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• Cabbages and Kings

  • Guess What, You’ve Been Snarked

    in Cabbages and Kings: There’s a word for it, this feeling of wanting to say something biting and nasty when you catch the day’s news, triggered by a constant sense of absurdity overwhelming logic, of contradictions without consistency, of shifting sands. The word is snark, and it has two origins, one perhaps from Low German or Swedish, meaning a snide remark, and the other from Lewis Carroll. » more
    
    

  • A Brief Biography Of Slapping

    in Cabbages and Kings: Few words have the immediacy of this one. In its first known usage in English, it’s nearly 400 years old, going back to the mid-1630s. Its roots are probably from the very similar Germanic, schlappe, and both are onomatopoeic, suggestive of the sound they make. » more
    
    

  • A Little Bit Of Tintin In Our Lives

    in Cabbages and Kings: It is hard to imagine our childhoods without him. We lost ourselves in his world. We laughed at the crazy things his friends did, but his struggles and ultimate triumphs were always our own. » more
    
    

  • Clueless in Kochi

    in Cabbages and Kings: As the volcanic ash-eclipsing dust finally settles on the Modi-Tharoor brouhaha, perhaps it is time for a reassessment of what was won and what was lost. Clearly, this was the theatre of the absurd, and India and its media nearly reduced to a laughing stock: a somewhat sleazy sports czar took a potshot at an international bureaucrat-turned-politician, they sniped at each other on a micro-blogging site, and instead of seeing the fracas for what it was — a childish ruffling of each other’s hairdos — all other news was swamped out. » more
    
    

  • An Unsuitable Boy: Shashi Tharoor, India and the UN Secretary-Generalship

    in Cabbages and Kings: The only time BBC’s congenitally obnoxious Tim Sebastian was thoroughly non-plussed was when he interviewed the redoubtable Nina Simone. While NDTV’s Barkha Dutt is no Sebastian, and Shashi Tharoor no Simone, she, too, seemed competely mesmerized by her subject. » more
    
    

• Censorship

  • In Search Of Ambedkar’s Parliament

    in Censorship: The conceit of India’s Republic is founded on one major premise: equality. It is this premise that underlies the thinking of our Constituent Assembly, and it is this premise that, perhaps in the interest of retaining its collective sanity, led the Constituent Assembly to believe that the elected representatives of the people who were to form Parliament would be not materially different from themselves: men and women of understanding, some learning, stature, maturity, committed, with a sense of purpose and public service, and also with the ability to laugh at themselves. » more
    
    

  • Someone To Watch Over Me

    in Censorship: It’s a vision from hell or, at the very least, from Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale or Fahrenheit 451. An award-winning film is slated for its television premiere. At the last minute, the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting — it’s hard to think of a government authority with a more quintessentially dystopian moniker — pulls the plug and insists the telecast be moved to a late-night slot. We must protect our children, we are told. » more
    
    

  • The Assault On Ideas

    in Censorship: In America, there is a furore over SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act in Congress, and its sister law in the US Senate, PIPA or Protect IP Act. Google, Wikipedia, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Wired protest. In India, Kapil Sibal leans on a slew of intermediaries and social networks to censor user content, ostensibly to prevent libel and blasphemy. A short while later, making its mind known much too early, a court demands that 21 websites do the same. At the Jaipur Literary Festival, a gaggle of Rip Van Winkle fundamentalists threaten writers over an issue 24 years old. » more
    
    

  • The internet’s Child And Its Nanny

    in Censorship: In the first week of April this year, India’s Department of Information Technology notified drafts of four sets of rules under the Information Technology Act 2000. Two of these, relating to sensitive personal data and guidelines for service providers, have tucked away in them provisions that have gone largely unnoticed. The New York Times had a strong article about these rules, and The Hindu carried an excellent analysis but the rules have otherwise been largely unnoticed by the Indian newspapers, reports being buried on the inside pages. The rules demand closer attention. Their wording is deliberately hazy, and they arm the government with wide unregulated powers against citizens. » more
    
    

  • The Ascent Of Stupidity

    in Censorship: What could these three things possibly have in common: the appointment of a new head of the censor board, a tax on a music concert and a book a famous Indian figure by a foreign author? It all seems innocuous, even routine. But underlying each of these is something extremely dangerous at play: state-sponsored domination of individual freedom. » more
    
    

  • Taking Leave Of Our Censors

    in Censorship: Last week, the Information & Broadcasting Ministry peremptorily ordered two TV channels (Colors and NDTV Imagine) to change the time-slots of their top-rated shows. While the channels got a reprieve from the High Court a day later, the government’s knee-jerk reaction to programming content shows just how out of step the government and our statutes are with media technology. » more
    
    

  • Burn Without Reading

    in Censorship: “It was a pleasure to burn.” In the dystopian future envisioned in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, it is illegal to think; to think, you have to read. Therefore, “… the pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house.” This is not vandalism. This is what the principal character in the book, Guy Montag, does for a living. He burns books. » more
    
    

• Cities

  • Every City Its Season

    in Cities: There are times in the lives of cities when the city seems suddenly to spawn great music, art, literature and architecture. At the turn of the 19th century, Vienna was such a place. » more
    
    

  • The Unquiet City

    in Cities: 1989 was a year of revolutions, one that saw the collapse of several communist states—Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Except for Romania, the others were singularly bloodless. All succeeded. To the east, another uprising against the communist regime of China gathered momentum and culminated in the brutality of the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. » more
    
    

  • Moments in the Life of Bombay

    in Cities: It’s an easy city to love, a hard one to hate, Mumbai, Bombay, whatever you want to call it. It grates on your nerves one day, and charms you the next. It is irresistible and it is undeniable, and it belongs to every one who comes here. If Delhi is a city of power brokers and their pawns, Bombay is truly a city of its people, resilient against all odds. » more
    
    

• Environment

  • From Myth To Mandamus

    in Environment: It is a scheme unlike any other: four times the capacity of China’s Three Gorges dam, five times the capacity of similar projects in America, six times that of existing projects in India. This is the Indian river interlinking project, one that four weeks ago received judicial benediction from the Supreme Court. » more
    
    

  • This Fragile Land

    in Environment: On a cold December day this year, a tigress was killed in Kaziranga. She was riddled with bullets from an AK-47. The autopsy reported ten. There was confusion about who fired the weapon, a forest guard or an Assam policeman. An enquiry has been ordered. » more
    
    

  • The Big Bright Green Deception Machine

    in Environment: Not so long ago, Jairam Ramesh and his Ministry of Environment and Forests were being pilloried by industrialists and the business establishment while being cheered by environmentalists. Finally, it seemed, there was someone unafraid of consequences and determined to do what his portfolio demands. There was action on the Niyamgiri issue, on POSCO, on mining near forest areas, on tiger conservation, on Adarsh and Lavasa and, briefly, even Jaitapur. Business satraps howled that he was choking development and consigning India to perennial poverty. The environmental lobby retaliated, repeatedly pointing out that savaging the environment could not possibly lead to ‘development’. » more
    
    

  • Looking Tokyo, Going Jaitapur

    in Environment: It can’t be easy being a nuclear scientist these days. Following the Fukushima power plant accident, people have become allergic to nuclear power, seeing it as Satan’s work-in-progress. Images are conjured up of mushroom clouds, the Manhattan Project and Oppenheimer’s famous quote from the Bhagvad Gita. Comparisons are drawn between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons (the kind they didn’t find in Iraq), between Fukushima and Hiroshima (distinguished, it seems, only by a brace of consonants and another of vowels). The comparisons are inaccurate and misleading. » more
    
    

  • Castles In The Sand

    in Environment: Once upon a time in a land that now seems far, far away, India had a Prime Minister of a very different hue. In fact, Indira Gandhi had so many hues she was entirely different things to different people. To environmentalists, she was very nearly a patron saint, at least from the time of her address to the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference. Her November 1981 letter to the chief ministers of India’s states demanding protection for India’s coastline and the maintenance of a 500-metre strip to be “clear of all activities” was seen as a re-affirmation of her—and therefore India’s—commitment to environmental protection. This letter (often called a ‘directive’, and sometimes even capitalized as if that lends it some sanctity) was always of the most dubious legal effect but as a piece of posturing, especially one designed to catch the eye of the international political community, it was magnificent; and if there was one thing that Mrs Gandhi was acutely sensitive about, it was the world’s perception of her as an enlightened leader. A few years earlier, it was she who had plunged India into a seemingly bottomless democratic abyss and it was only a miscalculation on her part that brought us out of it. During that time, her stock on the international stage had plummeted. » more
    
    

  • Who’s Afraid Of Jairam Ramesh?

    in Environment: The only reason our Congress-led coalition government, fondly named UPA-II like some yet to be test-fired rocket missile, hasn’t collapsed is because its opponents are in such complete disarray. What UPA-II offers is a party that is, with the sole exception of its in-house hyperbolic serial interrupter Manish Tewari, either preternaturally reticent on almost every issue of consequence or given to mouthing platitudes which do not translate into practice. It claims to be solidly against corruption. Our Queen Mum says our moral universe is shrinking. How would she know?  » more
    
    

  • The Environment Is Not The Enemy

    in Environment: In the midst of the several incisive comments he made during a recent Walk the Talk interview with Shekhar Gupta (the video is available on the NDTV website), HDFC Chairman Deepak Parekh made one profoundly distressing comment. He said, “… environment issues are coming in the way of development. Now, we want the environment to be protected, we want ecological improvements, but somewhere, we have to draw a balance. Do we want growth, and if we want growth, we have to make some sacrifices or take precautions. But you cannot say that you cannot give permissions. There is a disconnect between the industry ministry and the environment ministry. My personal view is, look at the existing industries that are creating all the pollution, emissions. They are going scot-free. Why can’t you try and clean the existing ones? I think you should have a responsibility to improve the existing industries. Don’t block a new entrant.” » more
    
    

  • The Plane Untruth

    in Environment: Pity Jairam Ramesh. The spirited Minister of State for Environment and Forests finds himself fighting a lonely battle against the Navi Mumbai International Airport (NMIA) project. The Aviation Minister lashed out at him in public. Now others — the editors of the Indian Express; the Governor of Maharashtra; and the young (and clueless) Turks of Indian politics — have also waded in against him. They accuse Ramesh of kowtowing to a knee-jerk, maudlin, impractical and fundamentally brainless “green” lobby, an amorphous group that conveniently excludes local citizens opposing the project. Environmentalists are afflicted by the BANANA (“Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone”) syndrome; the local population is ignored altogether. Both green and brown must be sacrificed for the greater good of the airborne.  » more
    
    

  • Environmental Impact Amusements

    in Environment: At Devprayag in the Garhwal Himalaya, the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi slam into each other and become the Ganga. Once, both were mighty. The Bhagirathi’s waters poured at nearly 29000 litres per second. Today, it is a trickle: just 56 litres per second. » more
    
    

  • The Embattled Forest

    in Environment: At 107 sq kms, it is 34 times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. There is nothing ornamental here. This is an old-growth forest, the home of 274 bird species, 150 species of butterflies and 42 mammals — including the leopard. This is Mumbai’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP) and it is probably the only biosphere reserve within local municipal limits anywhere on the planet. » more
    
    

• Governance

  • Video Killed The Media Star

    in Governance: O tempora! O mores! Thanks to the nature of these things, we can no longer say what we all know, and are forced into the needlessly elliptical. Therefore and thusly: the recent demise of the political career of a government spokesperson on accusations of his — for want of a better phrase — infelicitous conduct caught on some dull security camera videotape has generated all manner of controversies, from protestations of this being an entirely private matter to accusations of besmirching high office. » more
    
    

  • Reign Of Terror

    in Governance: The continuing stand-off between the dozen or so Chief Ministers and the Central Government over the National Counter-Terrorism Centre shows no signs of reaching a solution. The various State heads accuse the Centre of federal over-reach, of having encroached on a field purely within the States’ domain — criminal law — and ask why they were not consulted. The Centre’s responses, that terrorism knows no geographical boundaries and that a dialogue can be retrofitted, have not (yet) placated the angry Chief Ministers, or convinced anyone. » more
    
    

  • A Time To Heal

    in Governance: Our existing systems for tackling corruption are catastrophic failures. Prosecuting public servants needs prior sanction. It seldom comes. Prosecutions drag on for years. Relative to the (intangible) result, the effort is monumental. If the comparisons to cancer are accurate, is the solution to administer a mild sedative and only address the symptoms, which is what many say is all that the Government Lokpal Bill does, or is it to use a treatment many feel is so severe that it risks killing the body, the charge made against the Jan Lokpal Bill? In a time to heal, we must have something effective but not fatal.  » more
    
    

  • Rupees, Annas And Vice

    in Governance: If there exists popular perception that this is a government with an embarrassment of vices — an inexhaustible capacity for corruption, inventive mendacity (the dementia defence), and, it now seems, even gross political ineptitude — the Congress-led UPA has only itself to blame. Arresting Anna Hazare, then offering to release him, imposing conditions on his right to protest and then launching personal attacks all tell of a rudderless government bent on committing political suicide by ritual disembowelment. » more
    
    

  • Pashas Of Politics, Caliphs Of Culture

    in Governance: The city’s police are an unhappy lot. It’s bad enough they’ve been forced to pirouette endlessly over the murder of the journalist Jyotirmoy Dey. To show that they’re not completely left-footed, they’ve decided to teach the city how to dance and, in their usual subtle fashion, detain 31 youngsters at a Malad lounge bar for what they call ‘dirty dancing’. This throws up all kinds of interesting possibilities. Perhaps we can look forward to some terpsichorean initiatives from the city’s finest—arangetrams, perhaps, at the Police Gymkhana. Or the Malad mazurka, the Charni Road cha-cha-cha, the Salsette Salsa and the Titwala tango.  » more
    
    

  • The Confounding Fathers Of A New Democracy

    in Governance: Who or what is this “civil society” that has occupied so much airtime and newsprint, and what gives it the right to speak for everyone? Let’s be clear: “civil society” means half a dozen people who, by their own admission, refuse to face citizens at an election. These people have assumed the moral, legal and Constitutional authority to govern us. They say that “just because” a party won an election a few years ago does not mean it can “sit on our chests”. » more
    
    

  • What We Talk About When We Talk About Corruption

    in Governance: For all the wide-spectrum, scattershot weaponry they have built into version 2.1 of the Jan Lokpal Bill, Anna Hazare and the core group of supporters of his “movement” have a curiously narrow focus: the only form of corruption targeted is monetary corruption in public affairs. That such an eradication is impossible to achieve is another matter. Given the acknowledgement of widespread and pervasive venality and the need for effective regulatory mechanisms, we need a clearer definition of the objective. » more
    
    

