Five Star Poetry

Five star hotels in Delhi are legendary for their luxury.  I was astounded by their amenities when I toured India in 2010 and was relieved when I realized they accepted the government-rate for travelers like me.  I would upload photos from my trip four years ago, but I am having power problems at my residence so Rocky's recent photo will have to serve as a substitute for now.

Real orchid!

People: Old and New

An acquintance from DC - I'll call her Rocky - is in town and it's a relief to see a familiar face. Rocky and I spent most of yesterday touring Old Delhi on a rickshaw. The pollution and traffic were terrible, but it was delightful seeing the city by bike with someone I trust. Our driver was friendly, hardworking, and helpful. I tipped generously. After Old Delhi, we stopped off at CP to pick-up my suit and some clothes I had tailored and she taught me about about third-culture kids along the way.

We took advantage of the Taj Palace's High Tea and commiserated over work.  I left impressed with her committment, knowledge, and dedication and very appreciated of the chairs offered to us - they were the most comfortable and attractive chairs I think of in recent memory.  Then I ventured forth to PCO - a local and pretentious speakeasy.  It was fun, but we'll see if the bar can deliver again.  It's pricey and I don't know if one can really relax there because it feels like a place to impress someone.

Rocky and I met-up today at The Imperial for High Tea with a colleague I'll call Sproket and we all left impressed by the grandeur of the hotel and pleased with the conversation and company.  For all the maddening things about this place, it's beginning to feel like home.

Wow

Simply put, "Si" by Zaz is an incredible song.

Anywhere, USA is Redundant

No actually anywhere, just Anywhere.

HBO makes great shows, but they clearly need a geography lesson.  When I heard that HBO was planning to offer streaming service, I had hoped their definition of anywhere would fall in line with the lexicographers. But sadly the BBC reported the launch of HBO's "standalone streaming service" in 2015 will be limited to America, also styled as "Anywhere."

I curious to know which territories made the cut and which did not.  Puerto Rico? American Samoa? Guam? Navassa Island?

Obviously I understand that their marketing gurus are not geographers, but it's strange that they have not corrected the way their website displays on Google. It just looks silly.

Fortunately I can still watch clips of Last Week Tonight here in India on YouTube.

Wii r car free 2

The Atlantic published an article titled "The Cheapest Generation" about Millenials' aversion to buying big-ticket items like cars and homes.  My very unscientific observations lead me to the same conclusions, namely that my generation is more inclined to invest in ourselves rather than things.

I really enjoyed the quote by John McFarland, General Motors' manager of global strategic marketing: "I don't believe that young buyers don't care about owning a car.  We just think nobody truly understands them yet."  I can't help but laugh when I think about how he came to that conclusion because our parents' generation generally owned cars and schelped us around in them.

The title of the article was disappointing and crass and I think the authors qualify as Millenials (based on their headshots).  I suspect the magazine used it to attract attention (and it worked on me) and to distract themselves from their impending generational eclipse.

Art Meets Science

Tonight I attended a photographic exhibition sponsored by the German House for Research and Innovation by Indian youth.  Since I received the invitation in my official capacity, I had hoped that there would be more potential contacts there but that was not the case.  I was fortunately to have had the opportunity to listen to an interesting lecture by an art historian about the nexus between art and science, view some interesting photography, and eat free.

I really appreciated the keynote remarks given by Jamila Adeli, freelance curator and an art historian living in Berlin, because she articulated the importance of art and science to each other.  She pointed out how the Rhode Island School of Design incorporated science and art to create a visual aesthetic to present facts and truth simultaneously.  Her remarks reminded me of the creative Dancing Traffic Light.

The Dancing Traffic Light is a brilliant blend of public policy and public art.

Here are some of the photos from tonight.

(left) Wolfgang Zuborn and (right) His Excellency Michael Steiner of Germany

I love this photo because it contrasts a cartoonish monster with the very real and quotidian concerns about making it through the day as an underemployed young man.

Photo by Wolfgang Zuborn

How brilliant are these colors?

"When the Headless God Sat on the Branch" by Arko Datto

Review of Hitch-22

(This post was adapted from an e-mail sent in February 2014).

Several months ago I finished listening to Christopher Hitchens' memoir Hitch-22. I recommend the audiobook or the print versions, but for different reasons.  Listening to Hitchens' distinctive English clip and cadence is a pleasure in and of itself, but even more so since his death.

Since his memoir also reads as an excellent bibliography to modern English canon, it's a great starting point to review the works of Seigfried Sasson and Wilfred Owen and move onto more contemporary poets like Evelyn Waugh and James Fenton.  He cites the influence, personal, political, and literary of other British novelists like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.

But for someone who delights in being the smartest man in the room, his defense of supporting the War on Saddam (not, he pointedly wrote, the War on Iraq) is rather weak. His memoir is not a good window to his philosophy, which he belatedly describes as anti-totalitarianism (but sounds more like a reboot of classical liberalism) or even to the totality of his life.  He made no mention of his first wife and divorce and only passing mention of his second.  His children were tertiary characters at most.

Initially I felt that his contributions to the literary field he spends much of the book praising were transient because he did not describe the significance of his writings, but now I feel that omitting these details was clever because it left me wanting to learn more (which will drive sales) and classy. I appreciated his creation of pithy and biting sentences, his confident bordering-on-belligerant tone (he loves employing the descriptor "fascist"), and diction.  I liked that his comments on fellow writers was interesting, fair and honorable.

