in the same base position as in rotational defense. But as the play unfolds, there is less movement into the read positions. This is a good defense to dig out hard-driven balls. It is more vulnerable to tips, relying on players to take away those plays with their athletic ability. As such, it is more popular with mens teams with more size and range. Man Up or Red Defense As the name suggests, the man up or red defense moves a back player up to support the front three players. This protects the middle of court from middle attacks and tips. It keeps the wing players deep. This formation minimizes the movement from base position to defensive zone. The deeper base positions allow players to keep most plays in front of them. Fine-Tuning the Schemes Within these basic concepts, countless adjustments can be made to suit the ability of the team. Hybrid defensive schemes are common. As volleyball coaching legend Bill Neville once said, Defense should be designed so that it allows for putting the best diggers in areas that will most often be attacked. Brief history of volleyball In 1995, the sport of Volleyball was 100 years old! The sport originated in the United States, and is now just achieving the type of popularity in the U.S. that it has received on a global basis, where it ranks behind only soccer among participation sports. Today there are more than 800 million players worldwide who play Volleyball at least once a week. In 1895, William G. Morgan, an instructor at the Young Mens Christian Association (YMCA) in Holyoke, Mass., decided to blend elements of basketball, baseball, tennis, and handball to create a game for his classes of businessmen which would demand less physical contact than basketball. He created the game of Volleyball (at that time called mintonette). Morgan borrowed the net from tennis, and raised it 6 feet 6 inches above the floor, just above the average mans head. During a demonstration game, someone remarked to Morgan that the players seemed to be volleying the ball back and forth over the net, and perhaps volleyball would be a more descriptive name for the sport. On July 7, 1896 at Springfield College the first game of volleyball was played. * In 1900, a special ball was designed for the sport. * In 1916, in the Philippines, an offensive style of passing the ball in a high trajectory to be struck by another player (the set and spike) were introduced. * In 1917, the game was changed from 21 to 15 points. * In 1920, three hits per side and back row attack rules were instituted. * In 1930, the first two-man beach game was played. * In 1934, the approval and recognition of national volleyball referees. * In 1947, the Federation Internationale De Volley-Ball (FIVB) was founded. * In 1948, the first two-man beach tournament was held. * In 1949, the initial World Championships were held in Prague, Czechoslovakia. * In 1964, Volleyball was introduced to the Olympic Games in Tokyo. * In 1974, the World Championships in Mexico were telecast in Japan. * In 1987, the FIVB added a Beach Volleyball World Championship Series. * In 1990, the World League was created. * In 1995, the sport of Volleyball was 100 years old! * In 1996, 2-person beach volleyball was added to the Olympics While serving, coaches may make more zones to serve to so that they can make the other team move and force a bad pass. Some people determine zones according to the net. These are where their sets are going to go in the offensive. Basic skills in volleyball Volleyball play is comprised of the following basic components: passing, setting, spiking, blocking, serving, and receiving serve. * Passing is the act of sending the volleyball to a setter so that he or she can, in turn, present the ball to the spiker for an attack. The two primary passing methods are the bump and the dig. * Setting the ball is a critical area of the overall offensive attack. If the set is poorly placed, it can dramatically lower the effectiveness of even versatile spikers, because it limits their hitting options and their likelihood of hitting a kill shot for a point or sideout. Conversely, a well-delivered set gives a hitter a much better chance to avoid blocks and direct the ball strategically. * Spiking is the act of driving the volleyball hard into an area of your opponents court. The two basic power shots are the cross-court shot and the baseline shot.Once an opponent has developed a healthy respect for a teams spiking power, alternative offensive shots such as tips and dinks can be employed with greater effectiveness. * Blocking is the primary defensive skill used to neutralize strong spiking attacks. It involves using players arms to form a wall in front of the spiker, thus making it more difficult for him or her to hit the ball into the opposite court. When properly executed, a good block can be an effective weapon in scoring points or securing sideouts. In high-level competition, teams commonly employ more than one blocker against good spikers. * Serving is a very important element of volleyball. A server who can serve the ball reliably and skillfully will help his or her team far more than will a player who, for instance, is inconsistent with their serving. There are a variety of serves that are employed in competitive volleyball, from floaters that seem to shimmy and shake on their way over the net to hard-driven jump serves. * Receiving the serve is vital to success for any team. Poor reception of service puts teams hoping to get a sideout at a huge disadvantage right from the beginning. If the person receiving the serve is unable to make a good pass to the setter, then the setters task of setting a good ball to the spiker is made that much more difficult. Receiving the serve sets the tone, then, for the whole offensive sequence that follows.

Outpatient Treatment for Mental Health in New York

Outpatient Treatment for Mental Health in New York Michael Woodworth   For many individuals in the United States, mental and behavioral illness is something they must deal with on a daily basis. For many of those, the depression, anxiety, and feeling of powerlessness has become the norm due to a lack of treatment options. As the number of affected individuals grows, outpatient clinics are becoming the treatment of choice for many Americans and in New York this trend also holds true. With the third highest population in the United States, New York is home to over one million individuals suffering from mental illness. According to the 2015 census, the number of individuals suffering from mental illness had reached an all-time high of 900,000 adults and 528,000 adolescents (Friedman, Woods, LaPorte, 2016, p. 4). Despite the alarming increase in numbers, less than 20% of those affected by mental illness receive adequate, if any treatment at all (Friedman, Woods, LaPorte, 2016, p. 4). Although this may be partly due to the individual choosing not to receive care, I believe there is a direct correlation between the policies and procedures New York has put in place that govern the access, cost, and quality of mental health care. The New York State Office of Mental Health currently has over 50 categories of policies and procedures that govern treatment options, approved providers, medication, and criteria patients must meet to be treated, just to name a few (Office of Mental Health, 2017). As a result, many individuals choose to self-medicate or simply ignore their symptom rather than deal with the bureaucracy that surrounds behavioral health as well as the negative stigma associated with anyone receiving the treatment. Of the 20% of individuals receiving mental health services in New York, nearly 71% are through outpatient treatment services. Outpatient treatment exist as a way of providing access to individuals who are suffering from disorders that may not require intensive inpatient treatment. They are capable of treating disorders such as depression, anxiety, grief, phobias, trauma, and so forth. Overview on Outpatient Care Systems Outpatient care can provide a wide variety of services to individuals seeking assistance with their mental and behavioral health. These services include, but are not limited to: individual counseling, group therapy, acupuncture, massage therapy, DBT, art therapy, interventions, couples and family therapy, and alcohol and drug detox. These services are based on severity and need and are often delivered by peer advocates, licensed counselors, nurse practitioners, case managers, clinical psychologists, psychiatrists, and medical doctors. New York State offers two main avenues of treatment to those seeking outpatient care; these are the hospital systems and the health programs available within the community. For many people in New York, there are only two ways into these outpatient programs. The first being through a referral from a qualified healthcare professional (QHP). This can include a primary care physician, clinician, psychologist, nurse practitioner, among others (Friedman, Woods, LaPorte, 2009). The second is through court mandated supervision and treatment, and with one in 52 adults in New York on probation or parole, this accounts for many outpatient treatment referrals. The question now becomes, with such incredible services available why are only 20% able to get them? The answer lies within the policies. Although the policies do provide expectations and restrictions regarding cost and quality, the majority of outpatient policies focus on access. These policies not only determine who is eligible to receive services, but also what services are covered by Medicaid and other insurance. So lets take a look at just how these policies hinder so many New Yorkers from receiving adequate services. Hospital Systems With the hospital system, as with any business, accessibility comes down to resources; and in many hospitals the resources are limited. As a result, outpatient care is reserved for those that will not only benefit from it the most, but also those who will bring the hospital the most profit. Most of the individuals in New York who are receiving mental health treatment are covered by Medicaid. Those covered by Medicaid are by definition poor, and despite the need for the treatment are unable to pay the out of pocket expenses associated with it (Garfield, 2016). This fact has had significant influence on the policy makers to establish a list of criteria that must be met in order for Medicaid to pay for the total treatment. In addition, they developed a list of reasons that a hospital can deny mental health services to patients. Unfortunately in New York, many of the hospitals have a board of directors that have little to no medical experience. Instead they are comprised of wealthy and powerful business professionals from within the community. For example, one prominent hospital in Upstate New York has a board of directors that consists of several CEOs and presidents of companies that have direct ties to the local congressmen and assemblymen. One of the members of the board is actually a longtime friend of the current Governor of New York. These ties to politicians along with a lack of medical knowledge often result in policies and decisions being made for the sole purpose of profit rather than care and in turn make access much more difficult. Community Based Services The second healthcare system is that of community based resources. This is where the bulk of outpatient mental health treatment occurs. Many of these resources are non-profit organizations that rely heavily on funding from the state. Accessibility to these resources are governed by the overall state budget and is solely based on where the money needs