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Our business English classes focus on the language and ... www.englishlink.com Learn Business English |Why Study Business English' | |Business English is related to international trade. Most Englishlink business students plan to do business with English-speaking| |countries, or with local companies that use English in the workplace.  | |Learn Business English Online with Englishlink's award-winning online Business English lessons. Our business English classes | |focus on the language and skills needed for typical business communication, including: | |interviewing for a job | |making appointments | |discussing business over the telephone | |talking about international trade | |making polite requests | |dealing with complaints | |taking messages | |giving presentations | |negotiating | |leading a business meeting | |correspondence – such as business letters & reports | |day-to-day socializing in the office | |**************************************************** | |Who Should Study Business English' | |Business English is perfect for people planning to so business with English speakers and/or university students who are | |preparing to enter the job market. | |If you want to improve your general English skills (reading, listening, and speaking) and build your knowledge of grammar and | |vocabulary, we suggest you study general English before entering business English. | |Please note: you must be a Pre-Intermediate English level student to enter business English (your Placement Test result tells us| |this) | |What will I learn' | |To see what you will learn about in each of our business Units, please click on the links to the right, for each level. | |*********************************************************** | |BBC LEARNING ENGLISH / 10 DAYS:An interactive intermediate business English course featuring Tony Marshall and ... Improve your | |English as you follow Tony and May's Manchester adventures. | |****************************************************** | |BUSINESS ENGLISH COURSESA practical course with focus on business situations comprising 15, 20 or 25 lessons of General English | |and 5 lessons of specialised Business English. | |Introduction to online Biz English | Business Smart is a self paced. interactive, multimedia business English course, designed for students from a Non English Speaking Summary Nostalgia is always ideological. The past we seek never exists, except as narrative. From his first collection of short stories, Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozshah Baag (1987), to his most recent novel, Family Matters (2002), Mistry's work is an extension of Shakespeare. As a collective frame of reference and inspiration to him and his characters, Mistry finds ‘Shakespeare is like Bombay’. Mr. Kapur, a character from Rohinton Mistry's most recent novel, Family Matters, loves Shakespeare. When Shiv Sena attacks his shop for failing to replace the word "Bombay" on its sign with "Mumbai," Mr. Kapur knows he will soon be murdered by the Shiv Sena. Still with an unrealistic optimism in the face of doom, similar to Richard II’s defeat, he laments, “Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's, of the death of cities" (Mistry 2002, 295), tell sad stories of the death of kings. It is impressive that Mistry’s love of Shakespeare’s plays and characters provides his vision of the promise of multicultural harmony in Bombay. When his employee Yezad, an observant Zoroastrian, suggests that he turn to "Indian sources" instead of Shakespeare, Mr. Kapur defends Shakespeare as the best way to express his hope that Bombay will remain a place of religious tolerance and cultural inclusion. "Shakespeare is like Bombay. Comparing Shakespeare to Bombay (and not the other way around), Mr. Kapur connects Shakespeare to his beloved city that offers a home for everyone. Mistry has his own fears that India is fast losing to nationalism and to the ideologies of ethnicity and tradition that will make it [India remain] a home only for some. Mistry’s creates new versions of Shakespeare's plays and famous passages that address his own concerns: namely, the Parsi community of late twentieth-century Bombay, or, as he puts it in an interview, "the lives of those children in the old world" (Hancock 1989, 143). As a writer whose greatest inspiration lay in the domestic matters, the quotidian realities of Parsi families, Mistry uses Shakespeare to negotiate questions of home and of belonging, not only as a family member, but also as a member of a larger community. To Mistry, Shakespeare is the touchstone for the ideals as well as challenges of living in a multicultural community. Yet Mistry participates in a postcolonial tradition of creative engagement with Shakespeare that speaks not only of past glories of Bombay but of current painful difficulties. Rohinton Mistry writes primarily about the India of his youth. Writing about India from the vantage point of Brampton, Ontario, a suburban community just outside of Toronto, Mistry's treatment of Shakespeare is determined by India's specific history with the Bard. His novels also contribute to the distinguished tradition of Canadian Shakespeare. Canada is governed by a secular and multi-ethnic democratic type of Parliamentary. Canada has its own history of racialized oppression. It is the cultural and pedagogical legacy of Shakespeare in India and Canada that highlights the "familial" relationship between India and India. Caught in the debate between liberalism and multiculturalism, Mistry deals with the ideals of living in cosmopolitan cities and the subsequent immigration problems faced by Indo-Canadians, particularly the challenges of minority communities like Parsis. Mistry records the rise of communal tensions and violence in Bombay — a city like Toronto, as a haven of tolerance and inclusion. He uses Shakespeare to engage in an ongoing dialogue with his current Canadian home about the problems faced by these "world class" cities: the trials and tribulations of immigration, the tensions between multicultural vulnerability and liberalism. India has long considered Shakespeare to be a member of the family. Mistry approximates Tagore’s view that Shakespeare can "flood with light the mind of the whole world" (Tagore 1991, line 12). Tagore’s evaluation of Shakespearean universality may sound old-fashioned, but his words suggest how, to use Ania Loomba's formulation, the "easy polarity between 'us' and 'them'" (Loomba 1997, 138) and the binaries of colonial education and postcolonial subversion are transformed into a register of inspiration and appropriation. When Tagore muses, "Shakespeare's plays have always been our ideal of drama”. (Singh 1996, 138), he is judging Shakespeare not on how much India has to learn from him, but on what Shakespeare has to offer India. As in Canada, where Shakespeare has provided an artistic impetus, Indian Shakespeare Mistry’s defines primarily the mixed relationship between Shakespeare and India or Canada. