Word: slow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's a moment late in the afternoon on many long Indian train journeys when the world seems to slow down and rest for a while. As the fading light filters through half-closed shutters and the swaying of the carriages nudges passengers into an irresistible slumber, air-conditioner mechanic T.J. Mathai takes a break from checking that his machinery is working properly and that the vents are open just so. During a recent three-day trip from New Delhi, in India's north, to Kerala, at its southern tip, he hoisted himself up into his tiny nook opposite...
...languorous snore. The state-owned company, the monopoly owner-operator of the country's rail system, runs 12,000 trains a day over 39,000 miles (62,750 km) of routes, making it the world's largest railroad under a single administration. It was also notorious for being slow, inefficient and requiring constant government bailouts. But over the past six years, India's most important form of transport - "the lifeline of the nation" as it is often called - has undergone a remarkable turnaround. In its fiscal year ending March 2007, Indian Railways made more than $5 billion. Services are improving...
...Still, IR has miles to go before it can be called a first-class operation. Train travel in India remains infuriatingly slow. A 1,378-mile (2,217 km) trip from New Delhi to Goa just before Christmas, for instance, took me 35 hours, almost a day longer than a train trip over a similar distance in Europe would take. Because of a lack of equipment and tiny station platforms, freight is sometimes thrown from trains in heaps. The heavier loading, critics charge, has caused more breakdowns. (Kumar denies this.) Older carriages can be dirty, shabby and full of cockroaches...
...accounts for almost 30% of its total exports. But the same grinding geologic processes that make this wealth possible also bedevil Indonesia with disasters like the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 160,000 people in Sumatra. Lusi is unlike any previous disaster, however. Unfolding in implacable slow motion, it has confounded Indonesian engineers and mystics alike. The mostly poor villagers who have lost homes and livelihoods to the mud complain that the response to the unfolding disaster has been equally sluggardly - a symptom, perhaps, of the fault lines in Indonesian society's own unsettled foundations...
...have heard these stories before; we've heard them for decades, in fact. But there is a sense this year that the slow-motion depreciation of the American middle class has reached critical mass, and not just in Ohio and Michigan. It is an issue that reaches across party lines, which is why John McCain talks about the need to help displaced workers. "This income gap is the biggest issue for me," Bob Currens, a Republican painting contractor who was thinking about voting Democratic-for Obama-for the first time, told me after the church service. His wife Kim joined...