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Mint
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Mint
‘Songs Our Bodies Sing': The lightweight ambitions of a promising writer
Lindsay Pereira's new book, Songs Our Bodies Sing, is a collection of nine stories, several of which are set in Mumbai, the city he grew up in, while the rest is a motley bunch that portrays the trials of Indians in North America, England and Europe. The stories are easy to read—at times, a little too neat—and vary in length. Butterfly is only a few pages long, and If You Don't Weaken is as detailed as a novella. If you pick up this volume expecting the energy of a typical short story, which serves up a slice of life with a twist at the end, you will be disappointed. Admittedly, all the tales here are slices of life, but with little to no surprises. More often than not, you can see the ending from miles ahead. Or else, a promising story like The Antique Shop, with which the collection opens, simply peters out with a whimper. Himanshu, the protagonist of the first story, is a wily antique-seller, running a decades-old family business near Chor Bazaar in Mumbai. In the course of one morning's transactions, his internalised prejudices against white foreign customers, Muslims and homosexuals flare up. But, in the end, these details amount to little more than anthropological insights, with not much fictional substance. This failing to transform close observation into arresting stories, unfortunately, is endemic to the collection. The characters remain either too flat or too textbookish for the most part. If, on the other hand, you decide to read Songs Our Bodies Sing as an admirer of Pereira's style, you will be sorely disappointed again. None of the stories has the piquancy that marked his debut novel, Gods and Ends (2021), set among the Goan Catholic community living in Orlem, a suburb in Mumbai. There is no kick to the language spoken by his characters, no spiciness to the prose. It's almost as though the writer has undergone a sea change in his voice and decided to opt for bland reportage instead of mischief and gossip. In If You Don't Weaken, two Sikh men, both immigrants from Punjab, rent a basement in the house of a white couple in Canada. One of them is a student who works at Tim Horton's, the Canadian coffee chain, to cover his expenses, while the other is a long-distance truck driver, who had come to the country after incurring heavy loans for the visa but has nothing to show for all the trouble he's put his family through, nine years later. Paul and Marjorie, the elderly couple whose tenants they are, have lost their son to an accident. Embittered by grief, Paul has no interest in the lives of the renters, until a tragedy brings them closer. It doesn't take much to guess how things will turn out. If the cliched ending doesn't bore you, the commentary on Canadian politics and the misguided ambitions of immigrants who fall for it, will do. A similar feeling is inspired by Love of an Orchestra, where a Parsi music teacher, fallen on hard times, stews in self-inflicted miseries. His wife, Khushnuma, offers a glimmer of interest to an otherwise well-worn plotline, but she can't redeem the ending. The entire story reads like a salutary lesson in why it's best to avoid writing about a community as an outsider to it. Sadly, Pereira's decline has been steady since the bravado triumph of his debut novel. His second novel, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (2023), had begun to show cracks with its weak characterisation and poor pacing. It read more like a potted history of modern India, especially the troubled years in Mumbai following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992, than like a work of fiction. The storytelling was uneven, compromised by a padding of historical context, though Pereira did leave the reader with a sense of the past entangled with the present. In contrast, Songs Our Bodies Sing is undercooked all through, with its lifeless plotting and uneven curation. A story like Butterfly, which was first published in The Indian Express, may have worked in the limited space offered by a newspaper, but as part of a collection, it comes across as too cryptic, with no inwardness to the central character Karthik, or insight into his lifelong obsession with Elvis Presley. Like several other dull stories—Have a Nice Day being another—it feels like a force-fit in the collection. The large font size to add to the bulk of the book ironically accentuates the collection's lightweight ambitions. Except for the last two stories, Pereira's acuity as a writer is conspicuously missing. Rivers to Cross describes the misadventures of a snooty Indian man in Paris. It is told with tight control, with something of Pereira's edgy brilliance glimmering from time to time. The ending, with its reversal of fortunes, hits the spot. The title story, Songs Our Bodies Sing, is an account of a tragedy that befalls a Sikh couple living in London. It gives a peek into working-class life, the struggles of first-generation immigrants to the city, in the 1960s. But their lives are transformed by the power of great music—specifically by Hey Jude by The Beatles—a theme that runs through a few of the other stories, too. The beauty and sadness of the final pages of the collection gives the reader a glimpse of what it could have been. \
Belfast Telegraph
28-04-2025
- Business
- Belfast Telegraph
Canadian fried chicken restaurant opening new Belfast drive through
