In less than 60 minutes....

... you could watch SIX great short films (each less than ten minutes) on climate change. Made by award-winning film-makers. View for free, here.

walking on...

Mark Boyle's journey on foot, from Britain to Porbander via France, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

No money, no visas. Just relying on smiling and asking people to help out and explaining the Freeconomy Community.

Read him here.

post-andamans

Did you see the Jarawas?
(Did you toss them a banana?)
(Were they naked?)

Road to ruin.

Mr. S, whom we met on the ferry back from Mount Harriet, is here as part of a package arranged for him back in Ranchi. The package has covered Port Blair, Ross Island, snorkelling, Havelock island and a trip through tribal land. Mr. S saw three Jarawa children, who stepped out onto the road. He was lucky, he says, and recommends we take a trip through the forest as well, because it is worth taking the chance to see the tribals. The caves, that are ostensibly the reason people take the path that carves through the forest, are not too bad-looking either.

Traffic has apparently tripled along the road, since 2001. See here.

Where is the ladies?

The Tate Modern has new displays on cities - looking at them in terms of space, density, speed and so on with statistics, photographs and films to document the dynamics of some of the world's largest cities.

What fascinated me enough to go back again was Paromita Vohra's Q2P.

The second time around, I watched bits of it with a contrarian friend (I wish he would read this blog, but he's busy scrabbling for controversy and virtual fights elsewhere in cyberspace and none of that here!) who got completely peeved with what he seemed to consider the upper caste gaze of the filmmaker and her condescending jibes at the sort of Regular Roadside Romeo figures (in caps to mark my utmost respect for this ubiquitious constituent of life on an Indian street) who were being constantly interviewed through the film.

The filmmaker is out exploring the marginalising of women in India's public spaces and the reductivist view of her (seen as an object, rather than as a real human being with bodily functions, for instance) in popular culture and in people's attitudes and then watching this translate onto the larger canvas of public planning and city growth that ignores women.

The filmmaker chooses the gendered spaces of women's toilets looking at their practicalities and realities to reflect on the space women occupy in public. She looks at where they are situated, how small they are, how much they cost to use, who else occupies them and so on. She interviews members of the Sulabh group who set up a network of public toilets, asking them questions that relate to women's use. She interviews men. The interviews with the men are what friend objected to - most interviewees produced sniggers or looks of disbelief from the audience as they offered views which suggested they could not view women as needing to perform the same functions as them or having real needs.

Friend thought this was pointless - almost as if she was using the unknown man on the street as a fall guy and poking fun at his views? Perhaps because you could argue that these men were part of a larger culture and could not be isolated from it and then ridiculed in these rarified spaces of art gallery/sensitive film audience?

Seemed to me though like she was using irony to demonstrate how institutionalised some beliefs were. Does she not have the license to do that, to make her larger point more effective?

Watch the clip, but better still watch the entire film if you can.

hues

Finding Rachid Taha's Rock the Casbah on my iTunes has left me unexpectedly nostalgic for kasbah rooftops and inner alleys and friends who are far away dipping their toes in other exciting travels.

Speaking of nostalgia, I found some lovely photographs on a lovely blog. I want that dosa.

Smollypop

... and if I were to explore a neighbourhood's streets, I might go back to The Space at the Isle of Dogs just because that's where I watched the world's smallest freak show. And it was a riot :)

Pulse, at Coin Street this year, was such fun.
The clouds were manic.
Shikha was clicking furiously.
And my socks were perfectly matched.

The Biggest Blog in History

The National Trust is calling for people to record one day in their lives: an ordinary day, the 17th of October. It'll eventually be stored by the British Library as part of the History Matters project.

What a fun!

Mumbai monsoons

The worst monsoon in some fifty years. Lanslides. Eight hundred (and counting) dead. Villages and cities flooded. And in the middle of it all, a travel writer, barely managing to travel in a rain-lashed state, but writing.


*
News and updates here. And here an article asking some questions about the flooding. Link via Dilip.

Update: And Mumbai Help.

Living in style - Bidapa returns

India's fashion"guru" Prasad Bidapa is back. After a jail term in Dubai's Al Rashadiya prison. Was he beaten? Was he abused? Is he now a hardened man?

No!

Instead Bidapa had great food (South Indian coffee, milk, biscuits, cornflakes, cakes, chicken, mutton, lamb, fish, rice, salads, Lebanese bread), watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy, read Marquez, worked out, wrote some, organised ramp shows along the prison's corridors, made great friends and yes, even had time for face packs.

Here's the hilarious story in today's Bangalore Metro Plus.

From The Telegraph

Look! A blog story!