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Parsi theater successfully adapted Shakespeare for popular consumption (see Gupt 2005, Hansen 2001, Luhrmann 1996, Loomba 1997, and Singh 1989 and 1996, pages 120-52). Beginning with the Oriental Theatrical Company, founded in Bombay in 1868, and then in Lahore, Delhi, and Calcutta, the Parsi theater constituted one of the primary means of access to Shakespeare in colonial India and later to the development of Indian cinema. The Parsi theater was anything but faithful to the Bard or to British culture. Adapting Shakespeare’s lines of the plays, often rewriting tragedies with a happy ending and interweaving indigenous songs and poetry into the outline of Shakespeare's plots, the Parsi theater brought together Hindus, Muslims, Jews, and Christians from all social classes, allowing dramatic art to emerge out of cultural mixture. Cutting across linguistic, religious, and class lines, this de-centered art form incorporated elements of the many participating cultures. The basic function of the Parsi Theatre was to entertain and orient the Parsi community .In short Parsi writers including Rohinton Mistry, Bapsi Sidhwa... “continually revised, reinvented, and reinterpreted Shakespeare. (Pratt 1992, 6); however, the Parsi theater transformed Shakespeare with ease. For Mistry, who grew up in 1950s and 1960s Bombay, the Parsi theater was past its heyday and had been replaced by Bollywood cinema. Mistry's treatment of Shakespeare is thus bound up with what T. M. Luhrmann calls a "quintessentially Parsi" nostalgia: "the sense of the Parsi community. Shakespeare symbolizes the past glories and current difficulties faced by the Bombay Parsi. The great Bard’s naturalness, vividness, wit, linguistic charm or delight of conversations, his treatment of the themes of homelessness, and longing for home, and the transference of [Shakespeare’s] actual narratives in the works of Mistry make them significant. Like Mr Mody’s, in "The Collectors”, love for Shakespeare shows a sign of his confused priorities, Mistry’s idea of Shakespeare signals the limitations of cosmopolitanism. Having rejected his family to form flimsy bonds with others, Mistry’s short story; "Squatter" portrays the difficulties of leaving the old world to seek one's fortunes in the new. The confusion that surrounds the dream of immigration stems from set of relationships between parents and children. "Squatter" denotes Sarosh's inability to accommodate himself to Western toilets... crouching on his haunches, feet planted firmly for balance upon the white plastic oval of the toilet seat" (Mistry 1987, 153). After ten years of "squatting" in Canada — the idea of the "Squatter" also suggests his [Mistry’s] feeling of homelessness. He becomes convinced that he is fundamentally unsuited for life in Canada. "Surrounded by vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and big shiny motor-cars" (155), Western toilet, Sarosh/Sid decides to return to Bombay for good. Whereas cross-cultural contact for Sarosh is the fantasy of Canada as a hospitable home, Mistry’s failed assimilation into Canadian society shows his decision as unwise. Caught between cultures he is like Othello. Adapting from the famous speech of Othello, Mistry discovers that India has, itself, become a foreign land during a brief visit to Bombay. This is Shakespeare's version: When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe. (Othello, 5.2.337-44) Caught between cultures, Sarosh identifies himself with Othello, who once defended a Christian Sarosh discards the "pearl" of India — family, friends, tradition — by emigrating to Canada in an effort to become, Othello's famous lines to express the pain of being a stranger, caught between two cultures and at home in neither: Set down aught in malice: tell them that in Toronto once there lived a Parsi boy as best he The fantasy land of milk and honey (described in Family Matters as "not just the land of milk and honey, also the land of deodorant and toiletry" [Mistry 2002, 131]), has offered, not miraculous and succulent sustenance, but constipation. Prized above pearls, what Sarosh really Toronto nor preserves in Bombay. Yet immigration has become a "pain in the posterior" because of the pressure Sarosh places upon himself to assimilate totally into Canadian society, to "become completely Canadian" (155). This is Sarosh's error: He mistakes Canadian society is no longer just a squatter in Canada. For Mistry, the trials of immigration are Janus-faced — as he puts it, "looking forward and yearning backward" (Mistry 1987, 258). Mistry’s short stories best reflect upon the challenges of immigration as well as the meditations upon home that inevitably occur while away from home. The references to Shakespeare are tinged with a contrast between high hopes and dismal realities, and the pain occasioned by sacrificing home and family to individual aspiration. The cultural, racial and religious difference of Shakespeare’s Othello, serves as an apt point of reference for the distinctions Mistry draws, not only between the old world of India and the new world of Canada, but also between the old and new India. Mistry’s ability to theorize and critique his personal narratives rigorously which impose a nostalgia for the past, his lost home city Bombay, with its racial, ethnic, religious, cultural differences embedded in the novels and the short stories will be discussed in the later chapters. THE END