Mary Brown's Chicken is planning to move into a new drive through unit, which is being proposed for Balmoral Plaza Retail Park, with an application submitted by its owner Corbo Holdings Ltd. It would be located just south of the existing Tim Horton's drive through. Mary Brown's has opened a handful of locations here already, with restaurants in Lisburn and Odyssey Place in Belfast. The brand had confirmed there will be other openings in Belfast, and across Northern Ireland. Founded in 1969, the Ontario-based chain is one of the fastest growing food firms in Canada. It has around 236 units worldwide, with its new store marking a milestone in the brand's expansion into the UK and Ireland. The newly-proposed development is for a single storey drive though restaurant, alongside cold room, plant area, parking, outdoor seating and general, associated, ancillary site works, a fresh planning application says. 'The proposed operator is Mary Brown's Chicken. The restaurant is located just to the south of the existing Tim Horton's drive through. The retail park site is accessed directly from Boucher Road to the west and Apollo Road to the south.' Speaking at the time of its first location in Lisburn, Hadi Chahin, chief executive of Mary Brown's Chicken, said: 'For over 54 years Canadians have made Mary Brown's Chicken their first choice for fresh, hand-cut, hand breaded delicious fried chicken and Taters. We are therefore excited to introduce our legendary fried chicken to the wonderful people of Lisburn. 'What makes MB Chicken special is our delicious, handcrafted menu and genuine hospitality; we have been a beloved tradition in Canada for generations, and we can't wait to share our passion for delicious, made-from-scratch quality food with our new friends in the UK.'
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Pornhub is owned by a Canadian company. Could the owners block US access to protest Trump's takeover hopes?
What began as a joke by a comedian quickly turned into speculation about how Canada could mount a powerful protest against the U.S. over President Donald Trump's takover hopes. Not with its own retaliatory tariffs, or shutting down every branch of Tim Horton's and Lululemon in the U.S. — but by banning access to the Canadian-owned adult entertainment website Pornhub. 'If Canada could ban Pornhub in the States, we win the trade war. That's it. There is no trade war,' Toronto-based comedian Matthew Puzhitsky joked to the New York Post earlier this month, referring to it as 'Canada's nuke.' The idea behind the viral video got people talking. With Trump's reciprocal trade tariffs coming down the track on April 2, speculation grew on social media whether Canada could actually retaliate by blocking the most visited site in the U.S. Its troubled parent company MindGeek, since rebranded as Aylo, was acquired by Montreal-based Ethical Capital Partners equity group in March 2023 for about $400 million. A petition urging the Canadian government to restrict Pornhub's access to U.S. users was launched – although the man behind it says it's not serious. 'There are people taking the petition seriously and they're arguing… it kind of puts that spotlight on the absurdity of the whole [tariffs] and 51st state idea,' the petition's organizer Marc Olimpo told Now Toronto last week. So far, 1,151 people have signed it. But America is already halfway there, without Canada's help. Pornography restrictions have now been introduced across 17 states in the U.S., with Texas, Florida and South Carolina the latest to enforce the age verification laws. Georgia is also set to implement new laws preventing under 18s from visiting adult websites from July 2025. States have passed laws requiring pornography websites to verify a user's age by checking their ID or scanning their face. 'The regulation in the United States requires that the uploader attest that they hold the identity and consent from everyone appearing in content,' Solomon Friedman, a founding member of Equity Capital Partner told Canada's National Post this month. 'We have gone a step further, and now require that we hold that and verify it ourselves.' 'This is an onerous process, onerous in the sense that it costs an enormous amount of money to execute,' Friedman added. In response, Pornhub blocked access to its content in states that passed these laws. It continues to operate in Louisiana, despite age restriction laws being implemented last year that require visitors to provide state-approved identification. The site has since reported an 80 percent drop in traffic in that state. Florida and South Carolina also saw massive surges in VPN use since new laws were introduced to prevent people from visiting adult websites without government-approved ID. The new laws have been pushed by allies of Trump. The president's head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, previously called for an outright national ban on pornography, undercover footage last year revealed. In the footage, Vought suggested going about the ban 'from the back door.' 'We've got a number of states that are passing this and, you know, what happens is the porn company then says, 'we're not going to do business in your state,' which of course is entirely what we were after, right?' Vought said. Vought was also one of the architects behind Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump's second term, which called for pornography to be outlawed in a 900-page memo. Critics argue restricting sites like Pornhub undermines free speech protections and infringes on privacy rights – and users could simply go elsewhere. 'There's a reason why in Canada and the United States, in basically every Western liberal democracy, pornography is constitutionally protected as free expression,' Friedman said. 'Sexual expression is part of free expression, whether they're the ones creating the content or the ones viewing the content. I think there's something very profoundly human about it all.'
