The story so far in The Hungry Tide is very confusing. At times it feels all over the place but sometimes pretty straight forward. The story leans into the history of characters rather than the present. The novel tells us the story of Nirmal and his journey to Morichjhãpi and Kanai questions Horen about the events that took place during that journey. But that’s not the only history talked about as we go to Kanai’s childhood and Piya’s. You have Nilima explaining the history of the jungle and all of the tiger attacks that have taken place throughout the years to Kanai. It seems that even if it’s something small like a childhood story or tiger attacks History is always an essential aspect of the novel. I feel like the novel is trying to show that even though they are in the present focused on the future, they still hold onto the past. The characters try to use the past so they can shape their future which makes sense in a way but doesn’t really work I their favor.

An example of this is the instance with the tiger in the village as Kanai and Horen want to run away as it can be dangerous for them. Fokir choses to help sharpen their weapons so that the village can kill the tiger. This is the history out there as tigers are known to kill people. But Piya Choses to run in to the village and snap the bamboo spear in front of the people which led them to become aggressive. Pita’s history especially with what she studies has her have this very strong love for animals. But Kanai, Horen and Fokir have their own history and while they might love animals, tigers and predators like that, as Fokir says “when a tiger comes into a human settlement, it’s because it wants to die.” (pg. 244) This is the peoples mindset as this is how they’ve had to live for years. Another instance of this is how Fokir spent his childhood on the sea with his father. Fishing trips are normal for the men in Lusibari and Moyna has said earlier in the novel. But as he grew up Fakir became used to being on a boat. It came to the point that as an adult he enjoys his life more while he’s on the boat. The history of these characters shaped who they are and because its all so vastly different that they tend to clash with one another.

While reading I’ve seen this expansive world already. Ghosh’s use of descriptive language while at times can be much, is still really useful for not only world building but character building as well. The story seems straightforward so far into the story but there Is one thing that is confusing me. Nirmal’s paper that Nilima sent Kanai which in the beginning was Called a newspaper by Priya but not really mentioned in its fullest until a little later on into the story. My question about it is what was the meaning of the writing. Talking about the way the goddess Ganga was tamed by Lord Shiva by being “trying it into his ash-smeared locks.” This braid is the rivers that make up Bengal saying how each island is made up of “threads of India’s fabric, the ragged fringe of her sari, the ãchol that follows her, half wetted by the sea.” It makes the islands seem more majestic and seems to paint everything in a better light than it actually is. Nilima shows Kanai the boat on the mud and to Kanais surprise, the passengers were still trying to persevere through the mud even though the boat wouldn’t make it through it. He asks himself “How the boat’s passengers make their way across that vast expanse of billowing mud?” Their environment is terrible and while Kanai has spoken about how his uncle wasn’t all up there he still wrote his passages in which he wanted to show Kanai. But this piece was the first to be shown with no explanation behind it.

This story gets brought up maybe once afterwards and it’s when Nilima asks if Kanai if he’s read the paper that she has sent him. There is no expression of feelings the writing nothing. It gets brushed aside even though it’s an intriguing story that’s being told. Showing that the land is the way it is because of the gods and the fact that one stopped another god from “defending from the Heavens [as it would’ve] split the Earth” makes what they are living in seem much more special in a way. I know that Indians are very religious people so painting their damaged terrain as something that is supposed to save the world as we know it. One can question the significance of the story as it was brushed off so quickly. I feel as if the actual significance of the passage isn’t talked about enough in the story and while Nirmals other stories are read throughout the book this one isn’t cared about when it paints the land which seems like its in ruin and is so difficult for people to get around as they sink in the mud or can drown in it as shown with Pryia when she is pushed out of the boat and is rescued by the fisherman. The reality of what is going on around them is vastly different from what Nirmal has written about and I hope that later in the book they explore more into this passage and the lands supposed connection to the Gods.

