Free Thinking : The world
From New Delhi, writer Rana Dasgupta
-
The Architecture Of Impregnability
At a time when it seems impossible to escape Hollywood's nauseating 9/11 narcissism - is out this weekend here in England, just after we've got over - I wanted to write a few thoughts about the relationship of an architect to terrorism.
The towers were designed by Minoru Yamasaki, an American architect born to Japanese parents in Seattle in 1912. His parents were poor, and could not afford to send him to university. Who knows if this is why he seemed to become so impressed by wealth and influence. He came to specialise in buildings symbolising total, impregnable power, and he liked to work with the people in charge of the world.
These buildings proved to be mouth-watering targets for terrorists.
-
Images Of The Global City From China
The images that capture most interestingly the uncanny, amnesiac intensity of the contemporary global city come usually, for me, from China. Here I'll just mention two artists in this regard, but there are many others who spring to mind. One place to check out more such people is an interesting recent book, .
The image above is taken from Jia Zhangke's ("The World", 2004). The film depicts the lives of workers in a theme park outside Beijing where the world's great monuments are spectacularly recreated and where, as the park's slogan goes, you can therefore "See the world without leaving Beijing".
-
The Strange Feeling Of England
Am in England for a and once again contemplating the strangeness of my home country. I therefore post a poem I wrote after my last visit here to describe this feeling, at the centre of which is the invisible "they" who are the subject of so many sentences spoken here. Abstract and unidentified, vaguely benign and yet menacing too, "they" seem to make all the decisions, and the human being seems to invoke "their" name as the only way of naming the forces that make the world.
-
Can A Prison Be A City?
Further to the earlier post comparing cities and internment camps, is an extraordinary photo-essay about San Pedro prison in La Paz.
-
How Do We Read Cities?
Jan Chipchase lives in Tokyo and runs a beautiful of photographs he has taken in cities all over the world: acutely observed details that help him read the cities he goes to. He calls , taken in Kobrasol in S?o José, Brazil, "Clues To Where People Sit."
-
Mike Davis: Planet Of Slums
One of the most important thinkers about contemporary cities is , a radical urbanist who teaches at the University of California in Irvine.
His recent book, , is essential reading for anyone who wants to get a deep sense of what the future of the global city looks like. Essentially: it is crowded, it is built by hand out of corrugated iron and other such materials, it is dominated ideologically by radical Christianity and Islam, and it is a "warehouse" for the immense labour resources of the global economy.
I've posted a detailed summary of the book's argument by Mike Davis himself . Here is an extract:
-
Are Cities Good For Creativity?
I want to approach this question by thinking about a related, and in some ways opposite, one. "Are internment camps good for creativity?" In some respects, though not all, the internment camp can be seen as the opposite, the alter ego, of the city. We can think of Auschwitz and New York inhabiting opposite ends of the American moral-spatial spectrum in the second half of the twentieth century (which is partly why the events of 9/11 had such a profound resonance).
Yesterday my neighbour came to my door to show me the diary of one of his relatives, a Sikh fom Punjab who had fought in the British army in the second world war, and who was captured and interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. The man was a talented artist and draughtsman, and had filled his notebook with drawings of camp scenes. Men sunbathing in front of barracks, playing hockey, putting on theatrical performances. He wrote accounts of the camp's economy (with "one English cigarette" as the basic unit of currency) and stuck in newspaper clippings of Mussolini's death etc. His fellow camp inmates, among them , wrote poems and comments in the book, and painted pictures of "Jit Singh, the Indian painter" at his canvass. These comments bore witness to a deep intimacy and appreciation between the American, British, Canadian, French - and Indian - men who found themselves together.
-
Paris By Night
Let's not forget the romance of cities. So much of the news from Paris is bad these days, but there is always that amazing texture. Have a close look .
-
Where Is Home?
Have just returned home to Delhi from 10 days in Sydney and Melbourne to find that this blog has been chattering quite effectively without me. It is always good to feel dispensable!
One of the subjects it has been debating is whether I, born in the UK, deserve to call Delhi home at all, and whether I can presume to write about it. Peter Harrap introduced the debate:
"I have just found out that we are in fact addressing someone who is not Indian at all, but British-born and bred. Rather like illiterate Indians voted in Newhru's daughter because she had herself renamed "Ghandi".""Fitz" responded:
"Whilst anyone I believe can be invited to write about anything and anyone and anyplace. There is a certain moral code in literature or just the world that we do declare or interests, biases and backgrounds. Can we have a real Indian next time please? You could lose viewers (or at least discerning viewers) otherwise!"
-
Are We Approaching The End Of The World?
I've been struck by the almost unbroken pessimism of comments on these Free Thinking blogs. In response to John McGuirk's poignant speculations about the distant future, for instance, "Carole" wrote:
"The wheels of ignorance and evil are turning fast. And the whole world is embroiled in wars and "rumours of wars". Within our own environment, behaviour and attitudes have descended to a moral low. Unless people wake up to the fact that kindness, grace, selflessness, and moral values are the only way to create a decent society, then one can forget utopia. How very sad."
And many readers were anxious about my own descriptions of rapid modernisation in Delhi, expressing a desire that this part of the world at least be protected from the ravages of corporations and developers.
About
Free Thinking weblogs
Archive
Categories
Recent Entries
Recent Comments
- jason on Hospitality And The City
- Fitz on Hospitality And The City
- Fitz on Hospitality And The City
- Lee on Hospitality And The City
- olivia moore on Welcome to this weblog
Feeds
大象传媒 Blog Network
- Action Network
- Comedy
- The Editors (News)
- Five Live Breakfast
- Horizon on Everest
- Island Blogging (Scotland)
- Jazz
- Jeff Zycinski (Radio Scotland)
- Los blogs de 大象传媒 Mundo
- Magazine Monitor (News)
- My Africa
- Ouch (disability)
- Pods and Blogs (Five Live)
- PM (Radio 4)
- World Update with Dan Damon
- ?????? ?? ?? ?? ??????? 大象传媒 Arabic
- 大象传媒中文部博客 大象传媒 Chinese
- ????? ?? ?? ?? ????? 大象传媒 Persian
- ????? ??? ??? Rooze Hafton
- ?? ?? ?? ???? ???? 大象传媒 Urdu
The 大象传媒 is not responsible for the content of external internet sites
