#India connection

[murvinnriservices]

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[internationalinsight]

US Presidential Election 2024 And Its Double India Connection

It's been an eventful month in US politics ahead of the November 5 presidential elections. First, President Joe Biden came under severe criticism for what many described as an abysmal performance in the first presidential debate. And then, last Saturday, his Republican counterpart Donald Trump was shot at during a rally in Pennsylvania. The former president survived the attack with a minor injury on his ear.

As the world prepares for what's likely to be a neck-and-neck contest between the two candidates, there's another aspect of these elections worth taking note of - its India connection.

Four years ago, it was Kamala Harris, who created history when she became the US Vice President. This time, there's another individual with roots in India. It's Usha Vance, the wife of JD Vance, who is former President Donald Trump's running mate.

Kamala Harris traces her roots in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu where her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was born. Ms Shyamala went to the US as a teenager to pursue a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. There, she met Donald J. Harris, and the two got married in 1963. They had two daughters, Kamala Harris (born 1964) and Maya.

Meanwhile, Usha Chilukuri Vance was born to immigrant parents from Chilakaluripeta, Andhra Pradesh. She graduated from Yale University with a degree in History, then earned her M.Phil in Early Modern History from Columbia University, and a JD in Law from Yale Law School. She has worked in prestigious law firms and at the US Supreme Court as a legal clerk.

If Biden wins, Kamala Harris will continue her role as Vice President. However, if Trump and Vance emerge victorious, Usha Vance will become the Second Lady and will live at the Naval Observatory.

Recent polls show the popularity of candidates among US voters. According to YouGov, Kamala Harris is liked by 49 per cent of people, while only 28 per cent approve of JD Vance. The poll also shows that many Americans are still deciding what they think about Vance, who is still little-known in presidential politics.

A year ago, in July 2023, Republican and Indian-origin Hirsh Vardhan Singh announced his bid for the US President in 2024 against Donald Trump who was facing legal challenges. He had filed his candidacy and declared himself a "lifelong Republican" and "America First" conservative. He also referred to himself as the "only pureblood candidate" because he "never gave in to the COVID vaccinations."

[katnapsh]

Pool in Bengaluru

Example of a large trendy courtyard stone and rectangular aboveground pool fountain design

[terresdebrume]

It's funny (and great!) seeing fics where Charles is able to share his Indian heritage with the gang... at the same time, I think I find him more relatable if he's missing connections to it x)

I wasn't taught Guadeloupean culture : I don't speak creole, I don't know how to cook the cuisine, I don't have a real understanding of how it works, and anyone who could have taught me is either dead or not really a part of my life (granted, I'm further down the generation line since migration than Charles is)

So I guess for me it's interesting to look at Charles from the angle of like. Here's this thing that was a huge part of my mother's life and for whatever reason she's not sharing it with me, and I don't have like. A reason or a space to dig into it so why would I right? It's not a big deal.

Until the moments when it is

[maihonhassan]

When Maulana Tariq Jameel said;

“Zameen tumhara kuch nahi bigaar sakti agar tumhara asmaan se taaluq mazboot ho.”

I felt that !

[chaiaurchaandni]

JCB bulldozers: a tool of oppression across Palestine, India & Kashmir

via southasiasolidaritygroup

[theupfish]

One of the world's oldest and most persecuted religions is making a comeback

If you live in "the West," you might not have heard much about the Zoroastrian religion, outside of that memorable monologue in the first "Austin Powers" movie. But as priceless as that speech is, the Zoroastrian religion deserves to be known for more than just shaving Dr. Evil's balls. Actually, if you follow any Abrahamic faith, your religion owes its existence in part to Zoroastrianism.

Originating in Iran, Zoroastrianism is one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions. It's founder Zarathustra, AKA Zoroaster, lived some time between 1,500-1,000 BCE. He was one of the first in his part of the world to preach the idea of a single, non-corporal deity, as well as the idea of an eternal battle between good and evil. Fire factors into many Zoroastrian rituals, but they don't literally worship it, which is a common misconception.

