Analysis of Anita Desai as a writer

Anita Desai is born on June 24th 1937. She is an Indian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and children's writer. She is best known for her studies of Indian life. Anita Desai focuses on the personal struggles of Anglicized, middle-class women in contemporary India as they attempt to overcome the societal limitations imposed by a tradition-bound patriarchal culture. As a contemporary Indian female author, Desai has been identified with a new literary tradition of Indian writing in English, which is stylistically different and less conservative than colonial Indian literature and concerns such issues as hybridity, shifting identity, and “imaginary homelands,” a phrase coined by Indian novelist Salman Rushdie. Most of Anita Desai's works engage the complexities of modern Indian culture from a feminine perspective while highlighting the female Indian predicament of maintaining self-identity as an individual woman. Since the mid-1980s, Desai has shown a definite shift in her narrative voice, favoring dialogue over interior monologue and focusing on underprivileged characters rather than her usually bourgeois protagonists. Although Desai has not been widely read in her native country—mainly at Indian universities—Western audiences have warmly received her fiction largely due to its unique insights on the often neglected aspects of Indian culture. Many reviewers have praised her intellectual rigor and vivid portrayals of India, particularly her insistence on the multicultural dimension of contemporary Indian society. The passage above is basically a summary of the analysis of Anita Desai from http://www.enotes.com/contemporary-literary-criticism/desai-anita.

I personally feel that Anita Desai’s writing is very brilliant and she knows a lot about India. She is able to describe settings so well like in Village by the Sea that I could picture out what is happening just by reading the book. She is able to bring out the “bad” or poorer side of India in most of her stories too. I admire her writing skills a lot and aspire to be like her!

Character Analysis on B.B and The Taximan Story

The mother and daughter in both stories are very close.

B.B: The mother and daughter are very close probably because the father is often overseas, leaving the mother and daughter to fend for themselves. This made their relationship grow over the time, thus they are very close.

The Taximan Story: The mother and daughter are very close probably because the father is very strict and violent. This made them closer as they have to "help" each other. One example will be the mother pulling the father away when he wanted to beat the younger daughter. Another example will be the eldest daughter, who is very obedient, staying at home helping her mother.

The father and daughter relationship

B.B: The daughter loves and respects her father. There is also trust from the father to the daughter as the father told B.B his secrets and yet did not tell his wife.

The Taximan Story: The father and daughter relationship is not very good as the father is very strict and violent. One example will be the father wanting to beat his daughter to death when he found out that his daughter is fooling around with the foreigners instead of studying. I feel that the father being strict is good as the daughter will grow up to be very disciplined. They did not get along well probably because of the generation gap; therefore the father could not understand his daughter, leading to their strained relationship. The father is "old-fashioned" and cannot accept his daughter fooling around with the foreigners. The father's mindset is more like the one in the olden days, where discipline is very important. Their relationship was good initially as the father trusts his daughter, however, when the story is reaching the end, the father loses his trust for his daughter as she betrayed his trust.

Characters
B.B's Father: Irresponsible.
B.B's Mother: Stubborn to an extent and also loving.
B.B: Caring

Taximan: Strict and Violent.
Taximan's Wife: Submissive and "obedient".
Taximan's Oldest Daughter: Obedient
Taximan's Younger Daughter: Rebellious and Smart.

In conclusion, the two stories are common these ways: Mother-Daughter Relationship is good, Children in both stories forced to become mature, lack of communication between each other in both stories and lack of understanding between each other in both stories which eventually lead to a strained relationship.

Firstly, human rights basically means rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled. The human rights organisation is an organisation to protect these human rights. India has always been criticised by the human rights organisation on child labour as India has a lot of children working at even a tender age of 10.

India has the dishonor of being home to the largest number of working children in the world.

Nearly 100 million children of school-going age in India do not attend school. Many of them are working in hazardous jobs.

The government has recently revised the country’s 20-year old law prohibiting employment of children in hazardous occupations.

They have given the law more teeth but child rights activists says poverty needs to be eradicated first.

Bismillah Geelani has the story from New Dehli.


