chartandwaters

We took a govt bus to Pondicherry, took a private bus to Kairakal, and in the a.m. took another private bus to Velanganni. In govt buses people are seated (rather, pressed) very close together, and for a dollar more a private bus, with AC and padded cushions, is sometimes less wearying. Unfortunately they frequently come with a booming--I do mean booming, they say Indians love noise--DVD.

In the bus in the picture, we watched a DVD of a popular Tamil movie, in which a woman's neighbor stalks her and repeatedly molests her but she eventually falls for him. I was choking by the end but when I later began to tell the story to Kristin--"This man stalks a woman..."--she laughed and finished for me, "...and then she falls in love with him?" She said, not disparagingly, that she thinks such themes in Tamil movies might be the product of a culture of arranged marriages, in which the lack of experience with alternative scenarios results in some dubious ideas about them.

The rest of the scenes are just me trying to show the diversity of dress and the relationship between traditional attire and a bus.