to be allocated that year. As a result, many community resources are limited in the number of patients they can treat due to the limited annual funds available. Much like the hospitals, this causes the community resources to deny service to many individuals that need treatment. In general, these services are delivered in three ways and are typically based on the severity of the need. Hospitals offer outpatient mental health counseling for individuals who may require a higher level of intensity. Hospitals often utilize psychiatrists who have the ability to recommend and prescribe psychotropic medications for those suffering from severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia. The second option for patients is a privately or publically run outpatient clinic. These facilities usually employ licensed clinicians who are supervised by a clinical psychologist. Although they can offer the same level of counseling services as the hospital, they are not equipped to prescribe or monitor medications. These facilities are primarily used to focus on the less intensive mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and addiction. The third option is counseling and guidance through a religious leader. Although this option can provide assistance with minor mental health issues, it is seldom covered under insurance. This is due to the fact that in most cases, the religious leader does not possess the required education or credentials to be recognized by the state as a legitimate form of mental health treatment. However, as a result many religious leaders choose to pursue degrees in mental health so they can better serve their congregation. Barriers to Care New York has several different levels of care which include intensive outpatient treatment, outpatient treatment, step down treatment, continuing day treatment, and assertive community treatment (Friedman, Woods, LaPorte, 2009, p. 12). Each of which is a step within the continuum of care provided by New York State Office of Mental Health. Generally speaking, these steps are effective when utilized appropriately by the patient and followed through with by the provider. Unfortunately the greatest barrier falls in the follow through of both the patient and the provider. With over 380,000 adults and 575,000 adolescents in New York suffering from severe and persistent mental illness (Friedman, Woods, LaPorte, 2009, p. 12), it is easy for a patient to fall through the cracks of the system. Many providers have limited time and resources to track down a patient that missed an appointment, or just check in on a regular basis to see if they are alright. As a result, many patients will feel unsupported and stop treatment all together. As previously stated, outpatient is usually reserved for those with a professional referral and as such the access can at times seem quite limited. In the clinics that I have worked in, a patient could arrive only after a referral had been received. After they have arrived, they would undergo several interviews and assessments to determine if they would benefit from the treatments the clinic offered. If they would, then they could begin treatment. If however they were thought to not benefit, they would be referred to another clinic or to the local hospital for further consideration. In New York, the need for mental health services are far greater than the resources available and therefore every clinic and outpatient service does seem to have an extensive waitlist for services. I was a case manager for a supportive living program working with veterans suffering from mental health disorders as well as addiction and chronic homelessness. My program was a 12 month intensive treatment program and had 24 beds/apartments available. At any given time, the waitlist for this program had well over 50 individuals listed on it. Outpatient access is a serious concern in New York and so far has left much to be desired. For many individuals who require outpatient mental health services, access comes with three major barriers: Finding a clinic, getting approval from Medicaid and insurance, and physically getting to the clinic. Far too often these barriers hinder individuals from receiving adequate, if any services they so desperately need. With the constant change to Medicaid waiver services and insurance, it is difficult for clinics to accept every patient in need. With private insurance, managed care, and straight Medicaid placing strict eligibility and billing restrictions on the clinics, it is amazing that they are able to stay open at all. These regulations are causing the clinics to become more business focused instead of focusing on the real reason they exist. As a result of the clinics focusing more on the business, they are more inclined to accept patients that they can profit from the most. This ultimately tends to sway more towards those with private insurance as they are more likely to get approval for ongoing treatment. This leaves the majority of individuals suffering from mental health disorders to fend for themselves. As with any treatment, a referral is required to receive treatment in an outpatient setting. Attempting to get this referral poses the second struggle to accessibility. Many of those suffering from these disorders do not have a primary physician and are likely to go to free clinics if they seek assistance at all. As a result, many individuals are simply prescribed medications like Zoloft by the attending physician and told that they have a cookie cutter diagnosis of depression or anxiety. On average, it takes nearly six months of trial and error in medication before a referral is given and accepted by insurance or Medicaid. In far too many situations, the individual has given up on treatment before reaching the six months. Getting to a clinic often poses a barrier to those in a low income bracket. These individuals are unable to purchase transportation on their own and rely heavily on others or public transportation to maintain mobility. This requires them to find clinics that are on bus or subway line if they live in the city, or friends and family if they live in a more rural location. This causes unnecessary instability in treatment due to the patients inability to commit to a treatment schedule. For the more than 30 million adults in the United States that require but do not receive mental health services, 45 percent claim that the cost is the biggest deterrent. The average outpatient service can cost between $100 and $5,000 based on the service and the credentials of the provider (Babakian, 2013). In New York City the average rates for outpatient services are as follows: $80 $120 for a 45-55 minute standard counseling session (Babakian, 2013). $200 $300 for a 45 minute session with a psychologist or psychiatrist (Babakian, 2013). $60 $100 for group sessions facilitated by a licensed provider (Babakian, 2013). $300 $ 460 for individual art, music, and/or recreation therapy sessions with a licensed provider (Babakian, 2013). As with any healthcare service these can be paid for using self-pay, private insurance, and government insurance such as Medicaid and Medicare. Unfortunately due to the restrictions imposed by the mental health policies in New York, many individuals are forced to pay a significant amount out of pocket. As a result, many outpatient providers offer patients sliding scale charges which can be 30 percent lower than standard fees, payment plans with and without interest, and in some situations income based fees (Babakian, 2013). Although outpatient treatment is covered by most insurance, it is seldom covered in full. This causes many patients to stop treatment as a result of an inability to pay the deductible or co-pay. At this time, New York does not offer any additional assistance with co-pays or medical bills for individuals receiving outpatient services. However, if the patient were to be admitted to an inpatient clinic as a result of a mental hygiene arrest or emergency room visit, it would be covered in full by many insurance providers including Medicaid. This creates a situation that is counterproductive in that we do not offer treatment as an early intervention but rather offer it after the individual has reached a breaking point. In order to get an insiders opinion of the current barriers within outpatient care, I was able to interview Megan Cortese, LCAT. Ms. Cortese is a licensed art therapist and senior clinician in a very prominent outpatient clinic in Rochester, NY. During the interview I simply asked her what she sees as a barrier to her current and future clients. When asked what she would want to change about the overall way mental health services are provided, she had the following to say. The current system of mental health services has two major flaws; funding and accountability. Ms. Cortese stated that due to budgetary restrictions, lack of government funding, and overall economy struggles the quality of care is becoming lower. She stated that the clinical staff are underpaid and told to meet with as many clients as possible in a day. She stated that this causes many clinicians to burn out and therefore provide a subpar level of treatment. Ms. Cortese also stated that the lack of accountability from patients on Medicaid is ridiculous. She stated that when a patient on Medicaid does not show to an appointment that there are no penalties to the patient such as the cancelation fee that those of us with private insurance would have. Ms. Cortese stated that this causes patients to continuously miss appointments and therefore miss out on beneficial treatments. Quality of Care As for quality of care, New York does seem to excel at regulating the providers and clinics. The New York State Justice Center monitors, regulates, investigates, and enforces all policies regarding the fair treatment of individuals under care. As a result, every clinic is held to the same standards and accountability in regards to the treatment of patients. Although this is beneficial in providing adequate and proper treatment to all those involved in outpatient clinics, it is only effective if the patients are able to receive services. Policy and Influence So now that we have reviewed how these polices can hinder treatment, we must next understand not only how the policies come to be, but also who has the power to influence them. Health policy in todays modern world poses several complex legal, ethical, and social questions and as such require qualified individuals to write, approve, and integrate them into the current healthcare systems. As with the nation as a whole, New York relies heavily on Government officials to accomplish this objective while simultaneously respect and protect the rights of patients. As a result, several highly diverse and complicated groups are tasked with the oversight of these policies. Healthcare policies in New York are developed through the three branches of government; the judiciary, legislature, and executive branches. The judiciary branch is responsible for overseeing new policies to ensure that they do not violate any human rights as well meet all legal and financial guidelines. The legislature reserves the right to conduct hearings in an attempt to gather sufficient data from all parties involved with the policy. This ultimately provides additional checks and balances to ensure the legality and effectiveness of the proposed policy. The executive branch, or Governors office retains the power to sign the new proposed policy into law after it has made it through the checks and balances from the judicial and legislative branch (Gostin, 1995). Now despite a significant