'Sundar Jeebon' by Sandeep Chattopadhyay

A film by my friend Sandeep--won the National Film Award for Best Short Fiction in 2003.

Sundar Jeebon from Sandeep Chatterjee on Vimeo.

Here we are at Oly Pub.

Kisi Disco Mein Jaye - Bade Miyan Chote Miyan

Apropos of nothing--just in the mood for Govinda and Raveena Tandon

What makes for a successful city?

Urban gardens: The future of food?

With penny-farthings, handlebar mustaches and four-pocket vests back in fashion, the rise of urban farming should just about complete our fetish for the late 1800s. Today, you can find chicken coops on rooftops in Brooklyn, N.Y., goats in San Francisco backyards, and rows of crops sprouting across empty lots in Cleveland.

That it fits so snugly into the hipster-steampunk throwback trend is what makes urban farming ripe for ridicule. (“Portlandia” has taken a crack or two at it.) But could city-based agriculture ever make the leap from precious pastime to serious player in our cities’ food systems — not just for novelty seekers and committed locavores, but for the Safeway-shopping masses?

“I don’t want to make a statement like, ‘This is the future of farming,’” says Gotham Greens co-founder Viraj Puri, sitting at his laptop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, steps away from hundreds of rows of butter lettuce. “It’s probably never going to replace conventional farming. But it has a role to play.”

For more read: Urban gardens: The future of food?

Hour of the Furnaces - Ideological Warfare

The One AM Radio - In a City Without Seasons

Rick Santorum's Evisceration of the 'Family'

In my article "Family Values, Social Capital and Contradictions of American Modernity" (abstract below), I show how former Senator and current Presidential candidate Rick Santorum's defense of family comes at great expense--he actually has to empty the concept of family of all meaning.

"Family Values, Social Capital and Contradictions of American Modernity," Theory, Culture & Society July 2011 28: 96-123.
Contemporary American social and political discourses have integrated concerns about family values into the realm of debates about the associational life of social capital. In these discussions, theoretical and historical confusions about the relations between family and civil society run rampant. In this article, I first bring theoretical clarity to these social structures and the type of relations upon which they are predicated and, second, briefly historicize the relationships between an American idea of family and civil society. By tracing changes in popular understandings of family and civil society, I demonstrate that the modern family values movement spurns its Victorian roots by maintaining the nostalgic language for a life and family of old built around a Christian home, while embracing means and institutions, and even more importantly, a form of family, which belies the nostalgia. The family has now become an institution or association which can be sustained through instrumental interventions; it is no longer to do with the organic relations of sentiment remaining from some long-faded Gemeinschaft. The family and the Christian home ideal, which were at the center of American critiques of modernization, have ceased to be.

In the future, urban bikers go faster than cars

In Hollywood movies, the cities of the future have speeding monorails and flying cars, everyone careening toward their destination at a zillion miles per hour. (The future always looks surprisingly like “The Jetsons,” which turns 50 next year.)

It makes for great CGI. But does it make for a great city? For generations, velocity has defined the urban experience: screeching subways, maniacal taxis, hustling crowds. Life in the fast lane. A New York minute is no minute at all. Even as our roads become clogged with traffic, we think of cities as most city-like when they move at a blur.

But look around (if you have a second) and you might notice that a lot of the new ideas seeping into cities are aimed not at making them faster, but slowing them down. The buzziest mode of transport now is a bicycle. Streetcars, a pokey throwback, are returning. Walkable neighborhoods, traffic-calming measures and “slow zones” are catching on, and freeways are being torn down and replaced with lower-speed boulevards. Even things like sit-down pedestrian plazas and pop-up cafes seem to indicate a desire to slacken the pace.

For more, see: In the future, urban bikers go faster than cars

The New York Times' Critique of 'Home'

In his fin-de-siècle novel A Hazard of New Fortunes, William Dean Howells writes of Basil and Isabel March’s frantic search for housing, as they decamp from the staid Boston for a New York that was thought to be a homeless city. (Middle class commentators—like Jacob Riis and Howells, among others—considered the city to be homeless.) For them, a Babelian cacophony arose from the streets, decades before towers glowered down on the mutually incomprehensible sounds. Five-story tenement walk-ups enclosed darkness, staleness—holding light and air at bay. Journalists wrote of these throngs as spilling out from the stale, dank air of their semi-private enclosures. Though kitchens—with rough-hewn tables and stoves for warming coffee, food and people—provided a small locus for gathering, domestic life was thought to spill forth from tenements to flow into fire escapes, streaming onto sidewalks to join among the cart peddlers, and surging into the streets.

Into this industrializing city overflowing with immigrants, the puritanical Marches undertake a frenzied search for quarters. After a relentless day of unsatisfactory house-searching, Isabel tells her husband:

[T]he flat abolishes the family consciousness. It’s confinement without coziness; it’s cluttered without being snug. You couldn’t keep a self-respecting cat in a flat; you couldn’t go down cellar to get cider. No: the Anglo-Saxon home, as we know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in the Franco-American flat—not because it’s humble, but because it’s false.

Apparently, the new millenium New York Times, agrees. I have been trying to receive home delivery from the Times for several weeks, after recently moving back to the East Coast. I had migrated away from Times online, since they began charging a fee to access their website. Most other newspapers around the globe have found a business model which enables readers to access their online content for free, so I have frequented the BBC, the Washington Post, and for local goings on, The New Yorker.

When I moved to the tri-state area, I thought I would resume weekend home delivery, which would then in turn enable online access. I was quite excited about getting back to the Times. My first weekend went off without a problem. Alas, that was the end of the home delivery. The following Saturday I received no paper and no replacement paper—but was given a credit. On Sunday morning, again no paper. A replacement paper arrived in the afternoon but was only delivered to the lobby some twenty floors below. But the escalation in communications was to resolve the issue.

On a Saturday, a week later, I again received no paper but was assured that I would have the replacement by 2:30 in the afternoon—so much for morning coffee and the newspaper. Alas, when the replacement paper never materialized, I received another credit and a promise that all would be well. I assured customer service that one more mess up would result in cancellation of my subscription.

On Sunday morning, the delivery person decided that a sarcastic joke was more important than customer retention—the New York Post was delivered.

I am now back to the BBC, the Post and a host of other papers around the globe who want customers. I cannot help but think that the high-rise flat must not measure up to the expectations of home, and so home delivery is impossible.

Lobbying Firm's Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine Occupy Wall Street

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ClGC Memo.