  • Many Questions, Few Answers

    in Governance: It isn’t a good feeling, this confusion and sense of conflict of the past week or ten days. Yes, we understand what everybody and his uncle have been saying (mea culpa): the Jan Lokpal Bill, or People’s Bill, is undemocratic, dangerous, Draconian. It puts too much power in a few hands, and it hasn’t got enough controls on the use of that power. I suspect we’re also more than a little fed up of the potshots at Anna Hazare: he supports NaMo; undermines democracy; trashes ‘civil society’; doubts the electorate’s intelligence; has skeletons in his almirah; lacks the moral authority to Fast Until Death (FUD); he’s just another clueless FUDdy daddy. The flakes don’t help: Anupam Kher saying we need to change the Constitution just like we change gas cylinders. And Baba Ramdev’s paternity claims to the agitation make many of us very uncomfortable. Of all these, the most disturbing statement from Hazare is his contempt for the voters. This one assertion speaks of a man who hasn’t the foggiest notion of how democracies work. After every election, people get the government they deserve; it’s as simple as that. And it’s not for Anna Hazare, Kiran Bedi, Arvind Kejriwal or, god forbid, the yogi-who-would-be-king to tell us what is right and thereby trump the electorate.  » more
    
    

  • All Checks, No Balance

    in Governance: Just days after the crowds of the World Cup frenzy, it seems strange that another type of crowd should gather so quickly, one that seems to involve every one of us. At the centre of the storm is an unlikely icon, a lone man whose diminutive build belies the enormity of his moral stature.  » more
    
    

  • Plantain Republic

    in Governance: At least 600 years old, the word “commonwealth” comes from the phrase “common weal”, and the first known use of the word ‘weal’ pre-dates the 12th century. From the Middle English wele, similar to the Old English ‘wel’, it connotes a general well-being and commonwealth now means a sound, healthy and prosperous state with a shared well-being. In many legal and historical texts, it is used interchangeably with the word ‘republic’, from the Latin res publica signifying public affairs. A republic is a government of laws, not men, one in which decisions are based on law, not on the whims of an individual or a small group, and are designed to serve the common good. » more
    
    

  • The Statute Of Liberty

    in Governance: The heart of democracy is individual liberty. In most democracies, and certainly in the three that claim some form of historical or numerical primacy—the United States, the United Kingdom and India—personal freedoms are increasingly under siege as law enforcement agencies seek ever wider and more Draconian powers against citizens. The justification is only one: terrorism. » more
    
    

  • The CAG And The Forced March To Mediocrity

    in Governance: During the 30 May 1949 Constituent Assembly debates, Dr BR Ambedkar described the Comptroller and Auditor General as “probably the most important officer in the Constitution of India” with duties “far more important than the duties even of the judiciary”, one who should have “far greater independence than the judiciary itself.” That is a remarkably strong statement and underscores the unique position of the CAG. It is a constitutional post, and the holder of that office can only be removed in the same manner and for the same reasons as a Judge of the Supreme Court.  » more
    
    

  • Seize The Moment

    in Governance: All that grumbling about the security surrounding Barack Obama’s visit seems silly now. Was it all worthwhile? Yes; if only for each of these four unique events: Obama’s message at the memorial at the Taj, the visit to Mani Bhavan, the Town Hall style meeting at my old alma mater, St Xavier’s College, and the address to Parliament. » more
    
    

  • From C To Shining C

    in Governance: Nothing is sacred. A forest is decimated by a mining operation, the lease granted to nonentity whose only claim to fame is that he is the fruit of the loins of a legislative assembly member or an ruling party factotum. Land reserved for a building for war veterans and widows is usurped by politicians and bureaucrats, whose notion of a defence of the realm means finding new ways to protect their personal hoard. The land mining and Adarsh Society allotment scams are only the most recent instances of government corruption. Others are of such long standing that they have now become institutionalized systems with lives of their own; perhaps the best-kept secrets are those involving the purchase of equipment and materiel for the armed forces and police. » more
    
    

  • To Protect The Good, And Punish The Protectors

    in Governance: The word “police” has a convoluted etymology, from the English of the 1500s, middle French, Latin and ultimately the ancient Greek polisoos — polis or city, and sozo, to save, to keep. The word describes the function. In time, it has acquired multiple connotations most often expressed in the mottos of organized police forces; terms such as to protect and to serve, for example. In small print beneath the emblem of the Mumbai Police are the words “Sadraksanaya Khalanigrahanaya”: protect the good and punish the evil. » more
    
    

  • The Secret Diary Of A Prime Minister

    in Governance: Dear diary, Sometimes I think my head will explode. There’s so much I need to do, so much I want to do, so much I should do. But will they let me? All I hear is noise. All I see is more and more dirt and filth, in every stinking variant. One billion people to care for and I am allowed to do nothing. Every day I wake up with an OOPS (out of place sensation). » more
    
    

  • Uncommon Wealth Games

    in Governance: Anonymous sources at an certain ministry in the Central Government told an undisclosed reporter of a popular but nameless daily newspaper that at a meeting of the Embowelled Group of Mantrijis, chaired by a de facto (if not de jure) Head of Government (HoG), a new act quietly passed through both Houses during Happy Hour and is set to change the face of Indian politics. The salient features of the new legislation are presented for general delectation in the larger public interest. » more
    
    

• Journalism

  • All We Hear Is Radia Gaga

    in Journalism: In all the heat and dust raised by the disclosure of the Radia tapes, the country has been asked to forget something essential: the disclosures and wiretaps are both entirely illegal. The persons now accused of all manner of things were never the subjects of those phonetaps. The purpose of the recorded conversations has nothing at all to do with the uses to which they are now being put. What these tapes do show, and what we are being asked to accept without question is that the government is permitted, even entitled, to illegally curtail our most fundamental civil liberties and that this is not only perfectly all right but is actually necessary.  » more
    
    

• Judiciary

  • Ignoble, Ignorant And Unloved

    in Judiciary: Law, medicine and theology are said to be the three “learned” professions. Of their practitioners, lawyers have always been singularly unloved. They arouse public suspicion — they are, after all, defenders of criminals and the corrupt and, therefore, believed to be tainted by association. They invite derision and contempt: from popular lawyer jokes to real and imaginary accounts of bizarre courtroom exchanges portraying lawyers as people of limitless stupidity. » more
    
    

  • 150 Years Of Fortitude

    in Judiciary: It is a remarkable milestone when any single institution anywhere can claim to have functioned for a full 150 years without interruption. When that institution is a court of law, it affords all of us — not just the lawyers and judges — a very special opportunity. » more
    
    

  • The Judiciary On Vacation. Again.

    in Judiciary: In one respect, being a lawyer is very like being a schoolteacher, except that it pays much better. You get vacations. The annual calendar is vitally important: the first thing we do is to look at the red-letter days: long weekends, a four-week vacation in summer, two weeks at Diwali, another two over Christmas and the New Year and every public holiday in between, plus weekends. All told, High Courts work for only 210 days in the year, the Supreme Court for about 180 (lower courts work longer). » more
    
    

  • Reimagining History

    in Judiciary: It’s not about Rama. It’s not about Babur. It’s not even about a temple or a mosque. It’s about an assault of a kind we’ve never seen before, on history, law and the truth. » more
    
    

  • Past Imperfect, Future Tense

    in Judiciary: It’s a day like any other. There is the usual hectic activity in the squalid room. The furniture is creaky and damaged. There are more people than the room can comfortably hold, and, for a courtroom, there’s an unacceptable level of noise. Sitting on a plain bench against the far wall is a quiet man in a suit. He’s been sitting there for hours. It’s not his first visit either. He could be anyone. He just happens to be one of the city’s — possibly the world’s — most renowned cancer surgeons. If this sounds familiar, it should. At some point, all of us have had a similar experience, or know someone who has. No one is spared the indignities of our judicial system. » more
    
    

  • A Talkative Judge

    in Judiciary: For the most part, lawyers in the Karnataka High Court, a stately neo-classical structure in Bangalore’s Cubbon Park, are a restrained and circumspect lot. So when Udaya Holla, a distinguished senior advocate, complains about a judge’s conduct and language, you know something is seriously wrong. » more
    
    

• Justice

  • Where The Truth Lies

    in Justice: Unless I am very wrong, the date this article appears in print is one of only three such dates every century; and each one is special. 11-11-11, like 10-10-10 and 01-01-01 are all binary in appearance. (Of course, should you have the luck to read this at eleven minutes past an hour before noon, you should consider yourself twice blessed: 11-11-11-11-11). » more
    
    

  • The Burden Of Proof

    in Justice: It’s one of the three oldest professions known to man. The other two, prostitution and smuggling, are on the wrong side of common social acceptance; and law — criminal law in particular — has always existed in a slightly murky twilight zone between good and evil, right and wrong. The fact that lawyers make a living out of something as basic as justice makes them a favourite butt of jokes (“why won’t a shark attack a lawyer? Professional courtesy”), and the best always seem to echo a truth. Given the legal penchant for ‘maxims’, there’s a Latin phrase for this: in joco veritas. In jest there is truth. » more
    
    

  • To Forgive And To Forget

    in Justice: In early 1977, Jacobo Timerman, the publisher of a liberal newspaper in Argentina, was arrested by the military junta. For some time previously, he had used his newspaper to publish accounts of government brutality and human rights violations. After his arrest, Timerman was kept in isolation, blindfolded for long periods and subjected to brutal torture with an electric cattle prod. He was finally released in 1979 and his 1981 book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number is a harrowing account of his years of imprisonment. Never sentimental, the book has the dispassion of a professional journalist; this only makes it the more horrifying. But Timerman was a Jew, and his captors were anti-Semitic, and what troubled Timerman most, what he could not understand or reconcile, was the unreasoning hatred for his being a Jew. » more
    
    

  • The Right Not To Be Raped

    in Justice: Come June 25, and if the Baba Ramdev circus and roadshow haven’t hijacked common sense by then, India’s capital is slated to see a protest march of a very different kind: India’s first “Slut Walk”, a global march protesting sexual violence against women. » more
    
    

  • The Evil That Men Do

    in Justice: Titus Andronicus is the bloodiest and most gruesome of Shakespeare’s tragedies; the scholar and critic Clark Hulse, of the University of Illinois and a contributor to the Cambridge Collections, reckons that the play averages five atrocities in each act, one every 97 lines. Perhaps the worst is the gang-rape and mutilation of Lavinia, Titus’s daughter. In Julie Taymor’s 1999 film adaptation of the play, with Anthony Hopkins as Titus, this horrifying scene shows Lavinia after her rape seated on a tree-stump in a devastated landscape, her tongue cut out, her hands chopped off. The sequence is particularly startling because it makes no overt attempt to shock. » more
    
    

  • Children of a lesser God

    in Justice: Environmentalists and human rights activists cheered last month when the Central Government’s Ministry of Environment & Forests rejected Vedanta’s bauxite mining proposal in Niyamgiri, Orissa. Predictably, the motives behind the rejection were soon questioned. Jairam Ramesh was accused of political deviousness in targeting a ‘beneficial’ project in a non-Congress state.  » more
    
    

  • The Tears Of Our Children

    in Justice: Not a week passes when on the city, sometimes the nation, pages of every national daily there isn’t a report of some horrific atrocity against a child. A 6-year-old raped in Shahapur (7 July); a 16-year-old gang raped in Ghaziabad (23 June); a 5-year-old gang raped in Chennai (4 November 2006); another in Panvel (4 January 2010); a six-year-old raped and murdered in Bhayander (13 June 2010). This month, a young man has been arrested in Kurla, suspected of having raped and killed three minor girls. In June, a 41-year-old man repeatedly raped his teenage daughter, impregnated her, forcing an abortion (13 June 2010). » more
    
    

• Law

  • The Pushmi-Pullyu In Law: The RTI Act

    in Law: Hugh Lofting’s Dr Doolittle children’s books had many wonderful imaginary creatures. One of these was the pushmi-pullyu, a gazelle-unicorn hybrid with a head at either end of its body. When it moved, both ends headed off in opposite directions. » more
    
    

  • Live And Let Die

    in Law: He has been on death row for years. Now, three days before he was scheduled to be put to death, the Central Government has stayed his execution. This particular case, Balwant Singh Rajoana, seems to be peculiar. He was convicted for the assassination of Punjab’s Chief Minister Beant Singh in 1995. He chose not to represent himself. He still does not seek a reprieve. He says he has no grounds to do so, and has no faith in our system. Instead, today, it is the ruling party in the state that urges clemency. » more
    
    

  • The Good, The Bad And The Bovine

    in Law: It would be comic if it wasn’t so insidious. Karnataka proposes to pass into law the Karnataka Prevention of Slaughter and Preservation of Cattle Bill. This isn’t just to ensure the health of livestock (it does exactly the reverse) or control slaughter-houses. It targets specific communities and groups, particularly the poor, Dalits and Muslims. » more
    
    

  • In Joco Veritas: In Jest There Is Truth

    in Law: At the end of 2008, six people met at the Cardozo School of Law’s moot courtroom in New York. They included the free speech expert, Floyd Abrams; a sitting judge the United States Court of Appeals, Richard Posner; a judge of the New York state Supreme Court’s appellate division; a professor of law and novelist, Bernard Schlink; and a professor of literature. They were there to decide what appeared to be a simple case concerning a loan default. » more
    
    

  • Judgement Daze

    in Law: What is about judges that so upsets politicians and political columnists? A couple of days ago, one politician referred to High Court and Supreme Court judges as the “laziest” layer of the judiciary. That’s a curious statement coming from someone who’s made a career and an exceedingly good living out of that “laziness”. On television, a self-anointed political pundit was even more waspish, suggesting that judges “get off their butts” and saying that the judiciary was thoroughly useless, or words to that effect. » more
    
    

  • Ask The Experts

    in Law: We find television shows about lawyers, law firms and crime detection so compelling because we perceive court rooms as arenas for a civilized form of gladiatorial combat. ‘Courtroom’ TV serials show feisty lawyers trading verbal blows against each other and sometimes even against awkward judges. Witnesses are the hapless victims fed to legal lions. Every now and then an ‘expert’ witness — a scientist or a doctor, perhaps — is trundled out; sly lawyers try to tie them in knots, usually saying something like “so you can’t say for sure”, to which the witness responds “of course not; that’s just the most likely answer, in my professional opinion.” » more
    
    

  • Minority Report

    in Law: Of all the opening words of the Preamble to our Constitution, the most difficult is one that wasn’t even originally there. Till 1977, we were a sovereign democratic republic, recently turned gloomy with Mrs G in the middle of her run up to pole-vaulting us into bananadom. In that year, we became both socialist and secular; and, as the Aston Martins and Bentleys on our potholed roads, and repeated outbreaks of sectarian violence show, we have honoured both ideals. » more
    
    

