Future Cities: slush
What does the future metropolis look like? Cars fly, architects continue to push the anticipated forms of buildings, things float certainly. Things look more religious, things look postapocalyptic. The sky is brown and bright blue and then so polluted that the light is weak and the sun only sort of shines. It’s crowded. It’s Empty. There are few consistencies.
10 Ways to Make a US City Great
1. Socialize healthcare in a city. Show the US it can be done! Start small and grow out… cities with shrinking populations might give this a shot. (eh hem… Pittsburgh!)
2. Be the first city to build a Vertical Garden!
3. Be the first to place oxygen-rich plants in public schools (like Kamal Meattle did in Delhi buildings) and study the affects.
4. Build fountains that serve as sources for drinking water. Serbia did it… we can do it too! It creates an instant social space and sense of security and well being in the community.
5. Legalize street vending or make it easier to get a vending liscense. This easy entry into business will make room for small time entripenuers to get their foot in the door. It can also add free security to city streets, act as quick solution to workers on lunch break looking for a meal or a coffee, and add extra flavor to other wise monotone sections of cityscape.
6. Be the first city to paint all the rooftops white! Save on energy and become a green tourism location!
7. Make more streets walking streets. It’s something that is so rare in the US, as most cities are tripping over themselves to clear the way for cars. Imagine the downtown of any US cities with more open air restaurants and a safe place to walk and relax? Imagine Times Square without cars! Put the walking streets right in there with the public drinking fountains.
8. Include safe bike lanes in city planning. As cities in the US fret over obesity related health issues and pollution from cars, issues with congestion and traffic, “ye olde bicycle” remains a viable solution all around. Bikes put more eyes on the streets (safer streets) takes cars off the road, provide a means of free transport and exercise, and hey-–it’s fun!
9. Add Green roofs to any building!
10. Encourage dynamic educational and artistic programming in communities of all sizes.
Day in the Life of the Stomach Troubled Ghori
10am. wake up. look at broken clock on wall and realize that right now, it shows the right time. poke at stomach.
10:30. Get out of bed and think of showering. Feel optimistic for a 15 minutes. Feel bad again. Doubt doctor.
11am. Take medicine anyway. Maybe it’s not the doctor, it’s me.
11:30. Fall asleep again.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
12:30. Wake up and watch TED talks. Shamelessly post my website address on Facebook thread during Zappo’s founder’s speech because his speech sounds like such a commercial anyway. Wonder what it really takes to succeed. Listen to Zappo’s guy speak about happiness. Wonder if he’s really happy. Wonder why I didn’t choose some more practical money making career because I’m so good at long hours of work. Watch other speakers. Text friend who is actually at TED talks. Watch musical section of TED and worry that TED will never come to India again.
2pm. Go to sleep again.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
3:30pm. Wake up again. Realize I have to go out into the world and get rent money from the ATM. Dress nice to make myself feel well. Dressing nice makes people stare. Someone walks by and says something about “Ghoris…” a fourteen year old boy walks by and says “Seeeexxxyyyy!” Feel rediculous. Get money from ATM. Return home past leering men. Set out rent.
4:30pm. Go to sleep feeling bad again.
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
5:30m wake up. realize there is no other option besides going immediately to the imported food store and buying familiar healthy foods so I can convince myself not to give up hopes of eating a meal that agrees completely with my stomach. Go to Ghori store. Buy luxerious things such as smoked salmon and frozen peas. Buy something called “Southern Fried Chicken” which turns out to be too spicy to eat. Buy, of all things, ginger beer because it restores hope in the world and in my stomach also.
6pm. Return home and eat a meal so familiar I want to cry.
7pm. Convince myself I feel good enough to go out with the girls because I am so tired of laying in bed. Last week has had a few bright points of entertainment. Have spent too much time in one room!! Get dressed up and take all my medicine and hope that nothing goes wrong.
Fingers crossed…..
