A few remarks

In a lot of beautiful places it was prohibited to take pictures. The most stunning place apart from the Taj was the golden temple in Vellore. It's been completed only three or four years ago so it's a little known attraction, but one which will become world famous. The gardens were designed geometrically and contained loads of flowers and fountains. I could easily have spent the whole day taking pictures if it had been allowed. I also visited a lot of other nice Hindu temples but again, photos were not permitted.
In other places I was simply too slow get anything but blurred pics. Quite often, the sky was hazy so I'm not really happy with the light in most pictures. But then again, I don't want to photoshop it into something different than it was...

Last but not least, I'd like to thank everybody who let me stay in their house or had me over for tea. I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed meeting up, even though in most cases, it had been at least 12 years ago...A story I tell my friends about India is how I was silently wondering, why everyone I stayed with, had parathas, chicken curry and Sprite at home without me really telling them. Only at last in Bangalore I figured, that everyone was calling the last person I had stayed with to inquire about the things I like. Even though I try to be hospitable, I would never have thought about that...That was just so sweet.

So what happened to the family pics?

I have been thinking about whether to put family pictures on this website or not. I decided against it for several reasons:
1. I'm vain. A lot of the pictures were taken in low light and are blurred.
2. I don't know if my folks would appreciate it, if their pictures are published.
3. I forgot to take a few people's pictures (sorry for that, it's not personal at all)...
So I'll just e-mail the pics and whoever is on it can decide what will happen to it.

Delhi parliament

 

 

 

While I was looking at the building I overheard an Indian woman saying 'see these are the monkeys. They represent our politicians'.
The haze you see in the third picture is smog and it looked that way all the time. The weird thing is that the air is ok to breathe. What's good is that they're really trying to solve the problem. The tuktuks in Delhi for example use green energy.

Agra

 

After seeing the pyramids and Stonehenge I tried to figure out why visiting some iconic places is disappointing and why it's not like that at all in other places. I was stunned by the Taj Mahal although I have seen loads of pictures before. Not just the sihlouette is beautiful but there's a lot of nice detail work too. But that's not what made it special. What really made the Taj Mahal stand out as impressive was the fact that the surroundings were beautifully kept. It's not just the monument but how it interacts with the environment that really creates this feeling of wonder...

Delhi: Lotus Temple, Vishwa Shanti Stupa and Qutb Minar

 

 

 

 

What I like about religous architecture, regardless of the faith, is that they really try to make it beautiful and often succeed....

My favourite hotel in the world

 

 

 

 

I wasn't sure if I should come here. After all it had been one of my favourite places in my childhood and I was worried that the reality might be different from an adult point of view. Frankly it wasn't. Apart from that unidentifiable smell when they were cleaning the stairs everything was the same. The bombay toast and the iced tea where as sensational as ever, the views amazing and the waves are so loud, you have the feeling you're going to be washed into the sea. I didn't even have to raise from bed to enjoy the sight of palmtrees and the ocean. As the hotel belongs to a friend of my mother, I was lucky enough to stay two nights for free. But I would have happily paid for this great room. I also took a walk around Kovalam and passed through a palmtree forest. How lush and quiet...

Possibly one of the most beautiful houses in Kerala (or anywhere else for that matter)

 

 

 

 

Kerala: Thiruvalla

 

 

 

 

For a white person, walking through this place, where my mum grew up, is like being famous. School kids run to the gates, mothers hand over their children, girls giggle as they walk past and guys scream from their motorbikes: 'hi how are you?' or 'what's your name?'. It's a weird feeling, ok in a way, but just for a few weeks. While it's funny as a holiday experience I'm glad that random people don't walk up to me and want a picture taken when I'm at home...

Kerala: houseboats and vegetation

 

 

 

 

Plants are not often on my mind. It's not that I ignore them but usually I just pause a few seconds to look at something and forget about it. In Kerala whenever I was on the road and not seeing relatives I was looking at plants and thinking about them. For example these water hyacinths: the locals think it's a pest and call it weed and I'm sure they have their reasons. But these little plants can actually live in both sweet and salt water and therefore most have some kind of salt filter. A lot of plants have huge leaves and I just loved looking at those, I guess because we don't have them at home.
I didn't have time for a trip on a houseboat but I got a chance to take a few photographs. Some are palaces, bigger than my entire appartment (probably double the size) full of luxury items but I kind of liked the simpler versions, without flatscreen TV, where you have more of a connection with the environment....

Tamil Nadu: Mamallapuram

 

 

 

Indian Newspapers

One headline in the Times of India read 'Acid-throwing psycho on prowl in city?' Although it's disturbing that some madman followed women at night to throw acid at them, I had to smile. It's because of the word psycho. I don't think I've seen that word in a headline in any serious newspaper in Switzerland, the States or the UK. And if you read that headline to yourself with an Indian accent it gets even better.