  • Accessing The Law

    in Law: As our world gets more complex, so do our statutes. We now have laws for everything from the preservation of wild elephants (1879; seriously) to the running of cybercafes. This statutory morass is confusing and intimidating, and the citizen is more often victim than intended beneficiary. This is a situation that breeds corruption and administrative oppression; few, for instance, know precisely what their rights are whether it is a traffic offence or applying for a factory license. » more
    
    

  • A Question Of Trust, A Matter Of Faith

    in Law: Civilization’s future, EM Forster wrote in his July 1941 essay, originally broadcast on BBC, demands something less dramatic and emotional than prattle about love. “Tolerance,” he said, “is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.” Speaking about a post-War England, he was convinced that it was this quality that would most be needed in the years ahead. » more
    
    

  • For Whom The Decibels Toll

    in Law: We Indians are especially fond of noise. It appeases our gods. It makes us go faster on our pot-holed roads. It makes us better neighbours and fellow passengers on railway trains. Shouting into a cellphone shows how important we are (never mind that some of us like to shout into the wrong end of the phone). It also makes us incredibly stupid. When I once yelled at a driver for honking he looked genuinely perplexed and said, “but I wasn’t honking at you!” » more
    
    

  • A Monument To Corruption

    in Law: The Adarsh Society scam has many dimensions—illegal permissions, allotments, extra FSI, contraventions of the law, ownership of the land, and more. But there’s another scandal quietly brewing and it is possibly the worst of all. On the basis that, following the Ministry of Environment & Forests’ notice to the society asking it to show cause why it should not be demolished, some lobbies have recently suggested that the building should be “auctioned” (the auction proceeds to go to the state treasury). » more
    
    

  • Tyrannosaurus Lex

    in Law: In 2006–2007, Bryan Garner, the paladin of plain language in the law, video-interviewed eight justices of the US Supreme Court on their views on legal writing and advocacy. American lawyers studied these videos closely to see what each judge liked and didn’t, and began tailoring their writing and arguments to fit.  » more
    
    

  • A Country For Sold Men

    in Law: It is happening quietly, but certainly. Little by little at first, and recently in ways far more brazen, whole chunks of our country are being sold. » more
    
    

  • PILfering Justice

    in Law: Last week, India’s Law Minister, M Veerappa Moily, announced his shiny new ‘National Litigation Policy’. It recognises that the single largest litigant in this country is the government itself, and outlines several measures to make the government an ‘efficient and responsible’ litigant. » more
    
    

• Obituaries

  • The Power Of One

    in Obituaries: When that voice boomed through the school, even at the noisiest of times, everybody listened. By her desk in her small cabin — not for her the large and plush corporate-style offices; this one could barely seat three visitors — there was always her handheld mike and she would swivel around and thunder her will. » more
    
    

  • The Keeper Of The Faith

    in Obituaries: It was the first thing that you noticed in her home. The books. There were books everywhere, on every surface, racked, stacked and piled, novels, histories, coffee table books, old books, new books. Even the furniture seemed to morph itself around books. Here was a sturdy old chair, a shaded lamp just so beside it, which could only be meant for reading. By its side another old piece of furniture, a revolving book stand. It was quiet here, as books demand. The books were visibly well-thumbed but undamaged, like good friends, and the furniture was lovingly restored. Books, as they say, are the spine of a house, and if there was one thing Sharada Dwivedi and the house she and her husband Bhagirath had, it was plenty of spine. » more
    
    

• Others

  • At School in a Mumbai Mill, Igniting a Desire to Learn

    in Others: By Neha Thirani Jyoti Gupta, age 8, had never been inside a classroom when she started at the Sitaram Mill Compound Mumbai Public School this past June. When she started, she was a very naughty and unresponsive child, her teachers say. She routinely disobeyed teachers and ignored homework assignments. After six months of regularly attending the school, however, Jyoti has learned how to read and write basic English words and is now one of the brightest and most motivated students in her class, they say. » more
    
    

  • When a Fast Fails: Lessons From Gandhi

    in Others: By Samnath Subramanian | 30 December 2011 Even Mohandas K. Gandhi, the architect of the Indian obsession with the hunger strike, did not always succeed in his fasts — although success was, admittedly, measured by Mr. Gandhi’s own standards. He considered, for instance, a 1918 fast in Ahmedabad a moral failure. He had stopped eating in solidarity with striking mill workers, and three days into his fast, the factory owners agreed to raise worker wages by 35 percent. » more
    
    

  • A Band Tradition, Both Carried On and Change

    in Others: By JON PARELES It’s not the ball drop, but for tens of thousands of people, Phish’s annual run of shows at Madison Square Garden, which winds up on New Year’s Eve, is the more significant year-end event in Manhattan. Always an immediate sellout (but still available for pay per view at livephish.com), the concerts are both a tradition and a challenge. Phish has to provide its familiar joys but vary them enough to surprise fans who are obsessively meticulous tabulators. Thursday night’s concert was Phish in crowd-pleasing mode: uptempo, playing familiar songs and ready to keep fans dancing — never getting too abstract or experimental. Its two sets were both CD-length, just under 80 minutes each, with the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup” as a splashy, gospelly encore. This was the Phish that’s so light-fingered that its remarkable musicianship is often taken for granted; after all, things just keep bubbling along. The camaraderie of musicians who have been playing together since 1983 (with two major breaks) was acted out in the way each player’s improvisations peeked out and then tucked themselves back into the band.  » more
    
    

  • Sri Lanka’s Ghosts of War

    in Others: By NAMINI WIJEDASA COLOMBO, Sri Lanka—THE Sri Lankan government’s defeat of the separatist Tamil Tigers in 2009 ended a three-decade war that took tens of thousands of lives. But only now is the government beginning to acknowledge its huge human cost. Two weeks ago, a government-appointed reconciliation commission released a long-awaited report, giving voice to the war’s civilian victims for the first time. From August 2010 to January 2011, hundreds of people appeared before the commission in tears, begging for news of their loved ones, many of whom had last been seen in the custody of security forces. A doctor spoke of how they managed to survive under deplorable conditions in places “littered with dead bodies and carcasses of dying animals.”  » more
    
    

  • Many of India’s Poor Turn to Private Schools

    in Others: By Vikas Bajaj and Jim Yardley | 30 December 2011 HYDERABAD, India — For more than two decades, M. A. Hakeem has arguably done the job of the Indian government. His private Holy Town High School has educated thousands of poor students, squeezing them into cramped classrooms where, when the electricity goes out, the children simply learn in the dark. Parents in Holy Town’s low-income, predominantly Muslim neighborhood do not mind the bare-bones conditions. They like the modest tuition (as low as $2 per month), the English-language curriculum and the success rate on standardized tests. Indeed, low-cost schools like Holy Town are part of an ad hoc network that now dominates education in this south Indian city, where an estimated two-thirds of all students attend private institutions.  » more
    
    

  • What We Can Learn From Old Animals

    in Others: By Anahad O’Connor | 29 December 2011 It is not hard to argue that we live in a youth-centric culture, one in which young age and beauty are almost synonymous. And that obsession does not end with humans. Puppies and kittens melt hearts; images and videos of baby animals flood the Internet. But rarely does an image of an animal in old age ignite the same interest and adoration. In an unusual project, Isa Leshko, a fine-art photographer who lives in Philadelphia, set out to capture glimpses of animals at a time when they rarely attract much admiration or media attention — in their twilight years. The photographs, part of a series called “Elderly Animals”, are intimate and at times gripping. In one, a thoroughbred horse named Handsome One, age 33, stands in a stable, his hair wispy and his frame showing signs of time. In another, a pair of Finn sheep at the advanced age of 12 embrace as an elderly couple on a park bench might. And in another, a geriatric chow mix named Red lies with his paw under his chin, the signs of glaucoma apparent in his onyx-colored eyes. » more
    
    

  • The Joy of Quiet

    in Others: By Pico Iyer ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness. A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.” Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms. Has it really come to this? In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.  » more
    
    

  • The Fat Trap

    in Others: By Tara Parker-Pope 28 December 2011 For 15 years, Joseph Proietto has been helping people lose weight. When these obese patients arrive at his weight-loss clinic in Australia, they are determined to slim down. And most of the time, he says, they do just that, sticking to the clinic’s program and dropping excess pounds. But then, almost without exception, the weight begins to creep back. In a matter of months or years, the entire effort has come undone, and the patient is fat again. “It has always seemed strange to me,” says Proietto, who is a physician at the University of Melbourne. “These are people who are very motivated to lose weight, who achieve weight loss most of the time without too much trouble and yet, inevitably, gradually, they regain the weight.” » more
    
    

  • Instead of Work, Younger Women Head to School

    in Others: By Catherine Rampell Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force. “I was working part-time at Starbucks for a year and a half,” said Laura Baker, 24, who started a master’s program in strategic communications this fall at the University of Denver. “I wasn’t willing to just stay there. I had to do something.”  » more
    
    

  • Sam Rivers, Jazz Artist of Loft Scene, Dies at 88

    in Others: By Nate Chinen Sam Rivers, an inexhaustibly creative saxophonist, flutist, bandleader and composer who cut his own decisive path through the jazz world, spearheading the 1970s loft scene in New York and later establishing a rugged outpost in Florida, died on Monday in Orlando, Fla. He was 88. The cause was pneumonia, his daughter Monique Rivers Williams said. With an approach to improvisation that was garrulous and uninhibited but firmly grounded in intellect and technique, Mr. Rivers was among the leading figures in the postwar jazz avant-garde. His sound on the tenor saxophone, his primary instrument, was distinctive: taut and throaty, slightly burred, dark-hued. He also had a recognizable voice on the soprano saxophone, flute and piano, and as a composer and arranger.  » more
    
    

  • Pondering a Dire Day: Leaving the Euro

    in Others: LONDON — It would be Europe’s worst nightmare: after weeks of rumors, the Greek prime minister announces late on a Saturday night that the country will abandon the euro currency and return to the drachma. Instead of business as usual on Monday morning, lines of angry Greeks form at the shuttered doors of the country’s banks, trying to get at their frozen deposits. The drachma’s value plummets more than 60 percent against the euro, and prices soar at the few shops willing to open. » more
    
    

  • Speed of Light Lingers in Face of New Camera

    in Others: By John Markoff More than 70 years ago, the M.I.T. electrical engineer Harold (Doc) Edgerton began using strobe lights to create remarkable photographs: a bullet stopped in flight as it pierced an apple, the coronet created by the splash of a drop of milk. Now scientists at M.I.T.’s Media Lab are using an ultrafast imaging system to capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than two-trillionths of a second. The project began as a whimsical effort to literally see around corners — by capturing reflected light and then computing the paths of the returning light, thereby building images coming from rooms that would otherwise not be directly visible. » more
    
    

  • Outsourcing Giant Finds It Must Be Client, Too

    in Others: By Vikas Bajaj | 30 November 2011 NEW DELHI — Every three months, India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, meets with a special panel assigned the ambitious task of figuring out how to produce 500 million skilled workers over the next two decades. The panel is a cross section of India’s power elite, including many of the usual figures like the education minister, the finance minister and the former chief executive of the country’s biggest software outsourcing company. Then there is a more curious choice: Manish Sabharwal. Mr. Sabharwal runs TeamLease, a Bangalore-based agency that has created thousands of jobs by fielding temporary workers for companies in India that want to expand their work force while skirting India’s stringent labor laws, which businesses say discourage the hiring of permanent employees. Many labor leaders and left-leaning politicians accuse him of running the nation’s largest illegal business. He does not completely disagree. “We should not exist,” Mr. Sabharwal, a 40-year-old graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said about his company, which has 60,000 employees. “The genius of India is to allow us to exist.” » more
    
    

  • Bridge Comes to San Francisco With a Made-in-China Label

    in Others: By DAVID BARBOZA SHANGHAI — Talk about outsourcing. At a sprawling manufacturing complex here, hundreds of Chinese laborers are now completing work on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Next month, the last four of more than two dozen giant steel modules — each with a roadbed segment about half the size of a football field — will be loaded onto a huge ship and transported 6,500 miles to Oakland. There, they will be assembled to fit into the eastern span of the new Bay Bridge. » more
    
    

  • A Dirty Business

    in Others: by George Packer In the fall of 2003, Anil Kumar, a senior executive with the consulting firm McKinsey, and Raj Rajaratnam, the head of a multibillion-dollar hedge fund called Galleon, attended a charity event in Manhattan. They had known each other since the early eighties, when, as recent immigrants, they were classmates at the Wharton School of Business, in Philadelphia. Their friendship, intermittent over the years, was based on self-interest rather than on intimacy. Kumar, born in Chennai, formerly Madras, India, was fastidious and morose, travelling at least thirty thousand miles a month for work, and seldom socializing. Rajaratnam, a Tamil from Colombo, Sri Lanka, was fleshy and dark-skinned, with a charming gap-toothed smile and a sports fan’s appetite for competition and conquest. Kumar was not among the group whom Rajaratnam took on his private plane to the Super Bowl every year for a weekend of partying. “I’m a consultant at heart,” Kumar liked to say. “I’m a rogue,” Rajaratnam once said. Kumar had the more precise diction and was better educated, but Rajaratnam was one of the world’s new billionaires and therefore a luminary among businessmen from the subcontinent. In an earlier generation of immigrant financiers, Kumar would have been the German Jew, Rajaratnam the Russian. Kumar might have felt some disdain for Rajaratnam, but Rajaratnam’s fortune made him irresistible. » more
    
    

  • Trucking in Technicolor on Pakistan’s Highways

    in Others: By JAMES PARCHMAN MURIDKE, Pakistan.—HERE on the historic Grand Trunk Road, some 40 miles north of Lahore and a few hours south of the former Bin Laden hideout of Abbottabad, a mosque’s call to Friday afternoon prayers was overwhelmed by Pakistani pop music spilling from open-air markets. The barks of bus conductors calling out destinations added to the din. » more
    
    

  • Outcry in America as pregnant women who lose babies face murder charges

    in Others: Ed Pilkington in New York Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child. Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby’s death – they charged her with the “depraved-heart murder” of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence. » more
    
    

  • ‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Nuclear Crisis

    in Others: By NORIMITSU ONISHI SHIKA, Japan — Near a nuclear power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a series of exhibitions in a large public relations building here extols the virtues of the energy source with some help from “Alice in Wonderland.” » more
    
    

  • After N.Y. Senate Vote, Governor Cuomo Signs Gay Marriage Bill

    in Others: By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and MICHAEL BARBARO ALBANY — Lawmakers voted late Friday to legalize same-sex marriage, making New York the largest state where gay and lesbian couples will be able to wed and giving the national gay-rights movement new momentum from the state where it was born. » more
    
    

