everyone’s already heard about it by now, and you all know where i stand on it, so i won’t bore you with my thoughts on this matter. However conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan (who himself is gay) has posted on his blog some of the very articulate emails he’s received in response to bush’s announcement that are well worth a read. They begin here.
PS – his article “The ‘M-Word’ – Why It Matters To Me” is also very good.
[ alice, this post is for you! :D ]
This article critiques the MFA’s decision to allow Monet paintings to be displayed at the Bellagio Museum. but I’m quite excited at the prospect that such beautiful works will be that much closer to home (at least for me!). Who wants to go to vegas!! :D
a few days ago, jerimy and i went to a ‘holi’ festival that took place at the marriot executive apartments (a 2 minute walk from the renaissance.. it’s in the same complex). Holi actually takes place in March, but they decided to have a fun little night for the MEA residents early.
What exactly is Holi? Well, it’s a celebration of color, through music, dancing, and throwing a lot of brightly colored powders over each other. Jer and I did not come out of it unscathed. :)
Pictures will be posted here as soon as i get my camera back up and running! ^_^
my earlier post about India was admittedly, seen through rather rose-colored lenses. so let me clarify my early impressions just a little bit.
when i said people lived ‘organically’ i wasn’t kidding. i was, however, being somewhat euphemistic. “organic” to me has never meant orderly straight clean lines; it has always implied a natural state of disarray, although with a beautiful logic of its own. with that said, i have to point out that things are really messy here. don’t get me started on whether things are ‘messed up.’ that’s another post to come. 0_o
there’s garbage everywhere — on the streets, in piles along the unpaved roads, in front of the hovels and shanties people live in. on the drive to jer’s work, i noticed there were a lot of people kind of randomly squatting along the road, in the fields, anywhere. I had assumed it was just a natural rest squat — you know, where you don’t want to plant your butt anywhere but don’t want to stand any longer. what i hadn’t noticed until jer pointed it out was that their pants were down! they were actually going to the bathroom, and the pots of water next to them was for washing themselves afterwards. This public defecation is starting to change, however, as there is now a local government initiative to install public bathrooms along the streets. The new outhouses seem like they will be nice — they are small brick structures, kind of like the ones you’d see at a campsite, and i saw one that had a pretty mural painted on it. i do wonder whether the country has the infrastructure to handle the kind of en masse water sanitation system, not to mention a sanitation system at all, considering 50% of Mumbai’s residents are without water or electricity, and approximately 600,000 people live in its slums, which are the world’s largest. There is a long way to go.
The contrast between the haves and the have-nots is particularly jarring and astounding. The driver of our rental car (when you rent a car, it comes with a driver cuz there’s no way a foreign driver can hang with India’s traffic habits!) took me to a department store called Saga in Andheri West. The store is six stories tall, with big placards of expensive brands displayed on the outside of its brushed steel and glass windowed exterior. It sits on the banks of a rather pretty little lake, but that’s the only prettiness around it. Everything around the store is the same cement boxes of makeshift shops, and stalls supported by graying sticks of 2x4s, roofed with corrugated steel sheeting, and draped in muddy gray cloth to extend some shade. And this is not an unusual contrast. Driving down the nicer clean roads is quite pleasant, if you keep your eyes on the lush green planters in the center divider. Look to the shoulders and you’ll see the awkward edges of the pavement, which end abruptly and jaggedly into yellow brown dirt, and which are already beginning to engulf shards of the road into its crumbling morass. You’ll see the people walking alongside the road, dodging the rickshaws and cars that appear ready to dive into them at any moment as the vehicles play the rate*time=distance game when they pass each other. And you see the same ramshackle villages along the sides of these main roads, of the people who just happen to live where this thoroughfare goes through. In some ways, they fare better than others who have been cleared out of their slums to make way for new highways. But “development” always carries with it a very high price…
The contrast is also very apparent where we are staying. Everything about our hotel is gorgeous, from the relief murals depicting the story of Ramayana in the Lobby to the marble that exists everywhere — the floor, the staircases, the walls, etc. But right outside are the same shacks and stalls..
To Be Continued…
listening to dj dangermouse’s ‘grey album‘ right now, and damn is it good.
song of the moment: jay-z and dangermouse (and of course the beatles) – what more can i say
…because it doesn’t have SHAKTI POWER!
ok, it’s experiment time! i drank a glass of fruit beer (read: soda water with some sort of grape syrup flavoring) while i was out shopping in Andheri West today. The dispensing machine had Japanese characters on it and the sign claimed to use “only purified water.”
will i get deathly sick like jer did the last time he was in india and drank the water? place your bets, place your bets!
