India

Scott and Jenni, who spent a week with us this month after two weeks playing plumber in India, put up some gorgeous pictures from their trip to the subcontinent (know on this blog as "The Most Interesting Place in the World").



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Full slideshow here.

I'm all for this

Measures like this one (more backstory here) and efforts to restrict bottled water in nations that don't need it... even if the punishment seems a bit harsh.

Delhi to outlaw plastic bags

Customers and shopkeepers in India's capital face jail sentence or stiff fine for using polythene bags

Carry a plastic bag in Delhi and you could be imprisoned for five years. Officials in India's capital have decided that the only way to stem the rising tide of poly­thene is to outlaw the plastic shopping bag.

According to the official note, the "use, storage and sale" of plastic bags of any kind or thickness will be banned. The new guideline means that customers, shopkeepers, hoteliers and hospital staff face a 100,000 rupee fine (£1,370) and a possible jail sentence for using non-biodegradable bags.

Delhi has been quietly filling up with plastic bags in recent years as the economy boomed and western-style shopping malls sprang up in the city. There are no reliable figures for bag use but environmentalists say more than 10m a day are used in the capital every day. Not only are the streets littered with them, but polythene takes hundreds of years to decompose and creates demand for oil, which is used to make plastics.

At first the ban will be lightly implemented, giving people time to switch to jute, cotton, recycled-paper and compostable bags.

Newspapers in India quoted city officials as saying that the authorities did not "want people to be harassed and no prosecution will take place immediately; [once they] understand that by using plastic bags they will be in contempt of court, they will start using other material". The first targets in Delhi will be the industrial units that manufacture the plastic bags in the capital, which officials say will be closed down.

Civil servants said that punitive measures were needed after a law prohibiting all but the thinnest plastic bags – no thicker than 0.04mm – was ignored.

Although the government had originally concluded that plastic bags were too cheap and convenient to be disposed of, the authorities appear to have been swayed by environmentalists who pointed out that used bags were clogging drains and so providing breeding grounds for malaria and dengue fever.

I remember signs discouraging plastic bag use around downtown Delhi. Here in Thailand (relatively clean) they give you a bag and a straw with every bottled coke you buy at a 7/11. It just gets habitual, so in a place like Delhi overflowing with trash — good for them.

Living/traveling through smoggy emerging economies does make me both thankful for a strong environmental lobby in the US, and realize just how much of America's industrial pollution has simply been pushed overseas.

My Heart is Like a Cabbage

Happy Valentine's from India..

As a Valentine's Day card smoldered, more than 100 members of the Hindu extremist group Shiv Sena gathered in central New Delhi chanted "Death to Valentine's Day" and "People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!"

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This is a conspiracy to misguide the young people of our country," said Jai Bhagwan Goel, chief of the Shiv Sena's north India branch.

In his hand the card, with its image of a Victorian couple pictured in a tepid peck under a parasol, went up in flames.

"We have come to know that in America, even unmarried girls as young as 11 or 12 years have become mothers ... and every second man there is divorced," Goel told reporters after reducing several greeting cards to a small pile of ash. "This is their culture - it cannot be accepted here."

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Weather intervened to stop Hindu extremists in the northern city of Lucknow from carrying out their threats to beat couples found kissing, hugging or even holding hands in public. With torrential rains pouring down, young lovers stayed out of the parks where the usually seek privacy.

Still, even if some lovers stayed out of sight, they made their desires known, placing ads on special Valentine's Day pages in newspapers.

"My heart is like a cabbage," declared a man named Manoj to some lucky lady. "Divided into two; the leaves are for others and the heart for you."

Scott and Jenni, world-class canoodlers who just spent a week with us in Thailand, spent Valentine's in Mumbai. Hope they're ok.