Ode to the Pushcart
Show of Carts and Hand painted signage by Michael Genovese in Chicago, IL. Worth a look…
Rainfall Fantasy+
When I first arrived in Mumbai it was the monsoon season. I took this for granted because the rainfall was actually reasonably similar to the sort of rain that comes to both Tennessee (my birthplace) and Pittsburgh (my last state of residence in the US). If anything, I found myself thinking of childhood vacations to Florida, where the wind and clouds swirled around and dumped out a thunderstorm almost daily. Mosquitos and humidity followed but it was always worth it for that brief vacation from the heat and the clean air which inevitably followed.
The same was true here. In that first month in India, I came to think of the rain as a distinct part of this place. If nothing else, it provided a reason to stay in bed away from the “What am I doing here?” feeling that followed most misunderstandings or frustrations that take place beyond the wooden doors of my apartment.
Now proceeding into the months of October and November when it hasn’t rained for 3 weeks plus, my roommates and I confess to audio hallucinations of rainfall. Just a week ago during Diwali, I woke and heard that familiar Tennessee summer storm sound of hard rain on the windows and regular thunder in the back ground. Rolling over I dozed off again, feeling wonderful familiarity: if this is what I was hearing I must be at my parents house, and there would probably be someone waking me up soon for dinner so why not keep sleeping peacefully?
On waking a second time, I found the sounds in the distance were not thunder but fireworks going off, one after another. Now loud explosions were happening just outside my window as neighbors set off rockets from the roof. Children laughed and cried in unison. The rain had only been my ceiling fan, and I was (and am), a thousand miles from Tennessee.
In June, India’s scientists went to work seeding clouds to encourage rainfall and ease the droughts that were destroying farms in the South. The rains came, (it’s still unclear what the seeding changed) and they lingered almost 2 weeks in the year later than they usually do.
Besides the seeding, other methods were attempted:
The government of Andhra Pradesh ordered religious institutions to pray for rain
Frogs were married (later some called for divorce)
And in some villages, a girl wearing a skirt made of knitted vines and small branches, sang and danced through the streets of the village, stopping at every house, where the hosts poured water on her. The people of the village followed her dancing and shouting.
Following this,
the rain fell and fell and fell: for a limited time only.
Quite the Quite Quiet
For the last few days my roommates have been out of town and I’ve figured out how to sit still again. Hard to sit still in a place like Mumbai which offers so many versions of distraction. There are 20 things I see here everyday that I want to sit and write about, and I am overwhelmed…so I don’t write anything! Or I jot it down by hand in a notebook because the fidget of writing something on paper is still valid and appealing.
A few thoughts from the department of quiet time:
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The banana man and his son are always sitting on the corner 1 block away. You can have 6 bananas for 20 rupees which I think might be a little more than average but the bananas are always in good condition and the banana people always remember that for some reason I have decided 6 is the perfect number of bananas to buy at once so we don’t even have to make attempts at English or Hindi. I can’t say the banana man looks cheerful… He has a bright red beard. But his son seems very cheerful. I find myself thinking that they “just came in on a boatload of bananas”. Then I feel a bit like a jerk, because if you aren’t thinking you don’t realize that it would be kind of nice to be on a boat of bananas, and the ride might be beautiful, and that’s a huge amount of pudding potential.
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There are a hundred thousand million different fantasy and real versions of the world to partake of. In Mumbai there are twice that many. If you have a little money, you can pay to enter into almost all the modes of living: If you’d like to think of passing from one ideal to another as going from one building to the another you can. Each place will claim to be the most real and the most important. People from one building to yell across to the next “You are living in a dream land!” and the people who hear it will get defensive and yell it back. The tough part is it’s almost all legitimate. You can convince people over time that any building is the best one to be in.
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one person thinks I should move to NY.
one person thinks I should spend some time in Maine.
one person thinks I should move to Chicago.
one person thinks I should move to TN.
one person thinks I should stay in Mumbai.
one person thinks I should move to Portland, OR.
one person thinks I should go back to PGH.
