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Today a trip out to Majnu Kha Tilla, a suburb of Delhi, where there’s a Tibetan enclave. A haven of peace!

The temple is fairly small, with the usual beautiful collection of thankas and rupas. I was particularly drawn to a White Tara rupa.

Get the metro to Vidhan Sabha. It’s a 10/- rps ride on a cycle rickshaw from there.

And I’ve just dicovered that my ‘waitlisted’ reservation – I was no. 18 on the list – has been converted to a confirmed reservation. I’m off to Jaisalmer. This time I’m going to Delhi Junction Station by metro. The announcements on the metro really do say: Please Mind the Gap, though there’s no gap to be seen.

The whole journey from Amsterdam to Delhi went absurdly well and to schedule. When I’d cleared immigration and picked up my luggage, it was still a bit early to be looking around for a hotel, so I hung out at the airport until about 5.30, then got a taxi into town. I had the name and address of a hotel which had been recommended, but it took the taxi driver a while to find it. On the way, he tried to drop me in two places which were clearly not where I’d asked to go – and one of them was a dark alley where I definitely did not want to get out and explore.

Today has been the familiar culture shock: the heat, the noise, the crowds, the riches and poverty, the shoe-shine boys, the touts, the strange crumbling remnants of the British Raj. Of course, there are many, many changes since I was last here, in 1988, but my main impression is actually that it’s just the same. Or maybe it’s just the effect on me that’s the same! One difference: where’s that smell of bidis gone?

And not a spitoon in sight, just lots of spitting.

So … here’s a mix of music which begins with Fairuz evoking Christ’s Passion closely followed by Emily van Evera singing the famous Dido’s Lament from Purcell’s opera Dido & Aeneas. Two sublime voices from very different traditions.

There’s Chôros No. 1, one of the best-known guitar pieces by Villa-Lobos, followed by another sublime voice, that of Amália Rodrigues, singing Fado da Adiça.

Rokia Traoré sings Finini next. The translation of the words of this song is:

Nobody has both everything and nothing
Everything’s favouritism and inconvenience
That’s the way it is
Some people say that what we are, we asked for it
Others think that everything has a transcendent reason
Still others receive everything with a peaceful fatalism
No matter what your principles are
Hold the cloth that absorbs tears

Ghazal play a piece called Pari Mahal, which is followed by To a Dead Friend, part of the soundtrack to Eternity and a Day, composed by Eleni Karaindrou. The mix ends with a cheeky bit of froth from Werner Egk’s opera La Tentation de Saint Antoine, sung by Janet Baker.

Atkinson is particularly good at beginnings. Here’s the beginning of ‘Tunnel of Fish‘:

If Eddie could have chosen, he would have been a fish. A large fish without enemies, free to spend all day swimming lazily amongst the reeds and rushes in clear, blood-cold water. His mother, June, said not to worry, he was halfway there already, with his mouth hanging open all the time like a particularly dull-witted amphibian, not to mention the thick lenses of his spectacles that made his eyes bulge like a haddock’s.
Afterwards, of course, June had regretted saying that, but sometimes Eddie was so infuriatingly gormless that she couldn’t help herself. June had hoped that the removal of his adenoids when he was eight would make Eddie look more intelligent. It hadn’t. She had had the same expectations at nine for his spectacles. Most people she knew looked brainier with glasses, yet somehow Eddie contrived to look even more dopey. June thought that the grommets in his ears at ten would raise him from the undersea world of the deaf, and theoretically they had done, according to his ENT consultant, yet Eddie still behaved as if he couldn’t hear a word June said. Which was just as well, June thought, seeing as half the time the things she said to him were not very nice.

Despite the very down-to-earth style, the genre is definitely magic realism. What Gabriel Garcia Márquez might have come up with if he’d been born into the English middle classes, been educated at a good grammar school and gone on to get a first from a red-brick university. A big if, I suppose.

also new is the flickr plugin, which is ‘Flickr Photo Album‘, written by joe tan, seen here asleep on a plane. this is a great plugin; i’ve tested quite a few flickr plugins over the last 2 or 3 years and this is the most comprehensive and trouble-free i’ve come across. installing it was a breeze – for which i’m very grateful. i stumbled a little when it came to customising the photoalbum pages to fit the viola theme, but in the end it was very simple.

jona took this with his own camera when we stopped on the afsluitdijk on the way to schiermonnikoog – what a great photo! don’t you think?

In the introduction to his book ['Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq'], [Dahr Jamail] quotes the story of an indigenous Canadian hunter who was called to give evidence at an inquiry into a planned dam that would flood his homeland and destroy his traditional way of life. The hunter was asked to swear on the Bible that he would tell the truth, but he had never seen a Bible and wondered how this miraculous truth-telling instrument worked. “He spoke with the translator at length,” writes Jamail, “and finally the translator looked up at the judge. ‘He does not know whether he can tell the truth. He says he can tell only what he knows.’”

this story would make most epistemologists blanch. but so much the worse for most epistemologists.

link to an interesting site for independent journalism on iraq – electroniciraq.net

i don’t know about you, but as soon as i read about the possibility that micro$oft would take over yahoo, i began to search for an alternative to flickr.com (part of yahoo) to host my photos.

there’s google’s picasa, of course, but i’ve always found it appallingly slow and it seems to insist on running programs on my computer to inventarise and manage all the images on my hard drives. this i don’t want. i just want somewhere to put my photos where anyone (i choose) can get at them.

but there’s 23hq.com. i’d never heard of it before but it seems to have all the main features a modest user of flickr like me would need. there isn’t an API, which means little chance of swish facebook applications, but there is an RSS feed and even a wordpress plugin called ‘23hq integrator‘ (which i have yet to test).

23hq is also danish, which somehow feels like a breath of confidence-inspiring fresh air.

and … del.icio.us is also part of yahoo. now the search for an alternative to del.icio.us …