Word: rai
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sense of wonder Visitors who want to enjoy the jungle treks and wildlife of remote northern Thailand in five-star comfort will have their wish granted when Four Seasons opens its "tented camp" in February 2006. Located near the town of Chiang Saen in Thailand's northernmost province, Chiang Rai, the resort (fourseasons.com/goldentriangle) will offer sweeping views of the Mekong River and the jungles of Laos and Burma on the opposite banks. And while all accommodation is in the form of tents, guests need not fret about spending sweltering nights under moth-eaten canvas, for the Four Seasons version...
...neon. In western India, the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar is not even on the list of protected monuments. Traffic swarms around its walls, staining and rotting them with acrid fumes, while a Sikh group from England has covered many of the original murals with what conservationist Gurmeet Rai, a former student of Thakur, describes as "avocado-green bathroom tiles and plastic stickers" and has regilded the famous dome using cement, which she says is trapping moisture in the walls...
...Thakur sees her 120 disciples as another vital component of India's nascent preservation movement. These devotees include Golden Temple expert Gurmeet Rai and Taj Mahal specialist Meetu Sharma Saxena, who says of her mentor: "We are all her children." Declares Thakur: "If I need inspiration, I just need to look at them and see how inspired they get." Watching these heritage advocates in action, it's easy to see why Thakur hasn't abandoned hope. On a recent day-trip south of New Delhi to check on the Taj Mahal, Saxena tenderly strokes some new cracks she's spotted...
...Moreover, the losses are accelerating. In 1991 the Municipal Corporation of Delhi tore down much of the outer wall of Qila Rai Pithora, one of the city's last surviving pre-Islamic structures. Shah Jahan's great Shalimar Garden, where Aurangzeb was crowned, now has a municipal housing colony on its land. This March, there was an attempt to concrete over the sultanate-period Hauz-i-Shamsi in Mehrauli...
...interest? It's not just America's growing appetite for South Asian culture--movies like Bend It Like Beckham and stars like Bollywood actress and model Aishwarya Rai. The marketing thrust started with the 2000 Census, which revealed that during the 1990s the number of Indians in the U.S. more than doubled--making them the fastest-growing Asian minority. There are some 2.5 million desis in the U.S., and the vast majority are Indian. That may not seem terribly significant compared with, say, 40 million Hispanics, but consider how premium a customer a South Asian is: Indians alone commanded...