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A victim's message is magnified by the cruel fascination of violence, but it is notoriously slippery in memory. It is a problem illustrated in our own day by the case of Roop Kanwar, a twentyyear old Rajput who died whether it was the death of a hero or that of a victim is unclear in 1987. Her death has been the subject of an international debate over the practice of women 'becoming sati' joining a husband in death by immolation on his funeral pyre. Conflicting accounts of the young woman's death in one, she mounts the funeral pyre voluntarily, and waits serenely for the flames to engulf her, in another, she is drugged and thrust on the pyre by in-laws whose motives are cravenly economic have engendered a debate which reaches as far as the issues of the position of women, nationalism, and the influence of the West in South Asia and beyond. 1 The image of the death of a young woman bears within it such evocative power that it is peculiarly vulnerable not only to contesting voices who wish to annex its power, but also to a kind of rhetorical outward spiral, gathering significance as it attracts to itself concerns beyond its point of origin. Similar issues are raised by early Christian martyr texts. Tertullian of Carthage argued seventeen centuries ago that 'the blood of Christians is a seed'2 from which the Church would go forth and flourish: it was an oft-stressed point of the Christian apologists that persecution of the meek could only back-fire. Yet it is only in the half-generation since the publication of Michel

(In all former alimentary systems, flavor was considered as an emanation of the food, just as indissociable from its substance as can be the sound from the violin which emits it. From this time forth, in the likeness of synthesized sounds, food was decomposed in ingredients capable of being recomposed artificially, here including flavor (and color), added as extras, as the last and next-to-last components, the additives necessary to your palates still infatuated with nature.