  • The Hidden Route to Machu Picchu

    in Others: By MARK ADAMS AS we neared the end of a very long climb up a very steep ridge, my guide, John Leivers, shouted at me over his shoulder. “It’s said that the Spaniards never found Machu Picchu, but I disagree,” he said. I caught up to him — for what seemed like the 20th time that day — and he pointed his bamboo trekking pole at the strangely familiar-looking set of ruins ahead. “It’s this place they never found.” » more
    
    

  • Is there a ban on reporting bad news from India?

    in Others: By Andrew Buncombe It was the writer and activist Arundhati Roy who set foreign journalists in India busily chattering recently. In an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian, Ms Roy was discussing the Maoist and Adavasi “resistance” to encroachment on tribal lands. Mr Moss, asked her why, “we in the West don’t hear about these mini-wars?”. Ms Roy replied: “I have been told quite openly by several correspondents of international newspapers, that they have instructions – ‘No negative news from India’ – because it’s an investment destination. So you don’t hear about it. But there is an insurrection, and it’s not just a Maoist insurrection. Everywhere in the country, people are fighting.” » more
    
    

  • Goodbye to My Hero

    in Others: by William Dalrymple Last week William Dalrymple bid farewell to his friend, mentor, and hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Here he remembers one of the world’s greatest writers—and a British hero. They buried Patrick Leigh Fermor in the soft green turf of a Cotswold graveyard on a cloudy Thursday afternoon. In the church, a wonderfully abstruse reading from the Restoration mystic Sir Thomas Browne was read out by Paddy’s friend and executor, the travel writer Colin Thubron: “But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low,” he intoned, “and ‘tis time to close the five ports of knowledge; we are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves.” Also see: Telegraph obituary; 2008 book review by Dalrymple in the Telegraph » more
    
    

  • Egypt: The Victorious Islamists

    in Others: by Yasmine El Rashidi The forty-year-old Virgin Mary Church on Cairo’s al-Wahda Street—the name means unity, or oneness—looks striking these days. Its cream and white façade is unscathed by the dust and smog that otherwise blanket neighboring buildings and the rest of the city, and inside, its walls and floors glisten with newly laid cappuccino-colored marble. The church, its guardians say, has never looked better. “Ever, in its entire history.” » more
    
    

  • Sai Baba

    in Others: WITH a mere circling wave of His Hand, Sai Baba could make objects materialise out of the air. Gold rings, amulets and necklaces; blocks of sugar candy; images of Shiva made of topaz and sapphire; bottles of tonic and packets of blue pills; rosaries, silver vessels and even medallions inscribed with the name of the recipient, the day and date. He could produce vibhuti too, holy Ash that poured from under His fingernails. On average a pound a day flowed from Him as He gave darshan, allowing His followers a sight of God as He moved among them, a tiny ochre-robed figure with an immense black afro, or halo, of hair. The Ash might be salty or sweet, blackish or white. Smeared on the body, it forgave sins; taken in water, it helped digestive complaints. » more
    
    

  • Russia’s Crime of the Century

    in Others: BY JAMISON FIRESTONE If there remains any pretense that justice and rule of law exist in Moscow today, that notion should now be counted as pure fantasy. The case of Sergei Magnitsky — a senior partner at my law firm who was imprisoned, tortured, and murdered after his efforts to shed light on a massive governmental fraud by Interior Ministry officials stealing subsidiaries of my client’s company, the Hermitage Fund, and the $230 million of taxes they had paid — has illuminated the cruelty and criminality of Russian legal enforcement. And new evidence released last week on YouTube as part of the broad campaign seeking justice for Sergei, goes even further — exposing the blatant theft, impunity, and ill-gotten gains of senior Russian tax officials who were complicit in the fraud and subsequent murder of my colleague. » more
    
    

  • Japan Nuclear Disaster Put on Par With Chernobyl

    in Others: By HIROKO TABUCHI and KEITH BRADSHER TOKYO — Japan has raised its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday. Prime Minister Naoto Kan, meanwhile, called on the country to rebuild. While acknowledging the decision to raise the severity of the nuclear accident at Fukushima to the highest level, he took pains in a nationally televised speech on Tuesday evening to say that the reactors were being stabilized and to emphasize that radiation releases are declining. The prime minister said he had ordered Tokyo Electric Power Company, the operator of Fukushima Daiichi, to present its plans and expectations for the stricken nuclear power plant. He also expressed concern about the economic consequences of the accident, calling on people across Japan to continue buying products from the affected areas of northeast Japan. » more
    
    

  • Brave New World among top 10 books Americans most want banned

    in Others: By Alison Flood Banned in Ireland when it first appeared in 1932, and removed from shelves and objected to ever since, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is still making waves today. The novel of a dystopian future was one of the most complained about books in America last year, with readers protesting over its sexually explicit scenes, “offensive” language and “insensitivity”. The American Library Association (ALA) has just released its list of the 10 books which Americans tried hardest to ban last year. Topped yet again by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, a picture-book telling the true story of a chick adopted by two male Emperor penguins at New York’s Central Park zoo, the list is a compilation of complaints made to libraries and schools requesting a book be banned because of its content. Dozens of attempts were made to remove And Tango Makes Three from library shelves, said the ALA, with those seeking to ban the title protesting at the “homosexuality” of the two penguins and its “religious viewpoint”. » more
    
    

  • Strong Aftershock as Japan Urges More Evacuations

    in Others: By HIROKO TABUCHI and KEITH BRADSHER TOKYO—Japan is preparing to expand the evacuation zone around a crippled nuclear power plant to address concerns over long-term exposure to radiation, the government announced on Monday. Thousands of people bowed their heads in silence at 2:46 p.m., marking the passage of exactly one month since a magnitude-9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami brought widespread destruction to a wide swath of Japan’s northeast Pacific coast. The mourning was punctuated by another strong aftershock off Japan’s Pacific coast, which briefly set off a tsunami warning, killed at least one person and knocked out cooling at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant for almost an hour, underscoring the vulnerability of the plant’s reactors to continuing seismic activity. » more
    
    

  • Appeals court upholds Facebook deal from 2008

    in Others: By Carol J. Williams A federal appeals court panel ruled Monday that a 2008 deal between Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and three former Harvard colleagues is valid and enforceable. The decision upheld a negotiated agreement between Zuckerberg and the founders of a rival social-networking site, ConnectU, in their dispute over who came up with the Facebook idea by giving Divya Narendra and Olympic rowing twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss a share of the privately held company, deemed to be worth about $65 million at the time of the settlement three years ago. Because of Facebook’s soaring value, that share is now worth in excess of $160 million. In the opinion from Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who wrote for the three-judge panel, he said: “The Winklevosses are not the first parties bested by a competitor who then seek to gain through litigation what they were unable to achieve in the marketplace. And the courts might have obliged, had the Winklevosses not settled their dispute and signed a release of all claims against Facebook.” He concluded: “At some point, litigation must come to an end. That point has now been reached.” » more
    
    

  • Shane Watson smashes record 15 sixes as Australia beat Bangladesh

    in Others: Shane Watson hit a record 15 sixes to guide Australia to a series-clinching nine-wicket win over Bangladesh in Mirpur. The 29-year-old, who also hit 15 fours, ended on 185 not out after smashing the most sixes ever in a one-day international innings as the tourists moved into an unassailable 2-0 lead. Watson’s knock - which came from just 96 balls as his side chased down their 230 victory target with 24 overs to spare - was the highest one-day innings ever made by an Australian. He had earlier also taken two catches and a wicket as the hosts made 229 for seven. » more
    
    

  • The President Is Missing

    in Others: by Paul Krugman What have they done with President Obama? What happened to the inspirational figure his supporters thought they elected? Who is this bland, timid guy who doesn’t seem to stand for anything in particular? I realize that with hostile Republicans controlling the House, there’s not much Mr. Obama can get done in the way of concrete policy. Arguably, all he has left is the bully pulpit. But he isn’t even using that — or, rather, he’s using it to reinforce his enemies’ narrative. His remarks after last week’s budget deal were a case in point. Maybe that terrible deal, in which Republicans ended up getting more than their opening bid, was the best he could achieve — although it looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions  » more
    
    

  • A worthless corrupt pursuit

    in Others: By Peter Roebuck NOT even a week after the spectacular final of the 2011 World Cup, the cricketers are back among us, not wearing the colours of their country and playing 50-over cricket, but dressed in the apparently arbitrary attire of their Twenty20 franchises. Of course, it is the future. Cricket is finished as an international game. It faces a long and slow decline caused by an international cricket board that lacks vision and integrity, a board of knaves and fools that makes one-star decisions while staying in five-star hotels. Advertisement: Story continues below Through no fault of the ICC’s admirable employees, cricket has become a corrupt and worthless activity and deserves nothing better than the Indian Premier League, a format known for jiggery pokery, social excesses and cosmetic grins. » more
    
    

  • Surrealism? It was always old hat

    in Others: By Jonathan Jones The Joan Miró exhibition at Tate Modern will draw attention, once again, to one of the 20th century’s most famous art movements: surrealism. As a young artist from Catalonia coming to Paris, home of the surrealist movement, Miró absorbed its ideas and became one of its most brilliant artists. In its time, surrealism was seen as amoral, disgusting and extreme because it claimed to make art from the stuff of dreams. Today it is celebrated as a living influence. But was surrealism an original art movement at all? I think that far from being a revolutionary vision hatched out of the brain of its leader, André Breton, the surrealist movement was actually the last echo of a quest for the irrational that has roots deep in the 19th century. The surrealists themselves hinted at this by frequently citing influences such as art nouveau. But when you examine the sheer scale, and radical scope, of the 19th-century obsession with dreams, illicit sex, secret confessions and the collapse of reason, you have to wonder if the surrealist movement actually said anything new at all. » more
    
    

  • Lord Neuberger asks who is the master: the unelected judge or the elected politician

    in Others: Adam Wagner | Guardian | 8 April 2011 Is the master of the rolls Lord Neuberger the busiest judge in England? He has given another fascinating speech entitled Who are the masters now? The question posed is paraphrased from one asked in parliament in 1946, itself paraphrasing Humpty Dumpty. Neuberger used the Lord Alexander of Weedon lecture to tackle the slippery issue of parliamentary sovereignty. So, who is the master: the unelected judge or the elected politician? » more
    
    

  • Special Needs

    in Others: By Janet Malcolm The nine-part docu-series Sarah Palin’s Alaska, shown late last year on the cable channel TLC, has the atmosphere of a cold war propaganda film.1 It shows the Palin family during the summer of 2010, making happy trips to one pristine Alaskan wilderness area after another — fishing, hunting, kayaking, dogsledding, rock climbing — and taking repeated little swipes at the left. During a visit with her dad to a store in Anchorage named Chimo Guns, where she is buying a rifle for a camping trip in bear country, Palin remarks: Out and about in Alaska’s wilds it’s more common than not to see somebody having some kind of weapon on their person, in fact it’s probably as commonplace as if you’re walking down in New York City and you see somebody with a Blackberry on their hip. New York, of course, is code for all the things that Palin-style populism is against. I don’t have to tell my fellow Commies what these things are. … Perhaps the most surreal episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska is the one in which the TV celebrity Kate Gosselin appears and shamelessly upstages Palin. Gosselin has eight children — a pair of twins and sextuplets — who are the raison d’être of the TLC reality series originally called Jon and Kate Plus Eight, and renamed Kate Plus Eight when the pair split up. Palin has invited Gosselin and her children to join her family on a camping trip to a mountain lake in a remote wilderness area that can only be reached by seaplane, and the role she assigns to herself is that of protectress: she will prevent bears from eating her guests. At Chimo Guns, as she selects her purchase, she tells the salesman about the “gal who’s never camped before” who is “going to rely on me to protect her.” But the minute we lay eyes on Gosselin, we know that Palin herself may need protection from this small, pretty, powerfully unsentimental blond. “Beautiful view,” Gosselin says in a deadpan voice, as she and her eight enter the Palins’ lakefront house in Wasilla, and adds, “There’s a bear on the floor. Did anyone notice?” The kids throw themselves on the bear rug and toss about a tongue that has fallen out of its taxidermed head. After telling them to put the tongue back, Gosselin looks into the bear’s glass eyes and says, “Is this really real? Like this was once walking outside?” Todd Palin says, “Yeah, Sarah’s dad shot this a few years ago.” Gosselin stares at the trophy with an expression of pain and disgust. » more
    
    

  • Under this surreal ‘rule by law’, Ai Weiwei is guilty

    in Others: Isabel Hilton | Guardian | 7 April 2011 Such a distortion of the judiciary means those who seek to protect their fellow citizens are now most at risk in China When the Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei insisted to reporters in Beijing this week that “China is a country ruled by law”, and “other countries have no right to interfere” in the case of the detained avant-garde artist Ai Weiwei, there was a certain truth to his remarks. China is a country ruled by law. But this is quite different, as many victims of official corruption in China have discovered, from being a country in which the rule of law prevails. The rule of law contains important principles: the law is supreme, and all have equal rights before it. The concept of rule by law was pioneered by one of China’s harshest imperial regimes, the shortlived but influential Qin dynasty, 2,000 years ago. The Qin emperor saw the law as an instrument of authoritarian rule, to be defined and used as he chose, and it is this tradition that appeals to the current Chinese leadership. » more
    
    

  • After Mubarak

    in Others: Adam Shatz | 4 February 2011 Popular uprisings are clarifying events, and so it is with the revolt in Egypt. The Mubarak regime - or some post-Mubarak continuation of it - may survive this challenge, but the illusions that have held it in place have crumbled. The protests in Tahrir Square are a message not only to Mubarak and the military regime that has ruled Egypt since the Free Officers coup of 1952; they are a message to all the region’s autocrats, particularly those supported by the West, and to Washington and Tel Aviv, which, after spending years lamenting the lack of democracy in the Muslim world, have responded with a mixture of trepidation, fear and hostility to the emergence of a pro-democracy movement in the Arab world’s largest country. If these are the ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, they are very different from those Condoleezza Rice claimed to discern during Israel’s war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006. » more
    
    

  • How not to fight terror

    in Others: India and the Naxalites The Economist | 27 January 2011 Convicting a human-rights activist for sedition does India’s image no favours HE WAS accused of being a Naxali daakiya—a postman for the Naxalites, India’s leftist terror movement. Binayak Sen, a 61-year-old doctor and rights activist, was a frequent visitor to a jail in Chhattisgarh where he tended, among many others, to an elderly inmate, said to be a Naxalite leader. The visits were official: he visited the jail as a leader of a local civil-liberties group. Then in May 2007, after his 33rd visit in 18 months, the police arrested the doctor and charged him with sedition and helping a banned group. The case looked flimsy, resting on the claim that Dr Sen has carried messages to other Maoists (as the Naxalites are also known). He denies it. The jailers, who had sat in on the 33 meetings, testified that nothing had been couriered. An unsigned letter, said to be from the leftists and thanking the doctor for help, which the police claimed they had found at his house, was the hardest piece of evidence on offer. The Bengali doctor, pointing to a dodgy paper trail, said that was planted. » more
    
