first, check out
My Pics for some shots of my HYD home (scroll to the bottom).
second, i've been reading Kiran Desai's
The Inheritance of Loss and wanted to include a passage that is cause to pause, especially living as a Western foreigner in a developing country:
"These people could name them, recognize them-the few rich-but Lola and Noni could barely distinguish between the individuals making up the crowd of poor.
Only before, the sisters had never paid much attention for the simple reason that they didn't have to. It was natural they would incite envy, the supposed, and the laws of probability favored their slipping through life without anything more than muttered comments, but every now and then, somebody suffered the rotten luck of being in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time when it all caught up-and generations worth of trouble settled on them. Just when Lola had though it would continue, a hundred years like the one past-Trollope, BBC, a burst of hilarity at Christmas-all of a sudden, all that they had claimed innocent, fun, funny, not really to matter, was proven wrong.
It
did matter, buying tinned ham roll in a rice and dal country; it
did matter to live in a big house and sit beside a heater in the evening, even one that sparked and shocked; it
did matter to fly to London and return with chocolates filled with kirsch; it did matter that others could not. They had pretended it didn't, or had nothing to do with them, and suddenly it had everything to do with the,. The wealth that seemed to protect them like a blanket was the very thing that left them exposed. They, amid extreme poverty, were baldly richer, and the statistics of difference were being broadcast over loudspeakers, written loudly across the walls. The anger had solidified into slogans and guns, and it turned out that they,
they, Lola and Noni, were the unlucky ones who wouldn't slip through, who would pay the debt that should be shared with others over many generations."
Diwali's over (see pic for me on that day). I spent it at the home of a lovely couple that has welcomed me into their family. We consumed more sweets and breathed in more smoke from firecrackers in that one day than one should expose oneself to in a year. But, akin to Christmas or Thanksgiving Day excuses, this holiday occurs but once a year. I enjoyed wearing my new sari, though it was time for hair, make-up, and a costume change before going on the evening show to discuss Obama. All in all, a full Diwali.
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