Butler’s book starts in the distant future of the year 2024. Butler tells us a story focusing on the main character, Lauren, and the world she lives in that has been affected by climate change. Within the first chapter of the novel Lauren tells us about her stepmother who lived in the old weather saying that “Kids today have no idea what a blaze of light cities used to be-and not that long ago.”(6) That description alone shows how the change in climate can happen so sparsely and yet have such a drastic impact on our lives as we know it. The stepmother puts into perspective how slow things were as she tells Lauren that the “lights, progress, growth, all those things were too hot and too poor to bother with anymore.” (5) This is when she was younger and as Lauren starts to grow up she gets to see even more stars as the need for the street lamps. All of this goes into the same line of what Nixon was talking about with the topic of “Slow Violence”. Nixon goes on to explain how a situation such as 9/11 was slow violence since the deterioration of the buildings and the collapse of the building happened over time. Nixon recalls the “Efforts to make forms of slow violence more urgently visible suffered a setback in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11.” (13)

Butler shows the downfall of humanity though. Showing the future of what could be as people are now trying to fix what they caused throughout the course of so many years. Lauren tells us of the day she is going to get baptized and how they ride bikes to the church. This is so that they don’t allow for the cars to burn more Fossil Fuels and increase the carbon emissions by driving everywhere. Lauren also tells us about how going outside doesn’t feel safe anymore but her parents and every other adult chose to got out so they can step back into the “good old days when there were churches all over the place and too many lights and gasoline was for fueling cars and trucks instead of for torching things”(8) The way that she describes these people and their actions it sounds like they entered the apocalypse. She describes this naked women and she questions if she was on drugs or if she was raped so many times that she went crazy. It seems that the people here have stopped caring about everyone else and started going crazy. This heat the walls that they had to put up most likely led to all of their psyche’s to break due to the isolation from the outside world. The way the world is in this story Butler created just further proves Nixons idea of “Slow Violence” as he brings up the fact that this newer generation doesn’t have a long enough of an attention span to even begin to process what is happening to the world around them. They are letting the world die out because no one is even noticing what’s happening they aren’t seeing the Earth decay and when it happens it will already be to late.

Each of the three authors bring in their own outlook on Climate Change and its effect on Earth, This idea of “slow violence” amongst the topic of climate change comes from Nixon. Nixon starts off by giving an example of what slow violence is as he talks about the 1980’s disaster where “mothers in the Marshall Islands were still giving birth to ‘headless, eyeless, limbless human infants who would live just a few hours’ because of the long- term effects of radiation contamination from atmospheric nuclear tests con-ducted there from 1948 to 1958.”(pg. 2353) Saying that climate change is slowing causing more and more damage to the Earth in which we have been seeing in more recent years. He also claims that the youths “flickering attention spans” (pg. 2353) is a big cause in the drastic change of climate change because no one is staying focused on the task at hand. Everyone is getting distracted which stays true even in present day with the uproar in social media platforms. Even if someone posts about it we won’t think too much about it and move on to the next funny video we see. LeMenager takes a different approach by speaking about climate change as if it were a book genre as it’s Cli-Fi or climate fiction. LeMenager calls this genre important due to its “notoriety and because of its explicit project of redefining humanism and the humanities.”(pg. 3) LeMenager Is telling us the effects climate change has by saying it is redefining our lives which she isn’t wrong about due to the constant changes in temperature in recent years and it’s only going to get worse from here. But LeMenager goes through others Cli-Fi texts and analyzes them bit by bit. She analyzes these articles because she believes that the ‘news’ genre doesn’t do enough to truly show how bad the climate change situation is as it “implies and end to the everyday itself, since the everyday relies on human habit and its complement of forgetting.”(pg.2) So Lemenager is trying to find more ways to spread awareness since the news doesn’t help as it plays into this generations lack of an attention span. It’s why she lists out all the forms of media that  focuses on Cli-Fi because it’ll keep everyones focus all of this is to help maintain peoples focus and help teach us how we can be more apart of the fight against climate change. As for Ghosh she talks more on her own experience with climate change and working with climate change. She speaks on an experience of an odd weather shift from when she was younger. Ghosh tells us about a time when the winter was over and the typical Delhi heat was supposed to come in. This is “when the hailstorm broke”(pg.16) which was unusual for the weather that Delhi would normally get. This weather caused an eruption among the people as she describes the scene of when she looked up she saw “an extraordinary panoply of objects flying past-bicycles, scooters, lamp posts, sheets f corrugated iron, even entire tea stalls.”(pg.17) These people have never seen a shift in weather this drastic. They all didn’t know what to do and it led to the death of 30 deaths and 700 people getting hurt. Each author spoke about climate change in their own way but all through one common topic that we all need to help in stopping it or what could happen could be catastrophic.