Two Links and One Home News Flash

Links first:

From the Washington Post: Finally, Our Chance To Savor India's Favored Fruit ... "This is mango's moment. For the first time, India, the world's largest producer of the world's favorite fruit, has been granted access to the U.S. market. Best of all, it's the particularly coveted Alphonso variety that is on its way to grocers...."

From The New Yorker: Letter from Jaipur - The Idol Thief: Inside one of the biggest antiquities-smuggling rings in history.

Home news:

Our gardener cut his foot on the iron lid of the underground water tank, and it became infected. He walked gingerly, and wore a cloth wrapped around his foot for several days - he works barefooted. But then he removed it, so I assumed that he had recovered.

Three days ago he didn't come to work. In the afternoon his wife called and said that the infection had not gone away, and that he had been going to the hospital every day for an injection. According to her, the injections had generated too much heat in his body, so he had been eating only gruel and yoghurt (cooling foods). Finally, the diet and the foot together had kept him from getting out of bed altogether.

(I am writing about it because of the Indian notion of heat and coolness in the body which, when out of balance, leads to illness. Each new instance of this idea fascinates me.) (Fortunately, because or in spite of his mix of western and local treatments, the gardener has now recovered.)