India is...

India is an enchantress. She will lure you in with her vibrant life force and energy - redolent with fragrant spices, music, and colors. She will mystify you with enormous cities that shouldn't work as well as they do, and yet they do. She will charm you with the warmth, kindness and curiosity  of her varied people. She will alarm you with the frenetic pace and chaos of her traffic careening in a million directions. She will make you consider your beliefs as you listen to the muezzin call out the adhan (call to prayer) - a rending sound that simultaneously holds the fervor and passion of great love, or as you watch a Hindu reverently bow in prayer to an elaborate and masterful sculpture of Ganesh that will soon be returned to the lake or river. She will humble you as you watch a woman beautifully resplendent in a pristine sari walk barefoot through one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. She will challenge you and ideals you think you hold when you discover the housekeeper whom you have come to respect and care for can read barely a word - in any language, yet is working two jobs to ensure that her children - daughters too - are well educated and able to achieve more.  She will shock you when you see entire families living in abject poverty, huddled together under elaborate tarps trying to stay dry during the monsoons. She will make your blood seethe when you see gross injustice of begging children, advertisements begging the populace to educate girls and animals beaten before your very eyes. Yet in the next breath she will hearten you as a dozen hands reach to keep an elderly man from falling, friends holding hands walking down the street or laughing young children playing together in an abandoned field. She is all of these and so many more.

It can be overwhelming, it can be breathtaking, it can be shattering.

There are moments where the things I wish to share with you run like a torrent through my brain defying my hands to keep up as they attempt to capture each image and word - committing them to virtual paper. And that is if the power has managed to stay on during the most recent monsoon. There are other moments when I simply have no words to describe or discuss what I'm seeing, feeling, or thinking.

So my apologies for the delay in getting the blog up to date. I needed a couple of days to sort myself out. I have 4 entries poised for publication on the blog and I'll have them up for you to read soon - promise.