• Why is masking tape impossible to find? Yes...I went to a stationer, yes, they had five kinds of tape, and yes, they had heard of masking tape....just had no idea where to find it. Which leads one to wonder...are the walls in my flat a rarity? Western-style plaster, with paint? Do you not waste paper by creating items which are specifically temporary, needing only the use of masking's uniquely sticky skill set for just a few days?
• The new SRK - Shah Ru Kahn, my favorite Bollywood star - movie looks fantastic! An Ironman redo...debuts during Diwali. Super! Let me buy my ticket & arrange a movie night with friends!....but when's Diwali? Three people asked provided wide ranging responses - November to mid-December. Does it last that whole time? Even more importantly, is not knowing a sign of sheer ignorance, OR perfectly logical, since there's a Bengali calendar & the western calendar simultaneously used for all auspicious occasions, with a government officer surveying the astrological & Bengali equivalency of feng-shui before pronouncing the official compromise date...would be so nice to know if I'm blundering or legitimately confused. (The West Bengalese are incredibly proud people - they identify much more with the Bengal portion of their lives than Indian; functioning, therefore, with two calendars, about ten to 12 days off, & several hundred years between the two, seems perfectly natural...why dismiss millennia of history for just over 60 years of timeline since Indian Independence. Needless to say - it's tough to follow as a newcomer!)
• Kolkata is world renowned for their monsoons...& I can say first hand that when it rains it really pours & the season is ebbing now, so the storms I've experienced are mild compared to the deluge they call August! Wonder why, with so little fresh water for so many, don't they have public cisterns everywhere? There are large storage units on the apartment complex roof - at least two per six families. Maybe the cycle of replenishment requires run-off? Nearly everything 2 km or more outside of the main city is permeable, so there's plenty of space to capture, recycle, all that falls.
• How do the cows know where to go? They wander...I see the same ones from day to day...do they have territory like the dogs patrolling their block, protecting the areas where city dwellers put out rice on newspaper for them to eat? There are domesticated cows, too, both in the neighborhood & somewhere, presumably, in mass quantities, providing milk for delivery, paneer, curd (yogurt) for 13 million people. Do the "wild" cows, for lack of a better term because they are about as docile as a lazy dog, ever interact with those owned & utilized by families? It's such a fascinating part of the culture...religion on hooves; spiritualism literally embodied, moving through society. Saw only two cows in downtown this time, plus a flock of sheep being moved to greener pastures on the Maidan. Cows pass here daily in the neighborhood, with one bull, a russet horn tipped upside down on the left, bellowing each day along the main, paved road, exactly at 5:10! You can hear him from a kilometer away, then, sure enough, right at 5:10, he strolls past the complex! Maybe gathering in his harem of calfs & heifers for the night? So many questions...
(Thank goodness for ipad's long living battery - the generator is on for the first time since I moved in...Kolkata's also infamous for brown-black-outs...another thing no one admits, though it's understandable to shun conversations about something so completely out of your hands.)
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Location:Kol, WB
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