Well. I even shed a tear leaving India. I forced the driver to play a cd called Hindi Film Nostalgia 4 all the way to the airport. I suspect he enjoyed it as much as I did. Had a delicious final dinner with my friend Arul’s parents. Prawn moily and appams. I had treated myself to the 5 star experience. Ayurvedic massage, swimming pool, bizzare demands on the staff, a driver for the day (which they made complementary!)
It was also a very humbling day as I visited a friend of my mother’s who has been running a womens refuge/hospital/training centre since 1979. It’s a 5 story building with around 500 girls living there plus another 200 staff and 500 students during the day. Seeing a class of pre-schoolers 50 in size getting their afternoon nap by resting their heads on their chairs all crowded up against each other was a bit of a wake up. Still, as the staff member who was guiding me around said “at least they’ve got clean clothes, have been fed and been paid attention to today.”
I’m in Singapore now. Taking advantage of all the free tech stuff here. Will walk round for the 3 hours till my connection to Sydney departs. Looking forward to sleeping in my own bed and making myself a coffee tomorrow morning.
Hi Rob,
wandered over here via a text of Rana’s on nettime. good old six degrees of kevin bacon… can’t find an intimate, offline email address, and have somehow lost the cultural futures info, so, just saying hi, nice to see you in ak, and good luck with the very exciting sounding project. see you at the biennale! while you’re in singapore, make sure you spend some quality time in the food hall under takashimaya…. and check out the substation, a gallery whose address i do not have, but whose existence i am confident of.
best
stella
Hi Rob,
I swear I was going to ask you more about the project today… (it wasn’t meant to be all about me!). Anyway from the little snippets I did get, I’m really excited about how it’s all progressing, looks like your India mission was a fantastic source of inspiration and endeavour. Cool.
Oh and hi Stella, nice to see you here!