    

  • In Borneo, City Pleasures and Jungle Adventure

    in Others: Daniel Robinson | 21 January 21 A SNOW-WHITE fortress in the style of the English Renaissance, garnished with crenellations, pepper pot turrets and an octagonal keep, is not quite what you’d expect to find on a steamy bluff overlooking an equatorial river in Malaysian Borneo. But Fort Margherita, built in 1879 by Charles Brooke, the second White Rajah of Sarawak, is just one of the many charms of Kuching, a gracious and kaleidoscopically diverse city of about 600,000 just an hour and a half by air from Singapore. » more
    
    

  • India’s shoot-to-kill policy on the Bangladesh border

    in Others: Brad Adams | 23 January 2011 Do good fences make good neighbours? Not along the India-Bangladesh border. Here, India has almost finished building a 2,000km fence. Where once people on both sides were part of a greater Bengal, now India has put up a “keep out” sign to stop illegal immigration, smuggling and infiltration by anti-government militants. This might seem unexceptional in a world increasingly hostile to migration. But to police the border, India’s Border Security Force (BSF), has carried out a shoot-to-kill policy - even on unarmed local villagers. The toll has been huge. Over the past 10 years Indian security forces have killed almost 1,000 people, mostly Bangladeshis, turning the border area into a south Asian killing fields. No one has been prosecuted for any of these killings, in spite of evidence in many cases that makes it clear the killings were in cold blood against unarmed and defenceless local residents » more
    
    

  • Tout Sweet: The New French Chocolat

    in Others: Amy Thomas | 9 February 2011 Toss a praliné truffe in any direction in Paris, and you’ll hit a chocolatier, whether an award-winning master or a modest neighborhood peddler. But lately the city seems particularly cuckoo for cocoa, as a new breed of chocolate artisans has opened up salons, boutiques and bars all over the city. Pierre Cluizel, son of the master chocolatier Michel Cluizel, recently opened Un Dimanche à Paris, his sprawling chocolate concept store occupying three addresses in a historic back alley in Saint Germain des Pres. In the boutique, you can buy bonbons by the piece, chocolate by the block or baked goods ranging from macarons to éclairs to chocolate chip cookies, all of it made with white, milk or dark chocolate. Past the glass-walled pastry kitchen — where you can watch desserts being whipped, mixed and baked — is a restaurant and decadent salon de thé, and upstairs is a kitchen offering workshops. » more
    
    

  • Washington’s Secret History with the Muslim Brotherhood

    in Others: Ian Johnson | 5 February 2011 As US-backed strongmen around North Africa and the Middle East are being toppled or shaken by popular protests, Washington is grappling with a crucial foreign-policy issue: how to deal with the powerful but opaque Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, the Brotherhood has taken an increasingly forceful part in the protests, issuing a statement Thursday calling for Mubarak’s immediate resignation. And though it is far from clear what role the Brotherhood would have should Mubarak step down, the Egyptian president has been claiming it will take over. In any case, the movement is likely to be a major player in any transitional government. Journalists and pundits are already weighing in with advice on the strengths and dangers of this 83-year-old Islamist movement, whose various national branches are the most potent opposition force in virtually all of these countries. Some wonder how the Brotherhood will treat Israel, or if it really has renounced violence. Most—including the Obama administration —seem to think that it is a movement the West can do business with, even if the White House denies formal contacts. » more
    
    

  • Why WikiLeaks Changes Everything

    in Others: Christian Caryl | 13 January 2011 WikiLeaks changes everything. We can act as if the old standards of journalism still apply to the Internet, but WikiLeaks shows why this is wishful thinking. On November 28 the Internet organization started posting examples from a cache of 251,287 formerly secret US diplomatic cables. The few thousand journalists in this country who regularly track the State Department’s doings would have needed a couple of centuries to wheedle out this volume of information by traditional methods; the linkage of disparate government computer networks (a well-meaning response to the compartmentalization of data in the pre-September 11 period) apparently allowed one disgruntled Army private to pull it off in a few moments. As WikiLeaks itself boasts, this is “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain.” The scale is unprecedented. So, too, is the intent—or, more precisely, the lack thereof. Raffi Khatchadourian on the New Yorker website speculates that the aim of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “is not to reveal a single act of abuse…, but rather to open up the inner workings of a closed and complex system, to call the world in to help judge its morality.”1 This may indeed be Assange’s vision, but he doesn’t seem capable of articulating it himself. The WikiLeaks website contends that it’s out to expose “contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors” (as if a charge of hypocrisy were an adequate reason for exposing official secrets) and informs us that “every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington—the country’s first President—could not tell a lie.” » more
    
    

  • The Fading Dream of Europe

    in Others: Orhan Pamuk | 10 February 2011 In the schoolbooks I read as a child in the 1950s and 1960s, Europe was a rosy land of legend. While forging his new republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, which had been crushed and fragmented in World War I, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk fought against the Greek army, but with the support of his own army he later introduced a slew of social and cultural modernization reforms that were not anti- but pro-Western. It was to legitimize these reforms, which helped to strengthen the new Turkish state’s new elites (and were the subject of continuous debate in Turkey over the next eighty years), that we were called upon to embrace and even imitate a rosy-pink—occidentalist—European dream. The schoolbooks of my childhood were texts designed to teach us why a line was to be drawn between the state and religion, why it had been necessary to shut down the lodges of the dervishes, or why we’d had to abandon the Arab alphabet for the Latin. But they were also overflowing with questions that aimed to unlock the secret of Europe’s great power and success. “Describe the aims and outcomes of the Renaissance,” the middle school history teacher would ask in his exam. “If it turned out we were sitting on as much oil as the Arabs, would we then be as rich and modern as Europeans?” my more naive classmates at the lycée would say. In my first year at university, whenever my classmates came across such questions in class, they would fret over why “we never had an enlightenment.” The fourteenth-century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun said that civilizations in decline were able to keep from disintegrating by imitating their victors. Because Turks were never colonized by a world power, “worshiping Europe” or “imitating the West” has never carried the damning, humiliating overtones described by Frantz Fanon, V.S. Naipaul, or Edward Said. To look to Europe has been seen as a historical imperative or even a technical question of adaptation. » more
    
    

  • Bring Back the Rails!

    in Others: Tony Judt | 13 January 2011 The Way We Live Now Railways have been declining since the 1950s. There had always been competition for the traveler (and, though less marked, for freight). From the 1890s horse-drawn trams and buses, followed a generation later by the electric or diesel or petrol variant, were cheaper to make and run than trains. Lorries (trucks)—the successor to the horse and cart—were always competitive over the short haul. With diesel engines they could now cover long distances. And there were now airplanes and, above all, there were cars: the latter becoming cheaper, faster, safer, more reliable every year. Even over the longer distances for which it was originally conceived, the railway was at a disadvantage: its start-up and maintenance costs—in surveying, tunneling, laying track, building stations and rolling stock, switching to diesel, installing electrification—were greater than those of its competitors and it never succeeded in paying them off. Mass-produced cars, in contrast, were cheap to build and the roads on which they ran were subsidized by taxpayers. To be sure, they carried a high social overhead cost, notably to the environment; but that would only be paid at a future date. Above all, cars represented the possibility of private travel once again. Rail travel, in what were increasingly open-plan trains whose managers had to fill them in order to break even, was decidedly public transport. » more
    
    

  • When Picasso Changed His Tune

    in Others: By HOLLAND COTTER10 February 2011 It’s 1912, and Pablo Picasso is in Paris, thinking: All right, what’s next? A few years earlier he painted a killer picture, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” People had thrown up their hands in alarm; his friends hardly knew what to say. Energized by the fuss, he punched out variations on the theme: paintings of sharp-elbowed, wood-brown nude women, their bodies all ax-cut facets, set in pockets of shallow space. He’d changed history with this work. He’d replaced the benign ideal of the Classical nude with a new race of sexually armed and dangerous beings. He’d made art as much a problem as a pleasure. At the same time he left fundamentals unchanged. The human figure remained sovereign, abstraction unexplored. Painting was still a reflection of the world we knew, not an alternative reality with laws of its own. So there were further leaps to take. And Picasso had to ask himself how far he was willing to go. Quite far, it turned out, and exactly how far is the subject of “Picasso: Guitars 1912-1914,” a subtly buzzing manifesto of an exhibition that opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art. It’s made up of 70 smallish, thematically related objects borrowed from hither and yon: paintings, drawings, collages and combinations thereof, along with two renowned sculptures, one seen complete for the first time since it left Picasso’s studio after his death.  » more
    
    

  • No ‘Moby-Dick’: A Real Captain, Twice Doomed

    in Others: By JESSE McKINLEY | February 11, 2011 HONOLULU — In the annals of the sea, there were few sailors whose luck was worse than George Pollard Jr.’s. Pollard, you see, was the captain of the Essex, the doomed Nantucket whaler whose demise, in 1820, came in a most unbelievable fashion: it was attacked and sunk by an angry sperm whale, an event that inspired Herman Melville to write “Moby-Dick.” Unlike the tale of Ahab and Ishmael, however, Pollard’s story didn’t end there: After the Essex sank, Pollard and his crew floated through the Pacific for three months, a journey punctuated by death, starvation, madness and, in the end, cannibalism. (Pollard, alas, ate his cousin.) Despite all that, Pollard survived and was given another ship to steer: the Two Brothers, the very boat that had brought the poor captain back to Nantucket. And then, that ship sank, too.  » more
    
    

  • As India Thrives, Its People Remain Hungry

    in Others: Vikas Bajaj | 11 February 2011 BAMNOD, India — The 50-year-old farmer knew from experience that his onion crop was doomed when torrential rains pounded his fields throughout September, a month when the Indian monsoon normally peters out. For lack of modern agricultural systems in this part of rural India, his land does not have adequate drainage trenches, and he has no safe, dry place to store onions. The farmer, Arun Namder Talele, said he lost 70 percent of his onion crop on his five-acre farm here, about 70 miles north of the western city of Aurangabad.  » more
    
    

  • The Rembrandt of Riyadh

    in Others: Tim Adams | 27 January 2011 “The thing about being a painter,” Andrew Vicari, who has claims to being the most lavishly rewarded painter in the world, was saying, “is that every night you go to bed thinking the work you have done that day is fabulous. And then you wake up the next morning and look at your canvas and think it is worthless, a piece of junk, and you start again.” We were traveling on the upper deck of a double-decker bus along London’s Piccadilly in early December, on the way to meet the artist’s manager. Vicari, a heavyset man in a big coat, gestured outside in exaggerated despondency. “Sometimes I see pavement artists, working in chalk, work that the rain will wash away,” he said, “and I think: Is Vicari really any better than any of them?” He looked me in the eye, clutched my arm. “I mean, am I?” » more
    
    

  • Bhimsen Joshi

    in Others: MUSIC seemed to require him to use every part of his body. From a slow, mesmerised, almost motionless start his eyes would roll upwards, foreshadowing the ascent of the notes that emerged from his distended, gaping mouth. His hands flailed, as though reaching for some imagined object just out of his grasp. Perhaps Bhimsen Joshi was trying to bring back to earth a soaring note from one of his magnificent taans, the series of rapid melodic passages with which great classical singers in the Hindustani tradition of northern India demonstrate how skilled they are. Few could sing them like he could, his sonorous voice ranging effortlessly over three octaves as he explored the nuances of ragas—Indian music’s tonal settings for improvisation and composition, each associated with a season or a time of day. Yet those who packed concert halls to listen to him sing, as Indians did for over six decades, rarely mentioned his technique. Instead, they would talk about how he had made them feel, on a night long ago at the Dover Lane music conference in Calcutta, or under a tent in the grounds of Modern School on New Delhi’s Barakhamba Road, when he sang a raga of the monsoon—and suddenly the skies were full of thundering black rainclouds, even though it was bone dry and bitterly cold. It was on nights like these that Indians fell in love with this strange man, whose contortions defied the best efforts of those in charge of microphone placement. For nobody could match the extraordinary ability of Bhimsen—always Bhimsen to his listeners—to capture the essential character of a raga, whether playful or grave, and send audiences out into the night humming, with the music under their skin, almost stunned with the force of something they could not quite comprehend. » more
    
    

  • Miami’s concert hall

    in Others: The Economist | 27 January 2011 WHEN Michael Tilson Thomas was a boy growing up in Los Angeles, the young Frank Gehry sometimes acted as his babysitter. Since then Mr Gehry has become one of the world’s most famous architects and Mr Thomas a prominent conductor, and the two have remained friends. Now they have collaborated. On January 25th Miami unveiled the latest addition to its fast-improving cultural scene. The New World Centre, a gorgeous new concert hall designed by Mr Gehry, staged its first concert the following night with Mr Thomas conducting works by Wagner and Copland. See also the New York Times article. The photograph is from the NYT piece. » more
    
    

  • A Top Architect Settles Into a New Niche

    in Others: Celia McGee | 28 January 2011 Princeton, N.J.—SCRATCH most architecture wonks, and at some point they’ve studied the house that Michael Graves began creating for himself here in 1969. A 1920s furniture storehouse remade to evoke a Tuscan villa, it sits as solidly in the canon as it rests in the Italianate grounds he laid out around this laboratory for the classically inflected ideas, forms and design vocabulary that helped make his name. It has been widely covered, visited and debated. Every room, niche and cranny, which helped give shape to the movement that became postmodernism, has been photographed. » more
    
    

  • Artist Playing Cat-and-Mouse Faces Russia’s Claws

    in Others: Ellen Barry | 21 January 2011 KIEV, Ukraine. — IT has become difficult to locate Aleksei Plutser-Sarno. As a police dragnet closed around Voina, the radical Russian art collective that he belongs to, Mr. Plutser-Sarno stopped using cellphones out of fear they would alert the police to his whereabouts, resorting to Skype and, sometimes, letters hand-delivered by intermediaries. When pressure from the police is high, he tries not to spend two consecutive nights at the same place, and he will concoct elaborate diversions — once he gave a flurry of interviews saying he was in Estonia while simultaneously posting blog entries from Tel Aviv, another place where he was not. Interviewing Mr. Plutser-Sarno this month required waiting at the foot of a statue of an 18th-century Ukrainian philosopher for a young woman in a blue coat, who examined passports and led a circuitous walk to his location. Though no one mentioned it at the time, the philosopher was Hryhorii Skovoroda, and his epitaph read, “The world tried to catch me, but it did not succeed.” If it sounds like a game, there is a good reason for it. For three years, Voina, which means war, has been playing cat-and-mouse with Russian law enforcement, staging street actions that ranged from the obscure (throwing live cats at McDonald’s cashiers) to the monumental (a 210-foot penis painted on a St. Petersburg drawbridge, so that it rose up pointing at the offices of the F.S.B., the security service). Last September, Voina launched its most audacious project: “Palace Revolution,” which involved running up to parked police cars and flipping them over — a commentary, the group explained, on police corruption. » more
    
