u/gubernatus

The difference between micro-morality and macro-morality is key here. Gandhi definitely bridged that.

Ramakrishna Ashram Marg station. The tourist pass is supposed to be purchased at the costumer care located in every metro station, but not this place. Not at the station next to the tourist hotel area. Brilliant.

So you have a little district in Karol Bagh where you invite backpackers and tourists who want to experience a major Indian city and who WANT TO SPEND MONEY enriching your economy.

But your metro station, right next to the tourist area, won't sell 3-day tourist cards! They simply don't care. Why should they do their jobs and help New Delhi make money?

So you become a freaking prisoner in Karol Bagh, unless you are willing to walk 25 minutes in 40 degree heat to the next station where they are actually COMPETENT and have the cards.

New Delhi, come on! Things can get better here! Things can improve in this city! Start small - start with your tourist industry. Let the foreigners bring money to you to see your history and museums. Make it possible for them to travel on your Metro!

Why should a person come here if he/she can't even get on your Metro system easily!!!! We are willing to pay the 500 ruppees for 3 days, but you don't bother to have the cards!!!!!!

This is ridiculous! This is why things do not seem to be getting better here! How difficult can it be for the STATION MANAGER to get some 3 day tourist passes???????????? What is the station manager even doing over there? I see guys just standing around and hanging out. One of them can't be in charge of HELPING NEW DELHI make money by selling tourist cards?

Insane! Freaking insane!

Crosspost to more communities

I thought I’d share this here because the piece reads Frankenstein through a critical‑theory lens: not as a horror story, but as an example of how societies produce deviance.

Drawing on Shelley’s pacifist background, it asks whether the creature’s violence was socially manufactured...a product of exclusion, aesthetic norms, and disciplinary power...and whether the culture of the time could have even imagined a nonviolent alternative.

In that sense, it echoes Foucault’s analysis of how “abnormal” bodies are constructed and then punished.

But it argues that a different outcome was genuinely available, that the "creature" had a viable moral outcome the novel doesn't address.

Interesting and fun article which ties biology to theories by Adam Smith and David Hume.

The stories defy science, a sense of reason and plain common sense. Indeed, two prominent archeologists, Neil Silberman and Israel Finkelstein, wrote The Bible Unearthed to demonstrate that archaeology cannot even support, and often confutes, the “historical” stories in the Bible.

Do you know that there are two stories of creation in the Bible and they contradict each other?

Joshua stopped the sun in the sky even though the sun doesn't go through the sky, we revolve around it.

A flood supposedly destroyed the whole world about 4,000 years ago, but Chinese history books from that time do not mention a flood and China was not destroyed.

Scientists have shown we evolved from primates over millions of years, we have thumbs like primates, we have canine teeth, we share 98% of our genes with chimpanzees. Furthermore, there are two stories of creation in the Bible and they contradict each other, so Adam and Eve never existed.

If you take the Bible literally, you believe myths the way the ancient Greeks and Egyptians believed myths, but you don't see that just as they didn't see it.

Then you walk into literary studies and find out that the Bible is filled with symbolism, for example, look at all the symbols and how especially meaningful they are in this Water into wine... or this: Satan as a symbol

So I mean this in all sincerity...you cannot deny the science and literary scholarship. There is a deeper meaning in the Bible you are missing.

The stories defy science, a sense of reason and plain common sense. Indeed, two prominent archeologists, Neil Silberman and Israel Finkelstein, wrote The Bible Unearthed to demonstrate that archaeology cannot even support, and often confutes, the “historical” stories in the Bible.

Do you know that there are two stories of creation in the Bible and they contradict each other?

Then you walk into literary studies and find out that the Bible is filled with symbolism, for example, look at all the symbols in this Water into wine... or this: Satan as a symbol

So I mean this in all sincerity...how can you deny the science and literary scholarship? Isn't there a deeper meaning in the Bible you are missing?

I scroll through the Progressive Christianity web site every now and then and I found this interesting article.

I think it actually points to how the Bible should be taught to young people so that they are not brainwashed in any manner whatsoever. Also, it provides a useful look at what kind of methodology works in regard to trying to figure out the mysteries inherent in a lot of the Bible symbolism (not goofy Dan Brown garbage either). :)

The article is essentially arguing Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita provides a radically softened, even sympathetic reinterpretation of Satan.

It pushes back against the standard Christian (and literary) image of Satan as a malicious, envy-driven enemy of God. Instead, it suggests that this “devil” figure is better understood as something closer to a well-meaning, intelligent, socially functional trickster, a figure whose actions are not driven by hatred or rebellion, but by a different moral or metaphysical orientation.

I have 5 more days to go. I am thinking of just going to a cafe every day and reading and writing. I honestly don't want to interface with people here because it's all about trying to force me to take e-rickshaw rides or have my shoes cleaned or just hand over money.

Seriously, at least 50 times a day I hear, "Hello! Excuse me! Sir, you...hey you...you! ...sir...you! ...excuse me! Where are you going?" 

If I stop at CP to look at a book stall - "Excuse me...let me clean your shoes. They are so dirty. I can clean them"...they won't go. You literally have to keep moving as a tourist in New Delhi or they descend on you. I can't even look at books in a book stall because these guys bother me and won't leave me. I have to walk away.

