Shopping

Indian markets range from the new "western-style" malls, with entrance fees and high-end shops with internationally famous names, to the local cluster of small one-room storefornts or outdoor stands. Kira and Ben took me to one of the former, for the experience; it had a construction worker's camp (jhuggi, which means "hut" in Hindi) behind it - clearly the people who built the mall could never afford the entrance fee. I shop at various of the local clusters: medication vegetables flowers in my neighborhood or some of the local markets that locals use, paper goods and clothing in the larger and more upscale Khan market. There, and at other markets, the merchants have had meetings about how to protect themselves and customers in case of terrorist attacks - but the chaos is such that it seems hard to imagine any organized evacuation. Most people worry about terrorism in the abstract; it isn't a constant here as elsewhere.
Serojini Market is the biggest and most chaotic local market with every kind of shop imaginable but not the best food market; that would be INA - more or less under one roof - with incredible vegetables and groceries, fish (with live catfish swimming in a big bucket), and chickens so fresh that they cluck ... until hauled into the shop and butchered on the spot.
Old Delhi is a whole other world, with whole streets devoted to one kind of goods or another: brass merchants, spice merchants, paper products, auto parts, jewelry - my favorite is the extraordiarily colorful wedding saree street.

It's not every day

that you meet an elephant by the entrance to your school. But on Friday, this one was waiting for the doors to open, and arriving students were wondering whether the elephant was coming to their class. He was definitely not scheduled for mine.

Celebrating in New Delhi

Finally, the new century has begun.

Happy Hallowe'en from Fireman Jude