Indian Winter

The weather is mainly an ambivalent grey nothingness, like an over-cooked porridge, with nothing added to jazz it up, it just sits there.

Coming home yesterday by rickshaw (car still at garage) I felt an unfamiliar sensation: I was cold, dammit! I'm wearing my jeans and even my jumper some of the time. I'm eating soup and making boeuf bourginon. I'm attracted to all things orange: T-shirts, skin creams. I suppose this time of the year is as close to a winter as we'll get. Being so spoilt with the weather in B'lore, you finally miss the blue skies and sun when they go.

I cancel my yoga appointment and get my haircut instead. The hairdresser (Rakesh at Bounce) is an absolute gem and creates sex-and-the-city-slick from my low maintenance long hair. :=)

On a more sobering note: in the north of India, flooding has left more than 14 million homeless.
That's almost 1.5 x the entire population of Belgium (10 million).
But , it's 1% of India's whole population (1 169 016 000)

Maybe this explains what I perceive to be a low amount of coverage given to the floods here. For example, in the Sunday Times, 5th August, it didn't make the front page. The lead stories were the 7 wonders of India (following the interest for those of the world) and an Indian film star award ceremony. I look through the paper and don't even find an article on the flooding.

I go on the Times of India website today. The Times' is the most read English paper here. There's nothing on the flooding in the 'India' section on the front page. I dig a little deeper, click on "more". Still nothing on the floods. I search the word "floods": and finally I find several articles, but they seem hidden away. In contrast, it is on the front page of the bbc website (international version), and has been, on and off, for several days.

The different states in India seem to be more like the different countries in Europe, rather than one country. Ie each one has its own identity, language and environmental issues.

Photo by Eileen Delhi