There's the remembrance page where photographs of the deceased as well as some well wishes are published on the anniversary of their death. It's a nice idea. Most of the young ones mentioned were soldiers. The military is very visible here and it seems they're recruiting heavily.

Fight corruption ads feature very prominently. Not just in the papers but at the airport or the railway stations there's always a name and a number to contact. There are rules saying you shouldn't offer bribes and act as a whistleblower if someone else is involved in corruption. I have no idea how successful this initiative has been but it's a good start.

You can tell that Indian journalists are not fond of China or Pakistan. It was reported that the Chinese questioned the success of the Indian moon mission and although they didn't write anything nasty you could just feel that they were angry about this. Instead of a Pakistani they referred to one of them as Pak-man.

In another article about children's education it was striking that they never talked about parents but children's guardians, which hints at the fact that a considerable number of kids are brought up by someone else.

Half a page is devoted to religion. It's divided into sacred space, containing quotes from Buddha, Krishna, the bible and other religious figures. It's nice how all of them can happily co-exist in a little, gray box. The rest of the page is taken up by some religious leader who offers guidance about how to apply religion in daily life.

Two full pages were devoted to the retiring cricket star Anil Kumble. Only the Obama coverage a few days later got more space. They also report football results from the Premier and the Champions league which makes me wonder why on earth they haven't qualified for the World Cup?

What I found illuminating about this little reading exercise is how facts are implicitly part of what is communicated. By looking at word choice, subjects covered or the amount of space given to an article opinions and values shine through, regardless of if it was intended or not. By turning to another culture we can understand what we might not notice in our own papers.

Delhi

The first thing I noticed when I stepped out of the airport was the scent of sweet dust and some ozone. It's a pleasant smell because it reminded me of my last visit to India 12 years ago. The area close to the airport consists mainly of sand coloured things: buildings, dried grass and dirt. Men are standing or squatting all over the place and I wonder what they're waiting for. Others are sleeping in their cars with their feet hanging out of the door or on the open lawn. The roads are good and driving is pleasant on this Sunday morning. It has nothing in common with the roller coaster rides featuring elephants, buffaloes, cows, goats, scooters and pedestrians I remember from last time. Thanks to the greyish pollution haze there's an awesome sunrise which looks a bit like a peach soaked in grenadine siroup. The domestic airport is gated and some guys were standing on those gates resembling herons. Before I could ask what they're doing Lalu uncle said they're watching the planes take off and land.
After dropping my stuff at home we headed for the city center of New Delhi. Close to the Gate of India there was a parking lot which they had converted into a stage for showcasing Cobras and monkeys. I had no desire to go anywhere near the snake and I had a feeling I'd see many more monkeys. This turned out to be true. In the middle of the city there's a forest and the monkeys sit there next to the road because some people feed them.
A military brass band was performing in their kaki uniforms. I felt sorry for them because it was the kind of day, when you could drink a liter in 20 minutes. They played a fusion style between traditional march music and the latest bhagra tunes. I find it hard to imagine people stomping to war listening to the latest Sharuk Khan movie soundtrack.
Security is tight everywhere. After several blasts happening all over Northern India there's no market, shopping road or major shop you can enter without walking through a metal detector, opening your bags and letting them frisk you. It's sad but better than being blown up (I'm kind of attached to my extremities).
In Indian offices you have to hold on to your papers especially your money, as well as your clothes unless you feel like doing a Marilyn Monroe...This is because in every room there is at least one fan blowing everything around.

Thank You America

This time more was at stake. America has become my home away from home since the last election four years ago. My kiddie-cousins have been born and live in the States as well as other relatives I care for. I have worked with a number of African-American's in Stamford and a lot of other people who felt bad about the direction their country was heading. And last but not least Obama articulates the ideas I had about politics even before I knew who he was. I've been monitoring the race daily since January, hoping but not daring to believe in what happened today.

I'm happy because I think it's a safer country for my relatives if their leader is not obsessed with war. Al Quaida is pissed because recruiting terrorists is much easier with the perfect enemy they had in the hawkish Republican administration.
I'm happy because I know that the African-American community takes pride in 'their president'. According to an article of the NY Times school attendence has increased significantly since Obama has been on the stage because young black folks start to doubt the idea that they will fail anyway and school doesn't matter. Moreover everyone who is part of a minority or thinks that only the rich and connected can succeed can look up to Barack. This in my eyes is an important change because it's just not possible to succeed without having faith in the world and yourself.

Nobody knows yet if he will succeed with his approach to a different kind of politics but ideas have to be introduced to the public before they can be translated into laws, policies and attitudes. It was high time that someone would do that and Obama has already planted change in our minds, even if there are no tangible results just yet.

