NamedPipe

(A friend suggested that I should go back to writing things here after I suggested shutting down the blog. Luckily the following came to my doorstep on Sunday.)

I suppose this is all due to a New Yorker who’s first name was Truman. But you decide if this journalism or great literature:

Outside Jaipur, young men virtually bonded into labor hack with primitive tools at old tires. They work in an archaic assembly line beside the highway, chopping the tires into pieces and loading them onto trucks so they can be burned as toxic fuel at a brick kiln. The tent camp they call home splays out in dirty disarray behind them. A brutish overseer verbally whips them to work faster.

“Please take me out of here,” Rafiq Ahmed, 21, whispered as he bent in the darkness to lift another load. “My back hurts.”

On the revamped road next to him, the darkness has been banished by electric lights overhead. Auto-borne commuters race along six silky lanes toward the Golden Heritage Apartments, the Vishal Mini-Mart, the Bajaj Showroom featuring the New Pulsar 2005 with Alloy Wheels, all the while burning rubber that will eventually fall to the young men, hidden by night, obscured by speed, forgotten by progress, to dispose.

Or how about this paragraph.

To drive it is to gain momentum, to not want to stop, and not have to. Drivers no longer pass through towns, but by them, or where the highway soars into the air, over them. The rural landscape, formerly painted in pointillist detail, becomes a blur, an abstraction – a vanishing trick that may portend things to come.

While all this prose is beautiful if we were reading Hemingway or Zadie Smith, but this is the New York Times – read more if you want.

I’m generally a fan of the NYT, but this writing is overboard. The editors need to remind the journalists they are writing for newspapers, not novels. The sad part is the story is amazing by itself, India has only built 334 miles of new 4-lane roads in the last 50 years (Des Moines to Chicago) and the country – come on, India is more than 1/3 the size of the U.S. And now they are building and upgrading 40,000 miles of roads. This story doesn’t need metaphoric prose to interest the reader – the facts alone are worth reading.