New year, new directions!

T and I have finally decided that we will start looking for another house.
Our current house - beautiful as it may seem - actually has so many disadvantages that the balance no longer tips the right way, and as we are due for another 3,5 years we think it is worth looking for something else for the remaining time.

The biggest problem we are facing strangely enough has nothing to do with the house itself, but with a situation that we have been manouvred into: the fact that our garderners (who live on our premises) are actually not employed by us but by our landlord. This means that in case of situations where repercussions are needed, we are powerless. We cannot fire them or withhold their salaries, which in India unfortunately enough seems to be necessary. Their loyalty lies not with us but with their landlord (who doesn't give a shit about them, us or anybody else, as long as he makes money) and so they feel free to cheat us, lie to us and steal from us, our friends and our other personnel. The "incidents" have been going on for more than a year now and are starting to occur more frequently...Bas! (=Hindi for Stop). Enough!

I do not want to live in a house where I have to keep my handbag with me always because money otherwise disappears from it, where I have to warn my friends to put their valuables in our safe, where I have to lock my washingpowder away and where I have to buy something for my cook which she can lock her money and other belongings into....no more!
As we cannot fire them we have no choice but to either put up a fight with the landlord to change the contract (with the risk he will terminate the contract as he will probably be able to get 30-50% more rent for the house now) or to move.

As other factors are also starting to make living "in the country" less attractive (partyhouses that mushroom around us, a new landingstrip 500 m from our garden and the fact that 1000 new cars enter the roads every day, making our trip to "the city" longer and longer) we thought that moving back into the City would be a better option, despite the higher levels of pollution, noise, and the fact that I may not be able to take the chickens.
New year, new house, new chances....

From a sunny New Delhi, happy new year!

We are actually having lunch in our garden as during the day we hit the 20ºC...during the night Delhi is very chilly though, going as low as a watery 3ºC...we have one room that we can keep relatively comfortable, and that is where our lives evolve at the moment. Still, being in India makes me realise every day how lucky I am that I was born on the "right" side of the world...as new year is the time to give things a deeper thought, below is an exerpt from an article published in The Hindu, written by Harsh Mander, called Whose land is this?.
It left me silent...this too is India. Having lived here for more than a year now I have seen this on the streets, unable to describe it, unable to understand, unable to close my eyes to it, unable to accept it but understanding that change has to come from within:

" It was a remote village in Bolangir in Orissa that we met an ancient grizzled couple, Champo and minzi. They have for many years cut down to eating one meal a day. It is usually baasi, a small quantity of rice left overnight to ferment, with wild leaves from the forest. At night they drink black tea to kill their hunger, if there are no leftovers given to Champo when he begs. [...] Today, they can both barely walk but still, if on any day they are too sick to set out to labour, they just do not have food to eat. Yet when we met them, they often laughed and Minzi, while parting, tried hard to press into my hand a precious pumpkin, which she had grown on the roof of her thatch hut, as a gift to a guest from a faraway land."

" One night when we met deepak, he was engrossed in his mathematics textbook under a street light. He sleeps on the grimy unkempt pavements of Patna next to his father Ganesh, a rickshaw puller. His father's fondest dream is that one day his son Deepak would become a "sahib". He brought Deepak with him from their village to share with him the rigours of the city only so that he could sent him to a local school. He ensures that his son gets a cup of milk each day, and nutricious food, even if Ganesh himself sleeps half fed."

"education is the dream for their children of most people who are exiled to India's margins, even if it is in government schools that run without the sunlight of joyful learning, creativity and freedom. [...] But millions of parents are too poor to afford even free government schools: legions of children work, hundreds of thousands of others escape poverty and abuse and make the streets of cities their homes, still others are compelled to migrate with their parents each year to construction sites and mines. [...] There are reports from many corners of the country of Dalit (=the lowest caste) children who cannot sit with their classmates when the government statutory mid-day meal is served or other who boycott school meals if these are prepared by dalit cooks. An estimated one million children, women and men still carry human excreta on their heads as the onely livelyhood that society opens up to them."

"For all of these, there seems no light even in the far distant end of the tunnel in which they find themselves trapped. A day must come when this light is lit, when this land truly belongs to all who are born to it and nurtured its soil".

....!

We wish you a thoughtful and grateful new year.