In a hotel room in Mumbai, Sunday morning about 9am. I suddenly notice that it’s really quiet… all I can hear is the clock ticking and crows cawing outside. A tap-tap on the window turns out to be a dragonfly looking in. It must have been like this for at least half an hour. I’m pondering how peace and quiet is such a rare commodity in Indian cities, and how you could run special holidays to quiet places for city-dwellers. […]
It’s Independence Day in India today, my second one since arriving here, and a national holiday. I’ve now been here for 1 year and 8 months. Assimilation is probably too strong a word, but I joked that I was fully assimilated when I bought a pressure cooker for my maid to use a few weeks ago. I had never used one before, but the communal hissing of pressure cookers joins the sound of grass or twig brooms sweeping tiled floors […]
Here in Bangalore the traffic is legendary, but in particular the motorbikes and scooters — or “two wheelers” as they’re collectively known — are what makes the difference. Usually occupied by at least two people (and up to 5), the 2-wheelers make up a huge proportion of the traffic here. In a congested city with poor roads, the advantages are obvious: you can weave through gaps in the otherwise-gridlocked roads, you can go up on the pavement to overtake (and […]
The world’s biggest democracy just had the world’s biggest power-cut. According to the Times of India, 684 million people across 21 States and Union Territories in the North and East of India were without electricity yesterday, when 3 power grids failed. That’s more than half the population here, and pretty close to a tenth of the people on the planet. It was the biggest electrical power failure in history. 300 coal miners were trapped underground, the Delhi metro was […]