    

  • For Many Species, No Escape as Temperature Rises

    in Others: Elisabeth Rosenthal | 21 January 2011 KINANGOP, Kenya — Simon Joakim Kiiru remembers a time not long ago when familiar birdsongs filled the air here and life was correlated with bird sightings. His lush, well-tended homestead is in the highlands next to the Aberdare National Park, one of the premier birding destinations in the world. When the hornbill arrived, Mr. Kiiru recalled, the rains were near, meaning that it was time to plant. When a buzzard showed a man his chest, it meant a visitor was imminent. When an owl called at night, it foretold a death. » more
    
    

  • The glory of the rails

    in Others: Tony Judt | 23 December 2010 More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity. No competing form of transport, no subsequent technological innovation, no other industry has wrought or facilitated change on the scale that has been brought about by the invention and adoption of the railway. Peter Laslett once referred to “the world we have lost”—the unimaginably different character of things as they once were. Try to think of a world before the railway and the meaning of distance and the impediment it imposed when the time it took to travel from, for example, Paris to Rome—and the means employed to do so—had changed little for two millennia. Think of the limits placed on economic activity and human life chances by the impossibility of moving food, goods, and people in large numbers or at any speed in excess of ten miles per hour; of the enduringly local nature of all knowledge, whether cultural, social, or political, and the consequences of such compartmentalization. Above all, think of how different the world looked to men and women before the coming of the railways. In part this was a function of restricted perception. Until 1830, few people knew what unfamiliar landscapes, distant towns, or foreign lands looked like because they had no opportunity or reason to visit them. But in part, too, the world before the railways appeared so very different from what came afterward and from what we know today because the railways did more than just facilitate travel and thereby change the way the world was seen and depicted. They transformed the very landscape itself. » more
    
    

  • Christo’s ‘Over the River’: An Act of Homage

    in Others: Leo Steinberg | 3 December 2010 Jubilation is the dominant mood when- and wherever a Christo/Jeanne-Claude project is realized. I have witnessed it time and again—32 years ago, in Loose Park, Kansas City, overlooking its Wrapped Walk Ways, every inch of the winding itinerary paved with bright clinquant stuff, of which Christo remarked: “When the sunlight falls on that nylon and sets it sparkling, it’s very beautiful.” He saw no need to boast about cheerful families bestriding the luster under their feet as if walking on air. Joy hailed the Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami, May 1983: eleven small isles, each in its private hug, embraced by the scandalous pink of buoyant industrial fabric. Or, more recently in Central Park, Manhattan (2005): abundance of Gates, waving their saffron scarves, 7,503 of them, erected to host processions of walkers, whose glee reminded ambulant seniors of the smiles that lit up this same city on V-E Day, 1945—except that the present fête needed no losing side. For half a century now, I have wondered what it is in the actuality of a Christo/Jeanne-Claude project that generates such civic felicity. Let me try again. » more
    
    

  • ‘It Is Not Convenient To Speak of Such Things’: Notes from Rangoon

    in Others: I arrived in Rangoon at the beginning of the monsoon this summer after 36 hours of travel from New York, with a stop in Tokyo and a second change of planes in Bangkok. There I boarded an old Air Myanmar jet, and it was immediately clear that I was traveling to a country that lived in semi-isolation as the plane filled with migrant workers, many of whom were awkwardly toting large, makeshift bundles of carry-on goods—clothing, medicine, electronics, and other items that were either unavailable or unaffordable back home. » more
    
    

  • In the bitter new Washington

    in Others: Elizabeth Drew | 22 November 2010 After an election, there’s inevitably a variety of pronouncements of politicians on what they “heard the voters say.” They and the various pundits largely “hear” an echo of their own previously held views and find vindication of their particular hobbyhorses. It’s a subjective and self-serving exercise. There’s also the question of how representative the electorate of 2010 was: Was it the sign of things to come, or was it an aberration? The Democratic consultant Geoff Garin said in an interview, “The idea that these voters represent the center of gravity in this country is not correct, because the 2010 electorate didn’t represent the full range of American voters: it’s very different from the electorate of 2006.” By several accounts, it was older, whiter, and more conservative than the usual electorate. » more
    
    

  • Peter Milton

    in Others: Born in 1930, the American artist Peter Winslow Milton creates monochromatic and black-and-white drawings, etchings and engravings of astonishing realism. His work has the quality of the old large format cameras—enormous depth of field and exquisite sharpness throughout the frame. Thematically, the work ranges from architecture and architectural history to mythology, frequently melding several elements in one. In some works, there is a telescoping of time into a single, apparently transient, moment. Milton graduated Yale University’s Master of Fine Art program in 1961. His work is in the collection of most major museums, notably the the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the British Museum and the Tate Gallery, London, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.  » more
    
    

  • WikiLeaks in the moral void

    in Others: Christian Caryl | 7 December 2010 WikiLeaks changes everything. We can act as if the old standards of journalism still apply to the Internet, but WikiLeaks shows why this is wishful thinking. On November 28—as pretty much anyone who has the capacity to read this should know by now—the Internet organization started posting examples from a cache of 251,287 formerly secret US diplomatic cables. The few thousand journalists in this country who regularly track the State Department’s doings would have needed a couple of centuries to wheedle out this volume of information by traditional methods; the linkage of disparate government computer networks (a well-meaning response to the compartmentalization of data in the pre-9/11 period) apparently allowed one disgruntled Army private to pull it off in a few moments. As WikiLeaks itself boasts, this is “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain.” » more
    
    

  • An Industrial Project That Could Change Myanmar

    in Others: By THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE | November 26, 2010 DAWEI, MYANMAR — The vast, pristine stretch of coastline here is almost deserted, save for fishermen hauling their bountiful catches onto white-sand beaches. But a deal signed this month would transform these placid waters into a seaport for giant cargo ships. Cashew nut groves and rice fields would be plowed under and replaced with a warren of factories, refineries and an expansive coal-burning power plant. Myanmar, which is run by a repressive military regime that controls both economic and political life, recently captured the world’s attention with its first elections in two decades and the release of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s leading dissident, from house arrest. But the Dawei Development Project, as it is known, could have as much of an impact on Myanmar’s future as the decades-old political chess games between the military and its opponents — and perhaps more.  » more
    
    

  • Using Waste, Swedish City Cuts Its Fossil Fuel Use

    in Others: By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL | December 10, 2010 KRISTIANSTAD, Sweden — When this city vowed a decade ago to wean itself from fossil fuels, it was a lofty aspiration, like zero deaths from traffic accidents or the elimination of childhood obesity. But Kristianstad has already crossed a crucial threshold: the city and surrounding county, with a population of 80,000, essentially use no oil, natural gas or coal to heat homes and businesses, even during the long frigid winters. It is a complete reversal from 20 years ago, when all of their heat came from fossil fuels. But this area in southern Sweden, best known as the home of Absolut vodka, has not generally substituted solar panels or wind turbines for the traditional fuels it has forsaken. Instead, as befits a region that is an epicenter of farming and food processing, it generates energy from a motley assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines.  » more
    
    

  • On the Death Sentence

    in Others: by John Paul Stevens | December 2010 Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition by David Garland Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 417 pp., $35.00 Ken Light/Contact Press Images David Garland is a well-respected sociologist and legal scholar who taught courses on crime and punishment at the University of Edinburgh before relocating to the United States over a decade ago. His recent Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition is the product of his attempt to learn “why the United States is such an outlier in the severity of its criminal sentencing.” Thus, while the book primarily concerns the death penalty, it also illuminates the broader, dramatic differences between American and Western European prison sentences. » more
    
    

  • VS Naipaul’s absence has cost this parliament credibility

    in Others: by Hari Kunzru | 25 November 2010 I had to mention the VS Naipaul Islam row in my address to the European Writers’ Parliament, even though others seem to be shying away from politics I’m writing from the first commission session of the European Writers’ Parliament in Istanbul, while one of my colleagues expounds on his relationship to the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. When I was first invited, my imagination conjured a series of occupation-specific European institutions - a doctor’s parliament, a parliament for firemen, for painters … Sadly, it seems we’re the only such institution in existence. The EWP was started on the initiative of José Saramago and Orhan Pamuk, as a way for writers to come together and discuss our shared problems and concerns. Or talk about ourselves. One or the other. Which of the two paths we will choose remains in doubt right now. I’m hoping we manage to get down to business. » more
    
    

  • Homecoming for Stark Record of Apartheid

    in Others: By CELIA W. DUGGER | November 17, 2010 JOHANNESBURG — When he was only in his 20s Ernest Cole, a black photographer who stood barely five feet tall, created one of the most harrowing pictorial records of what it was like to be black in apartheid South Africa. He went into exile in 1966, and the next year his work was published in the United States in a book, “House of Bondage,” but his photographs were banned in his homeland where he and his work have remained little known. In exile Mr. Cole’s life crumbled. For much of the late 1970s and 1980s he was homeless in New York, bereft of even his cameras. “His life had become a shadow,” a friend later said. Mr. Cole died at 49 in 1990, just a week after Nelson Mandela walked free. His sister flew back to South Africa with his ashes on her lap. Mr. Cole is at last having another kind of homecoming. The largest retrospective of his work ever mounted is now on display at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, built in the neo-Classical style almost a century ago in an era when South Africa’s great mining fortunes were being made on the backs of black labor. It is a collection of images that still possesses the power to shock and anger.  » more
    
    

  • In Beirut, a Town House Rises From Rubble

    in Others: By Seth Sherwood | November 17, 2010 BEIRUT, Lebanon.—WHEN Lina Shammaa first saw the town house here that would become her home, it was a bullet-riddled wreck on the former Green Line, a street dividing the Muslim and Christian sides of Beirut during the civil war that ravaged Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. “It was a pile of rubble,” Ms. Shammaa, 50, a jewelry designer, said recently while sipping espresso in the soaring white living room of her 10,000-square-foot stone house. “When I first visited the place,” 10 years ago, she continued, “there were half-broken doors that said, ‘Visits are 15 minutes only, please.’ “ The three-story house had been split into four apartments, which she believes were used by prostitutes. “It was a hotel for hookers.”  » more
    
    

  • Chinua Achebe: the lord of misrule

    in Others: Bryan Appleyard | 24 January 2010 The essays, like his conversation and, indeed, his novels, are models of clarity, care and thoughtfulness. They are the product of a western-educated mind, but are suffused with an Igbo sensibility. Proverbs abound, as well as a sense of surrounding divinities. He concludes with a Bantu saying: “A human is a human because of other humans.” Achebe has just started a new novel, and he’s moving to Brown. He bears his age and his handicap with astonishing lightness, perhaps because of the first thing he said to me — he has noticed, with age, that both the Igbo religion and language seem to be reasserting themselves. It is a confusing consolation. “Maybe as one grows older, or for some other reason, there are moments in one’s life when the things I liked, rejected or feared as a child come back and regain some of the energy they seemed to have lost between childhood and now, and my own position becomes a little confusing…” He struggles to pull on an anorak as I go to look for the man who will wheel him away. The man appears, then, haloed by divinities, Chinualumogu Achebe is gone. No story ever really ends.  » more
    
    

  • The Lies of Islamophobia

    in Others: John Feffer | Posted: November 8, 2010 02:19 PM As long as our unfinished wars still burn in the collective consciousness — and still rage in Kabul, Baghdad, Sana’a, and the Tribal Areas of Pakistan — Islamophobia will make its impact felt in our media, politics, and daily life. Only if we decisively end the millennial Crusades, the half-century Cold War, and the decade-long War on Terror (under whatever name) will we overcome the dangerous divide that has consumed so many lives, wasted so much wealth, and distorted our very understanding of our Western selves. » more
    
    

  • Reflections in Vevey and Montreux

    in Others: Salil Tripathi | LiveMint 12 November 2010 And I’d see the landscape as nature had intended. And if there were gods, this is what they saw, how they saw, the earth beneath those green meadows, snow-capped mountains, clear skies and the deep blue lake. It seemed so perfect—palpable and momentary, making me feel it would always be like this—heavenly, cloudless, without tumult. Occasionally my friend Javed would join me, with his girlfriend of the season, and other friends he knew at his college in England, and my friends from America would come, and we’d trek those hills, our backpacks light, our concerns minimal, our cares none. I often carried my Walkman, but instead of listening to the sounds alone, I’d turn on the speaker, and with Vivaldi’s Four Seasons or Ravi Shankar’s Megh Malhar as my calling card, I’d make friends with kindred souls—from New Zealand, from Denmark—exchange addresses at youth hostels at night, hoping that one day we might meet again. We had our lives in front of us; we had our resolves, our plans. We had seen the sun that calmed, the moon that mellowed, the stars that we thought would guide us. » more
    
    

  • Outspoken Chinese Risk Confinement in Mental Wards

    in Others: By SHARON LaFRANIERE and DAN LEVIN | Published: November 11, 2010 LOUHE, China — Xu Lindong, a poor village farmer with close-cropped hair and a fourth-grade education, knew nothing but decades of backbreaking labor. Even at age 50, the rope of muscles on his arms bespoke a lifetime of hard plowing and harvesting in the fields of his native Henan Province. But after four years locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, he was barely recognizable to his siblings. Emaciated, barefoot, clad in tattered striped pajamas, Mr. Xu spoke haltingly. His face was etched with exhaustion. “I was so heartbroken when I saw him I cannot describe it,” said his elder brother, Xu Linfu, recalling his first visit there, in 2007. “My brother was a strong as a bull. Now he looked like a hospital patient.” Xu Lindong’s confinement in a locked mental ward was all the more notable, his brother says, for one extraordinary fact: he was not the least bit deranged. Angered by a dispute over land, he had merely filed a series of complaints against the local government. The government’s response was to draw up an order to commit him to a mental hospital — and then to forge his brother’s name on the signature line. » more
    
    

  • America and India: The Almost-Special Relationship

    in Others: By JIM YARDLEY | Published: November 6, 2010 NEW DELHI — At a panel discussion last week on relations between India and the United States, Strobe Talbott, the former American diplomat, told an audience of Indian business leaders that he had learned a valuable lesson about India: Do not hyphenate it. As in Indo-Pak. (Or, in a close cousin of a hyphen, as in Chindia.) The audience smiled at his epiphany: India matters because it is India. In a nutshell, President Obama is trying to deliver the same message during his three-day visit to India, the first stop on a broader Asian tour. Both countries are eager to build on their improved ties and set up a unique, special relationship, given that together they represent the world’s richest and largest democracies. Faced with a rising authoritarian China, and an economically wounded Europe, a weakened United States is casting about for global partners. India would seem a nice fit. “This is the time to be ambitious about this relationship,” said Shivshankar Menon, India’s national security adviser, speaking on the panel with Mr. Talbott. » more
    
