Photos

Happy birthday, Terra! Hope you all have a good time in Portland. I have been bugged by mom enough to post some photos so I will just post these with minimal explanation, I gotta get out of this office before 8 p.m. More soon. Enjoy-

One of the few and far between garbage cans; a monkey on this side, an ecstatic buddha on the other

This seemingly unremarkable, poorly shot photo is significant because it captures the three most commonly seen bizarre (to Westerners) occurrences of the Indian roadway:

- the omnipresent Ambassador car (described by one author as "clunky, a revamped 1948 Morris Oxford, which has a steering mechanism with the subtlety of an oxcart, guzzles gas like a sheik, and shakes like a guzzler)
- a group of cows hanging out on a highway
- the fact that our car is in the middle of the road (most of our time traveling on this trip was spent in the right, or wrong, lane, as you go into whichever lane has less cars in it, not which one was designated for your use)

The East India Distilleries sugar refinery in Pondicherry- you are looking at their state-of-the-art, brand new loading dock vehicles

My hosts in Pondicherry

Getting blessed by Lakshmi, the resident Ganesh-embodier, at Pondicherry's Ganesha temple