Srinagar: Actor Hina Khan is currently in Kashmir and is in complete awe of the beauty of the Valley.
Taking to Instagram, she dropped several mesmerising images. The pictures see her posing on the banks of the famous Dal Lake.
“This time was like a therapy, my shikara and dal lake..Eternally captivated by the rawness of this place #kashmir,” she wrote.
Hina looked as beautiful as ever in a green ethnic suit.
Take a look at pictures of her enjoying Shikara ride.
Hina’s “Kashmiri” pictures garnered several likes and comments.
“How beautiful,” a social media user commented.
“Sunder,” another one wrote,
Hina celebrated Eid this time in Kashmir.
Sharing her Eid look, she wrote, “Kashmir ki kali celebrating Eid in Jannat-e-Kashmir.. Eid Mubarak Everyone.”
For the occasion, Hina was dressed in a golden suit which she accentuated with a pink dupatta.
Hina became a household name with her role as Akshara in the popular television show Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai. She was also a part of Kasautii Zindagii Kay 2, in which she played the antagonist Komolika. However, she quit the show after a few months. She also participated in television reality shows like Khatron Ke Khiladi season 8 and Bigg Boss 11.
Some writers discover a territory and mine its riches: think Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Elizabeth Strout’s Maine, Colin Barrett’s small-town Mayo. Paul Harding is one such novelist. His first two books, Tinkers, which won a Pulitzer prize,andEnon, were both set in New England, and within the same family: the Crosbys, descendants of early European settlers on America’s eastern seaboard. In This Other Eden, Harding returns to the same coast. This time, though, he takes us just offshore to Apple Island – and here, “hardly three hundred feet across a channel from the mainland”, we’re among folk his readers will only have glanced in his fiction before.
Harding’s island is named after the apple trees planted by the first settler: “Benjamin Honey – American, Bantu, Igbo – born enslaved – freed or fled at fifteen, only he ever knew – ship’s carpenter, aspiring orchardist, arrived on the island with his wife, Patience, nee Rafferty, Galway girl, in 1793.” The story proper opens more than a century later, in 1911, with Esther, the great-granddaughter of Benjamin and Patience, and now matriarch of her own clan of Honeys, dozing in her rocking chair, grandchild on her lap, snow falling outside on a chill spring morning.
A handful of other people now live alongside the founding family. Based on the historical Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, home to a racially mixed fishing community from the civil war up until the early 20th century, Harding’s island is peopled by descendants of freedmen and Irish, of “Penobscot grandmothers and Swedish grandpas”, some still recognisably Angolan or Congolese in heritage, others like the Lark family “drained of all colour”. In their veins “run blood from every continent but Antarctica”.
Their lives are precarious. The Honeys live – just about – on carpentry; the McDermotts, who make their home in the shell of a beached schooner, by taking in washing. Esther’s nearest neighbour, Zachary, is a drifter and civil war veteran who spends his days carving scenes from the gospels into a hollow tree. Even the island itself is marginal, subject to flood tides of biblical proportions, the worst of which took the original orchard, Benjamin’s “half-remembered Eden no sooner restored than carried off by wind and rain”.
The islanders are proud, though. The supplies shipped over by well-meaning mainlanders are a puzzle to them: the shingles sent to repair their shacks are inferior to Zachary and Eha Honey’s handiwork, and Esther uses them for stove wood. The island’s children have free range, too, exploring and wandering long into the evenings, “the summer constellations humming, their light pulsing in time with the revolution of the planet”. So there is beauty here, and grace, and – crucially – refuge. Harding’s message is clear: only at the margins could such a community establish itself.
The mainland has also sent a minister. Matthew Diamond, “a courteous, plain white man”, strikes up a friendship of sorts with Esther. Surprised at her quick mind, he takes to sitting on her stoop, discussing scripture and Shakespeare. In Ethan, her grandson, Diamond sees an extraordinary talent for drawing.