In Hebrew school, my teachers taught us that ours was the first monotheistic religion. In my Hebrew teachers' defense, it was the 90s, and information was nowhere near as easy to come by as it is now; plus, half of them were in still high school themselves (our synagogue was tiny). In any case, Judaism took inspiration from Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrianism is to Judaism as "Dune" is to "Star Wars." And by extention, Christianity, Islam, Baha'ism, and the Druze religion have a bit of Zoroastrianism in them.

Zoroastrianism uh, declined after Islam became the main religion of Iran. Some Zoroastrians chose to remain in their homeland despite persecution. Others emigrated, and moved throughout the Middle East and South Asia before finally finding refuge in India. This group is now known as the Parsi people.

Freddie Mercury of Queen was a Zoroastrian Parsi.

Zoroastrianism has remained a small religion in numbers, not only due to the persecution, but also because like Judaism, Zoroastrianism has red tape for converts, which it doesn't seek out, and sometimes the kids of mixed marriages aren't counted as members of the faith. (Link)

However, Zoroastrianism is now making a comeback in Iran. The Islamic Republic of Iran has backfired, causing many Iranians to secretly leave Islam for other faiths. Since apostasy is punishable by death in Iran, the exact numbers of those who do so are hard to pinpoint, since they won't exactly broadcast it. Zoroastrianism, Baha'ism and Christianity are all popular choices, while many others are simply Atheist or Agnostic.

Zoroastrianism growing particularly among Kurds rediscovering their roots, and who particularly tend to feel disillusioned with Islam, what with the oppression and genocide and all that.

Many Iranian Muslims have a positive view of Zoroastrianism, recognizing its influence on their culture. Some more fundamentalist individuals on the other hand deny the identity and authenticity of this indigenous faith (And if you're Jewish, you're now saying to yourself, "Woa, deja vu!") But there are also many Muslim leaders who defend Zoroastrians, and call for peaceful coexistence.

And peaceful coexistence should always be the goal.

[spacy-snail]

I re-watched ATSV today and one of the things I noticed this time though was the repetition of the line “I can do both”

I obviously remembered Miles saying it, one of the main themes of the movie is how you can’t have your cake and eat it too, but that’s what Miles wants despite the improbability of it all working out

BUT

I didn’t catch the other two times that line was said

The first time was by Pavitr, he has a hold of the bus and his trying to save Gayatri and everyone else on board and then realizes Captain Singh is in danger, he tries to pull up the bus and while tying the web that’s holding the bus to the bridge he says “I can do both”

Just a little later Gwen tries to stop Miles from saving the Captain, and when Miguel calls her out on failing to stop him at Spider-Headquarters Miles says he thought she was trying to save him, Gwen replies with “I was trying to do both”

And then when Miles says the “he can do both”, Miguel solemnly says “not every time”

idk, something about how both Pavitr and Gwen failed at doing both, but maybe something worse would’ve happened without the others being there... and maybe Miles will be able to do both with the help and support from others? I’m not sure, but I only caught that this time through and I thought it was interesting

[get-back-homeward]

bug tumblr needs more flowers in the dirt love so after returning to it this week and unable to shake off the inherent haunting of it, i just need to inject this into the atmosphere.

this album is full of grief and mourning. its an elegy, a metaphorical burial of a loved one. but it also has this element of otherworldiness, like the main objective is communing with the dead in a futile hope of revitalization.

it haunts like those horror stories of desperate mourners left behind trying everything in the hours after their loved ones’ death to revive them.

that paul starts it 8 years after john’s death just shows that the shadows of grief can be long and unwieldy. the title itself suggests the time passed since the burial, flowers in the dirt. the flowers laid down by mourners on a burial site that have dried and started decomposing over many years as they join the soil.

but it also is cathartic in the way that fully feeling grief after burying it for years can yield. in that way, the burial is also an unearthing of emotions many years buried. to feel them, look at them, to hold them in your hands like you would dried flowers, and then lay them back to rest more peacefully.

but the looking at them lasts one moment too long, becomes a reviling in the afterlife and a brief longing to join the dirt like pulling covers over your head. you have to walk away feeling shame and guilt over it and the haunting persists. more subtle, the emotions more manageable, perhaps more tamed or understood, but still lingering like a fog in the night. you just get used to this haunting, you allow the ghost to make a home on your shoulder and it becomes easier to go on with life, day by day.