Rashid owns a restaurant in Delhi’s crowded Chandni Chowk area.

Most of the workers at this eatery are children below the age of 18 years.

One of them is wiping the tables down; one is taking orders from the customers while two others are serving.

And just outside the hall, sitting beside a water tank is the youngest of them all.

13-year old Raju from Bihar.

“We are very poor. We do not own any land either. I wash dishes here and clean the floor. I get meals and 800 rupees in return which I send to my home in Bihar.”

An overwhelming majority of these children working in factories, showrooms and restaurants like this, come from desperately poor families who cannot afford even the basics in life.

And employers don’t mind exploiting them as cheap labour.

“We employ young boys and give them 30-40 rupees a day. If we employ an adult, he will demand 100 rupees which means less income for us.”

The Child Labour Act of 1986 banned the employment of children below the age of 14 years in certain occupations identified as hazardous. The list of illegal occupations has been expanded several times and now includes 15 jobs.

Most recently, it has been expanded to outlaw processes involving excessive heat and cold, mechanized fishing, timber handling and loading and food processing.

The age bar on child labour has also been increased from 14 years to 18 years.

Harjot Kaur, Director of Child Labour Division in the Ministry of Labour says the idea is to rescue and rehabilitate working children.

“We seek to cove more children for rehabilitation enlarging the scope of the law, enlarging the ambit of the law. We seek to withdraw these children who are working in these occupations and then provide them with a rehabilitation package. That is the main objective with this amendment.”

But child rights activists do not expect much from this. Swami Agnivesh is president of the Bonded Labour Liberation Front.

“Given the gigantic nature of the problem, whatever the government does is like a peanut. It hardly touches the core of the problem. The political will is totally and conspicuously absent. With the result, we have millions and millions of children languishing in conditions of servitude.”

Hundreds of these children are rescued every year by the government and NGO’s but most of them drift back to work because they are not provided with alternatives.

Children Homes, which form part of government’s rehabilitation plan, are very few and poorly managed.

AK Dunu Roy, Director of New Delhi-based Hazards Centre says, children home as cure is worse than the disease itself.

“By putting them into children homes, you can’t rehabilitate the child. They are terrible. If I look at hazards, in fact, they are worse than the places which they have been rescued. Basic facilities are not there of sanitation, water electricity, food. And essentially, the people who look after these children homes are not very considerate to children. Because they are subjected there to more abuse.”

Donu Roy says it is the child’s family that needs to be rehabilitated in order to eradicated the menace of child labour.

“Child labour is a product of unemployment and poverty. It is because the family is poor that the child is in work. If the family is not getting an appropriate livelihood and income, the child will continue to go into work.”

Swami Agnivesh sees a guarantee of education for every child as the way out.

“Instead of taking recourse to legal means, children should be guaranteed the right to good quality full time education. Once this right is in place, all children will be in schools and not available for labour.”

The government agenda is to eliminate all forms of child labour in the country by 2020. But given the present situation, the agenda is likely to remain just a pious hope.

Till then, millions of young children working in roadside eateries, slaving away in glass factories, hunched up over carpet looms or sweeping and cooking in homes as domestic help will continue to toil in blatant violation of the Child labour Law.

This story has been taken from http://www.asiacalling.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=853%3Aindia-criticized-for-not-ending-child-labour&catid=96%3Aindia&Itemid=374&lang=bn.

I personally think that this is only a one-sided view of thinking.

In India, many children have to work as they would not have anything to eat if they do not work. India should not be blamed for child labour as the children do not have a choice on whether they want to work. The Indian government has already tried to eliminate child labour and I think that this should be commended. What I am worried about is what the children in India will eat if they do not work?

My perspective of child labour is that it should be condone in third world countries like India. Although it is understood that it is really very pitiful for those children to have to work at such a young age, but I think that it is their life. I think that only if they work and go to school can they break away from child labour in the near future so that their future generations do not have to work and can instead study. I sympathise the children there and hope that they could break free from this can of life to live like us, able to have three meals and able to attend school.