set of checks and balances within New York, policies are not always reviewed as they should be. Far too often members of the three government branches are influenced by outside factors and groups. As previously mentioned, outpatient treatment in New York has many governing bodies; which along with providers, insurance companies, and several special interest groups all have a way of influencing the current policies. Each of these groups have a significant impact on the access, cost, and quality of care that patients receive while participating in outpatient services. The real question is who has the power and are they using it to benefit the patient or are they simply looking out for their bottom line. So lets start from the bottom of the hierarchy and work our way up. At the bottom of the outpatient ladder are the small and seldom heard from special interest groups. In New York these are groups such as; NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), NMHA (National Mental Health Association), as well as smaller support groups located throughout the state. The main focus of these groups is to educate the public, influence change and improvement, and advocate for the patients. Many of these groups rely heavily on petitions and public outcry to influence change and policy at the higher levels of the state government. Even though these groups do not carry the influence of some other groups, with a mass of concerned voters behind them, they are usually quite effective. Sitting on the next rung of the ladder are the providers who influence treatment and policy by acting as a deciding factor as to what if any treatment is recommended. The providers are in essence the frontline of the outpatient world. The providers conduct the assessments that provide the information to choose the most beneficial treatment option. The providers are able to influence policy by simply choosing a course of action. If the majority of providers choose the same treatment for a particular diagnosis, then it is likely that the governing bodies will consider that to be the go-to treatment. Once this is the case, it is very likely that policies will be rewritten to reflect this treatment as the acceptable one. Sitting on the next rung is the insurance companies. The insurance companies have significant influence over policy simply because they pay for it. Insurance controls who gets treatment, where they get treatment, and what quality of treatment they can receive. This is of course all based on what tier level the patients insurance plan is on. Ultimately, the insurance company has the ability to approve or deny treatments simply based on the overall cost and as a result many patients are unable to access necessary treatments and medications. Now, at the top of the ladder is the state agencies such as Department of Health (DOH), Office of Mental Health (OMH), State Legislature, and the Governor. It is implied that these people have the ultimate influence over access, cost, and quality of outpatient mental health treatment. Policy recommendations are delivered from the DOH and OMH to the legislature who then agrees and passes them along to the Governor, or disagrees and sends them back to the agencies for revision. Once in the hands of the Governor, the policy is either approved or denied. As most healthcare in New York is Medicaid funded, the Governor has significant influence over who gets treatment and what treatments are offered simply by approving the state budget. If the Governor approves a policy that allows more access to treatment, he must also approve an increase in taxes to maintain funding. However, if the Governor does not pass a policy for increased care, they may lose ratings and therefore votes. As a result, it is a very complex balancing act when influencing health care policy. Although the aforementioned groups seem to have the most influence over health care in New York, I stumbled across a group of individuals that seem to have influence over the Governor himself. The United Healthcare Workers Union (1199SEIU) is a union of pharmacists, nurses, and physicians located throughout the nation. The influential power of this group is astounding. In 2009, the full power of this organization was felt by then Governor David Paterson. With a severe surge in Medicaid costs in New York, Governor Paterson proposed $3.5 billion in cuts to the Medicaid program. The Governor proposed shifting monies away from inpatient hospitals and into outpatient clinics which were significantly less expensive (Eide DiSalvo, 2015). This would have resulted in a 2% loss in revenue for the inpatient hospitals annually. Medicaid is the primary source of funding for the inpatient hospitals which employ a majority of 1199SEIU members. The union responded to the Governors proposal with a serious ad blitz which cost over $1 million per week. After a month of adds belittling the Governor, Paterson retreated and instead approved tax increases and cuts to other programs (Eide DiSalvo, 2015). As a result of the serious influence by the 1199SEIU, the overall quality, access, and cost of care suffered. In an act that simply secured their own interests, the patients suffered. Overall, the diverse and effective variety of outpatient treatments available in New York is quite impressive and could provide much needed assistance to many individuals. However, the lack of accessibility and increasing out of pocket costs create significant barriers to those individuals who need the treatment the most. In order for New York to effectively serve those needing mental health treatment, it is necessary for the policymakers to begin thinking in terms of care rather than profit. References Babakian, G. (2013, December 17). How Much Does Mental Health Care Cost? Retrieved from Clear Health Costs: https://clearhealthcosts.com/blog/2013/12/how-much-does-mental-health-care-cost-part-1-series/ Cortese, M. (2017, January 29). Outpatient Barriers. (M. Woodworth, Interviewer) Garfield, R. (2016, October 19). The Coverage Gap: Uninsured Poor Adults in States that Do Not Expand Medicaid. Retrieved from Kaiser Family Foundation: http://kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/the-coverage-gap-uninsured-poor-adults-in-states-that-do-not-expand-medicaid/ Lawrence Gostin, J. L. (1995). The formulation of health policy by the three branches of government. Retrieved from The National Academies of Sciences Engineering Medicine: https://www.nap.edu/read/4771/chapter/17 Michael B. Friedman, G. W. (2009). New York States Mental Health System. New York: Mental Health Association of New York City. Office of Mental Health. (2017, January 1). OMH Official Policy Manual. Retrieved from Office of Mental Health: https://www.omh.ny.gov/omhweb/policymanual/contents.htm Stephen Eide, D. D. (2015). The Union That Rules New York. The City Journal.

William Shakespeare :: English Literature Essays

William Shakespeare William Shakespeare was a very successful man; he was an English dramatist and poet. (1) He is considered the greatest playwright who ever lived. His comedies, sonnets, (the solid fact, however, of Meres’s mention of the Sonnets, two of which (though the whole collection was not published till ten years later) appeared secret, it would seem, next year (1599), introduces another range of hypothetical exercise in biography, which has sometimes been followed in opposition to the former method, but has been more frequently combined with it so as to permit of even more fruitful and wilder expatiation.), tragedies, and poetry. He has been famous ever since all of his works. He wasn’t really recognized then, because people didn’t know or understand who he was, now people know what he has done. The table of Shakespeare's plays is uncertain, but a reasonable approximation of their order can be imply from dates of publication, references in contemporary writings, and resources in the plays to contemporary events, thematic relationships, and metrical and stylistic comparisons. One of his accomplishments was his famous tragedy; it was called â€Å"Romeo & Juliet†, written by Shakespeare at a somewhat connection in his literary career, most probably in 1594 or 1595. In Romeo and Juliet the main plot, in which the new love between Romeo and Juliet comes into conflict with the longstanding hatred between their families, is skillfully advanced, while the true development of minor characters supports and enriches it. The most complex of Shakespeare's early plays, Romeo and Juliet is far more than (2) â€Å"a play of young love† or â€Å"the world's typical love-tragedy.† Weaving together a large number of related impressions and judgments, it is as much about hate as love. It tells of a family and its home as well as a feud and a tragic marriage. The public life of Verona and the private lives of the Veronese make up the setting for the love of Juliet and Romeo and provide the background against which their love can be estimated. (1) The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 1994-2000, â€Å"William Shakespeare† (2) The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 1994- 2000, â€Å"William Shakespeare† It is not the deaths of the lovers that enclose the play but the public revelation of what has happened, with the admonitions of the Prince and the reconciliation of the two families. Another one of William’s works of art is Hamlet. Hamlet is a legendary Danish prince and hero of Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

Also by Amitav Ghosh The Hungry Tide Incendiary Circumstances

Also by Amitav Ghosh The Hungry Tide Incendiary Circumstances The Glass Palace The Calcutta Chromosome In an Antique Land The Circle of Reason Sea of Poppies River of Smoke The Shadow Lines Amitav Ghosh www. johnmurray. co. uk First published in Great Britain in 1988 by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd First published in 2011 by John Murray (Publishers) An Hachette UK Company  © Amitav Ghosh 1988 The right of Amitav Ghosh to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Li brary Epub ISBN 978-1-84854-423-9 Book ISBN 978-1-84854-417-8 John Murray (Publishers) 338 Euston Road London NW1 3BH www. johnmurray. co. uk For Radhika and Harisen CONTENTSTitle Page Copyright Page Dedication Going Away Coming Home Going Away In 1939, thirteen years before I was born, my father’s aunt, Mayadebi, went to England with her husband and her son, Tridib. It startles me now to discover how readily the name comes off my pen as ‘Mayadebi’ for I have never spoken of her thus; not aloud, at any rate: as my grandmother’s only sister, she was always Mayathakuma to me. But still, from as far back as I can remember, I have known her, in the secrecy of my mind, as ‘Mayadebi’ – as though she were a well-known stranger, like a film star or a politician whose picture I had seen in a newspaper.Perhaps it was merely because I knew her very little, for she was not often in Calcutta. That explanation seems likely enough, but I know it to be untrue. The truth is that I did not want to think of her as a relative: to have done that would have diminished her and her family – I could not bring myself to believe that their worth in my eyes could be reduced to something so arbitrary and unimportant as a blood relationship. Mayadebi was twenty-nine when they left, and Tridib was eight.Over the years, although I cannot remember when it happened any more than I can remember when I first learnt to tell the time or tie my shoelaces, I have come to believe that I was eight too when Tridib first talked to me about that journey. I remember trying very hard to imagine him back to my age, to reduce his