I think I need a shower…
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I am going to spend all day working on a presentation about the Fulbright work I am doing here in India. I have always thought you really figure out what you are doing when you are required to describe it to someone who is not at all on your wave length. That also may be the point at which you make a complete fool of yourself. What if they just don’t get it? What if your idea is not that valuable? It’s enough to make a person figure out how to at least complete a functional task. ” This project will no doubt broaden the conversation about ______ and be useful by _______ to depict _______. And in conclusion, ______. “
Done and done.
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I am afraid of a world in which I don’t make sense. Either in reason and logic, or emotion and optimism. I picked up a small booklet that one of my friends already made fun of me for. It’s one of those cheap paper back guru booklets, but the name caught my eye: “Circus of the Mind”. Who would deny there are a few elephants and monkeys in there? Not me. When the featured Guru, Sadhguru is asked about the adequacy of the mind in understanding the deeper, uncharted realms of the spirit he replies: “It’s like trying to go to the moon on a bullock cart. No matter how hard you beat the bulls it’s not going to get there.”
Sweets for the Sweet, Inside and Out
Here in Mumbai it is Diwali and the sweets, fireworks, and flowers are swirling around the city in a smokey haze. The monsoons have sadly passed on and left the air quality wanting and the streets unwashed. Had I arrived to this two months ago, I would have much more of a problem with it, but now the unpleasantry seems a matter of fact, and who would dwell on it when there is so much more to capture your senses?
Diwali is a bit like New Years and Christmas combined and for days nothing is organized normally. The name is drawn from the Sanskrit word Deepavali, meaning “garland of lights”, and the celebration lasts about 5 days. It is a time for gift giving and hanging lights from buildings and terraces. Each days asks for a different sort of gift to be exchanged, and there are a whole set of customs and legends attached to each day. For example, one days is for giving gifts to family, one to husbands and wives and so on and so on.
For me, Diwali has been a bit like Christmas away from your family. There’s a party and you might get some of the sweets that over flow, but the real sweet being exchanged is the strengthening of the sort of ties that enrich a lifetime in a place like this: a gift to a co-worker, playful gambling with friends and family, or a gift to a partner.
When I first arrived in Mumbai the place seemed a mess, and it still is. Though staying longer, I am beginning to think that while the streets are neglected, on a personal scale people of all sorts are not, and maybe on some level this sort of human-centered delegation of time and energy makes much more sense than some of the cold order and distant pleasantries that make western cities and holidays what they are.
Of course I am writing from the outside looking in, and I have on some sort of turmeric colored glasses that give everything a delicious golden glow. There are sweets everywhere, here and in other countries, being passed back and forth constantly for both genuine and empty purposes alike. Everyone wants to focus on the taste.
Can I get the time:
The Icelink Snow 6 Timezone Watch
The watch problem has resurfaced in a new way: a need for a time piece that depicts time in two or more places. A watch like this seems like a key to some sort of schizophrenia— an admittance that someone is trying to lead multiple lives. I found myself thinking of an old favorite movie, H.G. Wells Time Machine.
Time Machine, a 1960s film based on a novella first published by H.G. Wells in 1895, follows the travels of an English scientist who builds a craft capable of that oh so desirable temporal travel. Clocks of all sorts fill the scientist’s home. Traveling to the future, the protagonist adjusts rather well to the new era after some initial shocks, then dominates and directs the course of all humanity through his time traveling insights and donnish English morals. Control of time is equated with control of destiny.
Maybe coincidence that I’ve been wanting to watch it recently and having trouble keeping tabs on everything I’ve left churning in the US as a certain new sort of reality blossoms here in India under the sweaty sun? Everything else is somewhere else and to remind me there is this thought of a new watch.
The strangest will be when people come and go from the US to here, here in India to the US, because some part of me has fooled myself into believing only a few people can slip through this magic rabbit hole. When you pop out on the other side there is no doubt it will be topsy turvy and just plain weird.