The Independent
26-03-2025
- Business
- The Independent
Pornhub is owned by a Canadian company. Could the owners block US access to protest Trump's takeover hopes?
What began as a joke by a comedian quickly turned into speculation about how Canada could mount a powerful protest against the U.S. over President Donald Trump's takover hopes. Not with its own retaliatory tariffs, or shutting down every branch of Tim Horton's and Lululemon in the U.S. — but by banning access to the Canadian-owned adult entertainment website Pornhub. 'If Canada could ban Pornhub in the States, we win the trade war. That's it. There is no trade war,' Toronto-based comedian Matthew Puzhitsky joked to the New York Post earlier this month, referring to it as 'Canada's nuke.' The idea behind the viral video got people talking. With Trump's reciprocal trade tariffs coming down the track on April 2, speculation grew on social media whether Canada could actually retaliate by blocking the most visited site in the U.S. Its troubled parent company MindGeek, since rebranded as Aylo, was acquired by Montreal-based Ethical Capital Partners equity group in March 2023 for about $400 million. A petition urging the Canadian government to restrict Pornhub's access to U.S. users was launched – although the man behind it says it's not serious. 'There are people taking the petition seriously and they're arguing… it kind of puts that spotlight on the absurdity of the whole [tariffs] and 51st state idea,' the petition's organizer Marc Olimpo told Now Toronto last week. So far, 1,151 people have signed it. But America is already halfway there, without Canada's help. Pornography restrictions have now been introduced across 17 states in the U.S., with Texas, Florida and South Carolina the latest to enforce the age verification laws. Georgia is also set to implement new laws preventing under 18s from visiting adult websites from July 2025. States have passed laws requiring pornography websites to verify a user's age by checking their ID or scanning their face. 'The regulation in the United States requires that the uploader attest that they hold the identity and consent from everyone appearing in content,' Solomon Friedman, a founding member of Equity Capital Partner told Canada's National Post this month. 'We have gone a step further, and now require that we hold that and verify it ourselves.' 'This is an onerous process, onerous in the sense that it costs an enormous amount of money to execute,' Friedman added. In response, Pornhub blocked access to its content in states that passed these laws. It continues to operate in Louisiana, despite age restriction laws being implemented last year that require visitors to provide state-approved identification. The site has since reported an 80 percent drop in traffic in that state. Florida and South Carolina also saw massive surges in VPN use since new laws were introduced to prevent people from visiting adult websites without government-approved ID. The new laws have been pushed by allies of Trump. The president's head of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, previously called for an outright national ban on pornography, undercover footage last year revealed. In the footage, Vought suggested going about the ban 'from the back door.' 'We've got a number of states that are passing this and, you know, what happens is the porn company then says, 'we're not going to do business in your state,' which of course is entirely what we were after, right?' Vought said. Vought was also one of the architects behind Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump's second term, which called for pornography to be outlawed in a 900-page memo. Critics argue restricting sites like Pornhub undermines free speech protections and infringes on privacy rights – and users could simply go elsewhere. 'There's a reason why in Canada and the United States, in basically every Western liberal democracy, pornography is constitutionally protected as free expression,' Friedman said. 'Sexual expression is part of free expression, whether they're the ones creating the content or the ones viewing the content. I think there's something very profoundly human about it all.'