height to mine, and to think away the spectacles that were so much a part of him that I really believed he had been born with them. It wasn’t easy, for to me he looked old, impossibly old, and I could not remember him looking anything other than old – though, in fact, at that time he could not have been much older t han twenty-nine.In the end, since I had nothing to go on, I had decided that he had looked like me. But my grandmother, when I asked her, was very quick to contradict me. She shook her head firmly, looking up from her schoolbooks, and said: No, he looked completely different – not at all like you. My grandmother didn’t approve of Tridib. He’s a loafer and a wastrel, I would sometimes hear her saying to my parents; he doesn’t do any proper work, lives off his father’s money.To me, she would only allow herself to say with a sardonic little twist of her mouth: I don’t want to see you loafing about with Tridib; Tridib wastes his time. It didn’t sound terrible, but in fact, in my grandmother’s usage, there was nothing very much worse that could be said of anyone. For her, time was like a toothbrush: it went mouldy if it wasn’t used. I asked her once what happened to wasted time. She tossed her small silvery head, screwed up h er long nose and said: It begins to stink. As for herself, she had been careful to rid our little flat of everything that might encourage us to let our time stink.No chessboard nor any pack of cards ever came through our door; there was a battered Ludo set somewhere but I was allowed to play with it only when I was ill. She didn’t even approve of my mother listening to the afternoon radio play more than once a week. In our flat we all worked hard at whatever we did: my grandmother at her schoolmistressing; I at my homework; my mother at her housekeeping; my father at his job as a junior executive in a company which dealt in vulcanised rubber. Our time wasn’t given the slightest opportunity to grow mouldy.That was why I loved to listen to Tridib: he never seemed to use his time, but his time didn’t stink. Sometimes Tridib would drop in to see us without warning. My grandmother, for all her disapproval of him, would be delighted whenever he came – partly be cause she was fond of him in her own way, but mainly because Tridib and his family were our only rich relatives, and it flattered her to think that he had gone out of his way to come and see her. But of course, she knew, though she wouldn’t admit it, that he had really come to nurse his stomach.The truth was that his digestion was a mess; ruined by the rivers of hard-boiled tea he had drunk at roadside stalls all over south Calcutta. Every once in a while a rumble in his bowels would catch him unawares on the streets and he would have to sprint for the nearest clean lavatory. This condition was known to us as Tridib’s Gastric. Once every few months or so we would answer the doorbell and find him leaning against the wall, his legs tightly crossed, the sweat starting from his forehead.But he wouldn’t come in right away: there was a careful etiquette attached to these occasions. My parents and grandmother would collect at the doorway and, ignoring his writhings, wo uld proceed to ask him about his family’s doings and whereabouts, and he in turn, smiling fixedly, would ask them how they were, and how I was, and finally, when it had been established to everyone’s satisfaction that he had come on a Family Visit, he would shoot through the door straight into the lavatory.When he emerged again he would be his usual nonchalant, collected self; he would sink into our ‘good’ sofa and the ritual of the Family Visit would begin. My grandmother would hurry into the kitchen to make him an omelette – a leathery little squiggle studded with green chillies, which would lie balefully on its plate, silently challenging Gastric to battle. This was the greatest sign of favour she could show to a visitor – an omelette made with her own hands (it fell to the less favoured to feast on my mother’s masterly tidbits – hot shingaras stuffed with mincemeat and raisins, or crisp little alpuris). Sometimes, watching h im as he chewed upon her omelette, she would ask: And how is Gastric? or: Is Gastric better now? Tridib would merely nod casually and change the subject; he didn’t like to talk about his digestion – it was the only evidence of prudery I ever saw in him. But since I always heard my grandmother using that word as a proper noun, I grew up believing that ‘Gastric’ was the name of an organ peculiar to Tridib – a kind of aching tooth that grew out of his belly button.Of course, I never dared ask to see it. Despite the special omelette, however, my grandmother would not let him stay long. She believed him to be capable of exerting his influence at a distance, like a baneful planet – and since she also believed the male, as a species, to be naturally frail and wayward, she would not allow herself to take the risk of having him for long in our flat where I, or my father, might be tempted to move into his orbit. I didn’t mind particularly, for T ridib was never at his best in our flat.I far preferred to run into him at the street corners in our neighbourhood. It didn’t happen very often – no more than once a month perhaps – but still, I took his presence on these streets so much for granted that it never occurred to me that I was lucky to have him in Calcutta at all. Tridib’s father was a diplomat, an officer in the Foreign Service. He and Mayadebi were always away, abroad or in Delhi; after intervals of two or three years they would sometimes spend a couple of months in Calcutta, but that was all.Of Tridib’s two brothers, Jatin-kaku, the elder, who was two years older than Tridib, was an economist with the UN. He was always away too, somewhere in Africa or South East Asia, with his wife and his daughter Ila, who was my age. The third brother, Robi, who was much younger than the other two, having been born after his mother had had several miscarriages, lived with his parents wherever they happened to be posted until he was sent away to boarding school at the age of twelve.So Tridib was the only person in his family who had spent most of his life in Calcutta. For years he had lived in their vast old family house in Ballygunge Place with his ageing grandmother. My grandmother claimed that he had stayed on in Calcutta only because he didn’t get along with his father. This was one of her complaints against him: not that he didn’t get along with his father, for she didn’t much care for his father either – but that he had allowed something like that to interfere with his prospects and career.For her, likes and dislikes were unimportant compared to the business of fending for oneself in the world: as far as she was concerned it was not so much odd as irresponsible of Tridib to shut himself away in that old house with his grandmother; it showed him up as an essentially lightweight and frivolous character. She might have changed her opinion if he h ad been willing to marry and settle down (and she hadn’t any doubt at all that she could have found him a rich wife), but every time she suggested it he merely laughed.This was further proof that he lacked that core of gravity and determination which distinguishes all responsible and grown-up men; a sure sign that he was determined to waste his life in idle self-indulgence. And yet, although she would pretend to dismiss him with a toss of her head, she never ceased to be wary of him, to warn me against his influence: at heart she believed that all men would be like him if it were not for their mothers and wives. She would often try to persuade me that she pitied him. Poor Tridib, she would say.There’s nothing in the world he couldn’t have done with his connections – he could have lived like a lord and run the country. And look at him – oh, poor Tridib – living in that crumbling house, doing nothing. But even as a child I could tell she didnà ¢â‚¬â„¢t pity him at all – she feared him. Of course, even she would acknowledge sometimes that Tridib did not really do ‘nothing’. In fact, he was working on a PhD in archaeology – something to do with sites associated with the Sena dynasty of Bengal. But this earned him very little credit in my grandmother’s eyes.Being a schoolteacher herself, she had an inordinate respect for academic work of any kind: she saw research as a life-long pilgrimage which ended with a named professorship and a marble bust in the corridors of Calcutta University or the National Library. It would have been a travesty to think of an irresponsible head like Tridib’s mounted in those august corridors. Part of the reason why my grandmother was so wary of him was that she had seen him a couple of times at the street corners around Gole Park where we lived. She had a deep horror of the young men who spent their time at the street-corner addas and tea-stalls around ther e.All failcases, she would sniff; think of their poor mothers, flung out on dung-heaps, starving †¦ Seeing Tridib there a few times was enough to persuade her that he spent all his time at those addas, gossiping: it seemed to fit with the rest of him. But the truth was that Tridib came there rarely, not more than once or twice a month. I would usually hear when he came: Nathu Chaubey, the paanwala who sat in the stall at the corner of our lane, or my friend Montu, who could see the far side of the lane from his bathroom window, or someone at the second-hand bookstalls, would tell me. They all knew I was related to Tridib.When I go past Gole Park now I often wonder whether that would happen today. I don’t know, I can’t tell: that world is closed to me, shut off by too many years spent away. Montu went away to America years ago and Nathu Chaubey, I heard, went back to Benares and started a hotel. When I walk past his paan-shop now and look at the crowds thronging th rough those neon-lit streets, the air-conditioned shops packed in with rickety stalls and the tarpaulin counters of pavement vendors, at the traffic packed as tight as a mail train all the way to the Dhakuria overbridge, somehow, though the paan-shop hasn’t changed, I find myself doubting it.At that time, in the early sixties, there were so few cars around there that we thought nothing of playing football on the streets around the roundabout – making way occasionally for the number 9, or any other bus that happened to come snorting along. There were only a few scattered shacks on Gariahat Road then, put up by the earliest refugees from the east. Gole Park was considered to be more or less outside Calcutta: in school when I said I lived there the boys from central Calcutta would often ask me if I caught a train every morning, as though I lived in some far-flung refugee camp on the border.I would usually hear that Tridib was around on my way back from our evening cricket game in the park. My cricket game was the one thing for which my grandmother never grudged me time away from my homework: on the contrary, she insisted that I run down to the park by the lake whether I wanted to or not. You can’t build a strong country, she would say, pushing me out of the house, without building a strong body. She would watch from her window to make sure I ran all the way to the park.But if I happened to hear that Tridib was around I would double back through the park and the back lanes. Someone would always be able to tell me where he was: he was a familiar figure within the floating, talkative population of students and would-be footballers and bank clerks and smalltime politicos and all the rest who gravitated towards that conversation-loving stretch of road between Gariahat and Gole Park. It