BLDGBLOG: Worshipping the Crash

BLDGBLOG, crash, shrine, accident, motorbike, Ballard, Rajasthan, energy, thanatos, vernacular

We didn’t stay long, unfortunately, but it felt like a scene from some black-market rewrite of Crash, rewritten for Indian readers in which holy accidents on various roads throughout the country are visited by over-enthusiastic tourists of the afterlife, intent on receiving ill-defined bursts of supernatural energy from celebrity collisions such as these. The U.S. might have its James Dean Crash Site & Memorial, and France might have the Pont de l'Alma Tunnel, but this machine-deification in the deserts of northern India showed what a rural folk tradition could do with the morbid significance of fatal crash sites and the often deeply unglamorous vehicles that enable them.

http://bldgblog.blogspot.be/2014/08/worshipping-crash.html