Invasion

The World Through Your Eyes, WP challenged on Friday night.  I’ve been thinking, and thinking of an appropriate – and new – image to submit. Only two pictures have repeatedly come to mind.  One, a woman in a bright purple salwar buying a plant with matching flowers at the plant market the other day – the light’s crystalline,  the composition well-balanced, and it reflects the quirky, colourful city I live in.  But it was the first time I’d used my new iPhone ‘on the run’, so to speak, and her companions’ heads graze the upper perimeter of the frame in a most distracting stoop.  As much as the scenario amuses me, the photograph won’t do.

The other – this image, which I think of as “Invasion” – may seem to be of a salubrious and enviable high-rise apartment building anywhere in the world – you certainly wouldn’t guess it’s on the edge of one of Colombo’s lakes.   It is indeed a beautifully sited building (a dress circle position in an area that is being dramatically gentrified!) – it’s just that it  (and a handful of others) are the thin edge of the wedge as far as the invasion of inappropriate architecture for the tropics is concerned.

I won’t rant about the ever-increasing cost of power, and air conditioning, and the visual disparity between these glass towers and the low, wide-roofed traditional – self cooling – architecture of the island – the photographs were supposed to tell their own story!