His precision about politics is eclipsed by his passion several times throughout the work. For example, he repeatedly employs "fascist" to characterize the 1967 Generals' coup, the aging regimes of Franco and Salazar, the juntas in Argentina and Brazil.

As a polemicist and a essayist, he was right to employ the term.  It's fair to expect a reader to do some follow-up work after an essay. But for a self-described political polemicist and admirer of Orwell, Hitchens brakes the rules Orwell outlined in "Politics and the English Language" distressingly often (especially rule five).  Books, especially audiobooks, must be more self-contained lest the audience get lost.  Sometimes I felt like he was writing the memoir for his coterie than the people he claimed to want to defend.

But most readers associate fascists with the Schutzstaffel goose-stepping their way into Vienna or the cartoonish Mussolini standing on a tank.  He noted that the Greek generals' tried to ban the letter Z and abused the civil rights of its citizens and debased them physically and added that the Argentine military perfected the sadistic art of throwing people out of airplanes and turning verbs into nouns. He used powerful terms often and before defining them.

In spite of these criticisms, I have no doubt his spoken memoir will continue challenge, charm, and inspire audiences now and into the future.  Even though I never met him, I could not help but feeling I made a new friend after listening to him for 17+ hours and as I reached the end, I could not feeling a little sad became I wanted to know what he would say about the civil war in Syria, the rapprochment with Iran, the crisis in Ukraine, and the legacy of 30 Rock.

It's a delight to read and listen to and for that reason it may be the only book that I recommend doing both simultaneously.

Car-Free Again

Today I sat down and did the math on whether it was worth it to buy a car.  I looked into purchasing a Maruti Suzuki Alto 800 for roughly $5721 that gets roughly 21.5 kilometers/liter in urban conditions. I estimate that I will drive approximately 350 kilometers/month. Gas is approximately $1/liter. Based on those calculations, I estimate that I will spend $20/month on gas (or roughly $720 during my time in India).  I estimate that insurance is $750/year, or 2/3 of what I was paying in Haiti.  I estimate that I will spend $500 maintaining the car, but that is low compared to what I spent in Haiti (which is roughly 1/3 of what I spent in Haiti).  Therefore the total estimated cost before resale is $9191 or $7691 after resale for $1500 less what what I purchased it for.

By contrast, riding in taxis is $3.3 each way to work, which works out to $5227 over the next 33 months if I make 11 trips per week.  Throw in extra random trips here and there and maybe it rounds up to $7000.  But I can work in the car and not worry about maintenance, parking, or dangerous driving, or the variability of petrol prices, or resale.  Moreover, I can work in the car and practice Hindi.  If I buy a bike and a mask, I can reduce my dependency on taxis even more. 

Pankaj Mishra, Part I

Today I read Pankaj Mishra's article in the New York Times about Prime Minister Modi.  His writing style - bold, sweeping, confident, and provocative - reminded me of the late Christopher Hitchens.  I did some more research on the writer and found his recent article in the Guardian about the broken western [sic] model.  I am still too ignorant of the author to be able to pin down his views, but I want to learn more because I like his writing style and the diversity of his references.

His sentences are challenging and fun to read.  Take this one from the aforementioned article in the Guardian. 

"The old Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Francis Fukuyama's influential end-of-history history these and cruder theories about the inevitable march to worldwide prosperity and stability were vended by such Panglosses of globalisation as Thomas Friedman."

I love how "vended" conjures images of cheap and older Snicker bars. Its proximity to "Panglosses" is another quick blow to the ideology of capitalism.

He incorporates many references throughout his long articles and I added several of them to my reading list, including China, East Asia and the Global Economy: Regional and Historical Perspectives by Japanese historian Takeshi Hamashita, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780-1914 by C.A. Bayly and Peasants into Frenchman: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 by a U.S. historian of Romanian descent Eugen Weber. 

Organic Hazards

When I was being driven home by a colleague after a dinner the minister counselor of the Public Affairs Section hosted, I saw a broken-down bus with a branch acting as its hazards!

Delhi Goes Green

This familiar site pleasantly reminded me of Haiti because drivers did the same thing when their cars broke down there.  I don't know if it was universal or I only saw broken-down cars without functioning flashers, but it was a practical mechanism for alerting drivers of the obstacle.

I wonder when I will see something like that in the States.

Supreme Court Declares Gravity Unconstitutional

-- NEWS FLASH --

NEW DELHI - Yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled gravity unconstitutional in H20 vs. Newton.  

The plantiff, H20, after the ruling

###

I'm always delighted when this happens in the freezer.  It's a delightful way to begin living in my new place.

What's Past is Prologue

A few years ago the New York Times documented "emerging adulthood." I remember that article vividly because it captured my demographic well and it was written with the same sense of bafflement, frustration and fascination that is often seen when one generation writes about another.

Recently I moved into temporary housing in Ballston and I'm surprised to discover how much I like it there.  The building is modern, the gym is well equipped, the metro is less than a block away and the Harris Teeter is ten minutes away.  The courtyard in front of my building hosts a weekly farmer's market on Thursdays, a Capital Bikeshare station, and the best lunch dollar-for-dollar in Washington: Potbelly's.

I felt so grown-up, mature and healthy.  I even signed-up for the rewards card and designated a school in Alexandria to benefit from my purchases at this store. And then I saw this at the Harris-Teeter.

Exhibit A of "Emerging Adulthood"

Well, at least it's reusable.