Veer Zaara

Hey all! So, Diwali is crazy! Imagine the 4th of July and Christmas combined, with no snow and extremely dangerous fireworks guaranteed to be illegal in all 50 states. The day was pretty boring. We stayed home and waited for the visitors who came and went, so there was alot of down time and alot of conversation in Hindi I tried in vain to follow. The night was when stuff really happened. As soon as it got dark the city lit up again with fireworks. All night long fireworks, firecrackers and bombs were going off. Sitting in my room it sounded more like I was in Iraq than in India. I even called my mom because I wanted her to hear what was going on all around me. I can just imagine her at her desk at work hearing her daughter in the middle of a celebratory war zone. Needless to say, it was very fun.

I don't know how much I have written about Gaurav Towers. It was an Indian mall here and all of us were always there going to Pizza Hut or McDonald's, getting coffee, going to the bookstore, using the internet or buying toilet paper at the grocery store there. Anyways, Gaurav Towers is no more. It burned to the ground on Diwali. Apparently in the middle of the night there was an electrical short that caused the basement to be scorched, and the structure is so unsound they have to knock the whole thing over and build it back from scratch (if they ever rebuild). Its just so ironic to me and the rest of us. In the middle of India, where there are no safety precautions, where I have watched men pour burning metal into molds barefoot without any safety measures, that this modern building completely representative of Western globalization and consumption habits would burn to the ground. We are all sad, mostly because we lost our hangout! I also never got a picture of it to show all of you back home, so you will just have to imagine it.

Yesterday Christine, Arwen, Conor and I went to see the latest Bollywood movie staring Shah Rukh Khan called Veer Zaara. It sucked. I was so disappointed! Ever since we saw Dhoom in September and saw a preview for this movie we were all so excited for it, but it proceeded to be the most boring beautiful movie I have ever seen. All Hindi films are 3 hours long, and this one should have just been 2 hours at the most. The songs were bad, the plot boring, the female lead was practically a prop (stand here, cry here, embrace him here, run to him there, look beautiful here). BUT the costumes were incredible, and I coveted every piece of the girls jewelry.

The most adventurous part of the movie was standing in line for tickets. In India there are separate women and men's lines for tickets (thank God!). Arwen and I waited for one hour for tickets to the movie, and when the box office finally opened the crowd went absolutely crazy! They had police officers there doing security for the lines, and a woman in a police looking sari with a big stick was beating men away from the women's line. I couldn't help but laugh and smile, it was so absurd! The police never, EVER seem to do anything here, and yet they were working security at the MOVIE THEATER! Oh well.

I have spent most of today running errands, because tomorrow I am off to Chittor! I have to pack now, just wanted to send you all a message before I left. It may be awhile before my next post. Until next time...