In a moment of crisis, he enlarged himself.
Born Rabindranath (Rob to his classmates), the teenager is a quintessential California kid, unfettered by cross-cultural angst, open to enlarging himself with ties to his Indian origins.
He must wrestle, as I see it, with the temptation to remain as he was, with the task of enlarging himself against the resistance within him to a more serious purpose, his calling to establish Israel.
In the end, Oz's exertions seem tied less to avarice or the ability to name-drop than to a desire to keep testing, surprising, exceeding and enlarging himself, along with his presence and influence.
He so enlarged himself through the folk background that he incorporated it for a while.
The funny thing, though, is that the telling of his story does not in the end enlarge Alan Sheriff's sense of himself, of his own significance.
Last year, when Gates decided to combine two smaller charitable funds into one and increase the endowment, he specifically chose not to enlarge the foursome in charge of ultimate decisions -- himself, his wife, his father (C.E.O).
But this energy and emotion was most often mobilised not for the self, but in order to enlarge the bounds of poetry and to put the poet himself at the service of the generous cause of humanity.
Whether this action against dissent undoes Modi's "mission for goodwill," which the Indian Express views as "an attempt to enlarge his field of possibilities with no real cost to himself," remains to be seen.