did not occur to me then to wonder hy he was well known, or known at all – I simply took the fact for granted, and was grateful for the small privileges his presence secured for me on those streets: for the odd sweet given to me by a shopkeeper of his acquaintance; for being rescued from a fight in the park by some young fellow who knew him. But in fact it seems something of a mystery to me now, why they put up with him: he was never one of them, he didn’t even live there, and he often didn’t have much to say.He was usually content to listen to their loud quicksilver conversations in silence: often when he came he would have about him the tired, withdrawn air of a man who has risen from some exhausting labour and ventured out to distract himself. But occasionally, when he was in the mood and somebody happened to say something that made a breach in his vast reservoirs of abstruse information, he would begin to hold forth on all kinds of subjects – Mesopotamian stelae, East European jazz, the habits of arboreal apes, the plays of Garcia Lorca, there seemed to be no end to the things he could talk about.On those evenin gs, looking at the intent faces of his listeners, watching his thin, waspish face, his tousled hair and his bright black eyes glinting behind his gold-rimmed glasses, I would be close to bursting with pride. But even at those times, when he was the centre of everybody’s attention, there was always something a little detached about his manner.He did not seem to want to make friends with the people he was talking to, and that perhaps was why he was happiest in neutral, impersonal places – coffee houses, bars, street-corner addas – the sort of places where people come, talk and go away without expecting to know each other any further. That was also why he chose to come all the way from Ballygunge to Gole Park for his addas – simply because it was far enough for him to be sure that he wouldn’t meet any of his neighbours there.Perhaps they put up with him simply because he wasn’t like them, because he was different – partly also because th ey were a little frightened of him: of the occasional, devastating sharpness of his tongue, and of the oddly disconcerting streams of talk that would suddenly come gushing out of him. But of course, he also had his uses: there was a streak of intensely worldly shrewdness in him which would stand them in good stead every once in a while.For example, he would give a student precise and detailed instructions on how to write an examination paper, because he happened to know that Professor So-and-so was going to correct it, and he liked answers that were slanted just so, and the student would do as he had said, and get a first class. Or else when someone was going to appear for a job interview he would tell him what he was likely to be asked, and when the interview was over it would turn out that Tridib’s predictions had been dead right.But equally his advice would sometimes seem deliberately misleading, perverse. Once, for instance, he told a young man who was going to be intervi ewed by a multinational company that the firm, once famous for its stuffiness, had recently been bought by a Marwari businessman and become very nationalist, and that he would not stand any chance at all of getting in unless he went to the interview dressed in a dhoti. The young man went off to the interview duly clad in dhoti, and found that the doorman wouldn’t let him in.Nobody was ever quite sure where they stood with Tridib: there was a casual self-mockery about many of the things he said which left his listeners uncertain about whether they ought to take what he said at face value or believe its opposite. As a result, inevitably, there were all kinds of conflicting rumours about him – especially because he was secretive about his family and his circumstances to an extraordinary degree – even more than was wholly warranted by the fact that everybody young was turning Maoist at that time.Someone would remark knowingly that he had heard that Tridib’s f amily was rich and powerful, that his father was a diplomat, the son of a wealthy judge, and his brother was a brilliant economist who had a job with the UN and lived abroad. But no sooner would he say it than a sceptical voice would cut him short and say: Where do you live, mairi? D’you think we’ve all dropped out of the sky that we’ll believe all that – don’t you know he’s married and has three children and lives with his widowed mother in a slum near Santoshpur?And since there was something just a little improbable about the son of a diplomat, scion of a rich and powerful family, turning up at those street corners for years on end, it was the latter kind of story that people tended to believe. Sometimes I would try to tell them the truth. But I was just a boy and I happened to have a reputation for being wide-eyed and gullible. Besides, they all knew we lived in a small flat down the lane; if I had tried too hard to persuade them that we had rich and powerful relatives they would only have thought that I was giving yself airs. When I was about nine Tridib once stayed away from his haunts in Gole Park for so long that the regulars began to wonder what had happened to him. I was the only one who knew, because I had stopped by at his house once (as I often did in those days) on my way to my maths tutor’s house, in the afternoon. This was during the time he was telling me the story of his journey to England in instalments. I had found him, as always, lying on a mat in his room at the top of the house, reading, with a cigarette smouldering in an ashtray beside him.When I told him that people were asking about him at Gole Park, he put a finger to his lips. Shh, he said. Don’t tell them a thing. Do you know what? I think I may have discovered the mound where the kings of the Sena dynasty used to bury their treasure. If the government finds out, they’ll take everything. Don’t say a word to anyone and don’t come here again for a while – you may be followed by secret agents. I was thrilled: I hugged the secret to my chest every time I was asked about him. He’d gone, I would say. He’s vanished. Then, one evening, on my way to the park, I heard he’d surfaced at Gole Park again.I doubled back and found him at his favourite adda, on the steps of an old house, surrounded by his acquaintances. I waved to him, from between someone’s legs, but he was busy answering their questions and didn’t see me. Where have you been all this while, Tridib-da? somebody said. It must be three or four months †¦ I’ve been away, I heard him say, and nodded secretly to myself. Away? Where? I’ve been to London, he said. To visit my relatives. His face was grave, his voice steady. What relatives? I have English relatives through marriage, he said. A family called Price.I thought I’d go and visit them. Ignoring their sceptical grunt s, he told them that he had been to stay with old Mrs Price, who was a widow. Her husband had died recently. She lived in north London, he said, on a street called Lymington Road; the number of their house was 44 and the tube station was West Hampstead. Mrs Price had a daughter, who was called May. And what’s she like? a voice asked. Sexy? He reflected on that for a moment, and said, no, she wasn’t sexy, not in the ordinary way – she was thick-set, with broad shoulders, and not very tall.She wasn’t beautiful or even pretty in the usual sense, for she had a strong face and a square jaw, but she had thick straight hair which came down to her shoulders in a glossy black screen, like a head-dress in an Egyptian frieze, and she had a wonderful, warm smile which lit up her blue eyes and gave her a quality all her own, set her apart. And what does she do? someone sneered. Is she a wrestler or a hairdresser? She’s a student, said Tridib. At least, a kind o f student – she’s studying at the Royal College of Music. She plays the oboe, and one day she’s going to join an orchestra.It was then, I think, that I could restrain myself no longer. I thrust myself forward through the thicket of trousered legs and cried: Tridib-da, you’ve made a mistake! I met you last month, don’t you remember? You were in your room, lying on your mat, smoking a cigarette. You were looking for †¦ There was a howl of laughter and a chorus of exclamations: You fraud, you liar, you were just making it all up, you haven’t been anywhere †¦ Tridib did not seem to be at all put out, either by what I had said or by their laughter.He laughed too, shrugging good-naturedly, and said: If you believe anything people tell you, you deserve to be told anything at all †¦ Leaning towards me, he pinched my cheek and grinned. Isn’t that so? he said, with an interrogatory nod, his spectacles glinting in the lamplight. H is aplomb gave an uneasy edge to the laughter and the comments around him: it seemed now that he had made them the victims of a complicated private joke. There was an edgy hostility in their voices when he left. You can’t believe a word he says, somebody exclaimed, he just likes to bamboozle people and play jokes on them.But another, sharper voice broke in and said: Joke? He wasn’t joking, he believed everything he said: it was no joke, the fact is that he’s a nut – he’s never been anywhere outside Calcutta. I was furious with myself now for having exposed Tridib to their ridicule. You don’t know what you’re talking about, I cried. I was shouting at the top of my voice, so they listened. Still shouting, I told them the truth as I knew it: that Tridib had been to London, with his parents, many years ago, when he was a boy. They had aken his father there for an operation, which couldn’t be done in India. They had had to go, even though it was 1939 and they knew there might be a war. His brother Jatin had been left behind in Calcutta with his grandparents because he was older and couldn’t be away from school for so long. And yes, there was a family called Price, who lived in West Hampstead, but they weren’t relatives – they were very, very old friends of Tridib’s family, because Mrs Price’s father, Lionel Tresawsen, had lived in India hen the British were here, and he and Tridib’s grandfather, who was a very important man, a judge in the Calcutta High Court, had been friends. Long after Lionel Tresawsen went back to England his daughter had married a man who had taught her in college, whom everyone called Snipe because his name was S. N. I. Price. When she’d heard that Tridib’s father was ill she had written to them and sent telegrams to say that they must stay with her in London, because she’d bought a big house, and she’d been wanting to take in lodgers anyway.And it was true that she had a daughter called May, but she was a little baby when Tridib was in London, and as far as I knew he hadn’t seen her since. And Mrs Price had had a brother too, called Alan, who had been in Germany before the war †¦ I gave up, exhausted. That’s an even better version than Tridib’s, somebody said, with a snort of laughter. It’s true, I shouted back at him. If you don’t believe me, ask †¦ Tridib? A voice prompted, and they doubled up with laughter. I pushed my way out and ran all the way down the lane and up the two flights of stairs to our flat.I was an hour late, and my grandmother was very angry. In her controlled, headmistress’s voice she asked me where I had been, and when I didn’t answer she raised her hand, drew it back and slapped me. Where have you been? she asked again, and this time I blurted out that I’d been down at the corner. She slapped me again, really hard. Haven’t I told you, she said, you’re not to go there and waste your time? Time is not for wasting, time is for work. I met