Gandhi Again

Pune, India, July 26, 2008, (Ghandi). As you tour India you find many monuments to Gandhi. He was a very important person to the independence of India. His ashes were spread out across the country to many memorials. Today we visited Aga Khan Palace, the place was Mahatma and his wife Kasturba was imprisoned but the English. Kasturba and Mahatma’s assistant are buried here. The palace was owned by a wealthy family that agreed to take him in so he didn’t cause the British any more trouble. The family has since given the palace over to India and it is a museum and a place used to educate rural and poor woman on how to become business woman by making clothing, hand bags, soaps and the like. Kasturba worked with people with leprosy and other aliments and to help educate the poor and her work still goes on today at this facility.
We visited the Raja Dinkar Kelkar Museum. This museum houses the personal collection of one mans effort to purchase and display all things Indian. It was the best museum so far as many museums are full of English stuff or stuff traded by the Indians such as Chinese or Greek stuff. One whole section was just for musical instruments of India. This is a very interesting museum which only displays about 12% of its items. We have tomorrow of so we are trying to put together some sort of adventure.
Side note on bombings, violence and lack of diesel in India. One of the cities we had a stop over on a plane three days ago, Bangalore, has had two days of bombings, killing a few people. The current city we are in, Pune, has six hours a day of blackouts due to lack of hydropower. Most manufactures, hotels, etc. have diesel back up generators creating a short supply of diesel. Cars and trucks run off diesel and most places in town are out of diesel. This has started to become a serious problem here.