For all his kindness and best intentions, Diamond wrestles with himself. His faith tells him “all men are brothers, all women his sisters”, but he still feels a “visceral, involuntary repulsion in the presence of a living Negro”. His attentions have also alerted others on the mainland. Journalists turn up to report on the “little rock’s queer brood”. Photographers make postcards to sell to the curious. Men come with callipers to measure heads, their interest eugenics, their intention to assess “the band of Nature’s problem children drifting off our shore”.
Through Diamond’s intercession, Ethan is offered tutelage on the mainland. As his drawing talent is undeniable and his skin light enough to pass, Esther knows this is a rare chance for her grandson. The potential reward is great, the risk equal: thus the scene is set for the further story’s unfolding.
Harding too is a risk-taker. Told in third person, but inhabiting multiple and often competing viewpoints, This Other Eden takes us inside Esther’s defiant penury, Zachary’s visions, Diamond’s “skewed, inexcusable heart”. Whether islander or mainlander, child or adult, each voice is wonderfully clear and distinct.
Harding’s use of time is equally deft. Tinkers was told over a dying man’s last hours: as George Crosby’s adult children gathered around him, he returned in visions to his own childhood, reconciling in memory with the father who long ago abandoned him. In Enon, the narrative opened with the death of Charlie Crosby’s young daughter, the story of his fatherhood and his family’s wider history revealed over the first raw year of his mourning. In This Other Eden, Harding takes a more elliptical approach. The three parts of the novel jump through time, from the opening among the island families, to Ethan’s new life on the mainland, and then back again, exploring the consequences of Diamond’s intervention not just for the boy, but for the whole island. Harding’s lightness of touch is masterful.
This Other Eden is a story of good intentions, bad faith, worse science, but also a tribute to community and human dignity and the possibility of another world. In both, it has much to say to our times.
This Other Eden is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
New Delhi: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy made a gala pitch in New Delhi on Tuesday calling global nations to invest in the state and be part of its economic growth.
Addressing the International Diplomats Alliance Meet during a preparatory meeting for the Global Investors Summit to be held in Visakhapatnam on March 3 and 4, CM Jagan said, “As a fastest growing state in the country with a GSDP of 11.43%, Andhra Pradesh has achieved the number one rank in the Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) and has retained it for the third successive year.”
Elaborating on the facilities and resources available in the state for industrial growth, CM Jagan said that out of the eleven industrial corridors being developed by the Centre across the country, AP shares space for three of them- Hyderabad to Bengaluru, Visakhapatnam to Chennai and Chennai to Bengaluru.
“We have a single desk portal facility. You will get all kinds of permissions in 21 days. In terms of electricity, industries can be set up at affordable prices. AP has ample resources in terms of renewable energy too. There is an opportunity for 33,000 MW pumped storage projects,” he said.
Agreeing with CM Jagan, president of Nasscom Debjani Ghosh said that the state has always been a leader in the adoption of technology.
Bharat Biotech Co-Founder and Chairperson for CII Southern Region, Suchitra Ella, praised the State government’s initiative towards industries.
“Countries of the world are looking towards India. It is gratifying to have single desk clearance in the state. AP has golden opportunities in the fields of agriculture, food processing, electronics and pharma. CM Jagan is also a visionary leader like his father Late YSR. CII will take the initiative to work with the AP government,” she said.
High up in Mallorca’s spectacular Tramuntana mountain range, the picturesque village of Deià is a Mediterranean idyll that has been a magnet for artists and bohemians for more than a century.
There is no beach to speak of nearby, which has served to keep the crowds at bay. Its problem now is that only millionaires and billionaires can afford to live there.
“It’s still attracting creative people but now they have to have money,” says the Chicago-born ceramicist Joanna Kuhne, who has lived in Deià since 1980. “They come here to relax and they don’t want to integrate or they don’t know how to. Their life is somewhere else.”
Ceramicist Joanna Kuhne in her studio. Photograph: Stephen Burgen
Local people have been priced out. It’s not that there’s nowhere to live – the two estate agents in the village have plenty of homes on offer for upwards of €2m (£1.75m) – it’s rather that people in the Balearic Islands, where the average monthly salary is €1,598, have been thoroughly priced out.
