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Showing posts from March, 2013

A little perspective

So here I am settling in Pune and loving the journey back home. Nothing surprises me or shocks me greatly as I am not so new to this environment. I lived in India, in Mumbai for 26 years of my life and was lucky to have enough exposure to the city with all it's beauty and madness. America has changed me however I can still relate and while things have changed quite dramatically India is still India. Now a little perspective. When I was growing up I went to a local SSC school 5 minutes from home. It was a good school, later I realized it was considered as one of the very best schools in Santacruz. Again, good is so relative in a land of over a 1,241,491,960 people (data from world bank). Not too different from saying North Edison has a good schooling system (as compared to what ?? south edison,Iselin, Metuchen or Central NJ, northern,south or East coast or America). So this is the relativity factor. Remember this is just a elementary/high or even middle school. But lets not take ...

Festivals

My memories of Holi are quite colourful literally.. When I was a kid about 8-10 yrs old Holi was great. It meant filling water balloons and keeping them in a bucket until it filled it with about 50 different colour and size balloons. It was a lot of hard work as many of them busted while filling, after filling and of course the hardest part knotting them up. We would then carefully then take the bucket downstairs and play Holi with colours and water. We had the pichkari or what we now call water guns and spray on each other. This fun lasted for hours and we would get so tired by the end of it. It was really messy and the colours were not always fun, I still remember some kids would use silver colour which would not get off easily and look horrendous. Also, some would use oil colours which also were hideous. Like anything else you had to choose where and whom to play with. For the most part it was safe and fun. Taking a shower and getting all the colour off was no ordinary feat. It t...