we are like this only

Just read an article in the latest Economist that made me see red. In the edit piece about Egypt's revolution and how the West mustn't fear the consequences thereafter, since even the Muslim Brotherhood is unlikely to be able to carry out its more fundamentalist agenda since they will need to go through a democratic process and enjoy only about 20% popularity, it ends by saying that the West can't now fear the aftermath of Egypt espousing 'Western' values like freedom and self-determination. Hello, are we speaking about the same West that colonized much of the world until recently and refused to get out until they were booted out? The same West that props up dictatorships world over from Saudi Arabia and Egypt to Latin America, for reasons that have more to do with economic or political expdiency and less to d with principle? The same West whose President once famously stated about a dictator that "he may be a son of a bitch but he's our son of a bitch...

A and I finally managed to get to the Anish Kapoor exhibit at NGMA before it got over. I had seen one piece by the artist ath the 2009 Art Summit in Delhi, and of course photographs of his work have been appearing for a while now, but I didn't really know what to expect. I was very curious, because I had heard rave reviews from Mumbai and yet Manjula Padmanabhan's review said that it was almost frighteningly isolationist in terms of dwarfing human experience with scale - art without heart. As for the exhibit itself, most of the pieces here are models of work that is installed or in progress elsewhere, so in that sense, while one gets an idea of what he is doing, one doesn't get the full experience. There were one or two smaller pieces though, and the one that got A and me hooked was titled triangle mirror. It was a rough circle, composed of hundreds of triangularly shaped mirrors, about 2 inches a side, pieced together like a stained glass piece. And it was magical. It drew...