"The Red Carpet" Characterization Paper.

In the story, “The Red Carpet,” Lavanya Sankaran writes about the everlasting shift in characterization of one of the main characters known as “May-dum.” Sankaren uses contradictions, cultural conflicts, and sympathy to show just how much her character actually changes as the story progresses. May-dum is characterized as a well off snob of some sort, but as the story continues, she starts to relate to Raju. Only at the end, we find her back to her old ways based on the caste system. She demonstrates that she feels higher and better than the people around her. Little does she know Raju is there for her no matter how powerful she is or feels.

Sankaren uses contradictions throughout her writing to show that even though May-dum changes, she ends up in the same place as where she had started. In the beginning of the story, May-dum is a high class woman who believes that she should get everything her way. She doesn’t like the car that was brought for her and believes that the red carpet was tacky. May-dum is like that for most basically the entire first part of the story. As time continues, Raju actually feels comfortable around her and Sankaren writes, “Before he knew it, he was telling her everything: all his hopes, his dreams…” (Sankaren, 8) This shows that the author is trying to change the personality of her character to be a bit more kind to her worker. She is creating a bond that would never have been imaginable from the snob that was introduced in the beginning of the story. Sankaren creates a changing character by making May-dum go back to her old ways at the end of the story. She leaves Raju and goes off with her friends. The fact that there is contradiction of the character’s personality shows that sometimes people do not change, and that society is always creating a circle ending up exactly where it had started.

Lavanya Sankaran includes social conflicts within her writing that exist today. Cultures are not educated on each other, so sometimes the way another acts may come as a shock to someone of a different culture. Raju thinks of May-dum as someone who dresses very inappropriately, but the thing is, he doesn’t understand that where she comes from it is okay to dress the way that she does. His religion and culture are much different than hers. Sankaran includes this to show that sometimes social conflicts are key to understanding someone from a different region as another. May-dum’s character does not change due to a conflict. She continues to dress the way that she would like to. The fact that she covered herself up when she met Raju’s family shows the tension that is between religions. People strongly influence one another, and sooner or later people begin to change as their environment and the people around them change. Although May-dum’s character itself returns back to normal, there is still the evidence that at one point, social conflicts made her give in and be something she was not for a short period of time. Sankaran develops her characters based on the environment that is around them, as people and places change, so do her characters. It is exactly how things run in society today.

Sankaran grasps resources to give detail to her characters that some people wouldn’t recognize. There is always the idea of sympathy for a character. As an author, she breaks down moments to create a mood where sympathy is felt for a certain character at a certain time. It gives the character a true quality for itself. May-dum is brought up as an expensive and high spending character. The thing that creates the sympathy is that Sankaren does not express anything about her character’s family. She seems well off, but the fact that she secretly befriends her worker, Raju, shows that inside, she is lonelier than she may appear. When a friend of May-dum appears in the story, she drops what she is doing with Raju to talk to her friend as if Raju is nothing but an employee of her. It creates a mood that makes the reader feel, in a way, bad for May-dum. Reading this applies a moral to the story. Sometimes the people who seem happiest on the outside are the people who lack something on the inside. May-dum is the perfect example. Sankaran develops a character that at one point the reader may feel sorry for, but once she continues to leave Raju, the mood changes back to maybe not liking that character.

Sankaran develops a character that changes as the story progresses. Within each character shift, comes a new mood. She uses contradiction, cultural conflicts, and sympathy to show how her character changes and the characterization of it each time. She uses moods and personality to get her point across about her characters. Within her writing is a style that creates an interesting character that is never in one way predictable.