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  That's my cousin!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Olafur Eliasson is all the rage in NYC this summer, he has exhibits on the East River, MOMA and PS 1. We walked the Brooklyn Bridge to see his art on the East River. It was hard to see from such a distance, but the idea is to lift water up, opposite from the direction of gravity and then have it fall, like a waterfall. I like his photographs of Iceland. NEW YORK, January 17, 2008—Take your time: Olafur Eliasson is the first comprehensive survey in the United States of works by Olafur Eliasson, whose large-scale immersive environments, installations, sculptures, and photographs elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Iceland, at the same time as they foreground the sensory experience of the work itself. Drawing from public and private collections worldwide, the exhibition will include 34 works that explore Eliasson’s diverse range of artistic production from 1991 to the present, including six new works created specifically for The Museum of Modern Art ...

Here is Mira, enjoying the petting zoo at Roosevelt Island Day. Picture is from the Main Street Wire.

Sheela Reddy profiles historian Upinder Singh in Outlook. I like the idea of visiting ancient sites while writing about them. Also I did not know that the simple game of Pithoo, is 5,000 years old..I like her middle path approach critiquing both hyper-nationalist right-wingers or blindly following the Marxist historians. You can't miss it," says historian Upinder Singh rather apologetically, giving directions to her home in the St Stephen's staff quarters. "It looks like a fortress." It does: a towering blank metal gate, of which a chocolate square pops open at the first knock to reveal the head of a grim securityman. And there's a whole posse of Black Cats behind the gate, befitting the home of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's daughter. But inside, it's a different world: cane chairs, cement floors and peeling white walls. The shabby-genteel world of two university dons who, between them, share most of the housework—there's a part-time cook, Neen...

Outlook has an interview with Ashis Nandy who has been charged by the Gujarat Police for criminal offense. This blog has also been attacked by the Hindu and Sikh right. The piece on Martha Nussambaum always gets strange comments written in poor English by Hindu fundamentalists. It is so important for other voices to be heard, so that communal, purist and fundamentalist belligerence does not get center stage. Famously trenchant political psychologist Ashis Nandy is charged with criminal offence by the Gujarat police for "inflaming" communal hatred. His crime: an article he wrote in January blaming Gujarat's middle-class Hindus for destroying communal harmony in the state. In an interview with Sheela Reddy, Nandy lashes out at Gujarat's NRI-inspired culture of hate and what it's doing to the national fabric. Why did an article blaming Gujarat's middle class for the Hindu-Muslim divide anger Narendra Modi? I don't know if it angered Modi but it surely angere...

You have a problem preoccupying you, you don't know the solution of the problem; well, you objectify your problem in your mind, put it in the most precise, exact, succinct terms possible, and then concentrate, make an effort; you concentrate only on the words, and if possible on the idea they represent, that is, upon your problem - you concentrate, concentrate, concentrate until nothing else exists but that. And it is true that, all of a sudden, you have the feeling of something opening, and one is on the other side. The other side of what?... It means that you have opened a door of your consciousness, and instantaneously you have the solution of your problem. It is an excellent method of learning "how" to identify oneself. For instance, you are with someone. This person tells you something, you tell him the contrary (as it usually happens, simply through a spirit of contradiction) and you begin arguing. Naturally, you will never come to any point, except a quarrel if you...

 

I heard Mr. Madhav Chavan give a wonderful talk on Pratham and the Read India movement sweeping India. By 2010, 60 million kids will have been reached through the integrated schools program. The Read India program was started in 1997 and 70 million kids have been impacted by Jan 2007. Pratham asked the government to publish the data on education in India. In 2005 86% of India was surveyed. And 90% of the children did go to school. But Pratham found that 50% of that school going population was not reading even at a first grade level. Also the percentage of kids in the Southern states were reading at a lower level than kids in the Northern states. He compared the Read India program to Teach for America program. He said he had started this project with a simple idea of doing the right thing. This had lead to volunteers agreeing to tutor young kids within their communities. The volunteering made the teachers feel important within the community, by giving them a role and status in the vill...

Outlook is reporting that Dr. Geeta Shroff is using stem cells to cure patients. The ethical issues of using human embryonic stem cells remain. Two years ago, 33-year-old Shannon Centman, an American Navy officer stationed in Port Huenme, California, fell asleep at the wheel. The next thing she knew, her car was wrapped around a pole, and she was being flung 50 feet back through the cold night air. Shannon resurfaced to find herself a paraplegic—"dead from the mid-back, all the way down". Her doctor told her she would never walk again. "I told him, 'I don't think so!'" Shannon recalls. "Oh, I can't wait to see him now! I'll walk in the door and say, 'How're you doing?' Now I can stand up with the help of callipers and I can use the rest-room like a normal human being!" The turnaround took place, Shannon says, after just six weeks at Dr Geeta Shroff's Delhi clinic, Nutech Mediworld, where regular injections of human embr...