Almost Divali

Divali (or Deepavali, as it's called in the South) is on Friday - the biggest holiday of the year, and I haven't done one thing about it. Today I have to pay bonuses to the staff, at least. I should be giving out boxes of sweets to friends, and buying new clothes for us. Last year I bought handmade-paper bags, and put boxes of chocolates, and sparklers, and clay oil lamps, and little gift-things in them. If we had kids I'd be buying firecrackers. Mary puts kolam, rice flour patterns, outside the gate and the front doorstep, so I will put out some lamps, like this picture from the Economic Times, on Friday evening:

I saw a picture of a crowd of shoppers in T.Nagar that looked like a political rally - people crammed together, filling the street, a few auto-rickshaws struggling to move through them - and decided to wait and buy something after Divali.

Mary and Lakshmi went out in the afternoon two days ago for the annual free sari distribution to the poor. Last year, The Tamil Nadu government announced that it would stop giving away free saris and dhotis, because the state had no money. The saris had been supplied by one village of weavers, who were now facing starvation. The opposition party announced a poor-feeding of rice gruel in that village. On the TV news they showed huge vats of it, and lines of people waiting to receive it.

Then the governing party announced that it would feed the poor with biryani - tastier, and more expensive, than gruel. The TV showed lines of people eating biryani off of banana leaves.

Then the two groups of party workers got into a fist fight, throwing things at each other, and the police were called in. All this was shown on the television - the stage at which notables were to speak, wrecked; white-dhotied party workers being dragged off. The weavers said, "What good is gruel or biryani to us? We need work." So it seems that their prayers have been answered, at least for this year.

Here's a picture of that ancient, newly discovered frog from the hills of Kerala. The Guardian had said that it resembled a flattened aubergine (eggplant) with a white snout, which seems about right: