Out My Window

ONE HIGHRISE, EVERY WINDOW, A DIFFERENT CITY

 

         Do you know where this quote came from? One highrise, every window, a different city. You probably do not know. This is from the site called "Highrise". This site is one of the world's first interactive 360˚ documentaries. Each film is told by the people who look out on the world from high rise windows. From this site, everyone can chose different person in different places and explore them. The person that I chose to explore was a baby girl from Bangalore. Her name is Akshadha. By watching these three short films, I found a lot of differences and also similarities with her life comparing to mine. First, I will talk about her life and her highrise then I will compare and contrast with mine.

          A little girl Akshadha lives in Bangalore in India. Her and her parents live in a gated highrise community. From their high rise, they see the monkeys going across the fense. Unlike Korea, they can also see the train going by infront of their house. Also the parent's office could be seen from the windows.

         In the country India, there are many people who work in the complex but people also have a dhobi who does laundry and irons their clothes in the basement parking lot. Dhobi is the Hindi word for laundry washer. Akshadha's parents worked there for a year. They work full days on Saturdays and Sundays too. They usually arrive at 7 in the mornings and leave at 8 in the evenings. Akshadha's mother works 2 days at home bringing clothes to wash at home. So that's 6 days for her. For every 3 buildings, there are usually 1 dhobi. There is not much washing to do because it's mostly ironing. The mother do washing at home to reduce the amount of work. The family live in Belathur in India and it's not very far to the hospitals. Prior to this, the mother used to work at the Sai Baba Hospital doing the same work, that is "Dhobi" doing laundry and then later on in Vaidehi Hospital. But in both places, she worked for the doctors and staff of the hospitals not the patients. There was an economic IT boom in Bangalore but has not touched Vishwarama(mother)'s wages. She earned no less, no more and it's the same as before. Still, she enjoyed being in that place and doing the job.

         There are place called 'Ghost building'. This building is an issue in Bangalore because of the recession. All the builders have stopped building. So all of them are in a halt now. All the builders are out of money because of the expensive steel prices and cement prices. No construction is going on right now.

          Now I would like to compare and contrast with Akshadha's life and mine. First, there is one dhobi in every 3 buildings which shows the cultural differences and our house design is like Han-ok. In Korea, the apartments usually all look the same with no differences but in my house, most of our furniture are made of wood making it to look like Korean traditional house Han-ok.

          From watching these short films, I found some similarities and differences between the little girl Akshadha and me. I learned that even though we are all living in a high rise, the environment is very different for each everyone and the culture difference.