ambainny

Amelia Gentleman writes about office furniture from Chandigarh being auctioned at Christies for $12,000. Every working day for the past 20 years, Suresh Kanwar, a civil engineer in Chandigarh's forestry department, has been sitting on the same battered wooden chair, an object which he said had "no beauty," even if it was, "for office use, very comfortable." Hazarding a guess as to its value, he suggested 400 rupees, or $10, "perhaps, at a junkyard." A pair of identical chairs, instantly recognizable to collectors as Pierre Jeanneret teak "V-chairs," will go on sale at the auction house Christie's in New York this month with a reserve of $8,000 to $12,000. A handful of antique dealers from around the world have become regular visitors to government junkyards in Chandigarh, the experimental modernist city 250 kilometers, or 155 miles, north of New Delhi, conceived by the architect Le Corbusier in the 1950s. They buy up disused stocks of f...

Naomi Klein has a good piece in Common Dreams about the racism being directed towards Obama, because of his middle name and the color of his skin. She wants him to question the critics and re frame the debate to what is wrong with being a Muslim. Instead of his response that I am not a Muslim. Obama, Being Called a Muslim Is Not a Smear by Naomi Klein Hillary Clinton denied leaking the photo of Barack Obama wearing a turban, but her campaign manager says that even if she had, it would be no big deal. “Hillary Clinton has worn the traditional clothing of countries she has visited and had those photos published widely.” Sure she did. And George W. Bush put on a fetching Chamato poncho in Santiago, while Paul Wolfowitz burned up YouTube with his antimalarial African dance routines when he was World Bank prez. The obvious difference is this: when white politicians go ethnic, they just look funny. When a black presidential contender does it, he looks foreign. And when the ethnic apparel in...

Tehelka has a candid interview with Arundhati Roy. I love her last line. "It’s not like one is looking for a new life in a supermarket." It’s 10 years since Arundhati Roy wrote The God of Small Things, won the Booker, and was shot out of a cannon into a mega-space that has few literary equals. Sitting against the fading light of a window in her beautiful wood and stone barsati in New Delhi, in one of her most personal interviews ever, she revisits the journey — its elations and its ambiguities — with SHOMA CHAUDHURY It’s ten years now. Looking back, what did the Booker do to you? It’s a little difficult for me to say because the Booker is conflated with so much else. From the moment I finished the manuscript, everything took off at such a trajectory — the Booker was just a part of it. I suppose it formalised it all, in a way. It was simultaneously a release and a burden. On the one hand, there was this artificiality that got me. It was almost as if we were all boy scouts say...

Tehelka has a shocking story on the imprisonment of Dr. Binayak Sen. By all accounts he seems to be innocent and a Gandhian who gave up privileges to go help the very poor in the tribal areas. The untenable imprisonment and victimisation of Dr Binayak Sen, a heroic humanitarian from Chhattisgarh, exposes Indian democracy as increasingly hollow, says SHOMA CHAUDHURY. Photographs by SHAILENDRA PANDEY FAR AWAY from the glittering salons of Bombay and Delhi, away from its obsessions with booming malls and plummeting stocks, a good man waits in jail. He’s Doctor Love: Binayak talks urgently of famine and inclusive growth through iron bars been in for nine months. But it is unlikely that the story of Dr Binayak Sen would have caught your attention. He’s been written about in bits. Some channels have covered him. But even though he is a mesmeric character — intense, articulate, idealistic, a man of privilege who seeks nothing for himself — and his imprisonment is a scandal that should shame ...