Apul’s post yesterday demonstrated the importance of the phallus in South Asian culture. As if on cue, Delhi officials announced today that they will be going ahead with plans to build the world’s tallest building on the outskirts of their city. From The Guardian Unlimited:
Local officials said the building in Noida would be 710 metres (2,330ft) tall – 202 metres higher than Taiwan’s Taipei 101, the current tallest building on the planet.
The skyscraper, said to have been designed to resemble the peaks of the Himalayas, is scheduled to be open for business by 2013.
It will contain a 50-floor five-star hotel, a 40-storey glass atrium and 370,000 sq metres (4m sq ft) of shopping centres.
“New York in the 30s, Malaysia in the 90s and China today all have used tall buildings to showcase their countries to the world,” said Hafeez Contractor, the architect behind the building.
“We want this building to show to the world what India can do.”
Ummm. How about working on poverty and literacy first. As you can imagine not EVERYONE is happy about this:
…some experts are critical of the new wave of Indian design, which they say simply mimics what others have done before and does not take account of local conditions.
“It’s not suited for Indian conditions. We do not have enough water. We do not have the uninterrupted electricity supply,” said Balkrishna Doshi, one of India’s most respected urban designers.
“The building will need its own power plant to make sure the lifts do not stop when the electricity does.”
Let’s see if plans for the building thrust forward or end up going limp when faced with pressure from the inevitable protests.
Afternoon TV is so funky sometimes. Today, the Christian channel was not showing a silver-haired white guy with expansive hand gestures, clad in a shiny double-breasted suit. Instead, it was showing a desi couple, the guy with those huge uncle glasses, singing a ghazal in Hindi, interleaved with clips of folk dancing.
Pardon my parochialness, but I’ve never seen this before. Fusion? Talvin and Karsh got nothin’ on the church. Similarly, I’ve always been fascinated by how omnivorously religious many Hindus are. They practice it like metareligion where other ‘one-and-only’ deities are merely slotted into the pantheon. I often see Bollywood philms where a Hindu protagonist’s idea of the holy trinity is to pray at a temple, a church and a gurudwara all in the same day. And many Punjabi Hindus attend their local gurudwara instead of temple. I’d imagine it all drives hardcore monotheists crazy.