May Price for the first time two years after that incident, when she came to Calcutta on a visit.The next time I met her was seventeen years later, when I went to London myself. I went to England on a year’s research grant, to collect material from the India Office Library, where all the old colonial records were kept, for a PhD thesis on the textile trade between India and England in the nineteenth century. More than a month passed after I arrived in London, before I could meet May again. I had to go to a great deal of trouble to find her. She was playing in an orchestra and living on her own in a bedsit in Islington. Mrs Price gave me her phone number and I called her several times, but she was never in.And then, one morning, while looking through the entertainment page of the Guardian, I saw a notice which said that her orchestra w ould be playing the Dvorak Cello Concerto that evening at the Royal Festival Hall. I went there early that evening: I could only afford a ticket for a place on one of the benches behind the orchestra, and I had heard they sometimes sold out very early. But as it turned out I managed to get a seat quite easily: the soloist was a Swedish cellist who clearly did not have much drawing power. When I went in, I discovered that my seat was directly behind the woodwind section.Soon I saw her; she was fussing with her music-stand, dressed, like all the other women in the orchestra, in a black skirt and white blouse. I watched her as she arranged her music and chatted with an elderly horn player who was sitting in front of her. Her hair was still cut exactly as I remembered it from the time she had stayed with us in Calcutta: falling thick and straight to her shoulders, mantling her neck and the sides of her face; but where I remembered it as dark and shiny, it was streaked now with bands of grey which shimmered when they caught the light.Her shoulders, always broad for her height, had thickened; she seemed almost top-heavy now, for she hadn’t added an inch to her waist. I caught a glimpse of her face when she turned to say something to a woman who was sitting in the row behind. She had deep lines running from the corner of her mouth to her nose, and her eyes, which had once been a clear, bright blue, had grown pale and prominent. Watching her through that concert, I thought of her as she was when she came to stay with us in Calcutta, all those years ago. We had moved to a much larger house then, and she had been given the guest room, downstairs.In the evenings, whenever I managed to elude my mother and grandmother (who didn’t want me to bother her), I would slip into her room, sit on the floor and listen to her playing scales on the recorder she had brought to practice on. Often she would blush with embarrassment, put her recorder down and say: Look, this must be so boring for you, all these horrible scales. But I wouldn’t let her stop. I would insist that she go on playing, and I would sit there entranced, and watch her blowing into her recorder, frowning, the muscles in her cheeks knotting in concentration.She was not frowning when she played in that concert in the Festival Hall: it was evident that her mastery of her instrument was so complete now that she had to give little thought to the music. All through that concert she, and most of the other musicians around her, performed with a bored mechanical precision, very much like veteran soldiers going through a familiar exercise at their sergeantmajor’s command. When the concert was over I waited in my seat until the audience had left and the members of the orchestra were busy packing their instruments.Then I leant over the railing and called out her name. She looked up, narrowing her eyes. She saw me and gave me a politely puzzled smile. Then, to my surprise, she re cognised me, and her face lit up and she waved. Pointing at the exit she mouthed the words: I’ll see you outside. I went out into the plush, chandeliered foyer and waited. Five minutes later, I saw her, picking her way through the last stragglers, her shoulders rolling, like a boxer’s, as she walked towards me. We met half-way down the foyer and froze in mutual embarrassment.She put out a tentative hand, and then suddenly she smiled, rose on tiptoe, pulled my head down and kissed me on the cheeks, her oboe clattering against my neck in its leather case. As we made our way out, I asked her how she had recognised me, after all those years. She gave it a moment’s thought and said: I put two and two together I suppose – I knew you were in London; Mother told me. She stopped to give me a quick, appraising look. And besides, she said, it’s not as though you don’t bear a family resemblance to the boy I met in Calcutta – and I remember him ve ry well.Her voice had a deep, gravelly, almost masculine texture; I couldn’t decide whether it had always been like that or whether it had changed. While she was leading me towards Waterloo tube station through a maze of concrete walkways, she stopped to ask: Have you got anything planned for the rest of the evening? I shook my head, trying not to look too eager. Well, she said, pausing to think; you could always come back with me to my bedsit, for dinner. I can’t offer you very much – just a beansprout salad and some grilled fish. I don’t know whether you care for that kind of thing?Yes, I said, nodding. That would be very nice. She gave me a quick smile. If it’s any consolation, she said, remember I sprouted the beans myself. In the tube, on our way to Islington, I told her how bored she had looked through the concert. She nodded sheepishly. Yes, she said; you’ve guessed my guilty secret. I only stay on with the orchestra because I’ ve got to make a living somehow †¦ She cleared her throat, hesitated, and went on to add: You know – I spend most of my time working for Amnesty and Oxfam and a couple of other relief agencies, small ones, you won’t have heard of them.I asked her a few questions and she described the project she was working on just then with a businesslike briskness: it was something to do with providing housing for the survivors of an earthquake in Central America. It was evident that she found a great deal of satisfaction in her work. Her room was on the first floor of a house that looked out on Islington Green. As she stepped in and switched on the lights, a television set near her bed lit up too, automatically. She hurried across the room and switched it off. Turning to face me she said, guiltily, as though she were making a confession: I leave it on all the time.It’s my only real indulgence. It fills up the room – it feels a bit empty otherwise. It was a large, pleasant room, full of plants; its windows looked out over the trees on the Green. There was very little furniture in it – an armchair, a desk, and a large bed, pushed up against the wall at the far end of the room. There were also a few cushions, with bright Gujarati mirrorwork covers, scattered on the floor, but they looked as though they had been thrown there more to fill up empty space than to be sat on: it did not look like a room where visitors were often expected.With a formal, faintly ironic little bow May invited me to amuse myself by looking through her bookshelf while she made our dinner. Glancing through her collection of Russian novels in paperback, miniature music scores and illustrated health books, I came upon an old photograph. It was pinned, along with a dozen other scraps of paper, on to one of those large boards that I had seen hanging over many student desks in London. It was a picture of her, taken a long time ago. While I was looking at it she darted ou t of her cupboard-like kitchenette to fetch something from the refrigerator.She noticed me standing in front of her board and came and stood beside me. When she saw what I was looking at she gave me a quick glance and opened her mouth to say something. But then, changing her mind, she whipped around again and went back to the kitchenette. Curious now, I followed her there and stood leaning against the wall, watching her as she bent down to look under the grill. I remarked casually that the picture must have been taken a long time ago: that was exactly how she had looked, if my memory served me right, when she had stayed with us in Calcutta.Not quite exactly, she said, watching the grill, her voice ironically precise; it was taken at least a couple of years before that. She looked at me, dusting her hands, raising her eyebrows as though in surprise. That was the picture, she said, a copy of which I was once privileged to send to Tridib. Later, when we were eating our dinner, I discov ered that in 1959, when he was twenty-seven and she nineteen, they had begun a long correspondence. Tridib had written first, she told me.He had always sent Mrs Price cards at Christmas, ever since they left London in 1940. But that year he had sent two, one to Mrs Price and one to her. He had inscribed a little note in her card saying that he remembered her very well, though she could not possibly remember him, that it would be a great pity if they lost touch altogether, and he hoped that some day she would find time to write to him. She was both touched and intrigued: she had already heard a great deal about him.Smiling at the memory, she told me how his card had reached her just when she was trying to get over an adolescent crush on a schoolboy trombonist, who had had no time for her at all and had not been overly delicate about making that clear. It was nice to feel that someone wanted to befriend her. She had written back, and after that they had written to each other regularly – short, chatty letters, usually. Soon, penfriend-like, they had exchanged photographs. I like to think that Tridib received May’s photograph the day he came to Gole Park and told us that made-up story.Actually my grandmother was wrong about Tridib: he was nothing at all like the hardened gossip-lovers who spent most of their time hanging around the street corners at Gole Park. He was often maliciously dismissive of those people; marine mammals, he would say of them, creatures who sink to the bottom of the sea of heartbreak when they lose sight of the herd. The truth was that, in his own way, Tridib was something of a recluse: even as a child I could tell that he was happiest in that book-lined room of his, right at the top of their old family house.It was that Tridib whom I liked best; I was a bit unsure of the Tridib of the street corners. His niece Ila and I used to disagree about this. We talked about it once, when we were about sixteen. I was soon to leave to go to college in Delhi, I remember, and Ila and her parents had just flown in from Indonesia for a short holiday. Soon after they arrived in Calcutta, they came to visit us. I still remember how my grandmother gasped when Ila climbed out of the car, the tasselled end of her long thick braid swinging freely in front of her.Even my grandmother, who was very critical in all matters to do with appearance, especially where Ila and her family were concerned, pinched her chin and said: Our Ila is growing into a real beauty – she’s taken after Maya. But as for me, I was disappointed: ever since I could remember, Ila had worn clothes the like of which neither I nor anyone else I knew in Calcutta had ever seen, and here she was now, dressed in a simple white sari with a red border, like any Bethune College girl on her way to a lecture.Soon, growing tired of our parents’ conversation, we went out, the two of us, for a walk. Involuntarily we found ourselves walking towards the lake. But when we reached it and spotted an empty bench, we both remembered how we used to sit on those