Is it possible for westerners to imagine what it is like to travel in buses without air-conditioning in South Asia?
These pictures taken in India and Sri Lanka last week will perhaps give an idea of the attitudes and emotions this experience evokes.
Patience in Ahmedabad
Relaxation and anguish in Ahmedabad
Forbearance in Colombo
Friday, March 27, 2009
A trip to Ahmedabad
Business travel can be the source of enjoyable moments, especially when it takes me to India.
I stayed at the Taj Residency Ummed, near Ahmedabad's airport early last week. At the hotel restaurant, Narmada, I enjoyed excellent Indian cuisine on a background of entrancing live Indian classical music. I love a raga starting slowly with apparently aimless chords struck on the sitar until it breaks into a rhythm accentuated by the tabla. It is always a great pleasure to me to hear the two musicians pushing each other to new heights of frenetic invention.
And then there are India's street life and colors, which I unfortunately could capture only as I was driven in cars riding at 40 to 50 km/hr.
An improvised fruit stall on a wheeled cart
A man dressed in the fashion of Nehru
Colorful garlands of flowers for sale
Dogs and people fleeing the heat in the shade to be found under idle wheeled carts
A colorful teeming commercial life ... people living and eeking out a meagre subsistence from commerce in the streets of Ahmedabad
A couple on a motorbike, apparently happy to see me taking pictures of them
As an incidental tourist in Ahmedabad, I felt at times a little ashamed peeping into an extreme poverty which I found exotic and colorful from the outside, but which people living inside cannot wait to shed and leave behind (assuming they know that there can be a better life). Snatching those sights partially hidden in a car moving through traffic was a lot easier than walking and taking pictures more closely, which may have evoked reactions of disapproval if not outright hostility.
Commerce is everywhere conducted in small shops crammed one on top of the other, hardly more than holes in the wall, or on stalls on the pavement.
I stayed at the Taj Residency Ummed, near Ahmedabad's airport early last week. At the hotel restaurant, Narmada, I enjoyed excellent Indian cuisine on a background of entrancing live Indian classical music. I love a raga starting slowly with apparently aimless chords struck on the sitar until it breaks into a rhythm accentuated by the tabla. It is always a great pleasure to me to hear the two musicians pushing each other to new heights of frenetic invention.
And then there are India's street life and colors, which I unfortunately could capture only as I was driven in cars riding at 40 to 50 km/hr.
An improvised fruit stall on a wheeled cart
A man dressed in the fashion of Nehru
Colorful garlands of flowers for sale
Dogs and people fleeing the heat in the shade to be found under idle wheeled carts
A colorful teeming commercial life ... people living and eeking out a meagre subsistence from commerce in the streets of Ahmedabad
A couple on a motorbike, apparently happy to see me taking pictures of them
As an incidental tourist in Ahmedabad, I felt at times a little ashamed peeping into an extreme poverty which I found exotic and colorful from the outside, but which people living inside cannot wait to shed and leave behind (assuming they know that there can be a better life). Snatching those sights partially hidden in a car moving through traffic was a lot easier than walking and taking pictures more closely, which may have evoked reactions of disapproval if not outright hostility.
Commerce is everywhere conducted in small shops crammed one on top of the other, hardly more than holes in the wall, or on stalls on the pavement.
Friday, March 6, 2009
Our decadence
Michael Jackson is coming back for a last curtain call ... an affair that will yield enormous sums (I have heard some US$100 million plus ... perhaps given to charities) after several years spent fighting accusations of child molestation ... and this is all over the news from MSN online to BBC Radio. Here is a picture of him ... There are actually worse ones.
It is an unmistakable sign of decadence that such a figure can be a celebrity adulated by millions.
It is an unmistakable sign of decadence that such a figure can be a celebrity adulated by millions.
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