Trick or Treat

This evening the children in our neighbourhood kept us busy by ringing our door bell and telling us “Trick or treat”. They came in batches. Some 30 of them. I had to rush out and get some candies to ‘treat’ them, or else, one never knows what kind of ‘trick’ they had in mind for us. It seems Halloween has traveled from the West and become a pre-Diwali fun game for our children too.

Met Fuad in the market in Bengaluru

Whenever I saw a new Indian face in Khartoum I used to greet him and include him in my mailing list of ‘Indians in Sudan’. This helped me to build a good networking with the Indian community, be it in Omdurman, Khartoum, Kassala, and Port Sudan. Now that I’m back in Bengaluru, India I have noticed a few Sudanese students in my neighbourhood. Met Fuad in the morning on a Sunday at the market. We both were buying vegetables. He was surprised to hear me speak Arabic with a Sudanese dialect and know that I had spent 15 years in his motherland.

Durga Pujas in Bengaluru 2018

The last Durga Puja that I had seen in India was 15 years back. So there was a special excitement in me this year. In 2002 there were very few Durga Puja pandals in Bangalore but someone said that this year the number was 125. Durga Puja is a festival and cultural programs are part of it. This also includes traditional drumming and prayer dance at the pandal. Here is a glimpse of the idols made in Bengaluru.

Disruptive Innovation

To build my ‘ecosystem’ in Bangalore after having lived in Sudan for 15 years, I am groping with ‘start-ups’, their ‘disruptions’ with ‘algorithms’ and ‘analytics’ of ‘footfalls’. The word ‘disruptive’ is no more troublesome but ‘innovative’.

Bapu@150 in Sudan

In 1935 Mahatma Gandhi on his way to England had stopped over at Port Sudan and met the members of the Indian Community who hailed from the same region as Gandhi in India. The name of Gandhi is known to young and old in Sudan.I have met more than one Sudanese person named Gandhi.There is a street named after Gandhi.On the occasion of 150 years of celebrating the Mahatma popular Sudanese singer Reemaz Mirghani sang Bapu’s favourite song Vaishnava Jana to…