Month: April 2017

Bridge over the River Kwai

kenritley

This is Alec Guiness, in front of the fictional Bridge over the River Kwai, in the 1957 film for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor:

And this is the real Bridge over the River Kwai, as it looks today:

To accomodate the flocks of tourists, the bridge is built with side platforms, so that the tourists won’t get run over when a train comes:

It’s temptingly easy to enjoy beautiful view . . . but the nearby cemetary and museum is a strong and moving reminder that this bridge had its origin in large scale atrocities carried out in WWII.

Kotilingeshwara – An amazing South Indian temple

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In the deep south of India, not too far from the Kolar Gold Fields and just on the border between Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, is the amazing Shiva temple called Kotilingeshwara.

It is not a temple in any conventional sense of the word.  It is more of a indoor / outdoor park, filled with thousands upon thousands of small, identical statutes called linga, which is actually a representation of the Indian god Shiva.  Here you can see a few of them, with a huge statute of the sacred cow Nandi in the distance:

Interestingly, I arrived on the day of a festival, and thousands of visitors were expected and beginning to line up. But a cousin of a friend of mine is a police officer who is assigned to this temple, so he let us in early before the crowd.  (That’s him above in the dark khaki clothes, carrying his big long stick that police offices in India are famous for.)

Here’s another look, showing some of them as large as a building (it’s one of the largest in the world), and others as small as tea cups:

I don’t know the details, but I think for the price of a donation to the temple you can arrange to have a lingam dedicated with your name.

Oh, and for those who think that Indian names are quite long and difficult, this name provides a wonderful segue to an upcoming post about Indian names: koti means 10,000,000, linga we talked about above, eshwara means god – hence the name Kotilengeshwara refers to the 10 million manifestations of the god Shiva.

 

When bad things become good things

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As far as modern nation-states to modernize in the 20th century go, Switzerland doesn’t exactly rank first.  The homes in many American cities, for example, began to get indoor plumbing as early as the mid-1800’s; but in Switzerland, particularly in rural Switzerland, many homes did not get indoor plumbing until after WWII.

But what does this mean?

My neighborhood in Switzerland is filled with DOZENS of communal water fountains, many of them within a stone’s throw distance of one another. Here is one:

And here is another:

What could be viewed negatively (modern plumbing arriving quite late) has in fact left a very positive legacy, with Swiss neighborhoods filled with these wonderful old fountains that still deliver fresh drinking water today!