As such, while poverty is driving the depopulation of rural areas on the Spanish mainland, Deià and dozens of villages like it in the Balearics are being depopulated by wealth.
The regional government is fighting back, with a request for European approval for a law that would ban anyone not resident in the islands from buying property.
This has been interpreted as a ban on foreigners’ buying property but that is not the case in Deià, where foreigners, mostly from the UK and US, make up around 37% of the population.
“It’s not about people’s nationality, everyone is welcome. It’s how they plan to use the houses,” says Deià’s mayor, Lluís Apesteguia. “What we want is people who plan to live here. We don’t want people buying second homes, nor do we want speculators.”
It was the English poet and novelist Robert Graves, who settled in Deià in 1929, who put it on the map as a place of pilgrimage for artists and writers.
Robert Graves with his second wife, Beryl, and children outside their home in Deià. Photograph: Daniel Farson/Getty Images
“Even when my father arrived there was already an artists’ colony of German and Catalan painters,” his son Tomás says. “In fact, he initially rented from an American woman.”
The charcoal industry had gone into decline, leading to massive emigration. As a result, houses were cheap to buy or rent.
When mass tourism arrived in the 1960s, the colony of foreign residents opposed any sort of tourist development.
“That was the first rift between the locals and the foreigners,” says Graves. “The foreigners didn’t want any more building and the locals saw what was happening elsewhere and wanted some for themselves.”
“Back then Mallorca was paradise,” says Carmen Domènech, who moved to Deià from Barcelona in 1974. “It was a refuge for artists, poets and intellectuals.
“There was a good relationship between the locals and the foreigners. You could sit in a bar and Julio Cortázar [an Argentinian novelist] would be at the next table. It was all very natural and it was a proper village with a butcher and a fishmonger.”
Things began to change in 1987 when the Virgin Group boss Richard Branson obtained planning permission to build la Residencia, originally conceived as an artists’ retreat but in reality a luxury hotel.
La Residencia in Deià. Photograph: Tyson Sadlo
“The rot set in with the arrival of Branson and that’s when I became an activist,” Domènech says. “The argument went that, thanks to Branson, lots of money would come to the area and everyone would have a job. Nearly all the village was against me because I opposed it.”
Graves says house prices rocketed “once the Residencia started to attract art consumers rather than art producers”.
Prices also rose when, under a bylaw passed in the 1980s, any new houses in Deià had to be built of stone, thus making them much more expensive.
Branson sold the hotel in 2002. It is now owned by Bernard Arnault, the boss of the luxury goods firm LVMH, and currently the world’s wealthiest man.
Francesca Deià, 63, has lived in the village for most of her life. She recalls what it was like growing up with such a cosmopolitan crowd in what was a very conservative and Catholic place.
A street in Deià. Photograph: Alex/Getty Images/iStockphoto
“To the older generation, the people who came here were like aliens and our parents wanted to protect us from the all the sex and drugs and rock’n’roll,” Deià says.
“I feel enriched that I was able to grow up with all these different nationalities and learn to speak English – and Welsh. The people I grew up with and their children are still here and they all speak Mallorquin. But nowadays I don’t see that happening much. There is less integration.”
Her Welsh partner, Dai Griffiths, says: “It’s curious that often artistic and bohemian types say they feel freer in rural, conservative places than in the city. It’s as though the linguistic and cultural barriers are a plus because they don’t feel a need to engage with the people around them. The village is just a backdrop.”
Apesteguia, who describes himself as “pathologically optimistic”, says the EU needs to be flexible and recognise that the islands are a special case, “otherwise villages such as Deià will cease to exist”.
“The Mallorca population is increasing while here in Deià it’s falling,” he says. “A village without a stable community isn’t a village, it’s just a group of houses or a tourist resort.”
Aside from a small supermarket, nearly all the shops have gone and GP services have shrunk from four days a week to two hours.
“It’s a ghost town and a theme park,” says Domènech.
Apesteguia is inclined to agree. “Tourists came here because it’s authentic,” he says. “But now it’s not.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
