Last week i started reading " the reluctant Fundamentalist" by Mohsin Hamid. The book is about a man in Lahore, Pakistan, who one night stops at a café and invites a stranger to sit with him. As the night goes the man named Changez tells the american about his life and how his four years and so in America was. As you continue reading you will learn a lot more about Changez´s life in America including his love life.
I chose to read this book because I thought that i may be influenced by the book on a different level, than the books i usually read. The plot in this book, made me want to read it even more, because it had all the things i look for in a good book. The author has written about love and current world problems. I like to read a book that is relevant to my life, or not my life, but the life of other real human beings. Although the other books are also very relevant, this book stood out to me.
My first impression of this book, after reading the first chapter, is that the author has a very formal way of writing. The main character is a very open man, and maybe that is an reflection of how the author is in real life. He wasn't afraid to approach a stanger and to just start to tell about his life story. Changez, the main character, said something on the first page that goes like this " Ah, i see i have alarmed you.Do not be frightened by my beard : I am a lover of America. " Which gave me the impression that later in the movie he will have some problems with the fact that he is from Pakistan. I´m looking forward to continuing reading this book and discussing it with fellow students who are reading the same book.
This period in English we are going to focus on literature. We are given three authors on whom we can chose a book from and read. To get to know the authors better, Gro ( Our teacher) decided that we first had to find some facts about the authors and then write a short paragraph about the impressions we got from the authors. So underneath you can find my impressions i got from watching some videos from the authors - which i also will post so that if you want, you can also watch them!
Amy Tan
My impression of Amy Tan, after watching the video, was that she maybe uses a lot of what her mother thought her in her stories. She actually said it her self, that her mom said a lot of stuff that other mothers would´ve thought was to brutal and that made her think more creatively while she wrote her book. She was´t afraid to talk about what her mother said, and she told the honest truth about moving to another country and being able to start over again. She also focuses on women leaving other countries and how they adapt and so on.
After watching the video, i wanted to research a little bit about her book, The Joy Luck Club, to see if she maybe used a lot of what her mother tried to teach her in her younger years, and she did. The book is about four different Chinese families who moves to America. If i were to read this book i would probably read a lot about how strict the families are and the difference methods there is to raising a child.
Andrea Levy
Andrea was a lot more emotional then the two other authors. So I can probably think that her book has a lot of emotional content and the hard and mental part of moving to another country. She was so grateful that the book got the attention it did because she thought that no one would care about how a Jamaican girl would have it. Her book is about four main characters: Hortense, Queen, Gilbert and Bernard. Its plot is set in 1948 and focuses on Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic move to England.
Moshin Hamid Moshin gave me the impression that he wasn't scared to leave out any details in his book even though some people from his culture was offended by the way he wrote the The reluctant fundamentalist which is the book we are going to focus on. By having two cultures he got to the capability to compare the two cultures into a book and he used that advantage. Something he didn't mention in this video but i was it in another, i can leave a link below, was that the book is about different culture love and the terror attack that happened in the US - 9/11. He used a lot of his experiences when making this book. Being a Pakistani man during the attack gave him a intel on how it is to me judged by the looks. His book as i said is about love and terror attack. It´s about a boy who moved from Pakistan to America, where he met a girl, who after a while became mentally ill, so after that and the terror attack of the twin towers he decided to leave and go back to Pakistan.
Something all of these authors have in common is that all of them have two different cultures that are influencing their writing. They all write about the difficulties about moving to another country and they take on three complete different subjects which makes the books different from each other.
Today we started by watching a Norwegian documentary about refugees. After that, we had a discussion and listen to a text from the book. Now we are going to do some tasks which I will post down below.
4 - Vocabulary
( What are the verbs from of these nouns from the short story?)
Gaze - to gaze, Advice - to advice, migrant - to migrate, development -to develop, relation - to relate,
sojourner - to sojourn, disapproval - to disapprove, labour - to labour
a. There is an ancestry group in Australia called the aboriginals. The Aboriginals is a majority of ancestry groups in Australia.
b. The largest group on the chart of Top 10 is the Australian ancestry group, and the smallest group is the Indian ancestry group.
c. The three graphs are very different, but the one i thought would resemble the graph that we are using now is the UK graph. The UK graph and the graph we are using now have in common that they both have two columns with ancestry groups that are a lot more larger than the others and the rest of the columns is a minority of other groups.
Today we had a "fagdag", which is a whole day with international English. We spend the whole day working with both an oral presentation and some tasks on p. 123 in our English book.
5 - Working with statistics
Look at the UK diagram on page 110. What are the two largest groups? What are the two smallest groups. Did anything surprise you about the order of size of ethnic groups in the United Kingdom?
The two largest groups on the diagram were the white ethnic group, having a percent of 87.5, and the Indian ethnic group with a percent of 2.7. The two smallest groups were the ethnic group called other black on the diagram and they had a percent of 0.2. The second smallest group was under the category other Asian, having a percent of 0.7. I wasn´t really surprised by the diagram because this was expected from the UK. I have always known that they didn´t have a large number of immigrants and ethnic groups compared to how big the ethnic white group population is. The only strange thing with this diagram is that the last column is referred to as other black, what does this mean? They had already mentioned black African and black Caribbean.
Picture taken from Access to international English
b. Look at the USA diagram on page 110. What are the two largest groups? What are the two smallest groups? Did anything surprise you about the order of size of ancestry group in the USA?
