I am finding that these days I am bashing India a hell of a lot when just generally chatting to people. India does deserve a good bashing. I have also made sure that I balance the bashing by higlighting the positives.

More so than ever though, I am worried that the Commonwealth games will be a debacle. Even staunch Delhiites who up until a few months ago were confident that Delhi would put on a good games are now doubtful. Just today there was an article in the Hindustan Times about how one of the venues has "Collapsed". It is one of the shooting venues and with less than 3 months to go how the hell is that going to be fixed in time.... that during the monsoon as well. ?? It is time that the people responsible for this mess stood up and held themselves accountable. Still in this so called modern India people in power take money and that will be the undoing of these Games. Why Why Why can things not be properly planned. India has such a wealth of intellectual talent but that talent is squashed by the bureacracy.

Now to balance that..... only a couple of days ago we were priviledged to be part of a tree planting ceremony just near our house. There is a programme to plant many hundreds of trees where we live. It was attended by many Professors of Delhi university who only cared to do the right thing. They were well informed and helped to motivate us to do the right thing. Below is a picture of one of the professors with Nikhil planting.

For the professors who were there, money had nothing to do with this event they spoke clearly and passionately about the benefits of what we were doing that day. Had this project got into the hands of the beauracrats they would have found a way to extract money. We need more of these protected initiatives.

Peace and Love