Our Local Pharmacy

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Medicine. For Mankind.

Ronald Masala

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Outside our guest hotel here in Noida there is a McDonald’s. I had two McFish Sandwiches, but as you can see there are also other things on the menu: Chatpata McAloo Tikki, anyone? Anyone?

Our New Neighbors

They arrived at midnight and fired up the machinery. It was deafening, and the smoke was toxic. This was the view from our front porch.
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And just for giggles, here is the same photo, “in miniature,” after using some post-production tilt-shift trickery:
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Our Un-Holi Night

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The beauty of being in a new country is that seasonal events aren’t fraught with the weight of memory: Diwali doesn’t take you back to the soul crushing family dinners with the relatives whose default dinner discussions are always politics, religion and illness; Janmashtami doesn’t remind you of the time that that asshole surfer dude stood you up, not only ruining your night, but giving you an annual holiday to relive the emotions. But that doesn’t mean that as Holi approached we weren’t weighted with expectations.

They said it would be messy. We were warned that upon leaving the house we’d be bombarded with fistfuls of colors. We’d seen the pictures of pigment-smeared people crowding the streets, ecstatically dancing to pulsating rhythms, moving as one, colors bleeding together, humanity united. This is what we heard and this is what we wanted.

We donned our whitest whites and hit the streets in search of rainbow-streaked adventure. We saw only the occasional group of young men covered with sprays of colored dust, and learned that expectation creates disappointment in any culture: where was the chaos, the music, the drift of colored smoke? Where’s the party dude???

We tried to go to a nightclub that advertised an evening Holi party, but got there just 5 minutes before closing time, and the police were already lined up to with their lathis to clear out the lollygaggers. So we waited in the parking lot for the all the multicolored people to pour out of the club, positioning ourselves so we could pelt them with our secret stash of color.

When the first clubbers stepped into the parking lot, we held our fire: they were all dressed in their best westernized evening wear, devoid of any errant color splotches. At that point we realized we were no longer wannabe Holi players; we were just four stupid white people in a parking lot.

SO, we did what any stupid white people would do: we began hurling the colored powders at each other, right there in front of the homebound nightclubbers and the club-wielding police officers. If this was a holiday for teenagers, then damn it, we were going to behave like teenagers! Then, before we completely exhausted ourselves and our supply of colored powders, we crammed ourselves into a tuk-tuk and bombarded midnight strangers with streaming clouds of color, from one end of Bangalore to the other.

It was the best Holi we ever had… ;)

A nation of over a billion people, and half of them are in my kitchen.

Before we arrived a little more than a month ago, I heard over and over again that there is no such thing as privacy in India. I am a social creature by nature but I’m easily exhausted by humanity.

Turns out, those people were right: there is no such thing as privacy in India. We have Rathnama, our delightful maid/cook who came with the house; her husband, Amitabh; her nephew, Venu; Venu’s adorable baby girl Lakshimi and his adorable baby wife Manisha as well as his brother Tusshar; our driver/nanny/translator Bhaskar; and Shankar who shows up at the house randomly and fixes random things; plus our landlord Satish and his restless five-year old who keep trying to get the pool to stop being green. And these are just the regular players! On any given day, at any given time, you can look up from whatever you are doing and find one or more of these people in your line of sight.

After less than two weeks this parade has come to feel normal. People interact with us and each other with ease, and don’t demand a lot of our attention. There seems to be a built-in respect for humanity, if not space. It might be a function of the necessity for such a large population to get along, or simply the fact that we can barely understand each other; either way the population boom in our lives is surprisingly comfortable.

How To String Jasmine For Pam’s Hair Every Day

This is Rathnama. She takes care of the house and pretty good care of us as well. Every morning she brings a string of jasmine flowers to Pam and ties them into her hair. We thought she bought them at the market, but in fact she makes them herself – here’s how she does it:

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Needless to say, Pam is never going back to a non-jasmine lifestyle. Hopefully one of you, dear readers, will learn from this video, and, when we get back to SF, bring these to Pam every morning.

Video shot with Pam’s cute little FlipVideo recorder. The pink one.