[murvinnriservices]

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[fatehbaz]

On May 28, 1914, the Institut für Schiffs-und Tropenkrankheiten (Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases, ISTK) in Hamburg began operations in a complex of new brick buildings on the bank of the Elb. The buildings were designed by Fritz Schumacher, who had become the Head of Hamburg’s building department (Leiter des Hochbauamtes) in 1909 after a “flood of architectural projects” accumulated following the industrialization of the harbor in the 1880s and the “new housing and working conditions” that followed. The ISTK was one of these projects, connected to the port by its [...] mission: to research and heal tropical illnesses; [...] to support the Hamburg Port [...]; and to support endeavors of the German Empire overseas.

First established in 1900 by Bernhard Nocht, chief of the Port Medical Service, the ISTK originally operated out of an existing building, but by 1909, when the Hamburg Colonial Institute became its parent organization (and Schumacher was hired by the Hamburg Senate), the operations of the ISTK had outgrown [...]. [I]ts commission by the city was an opportunity for Schumacher to show how he could contribute to guiding the city’s economic and architectural growth in tandem, and for Nocht, an opportunity to establish an unprecedented spatial paradigm for the field of Tropical Medicine that anchored the new frontier of science in the German Empire. [...]

[There was a] shared drive to contribute to the [...] wealth of Hamburg within the context of its expanding global network [...]. [E]ach discipline [...] architecture and medicine were participating in a shared [...] discursive operation. [...]

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The brick used on the ISTK façades was key to Schumacher’s larger Städtebau plan for Hamburg, which envisioned the city as a vehicle for a “harmonious” synthesis between aesthetics and economy. [...] For Schumacher, brick [was significantly preferable] [...]. Used by [...] Hamburg architects [over the past few decades], who acquired their penchant for neo-gothic brickwork at the Hanover school, brick had both a historical presence and aesthetic pedigree in Hamburg [...]. [T]his material had already been used in Die Speicherstadt, a warehouse district in Hamburg where unequal social conditions had only grown more exacerbated [...]. Die Speicherstadt was constructed in three phases [beginning] in 1883 [...]. By serving the port, the warehouses facilitated the expansion and security of Hamburg’s wealth. [...] Yet the collective profits accrued to the city by these buildings [...] did not increase economic prosperity and social equity for all. [...] [A] residential area for harbor workers was demolished to make way for the warehouses. After the contract for the port expansion was negotiated in 1881, over 20,000 people were pushed out of their homes and into adjacent areas of the city, which soon became overcrowded [...]. In turn, these [...] areas of the city [...] were the worst hit by the Hamburg cholera epidemic of 1892, the most devastating in Europe that year. The 1892 cholera epidemic [...] articulated the growing inability of the Hamburg Senate, comprising the city’s elite, to manage class relationships [...] [in such] a city that was explicitly run by and for the merchant class [...].

In Hamburg, the response to such an ugly disease of the masses was the enforcement of quarantine methods that pushed the working class into the suburbs, isolated immigrants on an island, and separated the sick according to racial identity.

In partnership with the German Empire, Hamburg established new hygiene institutions in the city, including the Port Medical Service (a progenitor of the ISTK). [...] [T]he discourse of [creating the school for tropical medicine] centered around city building and nation building, brick by brick, mark by mark.

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Just as the exterior condition of the building was, for Schumacher, part of a much larger plan for the city, the program of the building and its interior were part of the German Empire and Tropical Medicine’s much larger interest in controlling the health and wealth of its nation and colonies. [...]

Yet the establishment of the ISTK marked a critical shift in medical thinking [...]. And while the ISTK was not the only institution in Europe to form around the conception and perceived threat of tropical diseases, it was the first to build a facility specifically to support their “exploration and combat” in lockstep, as Nocht described it.

