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Tales from the Island of Serendip
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8,956 posts in this topic

Ah, the sweet innocence of children! No matter how poor, they shine with hope. Contrast this with the experiences of so many young women in Rajabazaar, the brutal realities confronted when barely out of childhood, by such as Nahid Parvin, posted earlier. And here is the even more harrowing story of Ruhi. In her eyes you see a level of suffering far beyond tears....

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The Story of Ruhi

Ruhi Sheikh is now a 25 years woman. She lives in a10/10ft room of her maternal uncle. She has a brother and mother. Her mother is the only bread earner of the family who earns less than one dollar per day (INR 50) as a fixed wage rate.
 

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Edited by Flex Mentallo
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When Ruhi was very young her father one day deserted her mother and from then they started living in their maternal uncle's house. When she was very young she saw that her cousin's were attending school. But her uncle didn't provide that opportunity to her.

She literally grew up in the streets. As Rajabazar's Muslim community is very conservative and male dominated, neighbors of Ruhi's family always blamed her mother for the separation. It is difficult to understand but in reality Muslim women of Rajabazar goes through all the possible ways of physical, mental or verbal abuse.

Ruhi and her mother patiently accepted every torture as they had no place to move. But one day it crosses all the limit.

 

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It was just a few days after her grandmother's death. When her uncle & aunty beat Ruhi to unconsciousness and throw her out of their ancestral home.

With no choice left they visited Roshni. Then Roshni asked them to report in the local police station which they denied for the fear of more force onto them. Next day Roshni visited their place and their claim. Talked to the neighbors and then took the call to end Ruhi and her mother's misery

They asked all the parties to sit for a review on the issue. Ruhi's uncle did participate but said that they cannot give them living space from the ancestral home as it is against the culture of the community. Roshni when insisted Ruhi to lodge complaint against them in the police station they somehow accepted their claim. However, the same abuses continued.


 

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At one stage Ruhi with the support of Roshni's counseling thought of fighting for justice. And after one more time when she got beaten by her uncle chose to lodge complaint against them. But this time police station denied to take FIR   and only took a general diary. With this Ruhi's uncle's family became more aggressive.
 

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Over the festive season I like to use Serendip to entertain fellow boardies with topics sometimes linked to but always at an oblique angle to comics and collecting. This year I thought it might be fun to loot my library for extraordinary books, whether because of their content, or in the case of limited editions and facsimiles, are extraordinary in their creation. As with all things related to Serendipity, the true art is to see and make use of connections between seemingly disconnected topics, so I intend to focus each narrative on a given book and use it as a pathway to other subjects, weaving some of my other interests into the narrative as I go. This is fun for me because it stimulates me to follow the white rabbit down new rabbit holes.

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Edited by Flex Mentallo
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I hope this will be entertaining, and serve as a digestif after - let's face it - far too much Christmas cheer.

 

I dont know in advance what I'll post, just making it up as I go along day by day, and as time allows.

 

Having drastically scaled back my comic collecting in recent years, I've focused more on my love of books, and find that I appreciate them more. I've collected books all my life, books on every topic under the sky, and indeed my apartment is as much a library as a living space, shaped more by bookcases than furniture.

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Though I read avidly, there is more to living with books than simply reading them, as all collectors know. Possession is nine tenths of the collector's handbook after all. But in books there is also that great comfort in being surrounded by art, knowledge and speculation, as well as fiction of all kinds.

 

The desire to buy more books than you can physically read in one human lifetime is actually so universal, there’s a specific word for it: tsundoku. Defined as the stockpiling of books that will never be consumed, the term is a Japanese portmanteau of sorts, combining the words “tsunde” (meaning “to stack things”), “oku” (meaning “to leave for a while”) and “doku” (meaning “to read”).

 

It originated as a play on words in the late 19th century, during what is considered the Meiji Era in Japan. At first, the “oku” in “tsunde oku” morphed into “doku,” meaning “to read,” but since “tsunde doku” is a bit of a mouthful, the phrase eventually condensed into “tsundoku.” And a word for reading addicts was born.

 

So this is your final warning - stop reading now, or risk becoming 'tsundokued' like me!

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The Natural History of Birds

 

The 19th century saw a rapid evolution in the publication of natural history books. Magnificent large-scale tomes, sumptuously bound and illustrated with hand-coloured plates, celebrated all the latest discoveries of exotic birds and animals around the world. Today, the surviving copies of these books command quite extraordinary prices.

 

When the online book marketplace AbeBooks released a list of the most expensive books it sold in 2015, topping the list was an 18th century Italian tome with a long-winded title: Storia naturale degli uccelli trattata con metodo e adornata di figure intagliate in rame e miniate al naturale. Ornithologia methodice digesta atque iconibus aeneis ad vivum illuminatis. Or, as it's known in English: A Natural History of Birds.

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Edited by Flex Mentallo
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The Birds of America

Often cited as “the most expensive book of all time,” there are still 120 known intact copies of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America (which was published between 1827 and 1838). While there are a handful of books in the world that may be worth more, until 2013 Birds of America held the record for the most money paid at auction for any single printed work: £7,321,250, or about $11.5 million.

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It is estimated that, when adjusted for inflation, five of the 10 most expensive books ever sold were copies of Birds of America. Only about a dozen are owned privately; the rest are in the hands of institutions, many of which display their copies for the public benefit, like the one at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia. Birds of America is also very likely the world’s most expensive wall covering. In 1827, Lady Isabella Hertford cut up her copy of the mammoth 39.5” by 28.5” handmade book and used it to wallpaper her drawing room.

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John Gould’s (Limited) Works

John Gould is sometimes known as “Britain’s Audubon,” but unlike his American counterpart Gould is infamous for not having actually written or illustrated a number of works that bore his name, instead leaving the latter task to more talented artists (including his wife, Elizabeth). Even so, a single folio credited to Gould can easily go for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and an “exceptional and pristine” 12-folio set of first editions of his bird books, published between 1831 and 1888, is currently for sale for $2,175,000 at Shapero Books in London. 

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The Parrot Chronicles

One of the people who illustrated for Gould was Edward Lear.  Despite receiving no credit for his work in Gould’s books, Lear is renowned on his own merits.  His 1832 masterpiece Illustrations of the Family of Psittacidae, or Parrots, which he painted as a teenager, typically sells at auction—even in so-so condition—for well over $100,000. Fewer than a hundred copies are known to exist.

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