Ari's Planet

A few thoughts for today.

In India, people wash their clothes in any kind of water they can find. I thought this would stop short of open sewage. I was wrong. Arriving on the train from Jaisalmer to Delhi, we passed people washing their clothes in the open gutter, amounting to a sewer, that runs along the train tracks. As we approached the station there were tin-roof and mud shacks lining the tracks, with people sitting in their front yards, that is, on the tracks. Kids playing on the tracks. Some of the houses were painted in the wonderful pastel colors they use in India and the women wore their colorful, though somewhat less brilliant, clothes. They washed their clothes in this water because that is the water available to them. I doubt if it made the clothes cleaner and instead just exposed them to diseases.

In an Indian paper, reporting on Heath Ledger's death, was this quote from Charles Sanders: "If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilisation does. In place of this we have death."

In a March 2005 issue of Indian Cosmopolitan, found at a rooftop restaurant in Bundi while waiting for lunch, with kids and their grandparent running around with toy guns to scare away monkeys, advice on organizing your pocketbook to reduce stress: "You will feel a lot less anxious when you can find your eyeliner quickly". Very important advice.