Ganesh Chaturti

There is a terrorist advisory for the upcoming Ganesh Chaturti. This will mean less women and children accompanying men during Visarjan. Security should be up to the mark in Pune and Mumbai.

Our Ganesh Chaturti here in Des Moines has Pratisthapana and Visarjan on the same day as the function is being organised in the local temple. I will be celebrating the event after 11 years.

Disaster relief and disaster creation

A safe place to send in your relief money is the Prime Minister's relief fund. Other relief funds seem to open and close during more dramatic disasters. Ofcourse, you never know which state gets hit, but the money is in reasonably good hands with the PM relief fund.

Speaking of disasters, illegal extraction of India's natural resources are one of the easiest ways the ruling parties makes easy money. It's easy to find the illegal activities. Anything that goes on 24 hours a day and without any questions asked is usually blessed from the top or the middle.

I do not know if that is happening in Maharashtra, so you can comment on that. But it is apparently happening in Andhra Pradesh and the reason we know is that it is causing damage in Karnataka. Here is another instance of sand quarrying in Tamil Nadu.

Our history books teach us that the British exploited our natural resources. But we may our own worst enemy in this regard. Ofcourse, we eventually love to blame those foreigners for using our bad river water.

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

The rain has got Maharashtra real good this time around. All low lying areas are in trouble now. Thankfully, evacuation and help activities are moving along well. This will be a hugely disruptive event in the lives of lakhs of people. I remember my uncle incurring thousands of rupees of damage in his shop due to rain. Insurance is not a poor man's tool in India. So most of these folks have the misfortune of absorbing their own losses.

Maharashtra photographs on Flickr

Flickr has this feature called tags. Go to this page and you can potentially see thousands of pictures taken in Maharashtra or having some sort of Maharashtra connections. You can jump around to other related tags like Mumbai, Pune or Aurangabad.