News That Stays News

The heroine of the “Taming of the Shrew” is quiet ego-centric person who wants the things around her to be under her control. She dares to insult her most close people – her family, just because of her bad mood or misunderstanding of their words. She takes the words addressed to her to literally without reading between the lines. Perhaps, a little bit more patience could help her to understand the people around her and not to take them so strictly.

As the quite opposite person we could see another Katherine. Katherine Boo – a Pulitzer Prize winner who is a famous journalist. The Article about her “An Outsider Gives Voice to Slumdogs” by author Charles McGrath ( Page C1) shows us how important and at the same time invisible person could be. She writes about the epic and important things around us and at the same time she never put herself at the beginning of the sentence as a point of view. She simply describes the things she saw with all the sincerity and gives the reader a right to judge. She doesn’t want to be a centre of someone’s’ attention and at the same time she actually could change the point of view of other people around her using the simple words.

In Act 1 of Taming of the Shrew, Katherine makes a remark to her father: ” I pray you sir, is it your will to make a stale of me amongst these mates?” In this statement Katherine is responding to her father, Baptista, for telling Lucentio, Tranio, Gremio and Hortensio that she must first be wed before any man is to marry his youngest daughter, Bianca.

In “Moving Past ‘Fierce'” on page E1 of the New York Times, fairly new designer Christian Siriano describes his struggles with being underestimated and looked down upon by his peers in the fashion industry due to his success from a reality TV show. While Siriano is not a female as Katherine, there are immense and apparent similarities in how they are perceived by those around them; just not good enough or rather misunderstood. Much like Katherine, Siriano states he is just fine with how he is perceived.

Another similar quality in these two individuals is the fact that the society in which they live is not perceptive to changes in social hierarchy. For Katherine, women were clearly not perceived as well respected individuals in the time period in which she lived. Today, reality TV stars are not highly respected (or at all) by industry peers. Their struggles are very similar.

While there are some fundamental differences between Katherine and Siriano, they both struggle in a society where they are considered inferior. Katherine is an intelligent, quick witted woman in a society where women are not highly respected-especially for speaking their mind. Instead, men such as Lucentio vie for the attention of a girl with an almost non-existent personality-Bianca. Whereas Siriano struggles to gain the respect of his peers for lack of “hard work” or having to “work his way up” like many other successful designers.

In the “Induction,” — the opening section of The Taming of the Shrew — Christophero Sly, a drunken beggar, is asleep in the gutter when a Lord decides to play a trick on him and make him believe that his whole life has been no more than a delusion, a long hallucination. The Lord and his servants conspire to convince Sly that he is a great Lord himself, with a beautiful wife, a rich household, and many servants.

At first, Sly wonders whether he has gone mad, but then he begins to accept what the people around him are telling him. He is rather quickly persuaded that the life he thought he had led was a delusion, and that he is in fact the great man that those around him now claim to perceive when they look at him.

In “From Founders to Decorators, Facebook Riches” (February 1, 2012),  New York Times reporters Nick Bilton and Evelyn M. Rusli describe the case of David Choe, a graffiti artist who painted the walls of Facebook’s first corporate headquarters and was paid for his services in stock rather than cash. After Facebook goes public later this year, Choe’s stock is expected to be worth more than $200 million. What effect will this have on Choe’s life? Will he, like Christophero Sly, begin to feel that the world of financial constraint he lived in prior to acquiring that fortune was a dream, a long delusion from which the money awoke him? Will his circumstances be so different, and will those around him treat him so differently, that he begins to wonder who he is, and whether he is losing his grip on himself?

Here’s his personal website: http://davidchoe.com  What do you think?

The larger question brought up by both of these stories is: are we the person we feel ourselves to be within ourselves, regardless of our external circumstances? Or is it our external circumstances and how other people see us that dictate who we are?