Word: afghanistan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Afghanistan today is known mainly for its hounds, carpets and pistachio nuts. Its rugged, ruin-strewn terrain is still strategically important, the geopolitical crossroads between China, Russia, India and Iran. But centuries ago it was a well-traveled highway. Remarked Hsüan-tsang, a 7th century Chinese Bud dhist pilgrim, of this 800-mile bridge between the East and West: "Here are found objects of merchandise from all parts...
Behind them in Afghanistan's shattered citadels, they left one of the world's most amazing collections of syncretic, or fused, art. Peoples clashed, but their art combined. In Manhattan's Asia House Gallery, where they are on view for the first time in the U.S.,* more than 100 objects give evidence of how styles learned from one another...
Many of these objects lay hidden in sealed chambers from the 3rd century until 1937 when French archaeologists excavated the crumbling city of Begram near the Hindu Kush, the mighty massif that barricades Afghanistan to the northeast. Roman glassware, Chinese lacquer work and Indian ivories were found together, revealing that the East and West were closer together in 300 B.C. than in the days of Marco Polo, 15 centuries later...
...Shot. Walcott first turned up in India in the early 1960s as president of a four-plane freight airline. Suavely posing as an American millionaire, he won a contract from Air-India to haul freight between landlocked Afghanistan and Indian rail centers. Traveling freely throughout India, Walcott often made short hops in his twin-engine Piper Apache until one day in 1962, when police checked the plane and found a crate that everyone had assumed contained spare parts for one of Walcott's laid-up DC-4s. Instead police found 10,000 rounds of 12-gauge ammunition, an item...
Nonteaching volunteers wind up as beekeepers in Cameroon, accountants in Afghanistan, architects in Tunisia, fish hatchers in Togo. Two dozen men and women volunteers live in some of the world's most scabrous slums, the hillside favelas outside Rio de Janeiro, where they run medical clinics, teach and do social work. This month, when torrential rains and landslides claimed some 200 favelados' lives in Rio, the Corpsmen helped evacuate stricken families, set up emergency health stations, staffed mass vaccination centers...