Make It Easy

A Temporary Matter A Temporary Matter is a story about grief and the secrets people keep from one another. Husband and wife Shukumar and Shoba are reeling from the loss of their child six months earlier. They avoid each other and their friends, Shoba filling her time with work and Shukumar procrastinating in finishing his dissertation. A deus-ex-machina in the form of systematic power outages allows for intimacy between the couple not achieved since the death of their son. The importance of communication within a marriage is a prevalent theme in  Interpreter of Maladies . Here the sorrow of the lost child causes a communication breakdown in the relationship of Shukumar and Shoba. This silence between them eventually destroys them because, in their grief, Shukumar and Shoba grow to become different people. Since they no longer share experiences, the couple grows apart. Their final secrets are painful ones – Shoba intends to move out and Shukumar violates the wishes of...

Diabetes Mellitus Diabetes mellitus: More commonly referred to as "diabetes" -- a chronic disease associated with abnormally high levels of the sugar  glucose  in the blood. Diabetes is due to one of two mechanisms: Inadequate production of  insulin  (which is made by the pancreas and lowers blood glucose), or Inadequate sensitivity of cells to the action of insulin. The two main types of diabetes correspond to these two mechanisms and are called insulin dependent (type 1) and non-insulin dependent (type 2) diabetes. In type 1 diabetes there is no insulin or not enough of it. In type 2 diabetes, there is generally enough insulin but the cells upon which it should act are not normally sensitive to its action. The signs and symptoms of both types of diabetes include increased urine output and decreased appetite as well as  fatigue . Diabetes is diagnosed by blood glucose testing, the  glucose tolerance test , and testing of the level of...

The Namesake In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase — that opens whole worlds of emotion. The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli...

Unaccustomed Earth In the stunning title story, Ruma, a young mother in a new city, is visited by her father who carefully tends her garden–where she later unearths evidence of a love affair he is keeping to himself. In “A Choice of Accommodations,” a couple’s romantic getaway weekend takes a dark turn at a party that lasts deep into the night. In “Only Goodness,” a woman eager to give her younger brother the perfect childhood she never had is overwhelmed by guilt, anguish and anger when his alcoholism threatens her family. And in “Hema and Kaushik,” a trio of linked stories–a luminous, intensely compelling elegy of life, death, love and fate–we follow the lives of a girl and boy who, one fateful winter, share a house in Massachusetts. They travel from innocence to experience on separate, sometimes painful paths, until destiny brings them together again years later in Rome.  Jhumpa Lahiri Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born in London and brought up i...

The Treatment Of Bibi Haldar Bibi Haldar is a 29-year-old woman who suffers from a disease that no doctor, priest or therapist could quite understand and therefore each of them offered differing 'cures'. Bibi was infamous for her illness, and everyone knew of her suffering. ''She was not pretty. Her upper lip was thin, her teeth too small. Her gums protruded when she spoke.” All Bibi wants is to live life like any other normal girl: get married, have children and be loved. Unfortunately, her illness precludes her from achieving the desired normalcy. As the story unfolds, Bibi eventually finds her 'cure', not through any medical prescription but in a way anyone could ever have imagined. Jhumpa Lahiri Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri was born in London and brought up in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Brought up in America by a mother who wanted to raise her children to be Indian, she learned about her Bengali heritage from an early age...

Meiosis The production of offspring by sexual reproduction includes the fusion of two gametes, each with a complete haploid set of chromosomes. Gametes are formed from specialized diploid cells. This specialized kind of cell division that reduces the chromosome number by half results in the production of haploid daughter cells. This kind of division is called meiosis. History Meiosis was discovered and described for the first time in sea urchin eggs in 1876 by the German biologist Oscar Hertwig . It was described again in 1883, at the level of chromosomes , by the Belgian zoologist Edouard Van Beneden , in Ascaris roundworm eggs. The significance of meiosis for reproduction and inheritance, however, was described only in 1890 by German biologist August Weismann , who noted that two cell divisions were necessary to transform one diploid cell into four haploid cells if the number of chromosomes had to be maintained. In 1911 the American geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan detec...