11.00am on Sunday and what else would one do, except get dressed up in my kurta and meet the great and good of the quadrangle of flats surrounding the garden where the 15 bottle palms I bought for the communal garden are to be planted. In fact it wasn't as cheesy as it could have been and after the wee speech and everyone concerned getting a chance to plant them out we had tea and samosas. There will be a wee sign saying that "some tube from Stonehaven bought these plants and will be remembered for being a tube", seriously though, they were charming and it all went swimmingly with photos aplenty.
Laiah and I being the only ones back at base, went into Connaught Place for lunch in Zen the Chinese/Japanese restaurant and pigged out on fabulous seafood and in my case a beer! By Indian standards it was expensive but the reality was it came to about $34 which included service charge and there was so much I have a doggy bag for tonight which we're to share.
Life in Delhi has been such a paradox of attitudes and practices that in the absence of any news (again, I must be getting boring), I thought I'd share some with you.
The cow is sacred as are monkeys & elephants and yet in a village in Haryana the locals went on a killing spree against the wild dogs which roam about everywhere (none of which seem to attack or even bark at you) on the basis of a story which had circulated that they'd eaten new born babies. The sad truth is that the female infanticide is a more likely source of the disappearing babies. A glaring example of this has been reported this morning when an IT engineer (I thought they were supposed to be smart), was charged with throwing his 4 day old baby daughter down a 30 ft well, what made this gruesome story even more tragic is his defence to the charge was that he wanted to spend more quality time with his wife and hence his actions!
Another story that left me speechless was a fairly famous and wealthy man phoned his wife from somewhere in Essex in England and uttered the word "Talaaq" 3 times to her, and as he's a muslim, she's now divorced despite her having changed to Islam only 3 months ago to please him. To ensure she got the message he sent her an sms with the same utterings.
On "Holi" there were about a thousand people convicted for drunken driving in Delhi alone, they got caught presumably because there was a distinct lack of traffic on the road that day and they must have been the only ones who, being pissed didn't notice!!
There is a flyover in south east Delhi not far from where we are, and it has been so badly designed that 6 people in three separate incidents have fallen off from it to their death in the last four days. On one day alone a family of 4 on a motorcycle (father, mother and two children) were killed after a collision with a crane and resulting in the four of them going over the side falling to their death on the road below, and this only hours after a young man toppled over the edge after a minor collision on the other side of the carriageway.
The number of suicides which happen when people are sacked or laid off is hard to comprehend, though this reaction certainly would reduce tribunals, if not a touch dramatic in the circumstances.
The traffic does get congested on the weekend and given the amount of vehicles on the road I suppose it is strange to see so many road accidents, since it is hard to imagine anyone getting up enough speed to do any lasting damage. The three wheeled rickshaw is the most vulnerable and is for the most part my form of transport when I have to go out at all. It is not hard to imagine it being crushed by some of the behemoths that pass for trucks with the equivalent of railway sleepers as part cabin and load bed. All of which is added to by the quirk employed of just going on whatever side of the road you fancy. The official driving side is the same as the UK, i.e. the left (a hangover from the colonial days), but doesn't seem to hold much sway, since everyone just picks whichever side they want and hope that anything coming the other way will have his lights on in the dark or will slow down to let you back in!
If all of this death and destruction sounds a bit pessimistic, then you'd be wrong. I love the chaos of the traffic in a perverse sort of way and so far the other forms of carnage haven't really impacted on anyone I know, so it is for the most part (and sadly) peripheral to my life in Delhi. It does though make for some gruesome reading in the papers we get daily, and when taken in the context of the life of a "Hindi" believer is paradoxical. Perhaps the high suicide rate is linked to the belief that the worse your life is here, then you must have been pretty awful in an earlier one and the next one will get better.
Namaste from a boring Sunday in Delhi and c'mon the Hoops!!
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