Nandan and I went to Delhi to attend Chandan’s wife’s wedding. She seems to think of many things relating to Varanasi as having the negative attributes associated with a rural place. The wedding had guns fired into the air as part of the celebration process. I talked with a lot of people there but did not find anyone who spoke much English, but still the people who knew a little could communicate much better than I could in Hindi.
The wedding was fun but it lasted about 10 hours the first night and the reception the next day was about 6, so the event was a bit long for my tastes. It seemed to me that for a great many attendees the event is mostly waiting while someone somewhere else is doing some ritual only with rotating select groups of attendees, but all Indian weddings seem like this to me.
After the wedding we visited the IAVI and PATH offices in Delhi. At IAVI we meet with the director who said that she would hear a request from us about a meetup in Mumbai which Nandan and I are planning. At PATH a worker gave us all their promotional materials and the contact of their director, who she said would be able to answer some questions about their projects which she could not.
We also visited Akshardham, which is a modern temple promoting Indian patriotism through the teachings of Swami Narayan. There is a set of shows in which some automatons act out the life of Swami Narayan, then there is a movie about the foundation, then there is this boat ride through the cave of Indian history. In the boat ride about 50 important characters from Indian history are depicted and named and I realized that I did not know many of them, so I plan to make a list of them and learn about them all.
Adam Sargent, Lane Rasberry, Ali Taqi at Zabaan