In India

I am in India at the moment. For a change, it's been cooler here than in Sydney though the winter dust has settled over the trees making everything rather muted.  Still, the mild end of an Indian winter is quite nice. And I can see the first hints of spring, the odd mango and gulmohur bloom. 

The days when I read my way through a flight are in the past given in-flight entertainment.   The first leg of the journey was taken up by The Social Network which was decent but forgettable though its "revenge on the ex" motif was way too simplistic. Next leg, Tamara Drewe, a reworking of the Hardy novel, "Far from a Madding Crowd".  It didn't have the weight of the Hardy novel but was a clever adaptation and quite fun.  Last leg, appropriately, was Udaan. It was a straightforward story but entirely naturalistic - astonishing really given the way Hindi films are. And the Jamshedpur setting was a bonus.

I had a brief stopover in Perth, possibly the world's most silent airport.  Like many an Australian city, it simply didn't look integrated with the landscape.  Part of this is because of the Australian bush which somehow seems to overwhelm human habitation.  There is a certain familiarity to the bush, the nature of the flora is broadly the same in look around many parts of Australia, but there are very many variations in play. Perth was no exception and I hope to go back and look around a bit. 

Back home, the threads of family are being taken up.  I cam across an old "autograph book" of my uncle's from his schooldays that I had kept as a keepsake and the entries made me smile.  Sunil exhorts him to"Love all, trust a few, do wrong to none". Harish says "Sugar is sugar, Salt is salt, If you forget me, That's your fault!". And Norbert relies on an old favourite, "Down in a Valley, Carved on a Rock, Three Little Words, Forget-me-Not". I have seen these in so many autograph books (I suppose they have mutated into a different form in the facebook age) and they are often a mixture of pious Christian strictures and sentimental Victorian poetry  that seems to have persisted well into the 1980s in India.

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The picture on top is of - I think - strawberry seeds that had just sprouted when I left Sydney.  The shoes  are discards from the op-shop and are excellent for growing young seedlings. Sadly, they may not survive my absence and the intense heat of the summer.