Far away across the ocean - by ftlsid - cybermonk

I’ve just gotten back from two weeks abroad in Vietnam and Japan with some friends. Vietnam reminds me a lot of India: the tropical greenery and the heavy rain that sustains it, the corrugated steel shacks housing everything from glass-blowers to Javascript development services, the profusion of impatient people on scooters. I was surprised by the degree of patriotism; in the week before the country’s independence day celebrations, nearly everyone was wearing the national flag (a yellow star on red). One morning in Hanoi I passed a group of older women doing calisthenics to a lively song about Ho Chi Minh, who seems to have been elevated to divinity in the public consciousness. His embalmed body is on display in a grand mausoleum in the center of the city, against his own wishes to be cremated and have his ashes scattered across his country. I assume this was inspired by the similar postmortem treatment of V. I. Lenin, but to me it seems quite gauche. I wasn’t allowed to see the body b

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• Ishwari Bawiskar