Word: slum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...into this ruin-strewn countryside. Today, of course, things are different. In the past century, New Delhi's population has grown from some 200,000 to over 15 million, and the fate of those ruins is most uncertain in a city where one-quarter of the populace live in slums and one-third have no sanitation; city officials, understandably, have other priorities. Already, most of the ruins seen by Franklin have disappeared. Those that remain stand not in open countryside, but atop roundabouts or tucked in beside the high-rises and flyovers of South Delhi. They obscure the fairways...
...municipal urinal or the haveli courtyard house of his great rival Ghalib is revealed to have been turned into a coal store; but most of the losses go unrecorded. I find it heartbreaking: every time I revisit one of my favorite monuments, it has either been overrun by a slum, unsympathetically restored by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), or simply demolished. By now, almost all the havelis of Old Delhi have been destroyed. According to historian Pavan Varma, the majority of the buildings he recorded in his book Mansions at Dusk 13 years ago no longer exist...
...characterize property destruction -whether it is pulling up paving stones in Paris, breaking embassy windows in Jakarta or wrecking a slum-area store in Los Angeles-with a phrase like 'reckless, ignorant vandalism' is a political judgment," Cohen has written. He agrees with Fordham University Sociologist John M. Martin that every act of vandalism carries a heavy freight of motivation and even logic-though scanalized and law-abiding citizens are not likely to appreciate either. As a classic example, the Luddites who smashed the new textile machines at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution were venting their rage...
Grand Boulevard is a slum, and maybe a worse slum for having had a splendid past. In little more than a century, it has known both wealth and glory, as home to the gentry of two distinctly separate societies...
...protests began on Nov. 27, when more than 1,000 slum dwellers in the coastal city of Gonaïves, angered by food and fuel shortages, took to the streets, shouting "Down with misery!" and "Down with the constitution!"--a reference to the document that gives Duvalier, 34, lifetime tenure as President and the right to choose his successor. The following day students in Gonaïves abandoned classes to demand an end to Duvalier's reign. Army troops shot two students in cold blood and beat a third to death. That inspired students all over Haiti to launch new protests, most...