K. Kumar's Blog, page 10

Zimbabwe and Food

I recently came across this article on Zimbabwe:

http://news.yahoo.com/villagers-zimbabwe-skip-meals-save-scant-food-062421742.html?soc_src=copyThe premise is, that despite having nearly perfect conditions for growing food, about 1.5 million Zimbabweans are in need of food aid. This is one of the key points of the article:

Once a major producer of corn, Zimbabwe has become a perennial importer of food following a slump in agricultural production blamed on President Robert Mugabe's land reforms,...

Bogotá

From Love and Tumult :

Bogotá was more spread out and more diverse and full of all the things and all the people in the world. Bogotá never began and it never ended. There was a deepness to the city, you could stand atop the tallest building and looking down you could see the city streets bleed into the mountain side; you could see millions of people all at once—merged together. In Bogotá, there was no apparent sun, but everything was bright colored and perfectly illuminated. Nothing was straig...

Museu da Lingua Portuguesa

From Sao Paulo:



















From Love and Tumult :

Outside the Luz station stood the Museu da Língua Portuguesa. I walked into the passageway and through an elevator. They dropped us off at the third floor and into a dimly lit interior. It was designed as a long hallway opposite a set of television panels that extended the entire span of the room. The displays told a story about the spoken word in Brazil, flashing images of the jungle, of symbols, of religion. A set of couches sat opposite the line of scree...

Medellin

This is an interesting take on Medellin:


I was recently in the city and a lot of what the article talks about rang true for me. It is a pretty expansive city with a useful and easy transportation system that can take you pretty much anywhere you want to go. There is something distinctive about the city, some magical element, that is hard to explain. The climate is particularly notable, it is cooler than Cartagena and Cali, but less polluted and hurried than Bogota. It is worth a visit.

Southpaw/La Revancha

I recently saw this movie:


Overall, it is an impreesive film, albeit a bit overwrought. And predictable in a sense. The fighting takes place inside and outside the ring, but the real battle is against anger. The movie does a good job of portraying real, visceral anger. And you can sympathize with the main character and also be disturbed by his actions, all of it seeming to be driven against some abstract force he has no control over. And it is resolved by fighting, by channeling the inner, out...

More on El Salvador

I saw this article a few weeks back on the situation in El Salvador:

Source: New Yorker

Narcos

I recently completed watching Narcos on Netflix, and it was an impressive series. I think what the ten episodes captured was the sheer madness and violence that can erupt in the midst of deep economic and social inequality. It brings about distrust, but also a kind of hope that comes from the struggle. Neither side is perfectly good or bad, but rather they both commit good and bad acts for the purpose of defending what they consider their good end. It is a case of the end justifies the means....

Safe Haven

There is an interesting debate about gold as a safe haven:

Source: Bloomberg
























The idea is that in the face of uncertainty, volatility, and inflation, investors will seek to find the safest asset to protect against the risk of default, bankruptcy. In short, investors will look for something tangible and naturally scarce versus something that is abstract. Gold is something you can touch and feel and it has a history as being a store of value. Governments still maintain reserves in gold, so clearly...

Van Gogh and Tersteeg

There is a fascinating passage from the biography of Vincent Van Gogh that I found very moving:

"Tersteeg renewed his charge of the previous spring that Vincent's artistic "calling" was nothing more than fakery and laziness, and that he should give it up. "You must earn your own living," he said: get a job and stop "taking money" from Theo." 

"...Tersteeg vehemently restated his opinion of the previous spring: "Of one thing I am sure, you are no artist."" 

"You failed before and now yo...

Africa's Embrace

I recently finished reading a thought provoking and, at times, brilliant book: Africa's Embrace. This is one of my favorite passages from the book:

Like many elites, they let the nail on the small finger of their left hand grow several inches long. The growing and maintenance of such an awkwardly long finger nail was not easy, but for them, it was necessary to show they did not do any manual labor, and thus, they were true elites. In contrast, the fingernails on their right hand were trimmed w...