Mar

18

The Invasion of Indian Manhole Covers

March 18, 2005 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

“…The beauty of manhole covers–what of that?
Like medals struck by a great savage khan,
Like Mayan calendar stones, unliftable, indecipherable…”
- Karl Shapiro (1913-2000, The Bourgeois Poet)

Pulitzer prize winning poet Karl Shapiro once wrote a beautiful poem about the ‘rustproof’ and ‘dated’ beauty of America’s manhole covers. Little did he know that America’s new manholes would all eventually be medals struck by the great savage khan’s great Indian neighbors.

Few people know that India is now the world leader in the manufacturing of manhole covers. Most of New York city’s manhole covers have been coming from India for the last several years. Though New York probably still has american manholes going back as far as 1840s, all of the new ones come from the low-cost Indian market.

The software giant Microsoft typically asked this question of its prospective candidates: ‘Why are manhole covers round’? It fetched a range of answers from the smartypants ‘because the manholes are round’ to the more technical ‘because the round shape prevents the covers from falling in’. (To prevent falling inside the manhole, the cover needs to be either a simple round shape or a more complicated ‘reuleaux polygon’).

Karl Shapiro spent the last six years of his life in New York city, and definitely must have seen the invasion of Indian manhole covers. And unlike in his poem, the covers did not come from the country of the great savage khan, but from the country of Shahrukh and Salman and Ameer Khan.

Karl Shapiro
Manhole Covers - Karl Shapiro
Indian manhole covers go places in the US
Reuleaux Triangle

Mar

17

It Happens only in India….

March 17, 2005 posted by indiatime | 1 Comment

Spider Man in India to Marry the Lizard-girl

Hundreds flocked to Mumbai’s J. J. Hospital this week to witness a miraculous feat of nature. The rumors spread like wildfire. A young girl visitor in one of the wards had apparently turned into a lizard. The hospital security staff rose to the occasion but it was finally the dean Dr Shingare of JJ Hosipital who had to break the disppointing news to the mob.
It’s a girl, it’s a lizard, it’s a rumour

Stupid Is As Stupid Says

A Mumbai man’s wife committed suicide 2 weeks ago, when she found out that her husband Sukhdev had been hiding his HIV-positive status from her for two years. Sukhdev and his mom had told the woman that he was in fact suffering from TB. When he heard that his wife had killed herself, Sukhdev said “I think she was stupid…I’ve had the disease for last two years..nothing happens…”

Several years ago, a CBS-60 Minutes team was interviewing a dying AIDS patient in Mumbai. “How are you doing..are you afraid?”, he asked the patient. “No..I’m not, but you yourself aren’t here for ever either…Are you not afraid..” snapped back the patient.
Wife of HIV+ man kills herself

Mar

16

The Great Indian Flood of 2010

March 16, 2005 posted by indiatime | Leave a Comment

Lord Rama’s ancestor King Bhagiratha is said to have brought the Ganges from heaven to the earth, basically to purify the ashes of his own ancestors. Sadly, Bhagiratha’s descendants and their buddies around the planet have been wreaking such havoc with nature for a couple hundred years, that the Goddess Ganges is all set to disapppear back to the heavens.

The latest report by WWF on the health of Himalayan glaciers is not just alarming and scary, but it has the potential to change the history and geography of the Indian subcontinent within the next few years. The report states that the Himalayan glaciers are now receding at a very rapid pace of almost 15 meters per year.

This will initially cause widespread flooding in the region covered by the glaciers (basically the basins of Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus), and will eventually lead to rapidly declining water levels with widespread drought. The implications are catastrophic.

The Himalayan glaciers are the largest body of water outside the polar ice caps and they cover an area of about 3 million hectares. The basin of the Ganges river supplies water to 10 percent of humanity. Even by modest estimates, the glacier area will shrink to less than one-fifth its current size in the next 25 years.

The recent Tsunami disaster brought home the consequences of the inactivity and procrastination on the governmental side. If nothing is done, India and its neighboring countries will face an apocalyptic threat from the vanishing Himalayan glaciers. First, the great flood of 2010 and then the prospect of the great Ganges desert. Long live Bhagiratha!

Water crisis looms as Himalayan glaciers retreat
Himalayan glaciers ‘melting fast’
Himalayan glaciers ? alarm grows

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