These rickshaw guys who follow you or accost you or the shoe cleaners who won't leave you and force YOU to walk away - they are seriously hurting your businesses and they don't care. They are also hurting tourism as people are learning that if you come to Delhi as a tourist you will be bothered mercilessly until you want to scream and run.

So many people have tried to scam me and money is missing from my backpack and I think my hotel staff took it. I was walking to the National Museum a few days ago and 3 different guys said, "Hey if you are going to the museum, it doesn't open until 2pm today because they open it for children first. Listen why don't you let me take you to a cafe I know of...." I continued to the museum and at 11:15 am it was wide open and no school kids. Three of these bastards just f---in' lied to me.

Friends, this affects people and reduces a visitor's trust considerably. This is why I just want to sleep for 5 days or read or write.

I regret coming here and I'll tell you that if you check online, overwhelmingly people say "Do NOT go to India." It used to be this bad in Hanoi for tourists but the government cracked down. Delhi needs to do something because I really do NOT want to interface with people here now until I leave. My plane fare got locked in when I bought my ticket before the war or I'd leave tomorrow.

My pet theory: The Mughals took over India in the 1500s. Native Indians became subservient to them. It was Mughal admins and Indian bureaucrats serving under them. Then the British took over. Same thing, only worse. Indians have only been guiding their own destiny since about 1947 or 48. I think this has adversely affected a large part of the culture and society.  

So a guy finds a forgotten 1968 book by two young professors who tried to destroy everything hollow about higher education and rebuild learning around lived experience, moral confrontation, and sincerity. They were eventually suspended and left academia.

The guy then wrote this short play (one interesting act). It opens with two sociology professors beginning a normal “Sociology of Religion” class before one of them detonates the entire logic of grading, credentialism, professional hypocrisy, academic careerism and the empty ritual structure of university life.

The argument isn’t just that academia is corrupt or bureaucratic. It’s that the university has replaced transformation with performance, the “Litany of the Word” without any lived encounter with reality.

Instead of papers and grades, the professors decide to take students into churches across the city to investigate religion, race, class, hypocrisy, solidarity, and meaning through direct experience. The play gradually turns into a broader argument that education no longer forms human beings; it reproduces compliant professionals.

I thought some people here might appreciate it.

Apichart is working inside several artistic lineages at once, and they all converge in the watch paintings.

He draws from the long tradition of repetition‑as‑practice, where the artwork is the residue of a daily discipline rather than a single expressive gesture; this connects him to artists like On Kawara, Roman Opalka, and Peter Dreher, all of whom turned seriality into a form of lived time.

At the same time, his work sits firmly inside the memento mori / vanitas tradition, which treats the artwork as a meditation on mortality; his own statement, that each painting increases while his remaining time decreases, is structurally identical to the logic of vanitas painting.

Layered onto this is the broader Asian lineage of technique‑as‑self‑cultivation, where repetition is not mechanical but ethical, a way of shaping the self through disciplined practice.

His paintings also belong to process art, in which the meaning lies in the accumulation of actions over time, and to time‑based conceptualism, where the artwork functions as a temporal record rather than a single moment of representation.

I am just wondering whether the city government has any shelters that women and children can live in temporarily? If they do not, will this become a priority?

There was a stretch of Lodhi Road, near Humayun's Tomb, where numerous women and children were living outdoors in filth.

I am a foreign visitor currently in Karol Bagh (yeah, a budget traveler) and I see women and children living outside publicly as well over here on my way to the metro in the morning. They are often very dirty, which makes me think they really are homeless and without shelters.

I am just a stupid tourist, sorry, maybe I am missing something. Are these people just pretending to be homeless to make money from donations?

If these women and children are homeless, shouldn't some city agency be helping? Even if they are not, isn't it child neglect for a mother to keep her children outdoors in this extreme heat and humidity in the middle section of a busy street with so much dirt and noise?

In New York City there are shelters that hold about 50,000 homeless people. This is criminal in my opinion, that so many people live in temporary housing that becomes semi-permanent, but at least the kids have a roof over their heads and can go to a public school regularly.

I guess I am asking in the most humble and sincere way I can - is New Delhi government doing enough to help the homeless and poor?

What can be done?

Hi,

Coming to Delhi was a dream of mine but things have gone badly. Someone tried to cheat me in regard to a ride back from the airport (4,800 INR instead of about 800 - I realized 4,800 was too steep and found the cheaper price.)

But that new driver from the Delhi Police Pre-Paid Taxi could not get me to the address I gave him on Faiz Road. This is a big road, how did he not find it? I felt lost and a bit scared. WE were just driving all over the place. I literally rolled down the window and yelled "Anyone speak English?" A guy came over and programmed the Google Maps for the driver to get me to the budget hotel.

So I get to the budget hotel and they say, "You know, expedia didn't charge you enough. We demand 10,000 INR more."

Everything is going wrong. I love Indian culture and history and have had wonderful Indian friends.

Can you please be my friend for the next 20 days that I am here? :) I will buy you coffee and good food.

I am a well-educated guy who worked for many years as a teacher in the USA and China. I love art and history and doing volunteer work.

Right now, I booked a new hotel but I am having trouble even finding it because of battling AIs.

I was hoping there might be a kind should who can be a bit of an adviser for me and I will pay you back mightily if you ever come to China or New York, :)

Please drop me a direct message?

Thanks - Dan