1. In 1991 I visited Cochin, and about five years later I traveled more extensively within Kerala.
2. Jewtown is a fascinating place.
3. It's a mannered, gestural, ritualistic dance theatre, similar in some ways to other Asian dance idioms, such as Indonesian and Japanese forms.
4. The technique is precise and physically exacting and requires years of study.
5. The dancers have perfect control of all face and body muscles, and the make-up is striking and elaborate.
Turn Out The Light : Anderson Digby
1. There is a word that usefully captures this trend to the insipid and denatured, and it is "Lite."
2. Lite is insipid, weak, denatured, flat, diluted, and easy: food for cowards and children.
3. So booming Lite business gives us a picture of the American and British consumer of food. He is ignorant, timid, squeamish, and childish.
4. Good eating is about physical sensations: of crunching the tiny bones of pigs' feet, sucking away at the crab claw, pulling that greeny purple asparagus spear through your teeth, punching the claret round the gums, chewing at that older and better piece of beef, sniffing the sinus-clearing horse-radish, the sharp intake of breath as the marc hits the back of the throat, the drying of the mouth as a sour Asian fish sauce touches the gums, and the sheer delight of using a Spanish wooden toothpick to excavate the gaps in the teeth and enjoy the flecks of almonds or filaments of stewed wild duck a second time around.
5. If a novice approaches them, it is he who has to submit and learn to appreciate them.
