Taken December 7, 2013 on Commercial Street in Bangalore.
This is one of the more ornate and less modern storefronts on Commercial Street.
Commercial Street is the heart of a market district in central Bangalore. It’s a short street that runs parallel to, and a few blocks north of, MG Road.
Taken October 16, 2013 in Delhi.
The India Gate honors 70,000 Indians who died during World War I fighting on behalf of the United Kingdom. Beneath the arch is India’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
It’s India’s answer to the Arc de Triomphe, and it sits at the opposite end of the Rajpath from the President’s house, i.e. the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Like the President’s house, the Gate was designed by Edwin Lutyens, a famous British architect.
The India Gate is among the must-see sights for visitors to New Delhi.
Taken October 13, 2013 at Fatehpur Sikri.
Red sandstone dominates the scene at Fatehpur Sikri, a 16th century Mughal city near Agra. The architecture is beautiful, but the view can be a bit drab. There are two areas where this monotony of hue is broken. One is the white marble in the Tomb of Salim Chishti (as well as some decorative accent white marble on the mosque itself.) The other is this little garden which inserts a field of green and rose-red into the mix.
Taken November 2013 at Queen’s Restaurant in Bangalore
I took this in a dimly lit Bangalore restaurant with a cellphone. Needless to say, it did not turn out well, but it’s something different for a Sunday. My chicken tikka came with a cool tomato lantern. It looks like something that fell out of Iron Man’s chest in this photo, but was a pleasant piece of ambiance in person.
Queen’s is a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Church St. I’ve found the food to be consistently good, though the decor might keep the faint-of-heart out.
Taken October 15 in Delhi
Connaught Place is a bulls-eye in the heart of Delhi. The inner circle is Rajiv Chowk and the outermost loop is Indira Chowk. The name Connaught obviously goes back to India’s colonial past. It was named for the first Duke of Connaught, Prince Arthur. Today it’s a popular hangout, has one of the busiest Metro stations in the city, contains a keyhole shaped park, and is surrounded by many corporate headquarters. Careful though, it also has one of the highest concentrations of shysters and con men in the city.
Taken November 23 at Hoysaleshwara Temple in Halebidu
For almost 900 years poor schlubs have had to scrub their way around this temple, washing its ornate carvings.
I wonder how similar or different the workers of past generations looked? Obviously, they didn’t have molded plastic water jugs, but the pottery version might have looked similar (not the day-glo lime green one, but certainly the brick-colored one.) No dress shirts or ball caps back then, but the turbans and sarongs are probably not so out-of-place.
Of course, the scaffolding, rough-cut wood lashed together, gives it an ancient feel.
Probably, the most striking difference is the female job foreman.
Taken October 16, 2013 at Indira Gandhi International Airport.
In the Delhi airport, there is a series of 12 bronze sculptures set up on a spiral platform that together demonstrate the yoga sequence called Surya Namaskara (i.e. Sun Salutation) The sculptor is Nikhil Bhandari.
I think this was a nice move. If ever one needed yoga, it’s in an airport–having been packed into a tiny space for hours and with high stress about whether one will get where one wants to go, it’s the perfect place to bust out the yoga.
Taken November 23, 2013 at Belur.
This is the gate into the Chennakeshava temple in Belur. In the foreground is the base of a pillar that served to hold the temple lantern that let all find the temple in the darkness. (Fun fact: the pillar isn’t secured to the base. That is, it’s held in place by gravity.) The base is the same multi-sided shape as the temple mounts.
Below is a pic of the lantern pillar (it’s not as askew as it appears in the pic.) (Fun fact #2: if you type askew into Google’s browser it will twist the page askew.)
Taken December 7, 2013 in Cox Town.
I took this photo yesterday in Cox Town as we were walking over to the United Charities Bazaar (a great and highly recommended event.) It’s a tree that juts out into the road next to a small Hindu temple. When they put in a flyover, they cut away quite a bit of the tree, but the part that remains seems to be thriving.
When one moves to a new country, one experiences a wide variety of cultural insights. All of a sudden, this invisible thing called culture becomes visible. There are, of course, many norms that grate on one’s nerves with respect to the culture one has been transplanted into. In the vast majority of cases, there isn’t anything inherently wrong with the new culture–they are just differences, just shocks to one’s system. There are a few cultural proclivities that one can fairly say are objectively inferior, and it’s a testament to India that they are trying to fix these problems (e.g. by outlawing the caste, by trying to prevent killing off of girl children, etc.)
However, if one is honest with oneself, one also gains insight into one’s native culture, and its particular inferiorities. As I said, we take culture so for granted that we don’t necessarily even see the peculiarities of our own culture. One of the Indian norms that I find most laudable is the preservation of living things to the extent possible. Put alternatively, one of the norms of my own culture that I’ve come to find most dismaying is the belief that anything that causes a person the least inconvenience must die immediately.
I imagine that some Westerners in India find it to be a pain to have to step out into the street when walking down the sidewalk because there are occasionally ten-foot diameter trees hogging the whole sidewalk. In the US, they’d just cut down the big tree and replace it with a dwarf tree of some sort that would never give them a problem–and if it did, just get out the saw.
Taken November 29, 2013 at Daria Dalaut in Mysore.
This cannon points right at the main entry to Daria Dalaut, Tipu Sultan’s palace in Mysore. It seems a tad inhospitable, but one can’t be too careful.
Taken November 29, 2013.
The gun doesn’t look so imposing from the end of the first cement pond, and is just a speck from the gate.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 