Today is India's Independence Day. And it's wet. The streets are quiet. I was in a rickshaw at the stroke of midnight, that most famous of midnights that divides forever India's freedom day from Pakistan's. The rain pelted down and in the backseat there was no escaping the warm monsoon spray = drenched to the bone, invigorated, stoked to be living in this amazing place.
I was flicking through Salman Rushdie's ode to partition - Midnight's Children - and stumbled across this: "to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world." No more apt description of the challenge for expats landing on Planet India for a few short years. We love you India, but you are such a big world to swallow!
Here's a pic from the original Independence Day in 1947 - people wandering around near the Secretariat Buildings in Delhi. I drive this road regularly, and always think of this image. The people look so happy, free, proud. But you also get the feeling the adrenalin rush was fading, and lives were returning to normal, a better normal. You can almost hear a collective 'what now?' rise up from the crowd. I wonder what that day must have been like: euphoric, exultant, an end day and a beginning day, but the rotis still tasted like rotis and someone still had to do the dishes.
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