The largest group on the cart was the German and African American ancestries. The German consisted of 50.2 million and the African American was 38 million. The two smallest groups were Swedish, who consisted of 4.3 million and Scotish- Irish who consisted of 3.5 million. The only thing that surprised me by the chart, was the amount of German ancestries. Personally, I thought that the American column would be bigger because it´s a very central country.
A few weeks ago we worked on a survey about social media and the knowledge and use of it in different age groups. We were divided into some groups, where we had to interview people on the street with question that were made by students in my class. We also made an anonymous survey on itslearning, a popular learning platform for students in Norway. After we got a lot of answer, we gathered all the answers in a Google Document and each group got three question and had to make an conclusion out of the answers. This survey went well and all the groups worked well together to make this survey work as well as it did.
If you want to take a look at the conclusion of the survey, just press this smiley face 😀
Hollywood is one of the oldest film
industry in the world. It was founded in the early 1900´s and has since then
produced mainstream Us movies.Movies
like Titanic, Forest Gump, The Avengers and a lot more movies set examples of
the variation Hollywood movies have.
Bollywood is the Hindu language version of
Hollywood, based in Mumbai, India. The Bollywood
film industry is only a part of the larger Indian film industry, which includes
other production. The movie “Sultan” is
a typical Bollywood movie including romance, dancing, singing and a lot of color.
Nollywood is the Nigerian film industry.
The movies from Nollywood are know for having bad quality and often being a
little bit strange in comparison to the movies we are used to.They can produce up to 50 movies a week, but
the movies look very “homemade”.An example
of a movie from the Nollywood film industry would be “ Maami”.
A while ago we watched a very disturbing
video in English class, showing you the horrific truth on how the government in
the US is responsible for a “secret drone war” that takes place in Pakistan.
The movie shows us all the sides to the ongoing war, all from the recruitment
of young pilots at gaming conventions, to the new definition of “going to war”,
how the world leaders give the secret “green light” to engage in the biggest
targeted killing program in history, and lastly the people who are willing to
stand up against the violations of civil liberties and fight for accountability
and justice.
This movie showed us a side of the word “war” that maybe many of us weren’t
that ware of before. I would recommend everyone to watch this movie because the
movie has a very important message that’s shows that the good people aren’t always
as good as we thought. Before I answer some questions tied to
the movie, I would like it if you watched the trailer on the bottom of the page
just to get more knowledge to the movie.
How does US
military use computer games in recruiting drone pilots?
Video gamers and virtual reality has
become a very common source for the US military when recruiting soldiers for drone
pilots.A lot of video games have their
plot in wars and guns, and the people recruiting for drone pilots often think
it´s just like gaming, but they fast realize that this time it isn’t a virtual
game, this is real and they are taking real lives not virtual lives.By playing video games you often sharpen your
capability to concentrate, and you become more aware on where you have to aim,
who the bad guy is and so on, and this is something the US military wants. In fact,
a while ago I read online that they even made a own video game, with real sound
effect to make more people want to become a drone pilot.
What
arguments against drones do earlier drone operators have?
Killing thousands of people will of course mark you for life.
Everyday a drone pilot target one person but ends up killing innocent lives
along with the one target they had. They also have to live with the fact that
their precision won´t always be the best, which causes more innocent lives
being taken and buildings being blown up. Another argument I would use is the
fact that the US used lies to make the pilots want to kill and protect their country.
When is
it okay to break article three in the human rights laws? The right to
life, freedom and personal security.
It is never okay to break any rule in the human rights laws, especially
the right to life, freedom and personal security. The only reason to why the
CIA and other military or so groups aren’t punished for their actions is that
they are saying that they are only eliminating the people who they see as a threat
to the nation, and people who who can be linked to earlier terror attacks.
What are the
viewpoints of the Pakistani human rights lawyers?
The human rights lawyers have no other point of view than to
stop the drone attacks. They are trying hard to fight to stop the drones from
killing more innocent lives.Not only
are they killing a lot more innocent lives then what´s been told, but the force
of the drone missiles causes collateral damage to the buildings around. The Pakistan people are so desperate to stop
the drone war, that they started to print out large photos of adults and children
whose been affected by the war, so that maybe they will reach out to the pilots
and show them the sad truth to what is actually going on in Partisan.
How do you think
the Norwegian government would react if terrorist had been targetd by drones in
Norway?
If terrorist would have
been targeted by drones in Norway, it would probably make a headline in all newspapers
and all the news stations in the world. The reason to this is that we are one
of the peaceful countries in the world and an attack to one person here, is an
attack to everyone. People don’t see the
attacks in Pakistan as the people of Pakistan do. For them the US military are
the terrorists and I think the Norwegians would right away blame terrorists
from countries like Pakistan because of the social media and how the people associated
with terrorism are being shown on media.
I remember when a terror attack happened in Norway, where a man with Norwegian
ethnicity shot and murdered a large amount of innocent lives, and people right
away assumed it was terrorism from foreign people from countries on the Asian
continent. The shock people got when
they found out that one of their own were the person behind the attacks, would
probably be the same as if terrorist were targeted by drones. We would stand
together and since we are a known country we would be heard and other countries
would help.
Who is responsible for the killing of civil lives?
The only ones who are responsible for the loss of civil lives
are the ones who control the actions. The US government for supporting this
decision, the CIA and the USAF for controlling the actions and the pilots for
doing the dirty work for them. Of course the pilots have a minor part then
the other because they are just doing their job while the government and the
CIA and so on are the ones who are in charge.
