India's Election Results

Anyone who has a conversation with me about travels will quickly come to know that I'm a huge fan of India, personally and politically. So I find little to disagree with in Michael Barone's column on the significance of India's election result:

The election held over four weeks in April and May has produced a result very much to our advantage. The Congress party has been returned to power with a larger share of the vote than indicated by pre-election and exit polls, and will no longer need Communists and left-wingers for majorities in the Lok Sabha. The [Hindu nationalist opposition] BJP attacked Congress for being too close to the United States; voters evidently decided that this was not a minus but a plus.

[I]t would not hurt to show some solicitude for our friends in India, with whom we share strategic interests and moral principles. The 700 million voters of India have chosen to be our ally. We should take them up on it.

As I heard expressed in many different ways in India, the world's biggest democracy and her oldest democracy are natural partners.

On Festivals

I've got mixed feelings about participating in the rites of religions I don't hold to. On the one hand, outside the West, nominally religious festivals are simultaneously cultural and civic events, and it can be great fun to seek out these events when visiting foreign countries. On the other, however, active participation in a ritual could potentially violate my own faith, and in a way disrespects those who do believe in it. I guess it comes down to a case-by-case basis. Anywho... this is all by way of introduction to Holi, the Hindu festival of colors, which just looks like way too much fun.

Dalrymple on Bombay

Theodore Dalrymple reflects on the Bombay massacre and his own experiences in that most memorable of cities. Here he explains his love for India, a love that I share, but could never hope to express as well as he does (a common hazard in reading Dalrymple) :

It had been a strange morning, to say the least, of the kind that could happen only in India. I have loved the country ever since I first went there as a student aged 19, and think I would be perfectly happy to live there, though I recognise that what attracts me about it repels others. For me, it is the most profoundly human place on earth, the glory and desolation of human existence being constantly before one there in a way that is matched nowhere else.

Precisely.