Rashid's Blog: A Place for Inquisitive Souls

Could anyone ever have imagined that our inane television serials would be educative? Well, certainly not those who called television soaps serial killers, convinced that all they had to offer were decadent moral values. Or those who felt that they were turning Indians into idiots because of their sheer stupidity and their inability to talk about serious social issues. Er…I too had similar opinions.

Not any more. These shows may not talk about serious social issues, but they are tackling serious social issues!!

A recent study of 2,700 households (in villages in the four states – Bihar, Goa, Haryana, and Tamil Nadu – and Delhi) from 2001 to 2003, by Robert Jensen of Brown University and Emily Oster of the University of Chicago shows that television is actually helping rural Indian women come out of their shell. Their attitudes seemingly underwent a change, even to an extent that women’s…

If you’ve been to Charleston, South Carolina–(home to the College of Charleston)–you’ve likely heard about/seen the typical Charleston house, which has a porch alongisde the entire length of the building (on two floors). The slideshow images above were snapped on a walk I just took around the downtown area–gotta get out of the office sometimes (In one of the shots you can see that the porch has been retained for show near the front of the house while the back section has been walled in as extra interior footage). The porch is marked by a ‘false door’ or sorts, which in years gone by was left open to signal that visitors were welcome (well, that’s what they tell you on the tourist carriage tours at least).

I was thinking about what was said in a recent lecture here by a self-proclaimed New Urbanist who came to speak at the…