Day 109

 Travelogue : America-two

Engineering Excellence

Citing one or two engineering marvels will be sufficient to highlight their- U S A- level of accomplishments for over a century plus years.

·        The Brooklynn Bridge connecting Manhattan and Brooklynn is a marvel to watch/ recall.

·         The bridge is truly iconic and grand looking as if it is hanging from the sky, with minimum support pillars.

·         The wonderment will go up when one realizes that it was completed in 1870.

·        Can we visualize many countries and their level of development at that point of time?

·         Another is the Manhattan skyline itself with numerous skyscrapers, the most significant being the two towers that came up at Ground Zero.

·         Like these there are many monumental structures to highlight, if one continues to list them. That is not attempted and needed here.

Let me end with the two memorials built for the victims of 9/11, human made, most barbaric tragedy of this century, when some 3000 innocents lost their lives and more than 6,000 others injured.

ü Those lost, lost… but the government did not buckle under threats posed by such elements all over the world.

ü Instead the country rose up like Phoenix. The town planners have left the foundations of earlier WTC towers vacant and built there a memorable fountain, with water flowing 24/7 into a huge crater, probably conveying to the world at large about the fate and plight of misguided elements, who will only go under again and again.

ü  The names of all those lost in the tragedy are placed around the two memorials and looking at them will remind humanity for all time to come about  the enormity of the disaster,  abysmal depth of human madness and  the colossal price of the tragedy for the humanity at large.

ü  At the same time the two Iconic new buildings at Ground Zero also depict the result of human aspirations, dreams, excellence and human triumph- a la American Dream.

***ASK NOT WHAT THE COUNTRY WILL DO FOR YOU,

                 BUT WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR THE COUNTRY*** J F Kennedy

Be happy. Be safe.

ॐ

8AM