Posts Tagged ‘USA’
Pine Creek Gorge
Pine Creek Gorge-in a part of the country far from any shopping mall or four-lane freeway-is a 64-kilometer passage through the northeastern wilderness that drops nearly 442 meters at its deepest point. It’s known as Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon, and though it may not be nearly as large as Arizona’s it is certainly grand.
The entire area surrounding the gorge is sparsely populated and largely undeveloped, with nearly 400,000 hectares of park and forest land. The gorge itself began forming 350 million years ago, and the layers of rock put on their own color show, as the sandstone, siltstone, mudstone and shale take on hues of green, gray, brown and red.
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America on the Greyhound
After I immigrated to the United States in October 2006, one of the first things we did was take a bus trip across the country. My wife and I traveled on a Greyhound bus from New York to Los Angeles, taking larger stops at Washington DC, St. Louis, Denver, Grand Canyon and Las Vegas and numerous other pit-stops enroute. The month-long trip was my way of knowing the country before we settled down to work.
My journey and observations was published as a two-part series in SPAN magazine. The articles can be read here and here.
US Farmer’s Markets
The average American sources his or her diet from that same long distance-2,100 kilometers away. It’s not the mileage itself, say environmentalists and some health experts. It’s that the farther the food travels, the less fresh it is and the more fuel is used to transport it. But many people are changing their ways, going to local farmers’ markets to handpick fresher produce. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that as of 2006 there were 4,385 organized farmers’ markets in the country, up from to 2,410 a decade earlier.
A 2006 department survey showed that 25 percent of the vendors interviewed said they relied on farmers’ markets as their sole source of farm-based income. Average sales at individual farmers’ markets in 2005 totaled about $245,000; average annual sales per vendor totaled $7,108.
Read article here.
Edison’s Little India
From indoor cricket to a Hindu temple, pan shops, dosa and biryani stalls, and saris in the store windows, this eastern U.S. suburban area could be an Indian municipality.
Driving down Oak Tree Road in Edison, New Jersey, is like going through Lajpat Nagar market in New Delhi-albeit with some key differences. Chock-a-block with sari showrooms, grocery stores selling curry pata, and Bollywood music shops…even the mannequins have the same plastic hair.
This is “Little India,” and like the Chinatowns and Little Italy’s that came before it, it is the expression of an immigrant culture that is finally establishing itself in the melting pot of America. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, Edison’s population of about a 100,000 was 17.5 percent Indian American. That is the highest percentage of any municipality in the United States, and growing.
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Bhangra on U.S. College Campuses
Every spring, around the same time as the Baisakhi festival in Punjab, college students from across America gather in a historic theater a few blocks from the White House. Some hail from India, some from Pakistan, and others from New Jersey, but today they are united in a common purpose: bhangra.
You can spot them from a mile away. Wearing shocking pink and green turbans and sparkling dupattas, the girls and boys of the top U.S. university teams make quite a spectacle as they pass the gray and white stone buildings of downtown Washington, D.C. They are here to compete in George Washington University’s Bhangra Blowout, the biggest intercollegiate bhangra dance competition in America.
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American cars in India
In the late 1950s, American car companies were pushed out of India by unfriendly trade and import policies, and the passion for American cars ebbed. It lingered longer in Bollywood, where superstars like Dharmendra sang paeans to the Chevrolet Impala and every hero roared onto the screen in some gleaming steel chariot designed in Michigan. But as the decades passed, that infatuation also faded, and Indian car companies began manufacturing smaller, more efficient automotive dreams for the masses.
Today the car market is decidedly larger and American companies Ford and General Motors (GM) are back, competing with a whole new batch of global car makers. After rough beginnings in the 1990s, American car companies are serious about India, and they are seriously growing as well. Ford and GM may be cutting costs and closing plants in the United States, but the plan for India is bigger and better without an end in sight.
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Adoption in India
A few decades ago, the adoption scene in India was inactive and one-sided at best. Raising children not born in the family was considered unacceptable by most Indians, and even though some Indians wanted to adopt, most orphaned children went abroad. But 1984 brought the country’s first adoption regulations, and by 1989 a quota system was introduced that required 25 percent of all orphaned children to be adopted within India. Since then, a social revolution has taken place, and more orphaned and abandoned children have a waiting list of parents who want to take them home.
According to the Central Adoption Resource Agency (CARA) 1,707 children were adopted in India last year. (This figure does not include agencies not registered with CARA, but with state governments for domestic adoptions only. Because of the large number of such agencies, CARA estimates the actual domestic figure is two to three times as high.) In addition, 1,021 children were cleared for foreign and non-resident Indian families to adopt.
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