Christmas and the inner bling

My absolute favourite season of the year is fast approaching.  Just a week till Christmas.  To celebrate, Anjulie and I went to Khan Market and bought lots of long 5 metre strings of Christmas lights – predctably all made in China – so now the house looks wonderfully kitsch.  In fact, I am planning on getting even more lights tomorrow, so there will not be a door or window left unfestooned.

India does that to you.  It releases the inner bling in even the most sober, strait-laced Brit.  Today we bought Christmas-y coloured lights -  red and green.  But I am sorely tempted by the Barbie Doll pink lights…

Khan Market was in the news today, as it so happens :

So, “one of the costliest commercial real estates in India” is about to get what the paper calls “a facelift”.  A couple of years ago, when my sister Jane was here for Christmas with her family, she took one look at the back lanes of Khan Market, cables and wires trailing everywhere and narow staircases leading up to tiny shops and rooftop restuarants, and said “So we don’t worry about fire exits and such boring stuff ?’ and then plunged happily into it all.

A couple of weeks ago Rory Kirk, a friend from Mauritius commented that one of my local bits of news was a storm in a tea cup.  The following biazrre bit of news is more of a scoop in an ice-cream bowl :

What else was in the news today ?  More damage to Delhi’s fragile water bodies :

Not only is Delhi suffering, but local farmers claim that the illegal mining is damaging their crops and that their land has been appropriated.  The apparent lawlessness and indifference of the police just doesn’t seem to stop.

But enough of gloom and doom. I am off to a wedding reception in an hour -  wearing my Pushkar finery – and so I will leave you with my word of  the day :

Tollywood ?  The Telugu language answer to Bollywood, of course. Because of the fast-unto-death (remember I blogged about it ?) that led to the proposed division of the state of Andhra Pradesh on lingustic lines, the quote unquote “bustling film industry” is suffering financially, to the tune of Rs 100 crore.  You can do the maths.

Those of you who either live in India or have visited, know how you get completely knocked sideways by the colours here.  To try and explain to those readers who haven’t yet come here, I offer 2 images to show how your bling judgement goes for a six here.  The top one was at Manisha and Himmat’s wedding -  the last ceremony, the “vidai”.  And the bottom photo was taken a few hours later, in the street leading up to a Muslim shrine in Ajmer.  This is why I am so buying pink fairy lights tomorrow.