61st Independance Day

Today is India's Independence Day. As an American, it's always kind of weird for me that Independence Day falls during the school year. If that happened in the US, what would we do? Have school and sing National Songs? That's what they do here, we'll sort of.

They hoist the flag up early in the morning and then the students perform some songs and dances. After that there is a parade of little kids dressed up like Mahatma Gandhi and other national leaders and then we all eat sweets. When we come home we watch Superman dubbed in Hindi.

At least, that's what we did.

Here's the weirder thing... You can only hang the Indian flag on two days a year, one of them being today. It is illegal to hang an Indian flag anywhere on any other day. You can go to jail.

We hung our flags on our three schools, carefully getting them up in the right direction, (Saffron MUST be on top). We removed the flags well before the appointed time, yet...

Someone still called the police and gave a false complaint that our flag was hung upside down. So, a bunch of our people had to go to the police station and give a report, even tho over a thousand people must have seen the flag today and seen it was correct, and even tho the person giving the complaint left no name, etc...

The police were polite and it wasn't a big deal. But O. is not here, which I think is a good thing since one of the policemen apparently hates us and started shouting, "Where is O.? Put him in jail!" Later he said, "You're not converting anyone are you?" Whatever.

We just pray for our enemies and thank God for the opportunity to be brought before the police.