    

  • Obama Invokes Gandhi, Whose Ideal Eludes Modern India

    in Others: By JIM YARDLEY | Published: November 6, 2010 NEW DELHI — Not long after Barack Obama was elected president, the United States Embassy in India printed a postcard showing him sitting in his old Senate office beneath framed photographs of his political heroes: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln and the great Indian apostle of peace, democracy and nonviolent protest, Mohandas K. Gandhi. The postcard was a trinket of public diplomacy, a souvenir of the new president’s affinity for India. Now that Mr. Obama is visiting India for the first time, on a trip pitched as a jobs mission, his fascination with Gandhi is influencing his itinerary and his message as he tries to win over India’s skeptical political class. “He is a hero not just to India, but to the world,” the president wrote in a guest book on Saturday in Gandhi’s modest former home in Mumbai, now the Mani Bhavan museum.  » more
    
    

  • Ai Weiwei, Artist and Activist, Confined in Beijing

    in Others: By MICHAEL WINES | Published: November 5, 2010 BEIJING — A phalanx of Beijing police officers confined the prominent artist and activist Ai Weiwei to his north Beijing home on Friday, a move he suggested came at the behest of unnamed but powerful political figures in Shanghai who feared that he was about to embarrass them. If so, they were correct. Mr. Ai had planned to fly to Shanghai on Friday to prepare a Sunday goodbye party at his million-dollar art studio meant to draw attention to its pending destruction. In telephone interviews this week, Mr. Ai said he built the studio only after Shanghai officials, on a campaign to burnish the city’s cultural credentials, implored him to. But in July, they ordered the finished building demolished at the command of anonymous higher-ups.  » more
    
    

  • Our Banana Republic

    in Others: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF | Published: November 6, 2010 Op-Ed Columnist In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie. But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse. The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.  » more
    
    

  • Cities as Hubs of Energy and Climate Action

    in Others: By ANDREW C. REVKIN | November 5, 2010 A pair of energy and development specialists from the mayors’ offices in New York City and Los Angeles are going global. Jay Carson, a former deputy Los Angeles mayor and aide to both Clintons, and Rohit Aggarwala, the former chief sustainability advisor to New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, are going to work for C40 Cities, a coalition of cities in rich and developing countries working to initiate and share ways to cut emissions of greenhouse gases and boost resilience to impacts of climate change. … Aggarwala noted that cities are natural hubs for initiatives that use energy more sparingly and move people more efficiently through transportation options involving feet, bicycles or mass transit. … “A city is inherently more transit oriented and walkable than a suburb,” Aggarwala said. “You’re going with the grain of urbanization.” » more
    
    

  • In Córdoba, Mosque-Cathedral Reflects Clash of Faiths

    in Others: By RACHEL DONADIO | Published: November 4, 2010 CÓRDOBA, Spain— The great mosque of Córdoba was begun by the Muslim caliphs in the eighth century, its forest of pillars and red-and-white striped arches meant to convey a powerful sense of the infinite. With the Christian reconquest of Spain in the 13th century, it was consecrated as a cathedral. Today, signs throughout this whitewashed Andalusian city refer to the monument, a Unesco World Heritage site, as the “mosque-cathedral” of Córdoba. But that terminology is now in question. Last month, the bishop of Córdoba began a provocative appeal for the city to stop referring to the monument as a mosque so as not to “confuse” visitors. … His friend Celestino González from Málaga disagreed. “It’s a mosque,” Mr. González said, pointing to the Islamic architecture. “I’m not practicing, and I don’t see any problem in combining the two names. For me it’s the same thing.” As Conchi Bello stood in the doorway to her house nearby, she said the debate was purely academic. “For us, for everyone in Córdoba, it’s normal to give tourists directions to the mosque,” Ms. Bello said. “We’re not offended. On the contrary, it’s a nice example of the history of our land.” » more
    
    

  • Iowa Judges Defeated After Ruling on Same-Sex Marriage

    in Others: By A. G. SULZBERGER | Published: November 3, 2010 DES MOINES — An unprecedented vote to remove three Iowa Supreme Court justices who were part of the unanimous decision that legalized same-sex marriage in the state was celebrated by conservatives as a popular rebuke of judicial overreach, even as it alarmed proponents of an independent judiciary. The outcome of the election was heralded both as a statewide repudiation of same-sex marriage and as a national demonstration that conservatives who have long complained about “legislators in robes” are able to effectively target and remove judges who issue unpopular decisions.  » more
    
    

  • Serengeti Road Plan Lined With Prospect and Fears

    in Others: By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN | Published: October 30, 2010 SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK, Tanzania — Every spring, out here on this endless sheet of yellow grass, two million wildebeest, zebras, gazelles and other grazers march north in search of greener pastures, with lions and hyenas stalking them and vultures circling above. It is called the Great Migration, and it is widely considered one of the most spectacular assemblies of animal life on the planet. But how much longer it will stay that way is another matter. Tanzania’s president, Jakaya Kikwete, plans to build a national highway straight through the Serengeti park, bisecting the migration route and possibly sending a thick stream of overloaded trucks and speeding buses through the traveling herds.  » more
    
    

  • Roy is often wrong, but she still has rights

    in Others: 28 October 2010 | SALIL TRIPATHI “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian Government has accepted this.” These words may exasperate an Indian nationalist, but they are hardly unusual, and if they are considered inflammatory and capable of inciting hatred, then something is indeed rotten in the state of India. » more
    
    

  • As Seas Rise, Future Floats

    in Others: By KATE ROSS | Published: October 27, 2010 PARIS — It might seem to be a futuristic scene like the one depicted in Kevin Reynolds’s 1995 movie “Waterworld.” But floating pavilions and cities may in fact help communities adapt to the effects of climate change, as well as meet the challenges of ever-rising real estate prices and congestion in urban areas. From single homes to office blocks and even roads, the construction of floating cities could make low-lying nations habitable amid dramatically rising sea levels and storm surges, according to DeltaSync, a design and research company that specializes in floating urbanization.  » more
    
    

  • In Paris, A 19th-Century Dream House

    in Others: By PAOLA SINGER | Published: October 27, 2010 PARIS.—THE French describe love at first sight as a coup de foudre, or a lightning bolt. That’s what Charles and Julie Carmignac said they felt in the summer of 2009, when they first saw the house they now share in the 14th Arrondissement on this city’s lower Left Bank. “We were totally captivated,” said Mr. Carmignac, 32, a member of the folk-rock band Moriarty. “It had a crazy charm and a beauty that left us breathless.” » more
    
    

  • The spine of a house

    in Others: By Edwin Heathcote | Published: October 22 2010 Books, like bricks, are a basic element of architecture. I wasn’t quite aware of this until I viewed a couple of properties recently and was struck, and appalled, by the lack of books. No books. Not one. The otherwise impeccable interiors seemed painfully incomplete. Bereft. At the exact moment that the book would seem to be in the greatest danger in its history, threatened by e-books and a proliferation of disposable gadgets, the book’s very old technology seems at its most attractive - and its most physical. E-readers may be able to convey content but they leave no physical trace. Once the machine is turned off or fails, the knowledge disappears. They are resolutely not a part of the architecture but rather of the increasingly messy landscape of stuff. Libraries and bookstacks have always been a physical and aesthetic manifestation of knowledge, of the world informed by reading and, consequently, a way of reading the inhabitant. There is more information to be gleaned about the occupant of a house from what is on the shelves than from the furniture or the food. Books, or the lack of them, form an almost perfect mirror of concerns and character. » more
    
    

  • India’s Smaller Cities Show Off Growing Wealth

    in Others: By LYDIA POLGREEN | Published: October 23, 2010 AURANGABAD, India — For decades this central Indian city was vintage old India: crumbling Mughal-era ruins and ancient Buddhist caves surrounded by endless parched acres from which farmers coaxed cotton. But this month Aurangabad became an emblem of an altogether different India: the booming, increasingly urbanized economic powerhouse filled with ambition and a new desire to flaunt its wealth. A group of more than 150 local businessmen decided to buy, en masse, a Mercedes-Benz car each, spending nearly $15 million in a single day and putting this small but thriving city on the map. Frustrated that the usual Chamber of Commerce brochures were slow to attract new investment, the businessmen decided to buy the cars as a stunt intended to stimulate investment in Aurangabad, one of several largely unknown but thriving urban centers across India’s more prosperous states.  » more
    
    

  • Communists In India Fight To Hold On To a Mission

    in Others: By JIM YARDLEY | Published: October 21, 2010 CALCUTTA — Lenin’s statue still rises near the center of the city, and portraits of Stalin and Marx still hang inside the biggest union hall. Anyone doubting the local political dominance — and cold war humor — of India’s Communists need only visit the street in front of the United States Consulate: It was long ago renamed for Ho Chi Minh. In the past 33 years, India’s Communists have built a political dynasty here in the state of West Bengal, staging one of the most remarkable runs in any democracy by winning seven consecutive statewide elections. This would seem to be a ripe moment to expand their influence: India is a nation of deep inequities, with millions of destitute farmers and laborers disconnected from an increasingly capitalistic economy.  » more
    
    

  • Sikhs Protest Obama’s Decision Not To Visit the Golden Temple

    in Others: By KEN MAGUIRE | Published: October 21, 2010 WASHINGTON — Sikhs in the United States expressed their frustration Thursday that President Obama would skip a tentatively planned visit to their holiest site in India, while advocacy groups called on the White House to reconsider. Mr. Obama was expected to visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, next month, but there were questions about how he would cover his head. Sikh tradition requires that men tie a piece of cloth on their heads before entering the spiritual center. The president, who is Christian, has fought the perception that he is Muslim. Sikhs are regularly mistaken for Muslims.  » more
    
    

  • Defecating Al Fresco

    in Others: Bulletin boards on the sleepy walls of village panchayat offices, rarely greeted with a glance, have started attracting a loyal audience in parts of Satara district over the last three years. That’s because boring pamphlets and notices have been plucked out to make way for a daily dose of toilet humour with unsavoury photographs of half-naked rich sugarcane farmers, businessmen and other villagers easing themselves in the open. The panchayat bulletin boards, one of the many innovative and potent weapons employed in the struggle for freedom from open defection under the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC), brought so much embarrassment to the exposed that they almost immediately sanctioned a home toilet. “Our work was to generate demand, create willpower to get home toilets built after shattering myths about toilets being an unnecessary luxury,” says Tukaram Garale, deputy CEO (Village Panchayat) who oversees the implementation of the center-run TSC in Satara under the banner of Sampoorna Swacchata Abhiyan. “We used all the methods we could imagine,” he says.  » more
    
    

  • Is this how we want the world to see India?

    in Others: Vir Sanghvi | Hindustan Times Now that the Commonwealth Games have passed off without any major hitches we can all breathe sighs of relief. Thanks mainly to the public uproar that followed the revelations that preparations were shockingly behind schedule, the organisers (and the entire government of India) got their act together and delivered a Games that went off smoothly. But the big question remains: was it all worth it? Did the Games justify the heartache, the humiliation, the moments of panic, and the vast expense? » more
    
    

  • Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

    in Others: By JOHN MARKOFF | Published: October 9, 2010 During a half-hour drive beginning on Google’s campus 35 miles south of San Francisco last Wednesday, a Prius equipped with a variety of sensors and following a route programmed into the GPS navigation system nimbly accelerated in the entrance lane and merged into fast-moving traffic on Highway 101, the freeway through Silicon Valley. It drove at the speed limit, which it knew because the limit for every road is included in its database, and left the freeway several exits later. The device atop the car produced a detailed map of the environment. The car then drove in city traffic through Mountain View, stopping for lights and stop signs, as well as making announcements like “approaching a crosswalk” (to warn the human at the wheel) or “turn ahead” in a pleasant female voice. This same pleasant voice would, engineers said, alert the driver if a master control system detected anything amiss with the various sensors. The car can be programmed for different driving personalities — from cautious, in which it is more likely to yield to another car, to aggressive, where it is more likely to go first. » more
    
    

  • Carbon-Cutting ‘Party’ Set for Sunday

    in Others: By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF | 8 October 2010 Some prominent climate scientists, like NASA’s James Hansen, think the safe threshold for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is no higher than 350 parts per million. Beyond this point, they say, we risk severe climatic consequences: melting ice caps and glaciers, rising seas, and a sharp increase in heat waves, droughts, crop failures and extreme weather events. Of course, the world bid farewell to 350 p.p.m. more than 20 years ago and is cruising steadily toward 400 p.p.m.: last year, the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii observed carbon dioxide concentrations above 390 p.p.m for the first time ever. The last time carbon dioxide levels were this high was 15 million years ago, scientists suggest. But even as many policymakers now view halting carbon dioxide levels at 450 p.p.m as an ambitious if perhaps unrealistic goal, one leading climate activist group continues to make returning carbon levels to 350 p.p.m. its raison d’être. » more
    
    

  • Artist Sudharshan Shetty’s spectacular multi-media mash-up

    in Others: By Deepika Sorabjee 4 October, 2010 There is a singular, remarkable effort going on at Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum (BDL) in Byculla. The oldest museum in Mumbai is restoring a tradition from a time when the posts of museum curator and Sir J.J. School of Art principal were held by the same person and works of artists from the school would be put on display at the museum. In a rare public-private endeavor in the arts, Tasneem Mehta, the BDL’s honorary director, has revived the museum’s engagement with contemporary art in Mumbai and created a unique opportunity to see art of the present in an historic space. Currently showing through October 31 is contemporary artist Sudarshan Shetty’s exhibition “this too shall pass.” It is the first of a series of exhibitions planned by the museum through a residency program that invites eminent artists who have studied at the Sir J.J. School of Art to work with the museum’s sumptuous space and legacy of historical objects. » more
    
    

  • In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises

    in Others: By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF Published: September 25, 2010 ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates—Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick—a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.  » more
    
    

  • Kristof: Message to Muslims: I’m Sorry

    in Others: By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Published: September 18, 2010 Many Americans have suggested that more moderate Muslims should stand up to extremists, speak out for tolerance, and apologize for sins committed by their brethren. » more
    
    

  • As Europe Kicks Coal, Hungary Town Hurts

    in Others: By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL OROSZLANY, Hungary. The European Commission is fighting a complicated battle against an influential but polluting industry. Above, Ferenc Rinyu, a miner at the Hungarian coal mine facing a shutdown. » more
    
    