But today I don't want to think about the future just yet. Because it's the first historical event in my life that I'm deeply grateful for witnessing. Thank you America. Thanks especially to all the folks who had their doubts, who were brought up to believe something different but then took a leap of faith.

Ideals

Ideals are hard to translate into real life. This is true for everyone of us and it must be even more difficult to infuse politics with them. There are several reasons for this. Not living up to your own ideals is painful. Often we question the validity of our values and ideals when our life is a mess and gradually we come to believe that whatever is noble has no place in the real world. Another reason is that we are traumatized by wars, terror and dictatorships. Capturing the imagination of people is associated with disaster. But one of the most salient aspects is that my generation does not have role models. Martin Luther King, Gandhi or JFK have one thing in common: my generation has seen pictures, we know in our heads that they have inspired millions but we haven't felt it in our heart.
The sparse number of historical events which I have witnessed and somewhat understood have disappointed me. My generation doesn't march for anything because we know it's of no use. We are so used to the bad guys getting their way that we don't believe anything until it's a fact. Like Barack Obama's election.
Now I know that there are a lot of cynical people out there who are making fun of people like me. They call us naive. They don't believe in inspiration which achieves something, they say it's just one gigantic Hollywood blockbuster show with a happy end.
It's perfectly allright to not agree with Obamas politics. What kind of president he'll be we'll all see in the years to come. But if they can't believe that one person can inspire people to become better people then I pity them. Because obviously they have not experienced how it is to burn for something, to love something and work so hard that that this one inspiration makes you cling on, regardless of how much grief you're confronted with.

We're all partners now

This is how Thomas Friedman, columnist of the NY Times finished his article 'The Great Iceland Meltdown'.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/opinion/19friedman.html?hp
One of the questions he addresses in this piece is why there are less police patrols in Surrey/England after icelandic banks were rescued by a government which is factually broke.
Globalization is such a complex phenomenon that investigating it reveals a lot of connections between seemingly unrelated things. What do you think links the war in Bosnia 13 years ago with the London bombings in 2005? Well according to Ed Husain's book 'The Islamist' the massacre where 8000 Bosnian muslims died made it easy for the militant, islamistic groups to recruit new 'soldiers'. They told the folks on the streets something like 'see people who were previously the neighbours of our muslim brothers killed them from one day to the next. This could happen in Britain too. Today the Whites are nice and tomorrow they slit your throat and rape your daughters'. Fear, as the last eight years of Bush regime have also taught us Westerners, is a powerful motivator.
This is one of many impacts of globalization. You can certainly think about others, for example by mentally tracing back where the t-shirt you're wearing came from.

This is intimidating because thinking about all these things shows us that anything seemingly trivial has consequences, most of which can't be anticipated because we simply don't have the mental capacity to consider the multitude of results which our behaviour might generate. What complicates the matter further is that we're not taught to think in systems. We study maths, geography, languages and history in separate units as if they had no relation to each other. But everything affects everything. This is frightening. But it means that you are important. What you do is important. Where you invest your money, how you vote, how you raise your children and what books you read are not trivial matters. They have consequences. Maybe someone got the confidence they needed from you today to carry out a difficult job. Maybe you're making an important difference and don't even know about it.

Ideas, Idiology and the Economy

I wasn't around in 1929 so I don't know if I shall believe the papers when they say it's the worst crisis since the Great Depression. But adjectives such as worse and worst are not going to help here. The economy is in trouble and after reading the papers for months the sentiments I gathered can be reduced to the following:
-'Banks get the profit and the tax payer bails them out.'
-'The main problem are the outrageous salaries and the greed of the managers'
and
-'This is the proof that capitalism and globalization have failed'

Undifferentiated and one-sided thinking like this caused the crisis in the first place. As a society we're trimmed to think that there's only a right and a wrong. The good and the bad guy. Conflicts and bad headlines sell papers, critical analysis does not. Just having an automated response (opinion or an idea about how to do something without working on a balanced assessment of the situation) is what is called a schema. Schemas make our day easier. These routines we've learnt happen, without having to think about them. Just imagine having to think hard how to exactly get out of bed, questioning whether there was a better way to use the shower or make your morning tea. You'd be exhausted before having started to work. So schemas are helpful. Schemas and habits (also thinking routines) are great but they have limits.

Schemas, habits and routines are not very helpful to solve complex problems. So let's look at some of the statements above:
Although there's undeniably a certain unfairness to the way some things are handled in a global company it's simply not true, that the common people don't profit from the banks or other corporations. Zurich is a good example. It's one of the richest cities in the world and it's going to have the first deficit for quite some time because the banks lost money and hence pay significantly less taxes. So without the banks our social security system, schools and other infrastructure would be in trouble. Pensions have been invested in bank shares so people have profited from the high return the banks generated without even knowing it.

