The mystery of this young woman’s gaze is what drew me to this photo taken by twingadani in Rajasthan, India. What do you suppose she’s thinking? Her look seems to communicate some disdain and perhaps apathy. I can’t help but be curious about her day to day life — in fact, it’s the kind of photo that inspires me to travel.
Have any photos you think might inspire others to travel? Upload them to Gadling’s Flickr pool and we’ll consider them for our Photo of the Day feature.
“New Lucky Restaurant” may seem like the most inappropriate name for an over 50-year old restaurant in Ahmedabad (Gujarat) that is built in a cemetery. In fact, it’s probably the most appropriate.
Built over a centuries-old Muslim graveyard, the locals who go there consider eating there lucky, and the manager believes that their business rocks thanks to the presence of the dead that has led the once mere tea-stall to expand into a full-fledged restaurant.
Although every religion in India takes care of dead bodies differently (Hindus cremate, Muslims/Christians bury, Zoroastrians leave the body to be eaten by vultures), the whole concept of death is different because of the general belief of being reborn — the ‘your soul never dies’ analogy.
The dead and the their souls that become spirits are given a lot of importance in the subcontinent. They are listened to and respected under the pretext of them being “holy”, so to speak.
Digressing from the restaurant a bit, but here are a few examples of how spirits are interacted with in India: there are groups of people who go to common suicide spots and perform rituals to give the spirits looming around there salvation; they believe that unsatisfied souls are what encourage suicides. Also, my grand-mum used to leave a bowl of milk outside every full-moon night because she believed that my late grand-dad would come for it. It was never there in the morning and you dare not tell her that maybe the neighbor’s cat sapped it all up.
So, with that insight into an Indian belief, you can see how having a romantic candle-lit dinner at New Lucky Restaurant is anything but spooky.
14 anthropometric blocks of human excrement from Indian cities New Delhi and Jaipur are on display at London’s Lisson Gallery. The modular blocks were collected by Sulabh International Social Service Organization under a sanitary initiative and have been formalized in this exhibition by provocative and often scandalous Madrileño artist Santiago Sierra.
The human waste was collected by many Indians who were obliged to do so under some karmic belief that would redeem them from their sins of their past life. The collection was eventually mixed with mud and exported to England.
This exhibition has been interpreted as an original Santiago tactic on shedding light onto the most inhumane situations in the world.
Sierra has a history of jaw-dropping “live” exhibitions: he has paid people to masturbate in public; he once invited Germans to wear gas masks and walk through what used to be a synagogue, smoked with fumes from the exhaust pipes of cars.
I enjoy this type of live art — although concocted rather simply, they have a strong and disturbing impact; the type that keeps you thinking way after you have left the exhibition.
If you have ever travelled to India you will agree with me that the strangest of things make it a special place. There is probably no other capital city in the world where monkeys walk around as freely as people. Alongside the “holy” cow, we in India have tremendous respect for monkeys, especially because they are seen as an embodiment of our God Hanuman — a monkey God from the epic Ramayana.
However these days, as about 5000 wild monkeys roam the streets of Delhi, jump onto trains and swing off residence balconies, enter homes and steal food from the fridge (!) — they have become an intolerable menace. Recently, the capital’s mayor died as he fell from his balcony while he was fending off some simians who attacked him.
To fix this problem, other than punishing people who feed the monkeys and encourage them to interact with humans, Delhi has hired tribal monkey catchers from Madurai in Southern India to capture and relocate the estimated 20,000 monkeys from the capital — budget Rs.10 million.
The monkeys are trapped harmlessly by luring them into a cage and locking them in, once inside. They are then sent to a monkey shelter in the south of Delhi. Here’s a clip from NDTV — the capital’s news channel — that gives you a glimpse into monkey life in the city.
Here’s some good news for travelers: an Indian consumer court ruled that all airlines in India must compensate passengers for sudden cancellations or long delays that cause “mental agony and harassment.” (Delays from bad weather are exempt.) The ruling came after passengers complained and demonstrated.
Although the article from the AP doesn’t detail what counts as “agony,” I can certainly think of a few situations: missing a connecting flight, missing a connecting flight and then your $2500 cruise, missing a connecting flight and subsequently your sister’s wedding — you get the point.
I’m glad to see that that someone is setting a precedence, even if it’s overseas. Anyone up for a protest at JFK?
Thanks to jyang825 on Flickr for the photo of the Bangalore airport.