Voices
out of the car, held shawls aloft as
we scanned the view, jumped back
in and headed home.
My dad divulged a detail at the
time, not in defense of his itinerary design, but parallel to it: apparently, tourists from the Saudi
Arabian desert also time their
trips to India to coincide with the
rains. They rent hotel rooms with
big windows and never leave, according to my dad. “Rain is so new
for them,” he said mournfully, as
if he were describing a life of extreme deprivation. “All they need
to do is stare.”
Those water-mad Saudis came to
mind at 7 a.m. last Tuesday. I was
waiting in line — along with seemingly all of New York — to see the
Rain Room. Its creators, a young
London-based art collective called
rAndom International, describe it
as a “hundred square metre field
of falling water through which it
is possible to walk, trusting that a
path can be navigated, without being drenched in the process.”
The magic is done through a series of body-mapping cameras, nine
controllable spouts, and 2,500 liters of water falling at 1,000 liters
per minute, filtered and cycled back
to the spouts from whence the water came. The result is as unnatural
MALLIKA
RAO
a version of a natural phenomenon
as one can imagine. You’ll feel like
Moses parting the Red Sea, promised the Guardian.
Last weekend marked the last
to visit the installation in its current state. London papers reported
visitors queuing up to 12 hours at
a time when it debuted in that city.
In New York, the rumors are comparable. A Gothamist staffer stood
for eight hours and let his mind
No one at my office
does this sort of stuff,
but they understand
I like it. Cultural stuff.”
wander; not worth that wait, he declared, though he couldn’t presume
to judge for others since he got to
see the end. I too woke at dawn to
make the decision for myself. By 7
a.m., I was established in line, between a golden-skinned mother,
there with her two toddler girls,
and a chatty finance guy whose boss
gave him the morning off. “No one
at my office does this sort of stuff,
but they understand I like it,” the
analyst, name of Matt, explained to
us. “Cultural stuff.”
A grandmotherly naturopath
HUFFINGTON
08.04.13