At a section of the Berlin Wall, we encountered a blind man being guided by his friend -- both of them wearing t-shirts from the Berlin marathon which, presumably, they had run the day before. The friend would read extensively from the exhibition kiosks before leading his buddy to the remains of the wall, guard tower and apartment blocks so together they could feel them. As I watched, it occurred to me we need an alternative term for how a blind person experiences the wonders of the world, since "sight" "seeing" clearly doesn't cut it. Any suggestions? Arriving in Paris after four days in Moscow, what was the most discernable difference between the two cities at first glance? The size of the vehicles people drive. In Paris bicycles, motorcycles and Smart Cars seem to be multiplying overnight. In Moscow, the same can be said of large, flashy sedans. True, at $8 a gallon, gas in Paris was double the price in Moscow. You would think crippling traffic would be incentive enough to downsize, but Russians don't seem to be feeling the pain. Maybe the explanation is as simple as the difference between a European society that's in a tight economic squeeze and a Russian society that's sowing its wild oats in the post-Communist era. Maybe it's the difference between a culture that believes in austerity in the name of the environment and one that won't worry itself about such things until every oil well is sucked dry. Or maybe it's both. Whatever the explanation, my husband Jeff observed there seems to be a simple inverse relationship between the size of people's apartments and the size of their vehicles in these two locales. According to his calculus, Muscovites have tiny apartments and big cars; Parisians have big apartments, tiny cars. I'll go with the Parisian model anytime. After all, what good is a big car if it's stuck in traffic all the time? Jeff's Unscientific List of Popular Cars:For more on traveling in Russia, click here
How weird is this? I hadn't seen any snow since the October shocker here in New York. And then last weekend I went to Seattle to visit friends. There, the city, accustomed to being sodden with winter drizzle, came to a virtual standstill with the accumulation of a mere two inches of snow. Over a two-day period, I saw only a couple of snow plows, both of them on major highways. Beyond that, it was up to the intrepid among us to negotiate the slushy and rutted hills that define the city by the bay. Jeff and I slipped and slid our way downtown on Saturday afternoon to check out some sights and were wowed by the Seattle Central Public Library building designed by the brilliant Rem Koolhaas (who has the awesomest name for an architect I could ever imagine). As for the breathtaking design, I'll let the accompanying pictures speak for themselves. But as for the function, let me say that Seattle has managed to redefine the metropolitan library as a place where people of all walks of life can seek both knowledge and refuge. Inside the soaring, light-filled space, we found the usual bookworms and students and tourists like us. But the frigid temperatures and snow clearly had motivated all kinds of nomads to come inside. Overflowing hikers' backpacks defined the Occupy Movement protestors; stuffed shopping bags and ragged overcoats defined the homeless; paint-spackled workclothes defined the day laborers, speaking mostly Spanish. They weren't just hanging around. They found seats at the hundreds of public computers -- provided for them, whether they had paid the taxes to build the municipal library or not. On the third floor -- or whatever floor it was you got to after taking two of the longest escalators I've ever seen -- there was a job resource center with a staffed help desk and hundreds more computers -- all of them in use. The library was as hushed and serious as any. But its colorful decor was a perfect backdrop for the diversity of its patrons, who seemed right at home taking shelter from the storm. The day I was slated to picket the White House and risk arrest to block the Keystone XL Pipeline was instead the day I attended the funeral of an amazing woman, Elizabeth Bata, a Holocaust survivor who for 93 years stood tall for what she believed in. So after hunkering down for Hurricane Irene and then hosting my son Ben on his 21st birthday (down from his temporary gig in New Hampshire), I made my way to Washington to lend my voice to the outcry (see this post for the details on the issue). A few thousand protestors were in attendance in Lafayette Park on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend to support the people who were getting arrested for trespassing on the sidewalk bordering the White House. By and large, these were people who had, like me, gone door-to-door to get Obama elected in 2008. But after the president announced last Friday that he would abandon his recent efforts to toughen air-quality standards, these people were frustrated and angry. If Obama disappoints them yet again by approving this pipeline, they'll be sitting in droves --- not under Obama's nose on the sidewalk, but on the sidelines of his re-election campaign. Do I hear a movement afoot to draft Al Gore? (Renewable) Power to the People?And what if the pipeline took a turn and ran through the White House grounds, like this...?In a few weeks from now you'll find me sitting down at the gates of the White House, with a few hundred like-minded people, waiting to get arrested. Why? Because I believe NASA's James Hansen and a whole cadre of eminent climate scientists when they tell me that if President Obama green lights a new pipeline from the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada to oil refineries in Texas, he will be guaranteeing our children a future on a dangerously overheated planet. President Obama has the unilateral authority to decide, as early as September, whether to "light a fuse to the largest carbon bomb in North America," to quote the folks at tarsandsaction.org. And we