Bittersweet Thanksgiving

by | Wednesday, November 26, 2008

The recent events in Mumbai have thrown a pall over the Thanksgiving break. That said, this is a moment to celebrate friends and family. Let us spare a moment for all the innocent victims and their friends and family.


Happy Thanksgiving!

This image, above, captures for me the spirit of Thanksgiving. What is funny is that I don’t look like these people. I had never tasted turkey before coming to the US. Thanksgiving at our house may or may not have a turkey – but it will surely have some spicy curries.

Even more complicated is the fact that, even in the US, this image could be regarded as being a myth – a feel-good vision of a past that may never really have existed. But as Picasso said, art is the lie that reveals the truth (or something to that effect, I am too lazy to google the actual quote). There is something in this painting, actually something in many of Normal Rockwell’s paintings, that touches me – deeply. I am not sure what it is – but I can’t deny its effect on me.

[See more of his art here]

Topics related to this post: Crime | India | Personal | Religion | Representation

A few randomly selected blog posts…

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A sad day…

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East Lansing in the NYTimes

Olivia Judson has a great column in the NYTimes about evolution. Today's column titled "Stop the mutants" is a thought experiment on how evolution would fare if all mutations were to magically stop. It is an interesting article, and in keeping with her previous...

Incredible !ndia

Patrick Dickson sent me this link to an article on Boston.com titled Scenes from India. As the article says: India is home to over 1.2 billion people of wildly varying religions, cultures and levels of wealth.... Though there's no possible way for these images to be...

TED is bullshit 🙂

Evrim Baran (who I often joke is the only reader of this blog) sent me this link to a set of notes by Jeff Jarvis from a TED talk he recently gave. He says that he used the opportunity of a TED event to question the TED format, especially in relation to education,...

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I just read this wonderful essay by UCLA professor Peter Nonacs titled: Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Game Theory Exam. In this essay he describes an experiment he recently conducted in his game theory class. This is what he told his students a week before the...

Happy Hanukkah: New Ambigram

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In keeping with the holiday theme (see Christmas ambigram below) it seemed appropriate to create a design for Hanukkah. That task actually turned out easier than I had expected - with some natural symmetries that I could take advantage of. The "U" at the...

2 Comments

  1. Jamie

    I was thinking a lot over Thanksgiving as I watched the coverage in Mumbai on the reactions of the US. It was sad and my heart goes out to anyone who was impacted. We see what happens in our own borders, but don’t always see past the lines of the rest of the world…

    Reply

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