Old Farts in New Delhi: Short and sweet, my baby's all mine, Head to feet, she's barely 4'9"

Well these lyrics from a Spinal Tap song have almost nothing to do with this week’s post – except it will also be short and sweet. (Question: if you cite the lyrics of a fictitious band, does it make for a fictitious post?)

So, let’s see. I am about 2/3 through my crushing two week schedule. It’s the gun lap and I can’t let my focus or effort slide now. The accreditation visit went amazingly well. The team was very positive and complimentary. Even the President of Stratford said we operate better than they do in the US. We had two minor citations to address, one of which was actually not our issue; Stratford has to fix it. The item we need to fix already has been done.

The Joint Venture Board Meeting was kind of like A Tale of Two Cities: it was the best of times and the worst of times. Over all it went well, but our Vice President for Marketing got beat up pretty bad, and I seemed to have little ability to deflect or soften the criticism. Still, the meeting ended on a positive note and no one lost his or her job so I guess All’s Well That Ends Well, it was Much Ado About Nothing, and Richard III. Wait. That last Shakespeare play doesn’t fit there at all. Never mind.

Friday morning we had convocation. 150 students form 22 different countries received their degrees. It was a well-run ceremony and everyone had a great time. There was little difference from this ceremony compared to the dozens I have seen and participated in before. The exception to that was the Lighting of the Lamp. It's a tradition to light a lamp first before starting any auspicious events or rituals. Light symbolizes the absence of darkness, grief and unhappiness. An open bronze bowl on a tall stand is filled with ghee (clarified butter). Eight cotton wicks, also soaked in ghee, are lit one by one. A Hindu prayer is then sung, in this case by three of our students.

Friday night we had a student party. It was fun to see the students from different cultures interacting in a social setting. The African students are much more open about pairing up as boyfriend and girlfriend. The Afghani men were very exuberant dancers, with each other and only as the evening wore on with girls. Indian girls were more open to dancing initially than the boys, again with other girls more than boys. As the evening wore on for Indians and Afghanis there was more mixed gender dancing but it was more groups of people rather than pairs.

Yesterday our niece Leslie Graff, her husband Allen, and their friends the McConkies arrived at our house. Leslie got in several hours ahead of the others because she had been in India on a medical mission. So she and Rae went shopping and I went along to carry the bags. The rest of the group got in, showered, changed, and we went to dinner. They then crashed as the 25+ hour trip in economy class had clearly taken its toll. Today we all went to Church then this afternoon we went to see some sites around Delhi (India Gate, Raj Path, Lakshmi Narayan Temple, and Lodi Garden). Rae fed them a good dinner and they boarded a night train to Varanasi. They will be traveling all week and then back here next Saturday.