Bangkok, totally wired. Cable clutter everywhere. Like electric monsters they hang over the junction. Sometimes like art-installations close to the sidewalk. Easy to reach out and touch for kids.

But this special picture is as vanishing as the shown technology at the beginning of the new millennium. It will disapear soon.
As so many things in Bangkok, wires are another symbol for this chaotic city. It seems to be unsystematic and dysfunctional. But as the traffic, always close to the collapse, it works, somehow.

In everyday Bangkok, western ideas of order and system have no place at all. What happens here is instead very much dominated by ordinary people and a philosophy of relaxed co-existence which permits seemingly irreconcilable contradictions. Everywhere, one finds a good-natured willingness to take life as it is, with all of its tensions and scurrilous variety, and enjoy it as well!

Thomas Kalak