Emergency Telephone

A surreal sight in the middle of rural Andhra Pradesh.

The board above the Emergency Phone has the phone numbers for Police, Fire, Hospital and, in case you needed it, the phone number for Hewlett-Packard.

All it's missing is the handset.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Mind - An Owner's Manual

In recent months, as the pandemic spreads and we have been forced to spend more time at home, with ourselves. It's given us a chance to get to know ourselves, our minds and it's innate wandering nature. The importance of the mind has been recognized from classical times. The Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, says "The mind, unconquered by violent passions, is a citadel, for a man has no fortress more impregnable in which to find refuge and remain safe forever." "For corruption of the mind,” he writes, “is a far graver pestilence than any comparable disturbance and alteration in the air that surrounds us; for the one is a plague to living creatures as mere animals, and the other to human beings in their nature as human beings." According to classical Indian thought, the human consists of the body, the mind, the intellect, memory, ego and ultimately the Self, which is the changeless witness to the human condition. You are born with some menta...
Read more

Book Review: Savarkar (Part 1): Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924

  For me, as part of a generation which had its education in the last quarter of the 20th century, Savarkar was not mentioned in any of the official study materials except for the insinuation that he was involved in the murder of Mohandas Gandhi. In the absence of viable alternatives to arrive at one’s own conclusion, the official position on Savarkar was the only one. Now with the arrival of social media and history in India being liberated from the clutch of vested interests in central institutions, new light is being shed on the contributions of individuals other than Nehru and Gandhi to the freedom struggle. Volume 1 of Vikram Sampath’s epic biography deals with the upbringing of Vinayak Savarkar, the political environment in India and how it shaped him, his journey to England for his legal studies and his evolution as a political revolutionary plotting to overthrow the colonial British empire in India. It ends with his receiving conditional release from his sentence of life ...
Read more

A walk around the lake

Image
Henry David Thoreau, in his 1854 book, Walden , narrates his experience of living in solitude for two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst the woodland. While we didn't have the luxury of spending as much time around our neighborhood Kaikondrahalli Lake , this Saturday morning walk around the lake was a delight with the variety of birds, bird calls and nature on exhibition. We reached the lake at around 9 AM by when most of the joggers and serious bird watchers with the telescopic zoom lenses have left. We start the walk with the call and sighting of a White Cheeked Barbet.The barbet is rarely seen outside the thick green foliage of mature trees and it is a rare sighting for us to see it perched on an electric wire. A White Throated Kingfisher flies to its perch - a wall on the edge of the lake and a little egret takes flight, splashing along its liquid runway. We walk towards th...
Read more