need to raise our collective voices and insist that our president honor his campaign pledge to transition us to a clean-energy economy and put the brakes on the kind of environmentally destructive and energy intensive practices being used to mine Canada's vast pristine forests and bogs for this dirtiest form of petroleum fuel. The development of the 1,700-mile-long Keystone XL Pipeline would invite the full exploitation of the Alberta Tar Sands, the world's largest oil reserve outside of Saudi Arabia and the our country's single greatest source of oil. From August 20th to September 3rd, thousands of Americans from all over the country will take turns joining in peaceful protest with dedicated environmental activists like Bill McKibben, Danny Glover and David Suzuki. They will risk arrest by getting within shouting distance of the White House to demand that the tar sands be left in the ground in order to give the planet a fighting chance to get back to a stable climate. So I'm giving three days of my time to the movement-- not much, given the high stakes. If anyone wants to join me, I'm going down on August 21st. But there are three weeks in which to act. So choose a time that's convenient for you. This issue needs your voice. Click here to sign up: http://www.tarsandsaction.org/sign-up/ credit: Sanjib Das I didn't think it was possible, but I was just transported back to India for 98 minutes via an incredibly vivid, complex and emotionally wrenching documentary called Marathon Boy, screened at the Tribeca Film Festival. Jeff and I were transfixed by this real-life "Slumdog Millionaire" story, told brilliantly in cinema verite style, about a 4-year-old boy plucked from the depths of poverty by a coach who trains him to be a champion marathon runner with the potential to one day fulfill India's Olympic dreams. But what starts out as a tale of redemption for both the boy and his financially impoverished mentor, devolves into a messy struggle among promoters, politicians, petty bureaucrats, thugs and family members who all want a piece of the boy's legacy for their own selfish reasons. In an interview, the director, Gemma Atwal, said she initially was driven to explore the psychological and spiritual relationship between the guru and his disciple. But as the story unfolded over five years of filming, it began to resemble "a Bollywood movie scripted by Dickens." In a discussion after the movie, she said even she was shocked at the twists and turns that eventually tore the characters apart, revealing the very raw underbelly of Indian society. And she remains unsure how to judge the actions and motivations of the coach who walked the fine line between saint and sinner -- which is just how we felt at the end of the movie. Editing her 300 hours of film into 98 minutes, the director was masterful in capturing the flavor of the India Jeff and I remembered from our brief two-week trip there earlier this year (click here for . The intensity of the politics, the ubiquity of the media, the tenacity of the bureaucracy, the vibrancy of the street scenes, the crushing poverty, the filth -- it was all there in sharp focus. And the passion of the people -- their way with words, their expressive eyes, their ingenuity -- that came alive, too. If you want a brief trip to India, try and see this film. The movie was partially underwritten by HBO and therefore won't have a theatrical release anytime soon. (Still, I predict an Oscar nomination.) And there's no air date yet for the film on TV. So if you're in the New York area, do yourself a favor and see one of the three remaining screenings between now and Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival. There are still tickets available to all three. Look here. Before I leave the subject of India, I have one last sweeping observation worth sharing. It has to do with egocentricity. We as Americans, no matter how worldly or well-read, still have a tendency to think that the rest of humanity is not only expecting us to pay a visit, but spend their waking hours studying our culture and keeping up with our news. On our first morning in India, the waiter serving us breakfast asked where we were from. "New York," I said. Nodding his head politely while he clearly searched his storehouse of knowledge, he then said with a smile of satisfaction, "Oh yes, I've heard of New York. That's in London, right?"
The fact of the matter is, during our two weeks in India, almost no one just assumed we were American. Looking at our fair skin -- and maybe the blue eyes in our group -- they guessed our nationality in this order almost every time: German, French, English, Australian, South African. And when they discovered we were American, they seemed surprised. When people just came out and asked, "Where are you from?," we learned over time not to just blurt out, "The U.S." or "The United States," because more often than not, the look that came back was a puzzled one. So we started saying "America," which clearly was a more recognized place on the map for Indians. Looking back, I realize that saying we were Americans may not really have clarified anything at all! Who was to say that we weren't from Canada or Guatemala or Peru -- all part of the Americas? But then, as Americans we have kind of co-opted the name to mean the "United States." A little egocentric of us, don't you think? I was on the streets of New York City during the Friday evening rush yesterday and was struck by the relative quiet around me. The sensation was like the one you have when emerging from a loud rock concert and feeling like you've got cotton in your ears or like you're in a scene where the soundtrack is missing. Here's a sample of what we've been listening to constantly in India for the past two weeks. It's not an exaggeration. Trucks bear signs on their rear ends imploring tailgaters to honk. It seems to be the only rule of the road that is universally obeyed. |
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