On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 7:48 PM, Sumant Srivathsan <suma...@gmail.com> wrote: > An ugly public building comes up right next to a 1500 year old temple. A >> monument to incompetence and corruption built in the backyard of >> a millennial legacy of elegance and brilliance, and no one bats an eyelid. >> > > I refuse to accept that any building constructed several hundreds of years > ago is brilliant or elegant purely by being there for that long. I find a > number of temples in India to be festering eyesores, and while I'd balk at > calling modern structures beautiful, they're not ugly just because they're > new, either. I'm drifting from the topic at hand, but unless you're > referring to something specific, I'm going to call bullshit on this sort of > generalization.
Oh I had a specific example in mind, from my neighborhood. The MRTS in Thiruvanmiyur - this - http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Thiruvanmiyur_MRTS_station.JPG Versus this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marundeeswarar_Temple which has a poem dedicated to it in the Thevaram as a towering glory that blocks out the moon on a bright moon's night, when the sound of the temple bells silence the buzz of the bees of the forest and the roars of the waves. I am waiting for some contemporary poet to write something similar about the MRTS station. I am sure I won't be disappointed now.