Some salaries are indeed outrageous. But the companies concerned in this crisis are all financed by shareholders. Shareholders are people like you, your employer, your insurance, your parents etc. You have the right to not elect the board of directors, you can raise issues at the general assembly which have to be settled through a vote and you can sell your shares whenever you feel that the managers are not doing their job properly. But why would you become a shareholder in the first place? Maybe because of the return which the 'greedy bunch' generates? So if you don't approve of the company or its managers don't invest.

Is communism going to return? Capitalism has failed! Globalization has caused the crisis to spread! Those are the headlines now. Whoever wants a communist regime should do a bit of travelling. Go to Albania, go to Kuba, ask the Russians, Cechs or the Chinese who left their country why they did that. I'm not saying everything about it is bad. Apparantly a lot of Russian students are very well educated, same with Albanian fishermen. But did they have the freedom to study where they wanted to, read the books or have a shop without fraternising with the bureaucrats? And how about the brutality of all these regimes? How fair would it be to earn the same amount of money for sitting in a call center as you would while operating people and saving lives?
Without capitalism and globalization you would not be sitting in front of your computer right now. The countries with oil and other resources would be rich and all the others would be poor. How fair would that be?

This is not an ode to managers, capitalism and globalization. This is about taking responsibility for your investments, your voting record and about how important it is to study an issue in depth before making decisions. It's not about good or bad. It's about how to find solutions which work right now but are also sustainable.

Gedichte

Das erste Gedicht das ich mich erinnere auswendig (oder teilweise) gelernt zu haben heisst 'Der Weltuntergang' und ist von Franz Hohler
http://www.purkersdorf-online.at/komm/_da.php?ar=6&num=01766-00000-00000-00000-00000

Es hat mich so fasziniert, dass ich die ersten zwei Strophen auch jetzt noch aufsagen kann (es ist immerhin 15 Jahre her). Vielleicht ist das der Grund, das die Poesie nie ganz aus meinem Leben verschwunden ist. Ich weiss es nicht, es ist auch nicht wichtig. Viel wichtiger ist, dass fast niemand den ich kenne, Gedichte noch liest.

Es gibt viele Gründe Gedichte zu lesen und ich werde ganz sicher nicht alle aufzählen, denn ich hoffe ihr werdet es selber entdecken. Ich werde immer mal wieder einige Gedichte hier aufschalten. Das Schöne an Gedichten ist, dass man sie geniessen kann, auch wenn der Kopf nicht alles versteht.


Mondnacht
Es war, als hätt' der Himmel
Die Erde still geküsst,
Dass sie im Blütenschimmer
Von ihm nun träumen müsst.

Die Luft ging durch die Felder,
Die Ähren wogten sacht,
Es rauschten leis' die Wälder,
So sternklar war die Nacht.

Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Flügel aus,
Flog durch die stillen Lande,
Als flöge sie nach Haus.

Joseph von Eichendorff


Und wer lieber etwas Modernes lesen möchte und ein bisschen Englisch kann, bitteschön:

Planting a Sequoia

All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard,
Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.
Rain blackened the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific,
And the sky above us stayed the dull gray
Of an old year coming to an end.

In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth–
An olive or a fig tree–a sign that the earth has one more life to bear.
I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard,
A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs,
A promise of new fruit in other autumns.

But today we kneel in the cold planting you, our native giant,
Defying the practical custom of our fathers,
Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord,
All that remains above earth of a first-born son,
A few stray atoms brought back to the elements.

We will give you what we can–our labor and our soil,
Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,
Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees.
We plant you in the corner of the grove, bathed in western light,
A slender shoot against the sunset.

And when our family is no more, all of his unborn brothers dead,
Every niece and nephew scattered, the house torn down,
His mother’s beauty ashes in the air,
I want you to stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you,
Silently keeping the secret of your birth.

from The Gods of Winter
© 1991 Dana Gioia

http://www.danagioia.net/poems/index.html

Clare

The seaweed on the beach
looks like neurons
maybe meant to
connect Clare's spine
with her hand
so that she could have squeezed
a hand of mine.

The guts from the sea
are lying around.
Some parts look like bones,
broken knees.
This beach,
a cemetry
full of body parts
not buried.

Seaweed and a shell entwined
get stuck in my toes.
I'll take the shell home
and call it Clare.
I'll fill it up
year after year
with birthdays and chocolate cake
graduation, the first car
and holidays at the beach.

Rhone de la Motte (Provence)

 
 
 
 

Lyon

 
 
 
 

A day at Crystal Cove