The Hindi’s
The NBA season is less than a month away. The First Annual Hindi’s are here to predict the winners of some very important awards.
Most Valuable Player: LeBron James – Now that Kobe doesn’t have the “Best player to not win the MVP” argument going for him, he will lose a lot of attention nationally. James is on a mediocre team and always turns it into a contender. I will devote a full article to the MVP race, but LeBron is always the guy to beat to begin the season.
Coach of the Year: Sam Mitchell – The COY Award is always a little screwy. Whichever team is not expected to perform well, but then suddenly does, the coach is awarded. I guess that makes sense, but it should be combined with the Trainer of the Year Award for keeping the players healthy.
Rookie of the Year: Michael Beasely – Most of the top rookies are paired with another rookie who could get consideration for the ROY and steal some consideration. Greg Oden and Rudy Fernandez with Portland. Marc Gasol and O.J. Mayo on Memphis. Beasely was impressive in the Summer League and the Heat are poised for a great turnaround season.
Under-Appreciated Tandem Award: Caron Butler and Antawn Jamison – Everyone talks about Gilbert Arenas and his constant injury concerns, but the Wizards were better when Arenas is wearing a suit and watching. Butler and Jamison are both legit stars and if management would try to build a team around them, Washington could finally knock off Cleveland.
Newcomer of the Year: Elton Brand – If Brand had stayed in L.A., the Clippers would be a contender in the West. Now on a playoff team in the East, Brand should make a huge impact. His low post game combined with the confidence of Andre Iguodala, the Sixers will be tough to match-up with.
Drama Queen of the Year: Lamar Odom – Now that Kobe is happy, theoretically, Lamar Odom is peeved that he might lose his starting spot to Trevor Ariza who has been impressive in limited action. Ariza is not better than Odom, but having Odom come off the bench would make him the main man with the second unit. But Odom has been watching too much “The Hills” and thought, “What would Spencer do?” Throwing a fit that should be a constant distraction is the only right answer.
6th Man of the Year: Grant Hill – Manu Ginobili is hurt so this race opens up and now that teams are starting to delegate a starter to the second string to lead the younger players. Hill is surrounded by talented, experienced players and won’t need to over-work for his numbers.
Most Awkward Potential Headlines Award: Kevin Love – Check out this gem from NBA.com, “Love Making Early Good Impressions With Wolves”. Now, is it the Love making or the Love making early that is causing the good impressions with Wolves? These are the problems that ensue with the last name of Love. I guess it’s just a good thing he was traded off of Rudy Gay’s team.
Vein Popping Award: Kevin Garnett – His intensity is unrivaled on this planet. Anyone who seriously poses the, “Will the Celtics still have the drive?” question, has never seen KG play consistently. I would feel bad for the guy who refs his kids soccer games. Garnett on the sideline pacing and pounding his chest as a 6-year-old scores a goal, that’s too much to handle.
Hot Hindi Stuff Online:
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAt a time when her life seemed to be crumbling, Katherine Russell Rich took on a writing assignment in India, where she was seduced by the idea of learning to speak Hindi, the language she heard swirling all around her. In a rash moment, she determined she’d go live and study in the ancient city of Udaipur. That decision lead to unexpected reclamation. In this beautiful and spirited memoir, she documents her experiences, from the bizarre to the frightening to the full-out exhilarating. Seamlessly combining her courageous (and often hilarious) personal journey with reporting on the science of language acquisition, Dreaming in Hindi offers an eye-opening account of what learning a new tongue can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, about ourselves. 
Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another LanguageAn eye-opening and courageous memoir that explores what learning a new language can teach us about distant worlds and, ultimately, ourselves.
After miraculously surviving a serious illness, Katherine Rich found herself at an impasse in her career as a magazine editor. She spontaneously accepted a freelance writing assignment to go to India, where she found herself thunderstruck by the place and the language, and before she knew it she was on her way to Udaipur, a city in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, in order to learn Hindi. Rich documents her experiences—ranging from the bizarre to the frightening to the unexpectedly exhilarating—using Hindi as the lens through which she is given a new perspective not only on India, but on the radical way the country and the language itself were changing her. Fascinated by the process, she went on to interview linguistics experts around the world, reporting back from the frontlines of the science wars on what happens in the brain when we learn a new language. She brings both of these experiences together seamlessly in Dreaming in Hindi, a remarkably unique and thoughtful account of self-discovery.
Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and NationThis edited volume of translations covers the major political essays of India's first feminist Hindi poet. A devout follower and advocate of Gandhi, Mahadevi Varma is a household name in India and is a major woman of letters in the modern Hindi world. The essays collected in this volume represent some of Mahadevi Varma’s most famous writings on the “woman question” in India. The collection also includes an introduction to her life, with biographical notes, an analysis of her importance in the field of Hindi letters, as well as a selection of her poems – these latter because Mahadevi Varma made her mark in the world of Hindi literature through her poetry, and a volume of translations would be incomplete without a sampling of them. The introduction to the translated volume sketches Mahadevi Varma's life and work and her significance to both the development of modern standard Hindi as well as to the nascent women's movement underway in the 1920s in India. Little scholarly attention has been given in the academy outside of India to Varma’s numerous contributions to women’s education, to the development of modern standard Hindi, and to political thought during the Independence movement in late-colonial India. This volume of translations engages themes like language and nationalism, women’s roles as artists, the politics of motherhood and marriage—themes that continue to be relevant to women’s lives in contemporary India and to movements for women’s rights outside India as well. This volume of translations of Mahadevi Varma’s feminist political essays is the first of its kind. While some of these essays, especially those from Mahadevi Varma’s Hamari Shrinkhala Ki Kariyan collection have been translated by Neera K. Sohoni and published under the title Links in the Chain (Katha, 2003), there is no sustained treatment of Varma’s political thinking in one, accessible volume. While there is ample work on Varma in Hindi, scholars of feminism (and students of Hindi who are in the nascent stages of language acquisition) have nowhere to turn for a comprehensive sampling of her work. Mahadevi Varma is also one of the most difficult writers to access even for trained scholars of Hindi language and literature. Her highly Sanskritized diction and her stylized prose sketches make her work a pleasure to read in the original but daunting to translate into English. This volume has contributions from some of the most highly regarded Hindi experts. In the editor’s introduction to the volume of translations a brief biographical sketch followed by an analysis of the political climate of Northern India has been provided so that the reader unfamiliar with India of the 1920s-1940s will have the necessary historical context to place her work. The introduction to the volume also raises the issue of why she gave up writing poetry and turned solely to writing prose when she became involved with the movements for women’s rights and national independence. Finally, the volume provides feminist cultural historians a rich archive of how Indian women like Mahadevi Varma were actively negotiating their lives as women, activists, artists, teachers, and married women. This work will be of use to scholars of Hindi language and literature in the US/European academy and should be of interest to cultural and feminist historians of modern India. This volume will introduce Mahadevi Varma’s literary scope to an English-speaking audience, and will serve as a reference for feminist historians of the nationalist period in the Indian subcontinent.
Poetry, Politics and Culture: Essays on Indian Texts and ContextsThis book maps the journey of the Indian poetic imagination—in Hindi, Panjabi and Indian English—from its original quasi-spiritual longings to its activist interventions in the public domain. As Indian poetry of the post-1990s gravitates towards a non-Orientalised postcolonial nationalism, it seeks to rewrite and disseminate the shifting coordinates of nationalist imagination in terms of the dissent of the subaltern discontents of the nation.
The book is interdisciplinary: it studies Indian poetry from the new emerging imperatives of postcolonialism, new historiography (subaltern, dalit and diasporas), nationalism, and cultural studies. Covering the two major north Indian languages—Hindi and Punjabi—along with poetry in Indian English, the book is a close textual study of about 150 poetry collections in these languages. It is path-breaking in its study of secular poetry written in the so-called vernaculars, with critical attention to its participation in the political as well as cultural processes of nation-making.
This cutting-edge book should be of interest to scholars of Indian writings in English, Hindi and Panjabi, gender studies, dalit and diaspora studies, postcolonial poetry and to students reading South Asian literature and culture.
