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From Our Own Correspondent: Diwali in India during the pandemic

14/11/2020

Diwali in India during the pandemic

BBC Radio 4 - From Our Own Correspondent, Diwali in India during the pandemic

Stories about Diwali in India, from Azerbaijan, Martinique, the Netherlands and Canada.

Stories about Diwali in India, from Azerbaijan, on Martinique's past, on cycling in the Netherlands and from an island off Nova Scotia. With Kate Adie.

For Hindus, Sikhs and Jains it's Diwali - the festival of lights.  But this year there's the pandemic. What impact is that having in India, asks Rajini Vaidyanathan in Delhi.   
In Azerbaijan, the decades-long intermittent war with Armenia over the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh flared up again in September.  Earlier this week, Russia brokered a deal to end the conflict. Olga Ivshina has just returned from the Azeri side of the frontline, where reporters' safety was not just threatened by shelling. 
The French Caribbean island of Martinique has a difficult relationship with its past. For about two hundred years the colony relied on enslaved Africans to work in its sugar cane plantations. Some think that period might have been shorter if it hadn't been for Josephine, the wife of Napoleon. And as Tim Whewell found, that's not the only sensitive subject of conversation on the island. 
Bicycles have been recommended as a safe form of transport in the pandemic, and cities around Europe have been improving their cycling infrastructure as a result.  Anna Holligan lives in the Netherlands, where cycling is second nature to many, and says that even there, more people are now switching to two wheels.  
On Mosher Island off the coast of Canada’s Nova Scotia province, self-isolation takes on a different meaning.  No need to worry about social distancing, there is no one to keep a distance from. The island only has two residents, a former lighthouse keeper and his wife. Greg Mercer paid them a visit. 

Presenter: Kate Adie 
Producer: Arlene Gregorius

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