Lahiri was quoted saying “I always felt so embarrassed by my name… You feel like you’re causing someone pain just by being who you are.” The character Gogol was directly born from this this incident. Most poignantly, her grade school teacher had difficulty pronouncing her name, so instead she took to calling her by her pet name, Jhumpa. Her family grew up on Rhode Island, a north eastern suburban town just like in the movie. In the story her mother is a librarian, but in reality it was her father who did that for a living. Her parents were born and raised in India, she often went to visit them in Bengali. The author was born oversee, in London, but moved to the US when she was 2. When I “looked under the hood” it was cathartic for me to discover how close I was to the truth. Who she was, what type of life she had, how she came to write this novel. I like looking under the hood to see how things work, and while watching the film in class the thoughts that went through my mind were mostly deductions about the author.
Watch the namesake full movie movie#
If writing is the means then closure is the end goal.Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel, and in turn the movie based on her novel, the Namesake, speaks deeply about issues very close to her heart and her history. This struck me because it shows us that everybody’s name has some sort of meaning.Ī truth in literature is that writing is cathartic. The father felt like the book saved his life because people noticed that he was moving from him moving the papers. But when she came to America she mixed rice krispies with curry and peanuts because she did not know about the way people eat in America.Īnother element that hit me was the second explanation that the father gave to Gogool. In America the traditional food would probably be a cheeseburger with french fries.
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In india they put a lot of spices in the food to get a great flavor. The other thing that struck me was how different when it comes to eating. As time passed they were able to buy a nice house in the suburbs.
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In Queens the buildings were nicer and there were less people on the streets. In india the people were poor and didn’t have any type of luxury goods. One striking element that I noticed at the beginning of the movie is how life in India and Queens are completely different(Their customs are different and the way people act are different). The Namesake was a pretty interesting movie. I feel also as I watch the Ganguli family that my own family has no such affection or warmth or commitment to ritual, that the environment I grew up in required that one turn inward, one might prefer to read or study than be part of the larger family society which seemed again cold, awkward, unwelcoming.
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For example, for me the most striking elements in the film are the visual elements meaning the shots of Calcutta, New York City, the Taj Mahal, the bridges in both countries as well as the more subtle suggestions of class, family dynamics, food, structures of intimacy that Mira Nair zeroes in on - such as the morning that Ashima wakes up for the first time in the States wherein it is apparent she is completely lost, devastated, homesick, a child really in a foreign land where she can’t turn on the stove, where she is intrigued by the social climate at the laundromat, the cold, the grey, the snow, the relative silence in the street. Please write a post in which you discuss striking moments in the film ‘The Namesake.’ Try to locate conceptually or intuitively something that the film gives you.