Nature Trumps Sonia, and a Great Museum

The big deal in Jaipur all week has been the preparations for the convening of the Congress Party, with party chair Sonia Gandhi, and the P.M.  Manmohan Singh.  It’s a big deal meeting which happens only when they feel like meeting, as far as I could decipher. Various people were picking up some of the garbage, painting some of the curbs, pouring new asphalt, etc and in general trying to make up for months of maintenance inactivity.  Then came the Congress Party people to add their banners, and their flags.  The place was looking fairly presentable, when on Thursday evening, nature struck in the form of a very infrequent thunderstorm.  The winds blew fiercely, leaves fell everywhere, and rain and hail appeared on the scene, wetting down the collection of desert dust that covers everything, and making a muddy mess over all the preparations.  Friday morning it hailed again, then city employees started in awith the repairs.  S. and I enjoyed the thunderstorm immensely, and it reminded us of how we enjoyed some of the seasonal change in Iowa.  SOME of the seasonal changes.

We were at a mall last evening to fulfill Abba’s request for Pizza Hut, and when we tried to leave we found ourselves locked in, as the motorcade took its sweet time passing by on the distant street.  It seemed overkill to us, but Sonia Gandhi’s family does have a violent past, with her husband Rajiv assassinated and her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi before him also assassinated, so perhaps I’d error on the side of caution as well.

Yesterday was a state holiday, so we took a fun field trip to the small neighboring town of Amer to visit the Anokhi HandBlock Printing Museum. The museum is inside a beautifully restored haveli, and the preservation project earned a UNESCO award for ‘Cultural Conservation’ in 2000.

Abba just finished a week’s apprenticeship in small neighboring community of Sanganer at the hands of a block print master, a master who spoke only 2 words of English to her, of which one was “mistake”.  She made some beautiful creations, as usual. At the museum we enjoyed seeing different examples of classical wood blocking printing and a man making some wood blocks.  We were smitten with the quilted examples that to the quilter’s eyes resembled those from Gee’s Bend.  See below and this FLICKR link for more. The museum was well put together and had a great view from the roof.  All in all a great outing.