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.