The 7th International AIDS Conference in Varanasi has just completed, after three long days. I wish I could report that the conference was a success – whatever that might mean. But by any measure, it was an unmitigated failure.
Posts Tagged 'shithole'
A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold
Published 6 February 2007 India , Science & Technology Leave a CommentTags: AIDS, AIDS conference, Anurag Rathore, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, G.P. Thakur, Gates FOundation, HIV, India, Indian Academy of Applied Psychology, L.K. Advani, Sanjay Gandhi Institute of Medical Sciences, shit-hole, shithole, Tabo Mbeki, Varanasi
Varanasi: Shit-Hole of the Gods
Published 4 February 2007 Environment , India , Religion, Spiritualism & Other Make-Believe , Science & Technology , Travel & Adventure 85 CommentsTags: Benares, death, disease, dying, ecology, Environment, environmentalism, excrement, exhibitionist, feces, filth, funeral pyre, garbage, ghat, Hinduism, human waste, hypocrisy, litter, moksha, pilgrim, pollution, public hygiene, pyres, rebirth, religion, religious festival, rubbish, sadhu, shit, shit-hole, shithole, solid waste, spiritual, spiritual fraud, spiritual poseur, spiritualism, spirituality, superstition, trash, Uttar Pradesh, Varanasi, Vedas
I’m posting this from the tarmac of the airport in Delhi (I no more enjoy calling it “Indira Gandhi International Airport” than I would willingly refer to National Airport in Washington, D.C. “Ronald Reagan Airport”), on my way to the 7th Annual International AIDS Conference. India is playing host to this year’s gathering of leading scientists, doctors, and NGOs working on the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the venue for the conference is Varanasi.
I am looking forward to the conference, at which I will be representing an innovative biotechnology project that provides unique sample preservation tools to enable the diagnosing HIV infection through analysis of DNA. Still, I am dreading being back in Varanasi. Rather than recount my reasons, let me attach the text of an email I sent following my previous visit in 2002.
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