benches when we were children, with our arms around each other’s waists, pretending to count the birds on the little island in the middle of the lake, and, suddenly embarrassed, we turned and hurried off towards the Lily Pool Bridge, in the distance, the awkwardness of our silence making me trip where there was nothing to trip on.At last, because I could think of nothing else to say, I asked her whether she remembered those days when we were children and she and Robi used to come to Calcutta in the summers, and three of us used to go up to Tridib’s room whenever we were bored and listen to him, in the still, sultry heat of the afternoons, while he lay on a mat, propped up with pillows, cigarette smoke spiralling out of his fingers, and spoke to us in that soft, deep voice of his, about the behavioural differences between the Elapidae and Viperidae families of snakes , or the design of the temples at Karnak, or the origins of the catamaran.Or, for example, the time when Robi and I decided to become explorers in the Empty Quarter, and went running up to his room to ask for a few tips before setting off. He had smiled and gone on to tell us in ghastly detail about the circumcision rites of one of the desert tribes. And then, spectacles glinting, he had said: So before you leave you’d better decide whether you would care to have all that done to your little wee-wees, just in case you’re captured. I asked her if she remembered how Robi and I had spread our hands instinctively over ur groins, and how angry we had been when she had laughed. Mere vagina-envy, she said, laughing, and I tried to keep my face impassive as though I was accustomed to girls who used words like that. But I could tell she didn’t remember. I asked her, then, if she had any memory of the stratagems we used to employ to get Tridib to tell us about the year he had spent in London, during the war; of how we used to pore over his photographs when we could persuade him to bring them out; of how he used to tell us about the people in them, pointing out Mrs Price with May in her arms, orAlan Tresawsen, her brother, with his bad arm hanging limply at his side, and her husband Snipe, who used to treat himself with Yeast-Vite tonic for his neuralgia and bile beans for his blood, Doan’s kidney pills for his backaches and Andrews Salt for his liver, Iglodine for his cuts and Mentholatum for his catarrh; Snipe, who had once sent Tridib to the chemist’s shop on West End Lane to buy him a glue called Dentesive so that his dentures would not be shaken out by the bombs. Yes, she said nodding, mildly puzzled by my insistence, she did have a faint recollection, but she could not exactly say she remembered. But how could you forget?I cried. She shrugged and arched her eyebrows in surprise, and said: It was a long time ago – the real q uestion is, how do you remember? But of course, to me it wasn’t a question at all. I tried to tell her, but neither then nor later, though we talked about it often, did I ever succeed in explaining to her that I could not forget because Tridib had given me worlds to travel in and he had given me eyes to see them with; she, who had been travelling around the world since she was a child, could never understand what those hours in Tridib’s room had meant to me, a boy who had never been more than a few hundred miles from Calcutta.I used to listen to her talking sometimes with her father and grandfather about the cafes in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, or the crispness of the air in Cuzco, and I could see that those names, which were to me a set of magical talismans because Tridib had pointed them out to me on his tattered old Bartholomew’s Atlas, had for her a familiarity no less dull than the lake had for me and my friends; the same tired intimacy that made us stop on our way back from the park in the evening and unbutton our shorts and aim our piss through the rusty wrought-iron railings.I began to tell her how I longed to visit Cairo, to see the world’s first pointed arch in the mosque of Ibn Tulun, and touch the stones of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. I had been talking for a while when I noticed that she wasn’t listening to me; she was following a train of thought in her mind, frowning with concentration. I watched her, waiting eagerly to hear what she would have to say. Suddenly she clicked her fingers, gave herself a satisfied nod, and said aloud, inadvertently: Oh yes, Cairo, the Ladies is way on the other side of the departure lounge.I had a glimpse, at that moment of those names on the map as they appeared to her: a worldwide string of departure lounges, but not for that reason at all similar, but on the contrary, each of them strikingly different, distinctively individual, each with its Ladies hidden away in some yet more u nexpected corner of the hall, each with its own peculiarity, like the flushes in Stockholm’s Arlanda, so sleekly discreet that she had once missed two flight calls because it had taken her so long to understand how the handle worked.I imagined her alighting on these daydream names – Addis Ababa, Algiers, Brisbane – and running around the airport to look for the Ladies, not because she wanted to go, but because those were the only fixed points in the shifting landscapes of her childhood. When I went to London, a decade later, often when Ila suggested going out somewhere, to a film in Brixton perhaps, or to a new Vietnamese restaurant in Maida Vale, I would jump to my feet and, before I knew it, I would cry: Yes, let’s go, let’s go on the Underground. She would burst out laughing and mimic me, saying: You’d think we were going on the bloody Concorde.To her the Underground was merely a means of shifting venue: it would irritate her to see how e xcited I got when we stepped on to the escalators; she would watch me as I turned to look at the advertisements flashing past us on the walls, gulped in the netherworld smell of electricity and dampness and stale deodorant, stopped to listen to the music of the buskers booming eerily through the permanent night of the passageways, and in annoyance she would tug at my elbows and hiss: Hurry, hurry, you can’t stop here, you’ll hold people up.And if I still lingered she would snap at me impatiently: For God’s sake stop carrying on like a third-world tapioca farmer – it’s just the bloody Underground. And I would say to her: You wouldn’t understand: to you Cairo was a place to piss in. I could not persuade her that a place does not merely exist, that it has to be invented in one’s imagination; that her practical, bustling London was no less invented than mine, neither more nor less true, only very far apart.It was not her fault that she co uld not understand, for as Tridib often said of her, the inventions she lived in moved with her, so that although she had lived in many places, she had never travelled at all. All through her childhood, every time her family came back to Calcutta for a holiday, they brought back souvenirs from wherever they happened to be living at that time. Her parents would bring back all kinds of things – Indonesian leather puppets or improbable North African stools with camellike humps.But there was only one kind of souvenir that Ila ever thought of bringing back and I was the only person to whom she would show them. We would slip away to the shade of the rusty water tanks on the roof of their house, and there, with a tight little smile, she would produce a large manila folder. They were always the same, and in time they came to mean as much to me as they did to her: they were the Yearbooks of the International Schools of whatever city she happened to be living in at that time. They were always full of photographs.There would be one of each student and then pages of others – of groups of friends, of parties and tennis matches, of whole classes together. For a long time I could not believe that they were really pictures of a school, because in the pictures the boys and girls were standing around all mixed up together, and besides, not one of them was in uniform. To me, the clothes they were wearing in those pictures seemed to have as little to do with school as the costumes at a circus. Then Ila would point herself out, and there she would be, dressed in jeans or a skirt, and even, once, a Persian lambskin waistcoat.She would show me her friends, standing beside her, and I would roll their names around my tongue – Teresa Cassano, Mercedes Aguilar, Merfeth ashSharqawi – names of girls mainly at first, and then, as we grew older, boys too – Calouste Malekian, Cetshwayo James, Juin Nagajima – names which imprinted themselves on my mem ory so that years later I recognised Mercedes Aguilar at once when she turned up in a photograph two continents away from where she’d been when I had first seen her in those photographs. Ila’s closest friends were always the most beautiful, the most talented, the most intelligent girls in the school.She would point them out to me in the pictures of picnics and fancy-dress dances. The three of us went to that together, she would say, Teresa and Merfeth and I; and we spent the whole evening talking to each other – you should have seen the boys buzzing around us – but Teresa decided that we weren’t going to dance that evening, just like that, so †¦ And she would point Teresa and Merfeth out to me, laughing, slender girls, making faces at the camera. But somehow, though Ila could tell me everything about those parties and dances, what she said and what she did and what she wore, she herself was always unaccountably absent in the pictures.When we w ere fourteen she once pointed to the picture of a boy who, to me, already looked like a grown man, with a face like an American film star, square-jawed and cleft-chinned, with long black hair that curled down to his shoulders. His name is Jamshed Tabrizi, she said, he’s a fencing champion and this year his father gave him a BMW sports car for his birthday; he can’t drive it yet because he’s not old enough, but their chauffeur brought it around to the school one day. It’s red, like lipstick, and as soon as he gets his licence, we’re going to drive down to the beach at Pattaya on Sundays; it’s just a few miles from Bangkok.And then, in a rush, looking at me sideways, she added: He’s my boyfriend. But a few pages later, in their class photograph, there he was, right in the foreground, in the centre of the front row, grinning, broad-shouldered, a head taller than anyone else, with his arms thrown around the shoulders of two laughing blond e girls. And before she flipped the page I caught a glimpse of Ila herself, on the edge of the back row, standing a little apart, unsmiling, in a plain grey skirt, with a book under her right arm.She saw that I had noticed, and when I came upon that Yearbook again a week later I discovered that that page had been torn out. I felt a constriction in my throat, for suddenly it seemed to me that perhaps she was not so alien, after all, to my own small, puritanical world, in which children were sent to school to learn how to cling to their gentility by proving themselves in the examination hall. Those schools were all that mattered to Ila; the places themselves went past her in an illusory whirl of movement, like those studio screens in old films which flash past the windows of speeding cars.I confronted her with this once, in London, when the three of us, she, Robi and I, happened to be together in a pub, the Kembles Head, on Long Acre, a short walk from Covent Garden. Robi was stopping by in London on his way to Harvard. He was on leave from his job in the Indian Administrative Service, so that