Monday, June 20, 2005

Suketu Mehta at home, from Bombay to Brooklyn

This isn't the Jewish Brooklyn of Woody Allen or the Italian Brooklyn of "Moonstruck." There are people living in Brooklyn who have no idea what stickball is, what stoop-sitting is, who the Dodgers were or why they left Brooklyn. These people play cricket in Marine Park, barbecue suckling pigs in their backyards, listen to Russian matinee idols in Brighton Beach nightclubs, and worship not Kobe Bryant and Derek Jeter but Diego Maradona, an Argentine soccer player, and Sachin Tendulkar, an Indian cricket star. They are inventing their own Brooklyn, a Brooklyn their kids will be nostalgic about 20 years from now.


From Suketu Mehta's latest, an intro to the 'new Brooklyns' in the New York Times.

It's no longer Crooklyn -- crime rates have dropped dramatically, and hipsters and high income latté drinkers have come in. With 2.5 million people, it's the fourth biggest city in the United States. Out of that 2.5 million, nearly a million are immigrants.

Mehta also does a multimedia feature (also known as an audio slideshow). Another multimedia feature has the voices of writers, including Jhumpa Lahiri.

3 Comments:

Kerim Friedman said...

New Yorkers are always re-discovering Brooklyn. What's Queens? Chopped Liver?

1:36 AM  
Amardeep said...

It's funny, after doing this post I found a blog dedicated to hating Brooklyn: Brooklyn Sucks.

I think Queens would be more popular if it had more than one syllable in its name. The Bronx has the same problem, though "Bronx" sounds cooler than "Queens."

9:54 AM  
Amardeep said...

Oops, that's Brooklyn Sucks.

He's says something gratuitous and mean about Suketu Mehta, but some of the graphics on the site are interesting.

10:06 AM  

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