Bird's Eye View of Ramadan Here

Ramadan has not begun, but you would not know that when driving on the highways. People thinking that they must drive in the middle of the painted line that marks the two lanes has begun in earnest.  That is only the beginning.  It gets worse.

I was in downtown K T today and saw all the marquees being erected everywhere in anticipation of the month of fasting.  Of course it is important to raise a marquee in every spare square centimetre around here because under each roof is as many food stalls one can pack into the covered area. After all, Ramadan is signified by fasting. 


Sorry, the logic in this whole exercise completely escapes me.  It has been noted that the time of year that people put on the most weight is during Ramadan.  Hmm.  Fasting and gaining weight?

You will see every parking lot filled with the white marquees, and every area that would have been used to approach a restaurant on foot is filled with newly ordered tables and chairs all ready for hungry diners during the next month.  All along the highway individuals erect food stalls, cooking meat, rice, fried bananas and whatever else they can put together in a makeshift shack. Kind of like a drive through McD.  So, on top of dodging people who are straddling two lanes on the highway, one has to avoid collisions with those who just stop their vehicle - sort of pulled off the main road to buy their 'fasting food'.

These two photos are just a view of only one corner!

It should again be interesting to get any work done. Lucky for me, I have a Tamil and a Chinese school in my mixture so should be able to remain productive there.  For the others, they begin to fade by 10 am at the start of Ramadan and then good luck for anything productive for the last couple of weeks at any time. Then, after all this 'fasting' they take a week off and eat even more!  

I have done juice fasts, cleansing fasts and various other fasts that at different times of my life I felt were good for me. My understanding of a fast was to consume no solid foods.  And consume no solid foods is exactly what I did.  Once again, I guess culture changes the rules of certain words. Fasting here is not stopping the consumption of solid or liquid foods at all.  They apparently do not consume through the day, but look out at the end of the day. When I asked someone why they cannot be productive in the early afternoon during Ramadan I was told that I should think like  they were preparing a Christmas dinner - every day for a month. Their whole focus every day of fasting is making a banquet they can eat after sundown each day. So all they really do is turn their days around and eat all night and then get a bit of shut eye and wander around the next day in a haze again preparing the banquet for the evening.  I still don't get it.  How is that fasting?