  • Tiger attack: FIR filed against NGO, villagers - Times of India

    in Others: It’s incredible that in this day and age people still look at a tiger in the wild and don’t just feel awed but actually want to throw stones at it. If I believed in a god, I imagine he’d weep in shame at the two-legged monsters he created. “What happened on that day is the result of a total militancy by villagers and NGOs who, instead of being sensitive towards the limitation of the department, not only obstructed them from working but also provoked the tiger by constantly pelting stones at it,” said R N Mehrotra, PCCF and Head of Forest Forces, Rajasthan. » more
    
    

  • Mumbai’s wrecked fishermen - Column by Salil Tripathi in the Mint

    in Others: The fishermen of Bombay — the very people who were here first — are, like the poor everywhere in this country, being squeezed out, marginalized and ignored. The oil spill has hurt them most, and yet they are almost entirely ignored. » more
    
    

• Pic du Jour

  • Tadoba Forest

    in Pic du Jour:
    Forest in Tadoba, the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, Chandrapur, Maharashtra, India
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  • Kaziranga grasslands

    in Pic du Jour:
    Forests and grasslands in the Kaziranga National Park, Assam, India.
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  • Krishna Janmashtami

    in Pic du Jour:
    Indian youth make a human pyramid to reach and break the ‘Dahi Handi,’ an earthen pot filled with yogurt, as they celebrate Janamashtami, the birth anniversary of Hindu God Krishna in Mumbai, India, August 22. (Rafiq Maqbool/Associated Press)
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  • Extreme Weather

    in Pic du Jour:
    A storm that produced 8-inch diameter hailstones bears down on Vivian, South Dakota July 23, 2010. (Chad Cowan)
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  • Cricket

    in Pic du Jour:
    Indian Hindu priests hold a replica of the Cricket World Cup trophy during a special prayer organised to seek blessings of Hindu god Lord Ganesha for the victory of the Indian cricket team in the tournament, at the Siddhivinayak Temple in Mumbai on Feburary 17, 2011. (STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images)
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  • Pakistan: daily life

    in Pic du Jour:
    A Pakistani girl held by her mother follow a man down an alley of a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad, the nation’s capital. (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)
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• Society and Culture

  • A Land Beyond Imagining

    in Society and Culture: It was a typically squalid town in the heart of India’s cowbelt: the usual cats’ cradle of messed-up wiring, open sewers, cracked pavements, blaring horns, loudspeakers on every corner blaring something indecipherable, the air so thick with dust and grime and exhaust that even the sunlight seemed to have surrendered. I was here, against all better judgement, on a work trip and regretting every minute of it. Along the way, an unexpected possible refuge; inside, the bookshop was small and tired, pulp fiction potboilers and outdated magazines with curled covers, the paunchy proprietor, soaked in boredom, alternately picking his teeth with a matchstick and shouting at an assistant. On one shelf, facing out, was a thick book, its kitsch cover a challenge: buy me if you dare. » more
    
    

  • Where India Shines

    in Society and Culture: In the summer of 1978, I took a train to Piparia in Madhya Pradesh. As far as I could tell, it was the middle of nowhere. I was straight out of school and was headed for a small village nearby. My parents had insisted I work for a few months with an NGO called Kishor Bharati which, with the Friends Rural Centre, had started a science teaching programme in rural Madhya Pradesh. » more
    
    

  • Sects And The City

    in Society and Culture: I come from a family of migrants. My paternal grandparents were from Gujarat. My father’s younger brother was born in Karachi. On my mother’s side, the family is very distantly from Gujarat but more recently from Solapur. My mother’s sister lives abroad. My sister and I grew up in Bombay (not Mumbai). My sister and all (well, most; see the comment below) my cousins live abroad too. My wife’s father was a Gujarati from Varanasi, her mother is from Ahmedabad via Surat (or vice-versa). And for all of us, Mumbai (once Bombay) is home, though it is not the place from which we come. What are we in Mumbai but migrants? » more
    
    

  • But They Still Stood There, Watching

    in Society and Culture: Harlan Ellison is an iconic writer of what has come to be known as speculative fiction—not quite science fiction, yet set in a cold-blooded and heartless future. Deathbird Stories, a collection first published in 1974, is something of a cult classic. Each story, superbly written, is horrifying. Ellison cautions readers not to attempt reading the entire book in one go. » more
    
    

  • Cane And Disable

    in Society and Culture: If the tragic death of Rouvanjit Rawla, a 13-year-old student of Kolkata’s La Martiniere for Boys, shows us anything it is this: that for all our gleaming buildings and six-lane expressways, we are still stuck in a time warp. It seems unbelievable that anyone, least of all the head of a school, should still believe that corporal punishment of students has value. » more
    
    

• The Iconic Image

  • Winners of the National Geographic Photo Contest 2011

    in The Iconic Image:
    “Cyber Monsoon”, honorable mention in Places category. A torrential monsoon rain in Bhaktapur, Nepal. (© Anuar Patjane)
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  • 50 best photos from The Natural World

    in The Iconic Image:
    An Abyssinian Colobus baby yawns at the Nogeyama Zoological Gardens in Yokohama, Japan. (Itsuo Inouye/Associated Press)
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  • Selected New Work 2010-2011 - Nick Brandt

    in The Iconic Image:
    Selected New Work 2010-2011 - Nick Brandt
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  • Krishna Janmashtami

    in The Iconic Image:
    An Indian schoolboy is dressed as the Hindu God Krishna. (Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press)
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  • The Iconic Photographs - Steve McCurry

    in The Iconic Image:
    A Rabari herdsman, Rajasthan, India, 2008. Photograph: © Steve McCurry/Magnum
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  • Here Comes The Sun

    in The Iconic Image:
    Bernice Acosta and other enthusiast perform yoga in Times Square during an event marking the summer solstice on June 21, 2011 in New York City. Thousands of yogis will attend the free day-long event in Manhattan on the longest day of the year. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)
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  • Volcano Erupts in Chile

    in The Iconic Image:
    A plume of ash, estimated six miles (10km) high and three mile wide is seen after a volcano erupted in the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcanic chain, about 575 miles (920 km) south of the capital, Santiago June 4. (Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)
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  • Cricket Passion

    in The Iconic Image:
    Bangladeshi fans celebrate outside the opening ceremony of the ICC World Cup of Cricket in Dhaka, Bangladesh February 17, 2011. (Kevin Frayer/AP)
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  • Holi: Festival of Colors

    in The Iconic Image:
    Hindu devotees have painted much of the town of Vrindavan — and themselves — red on March 21. The town, in Uttar Pradesh, India, is one of the cultural and religious centers of Hinduism and the site where one of the central figures of the religion, Krishna, grew up, according to tradition. (Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)
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  • Egypt: the wait

    in The Iconic Image:
    Anti-government protesters and Egyptian Army soldiers on top of their vehicles, make traditional Muslim Friday prayers at the continuing demonstration in Tahrir Square, Friday, Feb. 11, 2011. (Ben Curtis/Associated Press)
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  • Pakistan: daily life

    in The Iconic Image:
    A Pakistani girl held by her mother follow a man down an alley of a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad, the nation’s capital. (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)
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  • Beginning to look a lot like Christmas

    in The Iconic Image:
    A man dressed as Santa Claus holds a flare as he wakeboards on a small lake in Hamburg, Germany on December 5, 2010. (REUTERS/Christian Charisius)
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  • Let it snow!

    in The Iconic Image:
    Ski instructors with the Copper Mountain Ski and Ride School ski down the mountain into the village during the torchlight parade as part of the ski resort’s En Fuego Celebration at Copper Mountain, Colorado on Nov 27, 2010. (AP Photo/Summit Daily News, Mark Fox)
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  • 2010 Asian Games Opening Ceremony

    in The Iconic Image:
    Illuminated performers take part in the opening ceremony of the 16th Asian Games on November 12, 2010. (REUTERS/Mick Tsikas)
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  • Mt Merapi’s Eruptions

    in The Iconic Image: Lightning strikes as Mount Merapi erupts, as seen from Ketep village in Magelang, Indonesia’s Central Java province November 6, 2010. (REUTERS/Beawiharta)   » more
    
    

  • Great Migrations

    in The Iconic Image:      » more
    
    

  • Pakistan Floods

    in The Iconic Image: August 2010: Severe Flooding in Pakistan  » more August 2010: Continuing Pakistan Floods September 2010: Pakistan in Need
    
    

  • Commonwealth Games

    in The Iconic Image: India Prepares for the Commonwealth Games  » more XIX Commonwealth Games, New Delhi
    
    

• Tiger

  • The Eye Of The Tiger

    in Tiger: It took six hours to wound, maim and finally kill the tigress. She was already trapped in a net. The handful of forest officers present could not control the 5000-strong mob. The tigress, they said, had killed their cattle, and even a villager. And so they stoned and clubbed her to death. And then rejoiced in their bloodlust with a victory parade. » more
    
    

  • Broken Tigers

    in Tiger: The official report is so clinical and impersonal that one might be tempted to skim it and move on. That would be a mistake. Behind the dry words of the official report is the heart-rending tale of a monumental tragedy. » more
    
    

• Urban Planning

  • Murdering Trees, Killing Cities

    in Urban Planning: In the run up to Mumbai’s municipal elections, of the many to-be-left-unfufilled promises made by political parties, two were common: less corruption and more “infrastructure”. The latter, in our peculiar notion of what makes a ‘world-class’ city, only means more roads, more bridges. No one promised to make our city more liveable. In my constituency, apart from the familiar talk-to-the-hand and offerings for lotus-eaters, there were many odd symbols for candidates: a sewing machine, an LPG cylinder and something that looked like a pasta machine cross-bred with a meat grinder. Not one had a tree or anything that looked like it. » more
    
    

  • A Manifesto For Mumbai

    in Urban Planning: Mumbai matters. How can it not? The sixth most populous city and one of the largest urban regions on the planet, it is home to over 20 million people. It’s a city that speaks over a dozen different languages, each one uniquely filtered, adapted and adopted: only here will you hear an irate bus conductor bellowing at a passenger “aage chal, khaali-peeli bichme khada hain khamba ke mafak” — an absolutely delicious phrase that melds Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and Mumbai into one unmistakable linguistic bhel-puri that still gets the message across. » more
    
    

  • The City’s In A Pickle: Add Salt?

    in Urban Planning: Every few years the issue surfaces only to be buried. It happened again last week: The Chief Minister floated an idea of opening up Mumbai’s salt pan lands for affordable housing and slum rehabilitation. A few days later, the idea was dropped. Once again, the backpedalling was the result of our Queen Mum’s view on things. This U-turn was triggered by some letter she wrote many years ago. If Madam has spoken, who are we to even dare to think? » more
    
    

  • A Bridge Too Near

    in Urban Planning: Last Monday’s so-called “public hearing” on the Peddar Road flyover project seems to have been designed for failure. There is no logical reason why a large group of Nationalist Congress Party members should have felt it necessary to disrupt it — apart from the fact that the NCP controls the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation, the project proponent. It’s unlikely that these fine, dedicated party workers will be found swanning back and forth along this road. The only reason why any road and bridge building contractor would love such a project is, of course, its monumental cost. There’s money to be made here, lots and lots of it.  » more
    
    

  • Minimum City

    in Urban Planning: A few hundred yards down the road from Nana Chowk to Tardeo, next to Sunkersett Mansion on the road’s left, there stands a small temple. It has a handsome arched entrance and clear space on three sides. This is not one of the over-built modern temples that substitute spirituality with size and commerce; this is an old, quiet place of worship that appears ageless. It also looks like a last act of defiance against the towering monstrosities that surround it. A little further on is another, an agiary. That, too, has withstood the steady onslaught of commercial high-rise development. » more
    
    

  • Exterminating Communities

    in Urban Planning: What kind of government, what kind of system allows suffering like this? Very early in Gregory David Roberts’s Shantaram comes this reaction to a first view of Mumbai slums. It is a reaction fuelled by shame, guilt and rage, and it is the view of an outsider. We who live here have passed beyond such feelings. We simply do not even notice them any more. Perhaps this has to do with our ‘culture’ of the philosophical shrug and the always-reliable excuse of karma. But karma and justice are uneasy bedfellows. » more
    
    

  • Walking The High Line

    in Urban Planning: In Mumbai, we have become used to limiting our thinking of public open spaces to areas planned for public parks and gardens. To create a public open space out of abandoned, privately owned industrial infrastructure requires a leap of imagination. » more
    
    

  • What Kind Of City

    in Urban Planning: Last Tuesday, protesters from Vasai did the unthinkable: marching to South Mumbai from Vasai they diverted onto the Bandra Worli Sealink, otherwise closed to pedestrians, and so stormed a cars-only citadel. The police were unable to stop them. Questions were later raised about this act of “illegality”, but the comment from independent MLA Vijay Pandit, who led the march, provides another perspective. “Why should the Sea Link be only for rich people and their cars?” he asked, calling the Sea Link a rich people’s bastion.  » more
    
    

  • Playing Games With Our Cities

    in Urban Planning: Part of the process of growing up is the recalibration of the dazzling career ambitions of childhood to far less glamorous endeavours. Few ever realize their dreams. Fewer still know exactly what they want to do when they grow up. Some dreams, like becoming a dentist, are unlikely. One thing no child ever dreams of being is an urban planner. » more
    
    

  • If Only We Had Listened

    in Urban Planning: On 1 September, Charles Correa turned 80. By any measure, it has been an extraordinary life, marked by uncommon professional success and international recognition as one of the great designers of the world. A week earlier, Ratan Tata released Correa’s new book, A Place in the Shade, a collection of essays and lectures spanning several decades and extending his previous book, The New Landscape. » more
    
    
    

• Video

  • Landau Eugene Murphy, Jr., 36 ~ America’s Got Talent 2011

    in Video:
    
    

  • Planet in Peril

    in Video:
    
    

  • The Good, The Bad and the Ugly — how it was done

    in Video:  » more
    
    

  • Mumbai Masters

    in Video:  » more
    
    

  • Nana Patekar address

    in Video:  » more
    
    

  • RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

    in Video:  » more
    
    

  • Beautiful Minds: Stephen Wiltshire

    in Video:  » more
    
    

  • Drive: What Motivates Us

    in Video:  » more
    
    

  • India: The Next Generation

    in Video:
    
    

  • Notes from a beautiful city

    in Video:  » more
    
    

• Wildlife

  • Animal Rights, Human Wrongs

    in Wildlife: My cousin, Aniruddh, a senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego has an ongoing love affair—with a sulfur-crested cockatoo. Aniruddh studies music, language and the brain. Two years ago, Aniruddh’s colleague introduced him to Snowball. He—Snowball—isn’t your garden-variety cockatoo. He has a very specific like, and it is, quite improbably, the Backstreet Boys’ song, Everybody. He dances to it. In an interview in June with the New York Times, Aniruddh spoke about his work (all cutting edge) and, specifically, Snowball. Throughout that interview, Aniruddh referred to Snowball by name, or as “the bird” or “he”. Never “it”. » more