Are you or someone you love dating a banker? If so, we are here to support you through these difficult times. Dating A Banker Anonymous (DABA) is a safe place where women can come together – free from the scrutiny of feminists– and share their tearful tales of how the mortgage meltdown has affected their relationships.

Yes, there’s been a lot to suggest that economic downturns ends of “saving marriages” because people can’t take the financial risk of separating ways. But what when you are only dating?

Relationships have little to do with love anyway. What breaks relationships in these turbulent times is not just a matter of finances, but how the chequebook forever looms in the background. The constant stress is more of a killer than unstable finances.

Now, where’s the blog for the SOBS (Spouses of BankerS)?

Introducing Gaysifamily.com. Where Gaysi = Gay Desi. Broom is the editor for the blog, and it’s already fantastic!

GV has been amazing really. From the lean crowd in London in 2005, to this sudden swell of over 200 people sitting here in Budapest. (Any many more mailing in from their respective living rooms).

I got here yesterday afternoon, and since I had the day to myself, went off to soak in the city and all the sunniness it offers. It’s a relief to not see the usual grey skies of London bearing down on one’s shoulders. Old buildings right next to the ugliness of the sixties and seventies. An aesthetic mish-mash of old aristocracy and the communist monstrosities. Yesterday, riding the metro here, I suddenly realized how much a city can be felt and understood by just using public transport. Dim florescent-ish lights in blue-green coaches.

And the latest addition – Gaurav Mishra (who is insanely fond of linking) who will subject Lit Blogs to his unfailing scrutiny. Sadly though, his first post hits a sombre note.

On that note, Global Voices has a nice surprise up its rather global sleeves that should be out in a few days. Hee Hee!

May the baby be as bright and cheery as you Mad Momma. Hope the winsome two and OA provide fodder for great blog posts. :)

To understand his stories, you have to understand the world he was coming from, and how it made him understand the one he suddenly found himself in. He was young, so young, and had lied about his age at the army recruiting station so he could be accepted. Like most of his regiment, he had never before left home. Never travelled outside of the city of his birth. Australia in the 1940s was provincial and quiet, and still saw itself very much as a distant outpost of the British Empire. The White Australia Policy- restricting immigration of people from outside Britain- was resolutely in place. He would have seen very few people in his whole life who spoke a different language, or had dark skin.
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There are photos in the foyer of the Galle Face Hotel, framed sepias of the building in its grounds throughout the past. It stands alone, at first, wide and white between the sea and a single palm, one rickshaw ambling past. I scan them all for a glimpse of my grandfather’s city, but the images stop in the 1930s. Still, walking through the ballrooms and the bar, I can imagine him here on day leave, almost. Thin and dapper in his uniform, drinking gin and ginger beer with his mates, as the band played The White Cliffs of Dover; songs of a motherland that really wasn’t his. But even this must be fiction.

On some days, you come across such sheer brilliance – this overlapping of self with history, of cities with wars, of images with memory, and suddenly realize that this is what perhaps good blogging, or even writing supposed to do to you. Make you, for some time, sink into someone else’s life.