The field of Tropical Medicine had been established in Germany by the very same journal Nocht published his overview of the ISTK. The Archiv für Schiffs- und Tropen-Hygiene unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Pathologie und Therapie was first published in 1897, the same year that the German Empire claimed Kiaochow (northeast China) and about two years after it claimed Southwest Africa (Namibia), Cameroon, Togo, East Africa (Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda), New Guinea (today the northern part of Papua New Guinea), and the Marshall Islands; two years later, it would also claim the Caroline Islands, Palau, Mariana Islands (today Micronesia), and Samoa (today Western Samoa).

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The inaugural journal [...] marked a paradigm shift [...]. In his opening letter, the editor stated that the aim of Tropical Medicine is to “provide the white race with a home in the tropics.” [...]

As part of the institute’s agenda to support the expansion of the Empire through teaching and development [...], members of the ISTK contributed to the Deutsches Kolonial Lexikon, a three-volume series completed in 1914 (in the same year as the new ISTK buildings) and published in 1920. The three volumes contained maps of the colonies coded to show the areas that were considered “healthy” for Europeans, along with recommended building guidelines for hospitals in the tropics. [...] "Natives" were given separate facilities [...]. The hospital at the ISTK was similarly divided according to identity. An essentializing belief in “intrinsic factors” determined by skin color, constitutive to Tropical Medicine, materialized in the building’s circulation. Potential patients were assessed in the main building to determine their next destination in the hospital. A room labeled “Farbige” (colored) - visible in both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications - shows that the hospital segregated people of color from whites. [...]

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Despite belonging to two different disciplines [medicine and architecture], both Nocht and Schumacher’s publications articulate an understanding of health [...] that is linked to concepts of identity separating white upper-class German Europeans from others. [In] Hamburg [...] recent growth of the shipping industry and overt engagement of the German Empire in colonialism brought even more distant global connections to its port. For Schumacher, Hamburg’s presence in a global network meant it needed to strengthen its local identity and economy [by purposefully seeking to showcase "traditional" northern German neo-gothic brickwork while elevating local brick industry] lest it grow too far from its roots. In the case of Tropical Medicine at the ISTK, the “tropics” seemed to act as a foil for the European identity - a constructed category through which the European identity could redescribe itself by exclusion [...].

What it meant to be sick or healthy was taken up by both medicine and architecture - [...] neither in a vacuum.

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All text above by: Carrie Bly. "Mediums of Medicine: The Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases in Hamburg". Sick Architecture series published by e-flux Architecture. November 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[non-conventionnel]

What are karma, eternal recurrence, reincarnation, and free will? What is the human consciousness? What were the Buddha’s teachings and how did his teachings influence the spiritual formation of Jesus?

[whitehartlane]

i know this is a question asked literally all the time but would you rather see your club win your league or your country win the world cup?

[lemmesayimthebiggesthater]

i am really concerned at the state of free media right now.

i have been following accounts on instagram that talk about climate change, sexism, classism, industrial pollution, and politics in india. but my fyp is not showing ANY of that content. like, it's straight-up shadow-banning all the accounts that talk about those topics. it's only the videos that use censored versions of those terms that are showing up. i am searching up the above-mentioned terms repeatedly, yet i do not get those in my feed.

instead, my feed is filled with harry potter, corporate reels (specifically duolingo, webtoon, kfc, captain crunch, etc.), and speeches in which politicians are praised. it is so jarring to see those things when i barely ever like them. this is so frustrating.

[kiritpankhania]

You have incredible power. You are supposed to consciously create and radiate love and strength, hope and courage and elevate your life and of all you are graced to serve.

What’s wrong? Have you forgotten who and whose you are? 🧐 Time to remember and Implement this gift of life. ��

Find out how and Why

DM or reply here. #DoShare.

#kiritpankhania #SuperCoach #livealegacy #theinvironmentalist #leadershipexpert #TheREVblueprint #coaching #inspiration #peakperformance #businesstransformation #entrepreneur #tkcleadership #loveandkindness #transformationalleadership #publicspeaking #bethedifference #getstuffdone #successcoach #galacticsuperstar #mindflownotmindset #mindblasting #keynotespeaker #Mentor #bestinspirationalspeaker #businessguru #leadership #motivation #oneworldourworld #lawofattraction #love

[dancing-with-stars]

do you guys ever just sit on the kitchen floor and suddenly feel like everything will be okay?