June 2009 - Posts - Life etc...

June 2009 - Posts

The environmental cost of education: Penn's Cave

Posted by Himanshu Burte at 
I saw my first stalactites two days ago in an underground cave in central Pennsylvannia, USA. It was a wonderful experience, of course. But it also set me thinking about how we are locked into a cycle of destroying much of nature by our very enthusiasm for it. Mind you, Penn’s Cave looked to be in rather good health for a popular tourist spot ( Kilroy...

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A daughter remembers...

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
I always thought my father could have been a character in The Great Gatsby . Sartorially, that is. He wore perfectly tailored white full-sleeved shirts and white trousers to work every day, and had a good collection of silk ties. Of course, by the time I came into his life, he had almost hung up his work clothes and certainly his formal suits, so my...

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Community mapping: to make your own neighbourhood

Posted by Himanshu Burte at 
A few days ago at the University of California, Berkeley, I attended a small meeting of people from different disciplines discussing an initiative that helps indigenous American tribes ( or American Indians) map their own lands and landscapes. Much that happened in the meeting made me think about how destructive much modern development has been everywhere...

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Tennis in the time of radio

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
Its difficult to think such a time existed, living as we do when everything is either ‘live’ or 'breaking’, visually across a screen. It was a time when auditory sensations could be in gorgeous technicolour, a time when the timbre of a voice flirted with the flavour of the spoken word to conjure up incredibly vivid, sensual images. A youtube video...

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What do women really want?

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
This is one of those questions. If only we knew the answer! But for a long time, I thought that it was a question men asked and asked so often it had acquired the status of something more exalted than a cliché. But do women themselves know? Will they admit to being sometimes confused, as is only human? Do men know what they want? asked a friend who...

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Fools rush in...trusting food reviews

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
How far would I go for a taste of home? Pretty far, as I discovered this afternoon. Two friends (one Malayali and the other Bengali) and I decided to have lunch at Kerala House, very near our office, on Jantar Mantar road. Inspired by a review in the new issue of Time Out Delhi (read it here ), we braved the 42-seeming-like-50-degree heat for what we...

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I buy, therefore I am

Posted by Papi Menon at 
When a few crazed and desperate men flew deadly airplanes into the towering skyscrapers all those years ago, it was like they'd delivered a bare-knuckled punch to America's solar plexus. For days, it seemed as if the entire country could hardly draw breath. A month later, when President Bush addressed a news conference, the shock had barely...

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On World Environment Day, look harder at: (In)Visible waste

Posted by Himanshu Burte at 
Every time you eat in the US, you consume paper (more like, every time you do any necessary function, actually). But how close paper sticks to food in the cycle of consumption is perhaps most visible in a university setting, where much of the food people carry around in bags has been bought, rather than brought from home. Even on the streets and food...

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The united colour of racism

Posted by Elizabeth Eapen at 
I am as outraged as any right thinking person about the attacks on Indian students in Australia. While there are some I spoke to, including a former colleague and friend who has just finished a course of study at the University of Melbourne, who say "Indian media seems to have gone nuts with the story", I will stick my neck out and say that...

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Driven round the bend

Posted by Vandana Vasudevan at 
Few relationships of my life have been more complicated. Fraught with break ups, reunions, misunderstandings, ego tussles and broken promises. The most important man in my life and I are mostly on a relationship roller coaster. He knows I need him more than he needs me. I know I don’t need an agony aunt to tell me that this is an unhealthy equation...

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