he could take up a fellowship in administration and public affairs for six months. We had decided to spend the evening together. Ila laughed when I reminded her about those Yearbooks and, picking up her glass of whisky, she said: Of course those schools mattered to me, schools are all that matter to any child, it’s only natural.It’s you who were peculiar, sitting in that poky little flat in Calcutta, dreaming about faraway places. I probably did you no end of good; at least you learnt that those cities you saw on maps were real places, not like those fairylands Tridib made up for you. But of course, among other things, Tridib was an archaeologist; he was not interested in fairylands: the one thing he wanted to teach me, he used to say, was to use my imagination with precision. For instance, when Ila and I were ten, her family came to Calcutta from Colombo for a holiday.Ila came with Tridib and her mother to visit us, and her mother, in her kindly way, knowing how fascinated I was by the countries they lived in, asked Ila to tell me a story about their house that she thought would interest her. Their house was in a quiet part of Colombo where diplomats and senior civil servants and people like that lived. It was an area where sprawling bungalows with huge lawns were threaded through by lanes that were often flooded with puddles of scarlet gulmohur and yellow jacaranda. Their house was at one end of a very quiet lane.It was a big house with large verandas and a steeply sloping roof covered with mossy tiles. The garden was at the back. It seemed to stretch out from inside the house; when the French windows were open the tiled floor of the drawing room merged without a break into the lawn. It was a quiet secluded garden, with a bronze vat, taller than a child, standing like a brooding tumulus in a corner. And it had a blue-tiled lily pond i n the centre, in which plump, fantailed goldfish flashed their white bellies at the sun. There was only one problem: adjoining the garden at the back was a poultry farm.This caused Ila’s mother a good deal of worry, apart from the bother of the smell and the noise, for she had heard that snakes were certain to appear wherever there were chickens. Still, the house was surrounded by a very high wall, and when the breeze was blowing in the right direction the garden was as tranquil as a Japanese cloister. One morning, soon after they moved in, their cook Ram Dayal came running upstairs and burst in upon Ila’s mother who was taking her midmorning nap in an easy chair on a veranda. Mugger-muchh, shrieked Ram Dayal. Save me, burra-mem bachao me from his crocodile.He was a tall, willowy, usually drowsy man, but now his eyes were starting from his gaunt face and his lips were flecked with spittle. Never heard of such a thing, Ila’s mother said to us. Crocodile in my gar den; almost fell out of my easy chair. My grandmother and I looked carefully away from each other, but ever afterwards the thought of Ila’s mother, with her rounded figure, as soft and plump as two buns squashed together in a schoolbag, falling out of her easy chair at the thought of a crocodile in her garden, was enough to reduce us to helpless laughter.Man was in a state, she snorted. Never seen anything like it. But now, being the woman she was, she folded her tiny hands in her lap, pushed her knot of hair back to the top of her head and sat up in her chair in the way the family had come to know so well, that characteristic pose that had earned her the nickname of Queen Victoria. Shatup Ram Dayal, Queen Victoria snapped. Stop bukbukking like a chhokra-boy. Dekho burra-mem, he said again, his thin voice vanishing into a screech. There it is, in the garden. And right he was, Queen Victoria said, her voice shrill with amazement.Damn and blast, there it was – a heck of a huge great big lizard, all grey and black, nasty greatbig creature, with a little pointed head and a tongue like a bootlace, wandering about in my garden like a governor at a gymkhana. But being, as she was, the daughter of a man who had left his village in Barisal in rags and gone on to earn a knighthood in the old Indian Civil Service, she retained her composure. Muro-it, Ram Dayal, she cried. Catch hold of it before Ila-mem sees it, and cut its head off. (As though it were a penis or something, Ila said to me years later. But Ram Dayal was knocking his head against the wall now, the whites of his eyes showing, tears zig-zagging down his cheeks. Why did I come to Lanka? he wailed. I knew Ravana would come to get me. Shatup Ram Dayal, Queen Victoria snapped. She rang the little bronze bell she always carried to summon Lizzie, Ila’s recently arrived Sinhalese ayah. Yes madam? Lizzie said from the doorway. She was a thin, middle-aged woman with a stern mouth and a small, was ted face, always very neatly dressed in the blouse and sari of her native Kandyan foothills.Waving a hand with careful nonchalance, Queen Victoria said: Lizzie, at it-garden looking-looking. The animal was sunning itself now, its grey chest raised high on stiff forelegs. Lizzie, what it-thing being-being? Queen Victoria said. She always spoke like that to Lizzie, though Lizzie spoke very good English and even knew a little Hindi. It was a language she had invented on the spot when Lizzie first came to them on the recommendation of a senior Sinhalese civil servant. Lizzie looked at it and laughed. That’s a thala-goya madam, she said. Very common here, very gentle animal.Queen Victoria glared at the reptile. Gentle, by Jove! she said to us. Wretched beast could have passed for a bloody tyrannosaurus. She turned to look at Lizzie. No possible, she said, it-thing killing-killing? Kill it? Lizzie cried, once she had decoded this. But why to kill it? They keep snakes away. She ran downstairs, and a few minutes later they saw her go into the garden with an armful of cabbage stalks and vegetable peel. She scattered them on the grass and the animal darted forward and began to feed. Hai, hai, hai, gasped Ram Dayal. Hai, hai, hai!Determined not to be outdone by Lizzie, Queen Victoria stiffened her back and went out into the garden herself, taking a few vegetables with her. The animal fixed its eyes balefully upon her as soon as she stepped into the lawn. She froze. Then, drawing on her last reserves of courage, she managed to mutter to it: Eating-eating nice veggie-veggies? which was only her Lizzie-language turned inside out, but the animal’s tail seemed to flicker in answer and from that moment onwards she considered it a part of her household: she was always at ease with anything and anybody who would respond to one of her private dialects.After that, even though many of her Sinhalese acquaintances were alarmed to find a monitor lizard on her lawn and to ld her stories about how they had been known to break children’s shinbones with a swipe of their tails, she allowed it the run of her garden, except, of course, when she had parties, when Lizzie was made to tie it to a tree with a length of rope. One day, early in the morning after one of her parents’ parties, when the lawn was still dotted with cigarette stubs and half-eaten snacks, Ila went out into the garden to read.She had a book with her that she had had to put away the night before when she was only twenty pages from the end, because Lizzie had switched off the lights in her bedroom. She flopped into a deckchair beside the lily pond and in a moment she was absorbed in her book. Ten pages later, still engrossed, she heard a soft splash in the lily pond. It was a very gentle splash, no louder than the sound of a goldfish’s tail flicking the surface.But she stirred, and, not quite taking her eyes off the page, she caught a glimpse of a shadow, as slim and si nuous as a branch of oleander, stretching from the edge of the lawn, under her chair and into the pool. Then the shadow rippled, and this time she looked up properly and saw scales glinting on a long muscular body. She screamed, and the book dropped out of her hands. It hit the edge of her chair and tumbled off, and she heard a dull, fleshy thud as it struck scales and muscle. The whole length of the snake’s body flashed past under the chair with an angry rustle, and then, somewhere behind her, she heard a slow prolonged hiss.She turned, slowly, stiffly, in the way one has to when one knows that one’s lungs are suddenly empty and one’s muscles have gone rigid with fear. The snake’s head was about a foot from her back. Its body lay curled, in tight regular coils, flat on the earth, while its head had reared up, higher than the back of the chair. She was whimpering now, trying to call out, but at the same time, looking at the snake’s head, she saw it more clearly than she’d ever seen anything before, with the telescopic clarity of absolute concentration.She could see its tiny eyes, the flaring nostrils at the end of the sharply pointed head, the tongue, no longer flickering, drawn into the soft pink mouth in readiness, the fangs, erect now, and dripping. Then she heard another sound at the far end of the garden and dimly, without turning her head, she saw the thala-goya thrashing at the end of its rope, battering the tree it was tied to with its tail. The snake heard it too, and it hesitated for a moment with its body arched. Its eyes settled upon Ila again and its neck bent still further back till it was like a drawn bow.Then its head flashed forward. At that moment, reflexively, Ila turned her body, a very small movement, but enough to overbalance the chair. She fell, the chair tumbled over with her, and the snake’s fangs glanced off its steel legs. It reared back again like a snapping whiplash. Ila tried to pus h herself up, but her hands slipped and she fell back. And then, with all the suddenness of a knot springing undone, the coiled snake dropped its head on the grass and shot away towards the wall. She looked up to see the thala-goya lumbering after it. It had bitten through the rope.But the snake was quicker and it had slithered over the wall long before the thala-goya could cross the lawn. So, young chap, Queen Victoria said, patting my head, her eyes twinkling. What do you make of that? I glanced instinctively towards Tridib. He was looking at me, eyes narrowed, head cocked. I was nervous now: I could see that he was waiting to hear what I’d have to say, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. My mother and grandmother were exclaiming with horror about the snake, asking Queen Victoria how big it was, whether it was poisonous or not.Taking my cue from them, I chose a safe course: hoping to earn Tridib’s approval by showing him how well I remembered everything he to ld us, I asked Queen Victoria whether the snake was of the species Boidae or Elapidae. Queen Victoria goggled at me and mumbled something to the effect of: Well that’s a bit of an uppercut, young chap; I don’t think I could tell you in a month of Sundays. While she was mumbling I stole a glance at Tridib. He had pursed his lips and was shaking his head in disappointment. I sat out the rest of their visit in crestfallen silence.On the stairs, when I was going down to see them off, while Ila and her mother lingered over their goodbyes, Tridib said to me casually that, if one thought about it, there was nothing really very interesting about snakes – after all, if I saw one in the lake, for example, what would I do? I’d come back home and tell everyone, but in a few minutes I’d forget about it and get back to my homework: the snake would have nothing whatever to do with my real life. I did not particularly care for the suggestion that my homework was m y real life, but I kept quiet anyway: I c