Notes from the Newspaper

At a Nepalese airport flights were delayed for 2 hours due to technical difficulties. Two goats were on the runway.

A water truck driver ran down an old man in a market yesterday. A mob quickly surrounded the driver and started kicking and punching him- the cops had to pull him out. There was a picture in the paper. This mob stuff happens here every now and then. As I was driving home after dark the other day I saw a guy tied to a pole getting hit by some men in a crowd. My friend thought that maybe he had tried breaking into someone’s house. There are so many people here, and a crowd can gather so quickly. I feel like a couple of guys can avalanche into a mob really fast. It is quite scary. And not uncommon. A few weeks ago a mob of men meted out justice to a thief, then afterwards lined up in a very orderly fashion to have their picture taken for the paper. I think this phenomenon just happens when you have this mass of people, things come to a head and bam you have a mob. We don’t have that kind of density very many places in the US. It is very weird to see.

There was an article about the fact that the Delhi bus drivers are really scary. Way scarier than Mumbai bus drivers. They don’t kill people in tragic, impossible to avoid accidents. They kill people with reckless abandon. I don’t think they run people down, throw the bus into reverse, and back over them exactly, but they do blatantly run people down at intersections. And drive through stopped traffic. Literally, stopped traffic. A man and his son were on a motorbike waiting at a light and were killed when a bus drove through them. Not surprising, many of the drivers don’t have licenses.

I should mention that I have recently seen some surprisingly nice action on the part of Bombay bus drivers. Three times now I have seen the buses slow to let people on as they were running down the street, whether the bus was near a scheduled stop or not. The people on the bus reach out and help the runner on. That gives me a nice community feeling. Also, the bus drivers haven’t particularly gone out of their way to try to kill me lately. That gives me a nice feeling too.

You can get past life psychotherapy. I don’t think this is just in India or anything, but it was in the paper here. If you died in a plane crash in a previous life, that may be why you are afraid of flying. You can talk to a psychotherapist about it! Or maybe, since everyone always seems to have been someone mighty and rich and famous in their past lives, maybe the reason you can’t leave your dead end job selling life force crystals at mall is because you are fundamentally afraid of making those big decisions about what to do with your life. Because you were Hamlet! Or you are afraid of elephants because you were Napoleon. You are afraid of commitment because you were Anne Boleyn. Snakes? Cleopatra. Unhappy with family life? Medea. Feel excessively angry all the time? Attila the Hun. Afraid your best friend is going to stab you? Julius Caesar. The possible psychoses are endless!

Current favorite headline: “Many brides in India dress like drag queens”

There is this new Thai book out: Foreign boyfriend, foreign husband. Trying to get the message out to young Thai village girls: Old and white is good, he won’t cheat on you or hit you. What you need to do is hang out in bars to find one, then when you have a guy, clean all the time and have sex with him whenever he wants. The reporter who wrote the article about the book interviewed one Thai woman who was like, yeah, it’s not the most sophisticated book.

Harish Patel is a Hindi speaking Bollywood actor in a play in London. However, he doesn’t speak English. He memorized the English play he is in, and understands enough to put in the right inflections.

Ram Situ/Adam’s Bridge: A ridge underwater connecting India and Sri Lanka. Is thought to be a bridge made by Ram, an ancient king and deity, as seen in the Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic. The Indian government wants to dredge it to make a shipping canal, to serve as a shorter route for the ships that are small enough to pass through. People are (probably rightly) worried about the environmental impact of knocking down a coral structure that is so big that you can see it in satellite photos. And of course there are the religious implications of chopping through a structure traditionally believed to be the work of an ancient deity. So someone somewhere thought that a good way of going about justifying the dredging would be to have the Archeological Survey of India question the existence of Ram, in an affidavit submitted to the Supreme Court. That didn’t upset or offend anyone. Hasn’t caused riots. Good thing the government made its doubts on the existence of a mythological being close to the literary and religious heart and heritage of the nation well known. Big vote winner.
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Great quote I found:
“I would not lend a book to the man who refuses a Bombay mango.”