Saturday, February 20, 2010

Saturday Special: Lost Cities, Sarai, The Onion and more

Sarai celebrated it's tenth year in Delhi last week with a wide range of activities and performances.  I've got it from reliable sources that Ashis Nandy made some interesting remarks about the many kinds of cities out there in the world: cities that define themselves in relationship to the village; cities that define themselves in relationship to other cities; ancient cities, lost cities, etc.  Delhi, of course, is many cities at once.  Regardless of what the organizers of the Commonwealth Games want us to think, the village remains important in the way this city understands itself, because most of the lakhs of people who come to Delhi do not come from Paris or London. 

Today, I'm taking the metro to Old Delhi and that's got to say something about what kind of city we live in. But it's Saturday, and I don't have the energy to write a serious essay about how we imagine the cities we live in.  Instead, I'm going to make an entirely different kind of contribution to this discussion. Here are the people at The Onion discussing another kind of lost civilization.

Will Facebook, Blogger, Twitter be next?
****
P. Sainath on the ABC's of Indian Media: Advertising, Bollywood, Corporate power
A story worth watching: Shyam Saran resigns his post.

2 comments:

  1. Good to see the refreshing post on lost civilization. Mishaps don't happen in real world alone, they are part & parcel of virtual world too. :P

    ReplyDelete
  2. @Kabir--very true, though perhaps the virtual stakes are not quite so high as the real ones!

    ReplyDelete

What do you think?