(Any opinions expressed here are those of the author. They are not necessarily those of Thomson Reuters)

Nov. 2 was Karva chauth. I wouldn’t have known it if it weren’t for the special discounts at stores, the diamond and sari advertisements, and articles wondering whether newlywed actress Kareena Kapoor would fast.

It is not often that Indian designers do evening gowns and dresses without using any Indian elements. Designer duo Gauri and Nainika are two of the few who do.

Their show on day four of the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week in Delhi could as well have been a day at the races, with bold ruffles, mermaid cuts, pencil dresses, flares, slits and peplum.

Having grown up on a big dose of Yash Chopra and Karan Johar films with tonnes of weddings and wedding clothes, it is natural to be excited about a Manish Malhotra show, one of the most successful Indian designers and pretty much the official designer of Bollywood.

I have often wondered what would it be like to be at a Malhotra show, which I finally got to do at the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week in Delhi. It was the most crowded show of the day. Women, young and old, famous, not famous, were all there. Well, there were men too, though what do they do there? Malhotra has dressed some rather famous ones, including Shah Rukh Khan in the 2000 film “Mohabbatein”, and his collections feature men’s clothing.

Kanika Saluja Chaudhary shook fashion fans awake with her strong designs featuring metal work and elaborate headgear on Sunday afternoon, the second day of the Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week in Delhi.

Chaudhary has dressed up Madonna, Nargis Fakhri and Chitrangada Singh, among others. Her designs at Fashion Week, she said, were for women who are creators, fighters and destroyers.

The Wills India Lifestyle Fashion Week Spring-Summer 2013 at Pragati Maidan in Delhi started off on a note of optimism but buyers are still indecisive on their final purchases.

There was colour, craft, embroidery, tradition, drama and “zardozi“, everything that makes Indian fashion unique — and increasingly popular.

From Ahmed Ali’s “Twilight in Delhi” to William Dalrymple’s “City of Djinns”, many books have tried to unravel the layers of Delhi’s history. First-time fiction writer Nilanjana Roy took a less-trodden path in her novel “The Wildings,” which came out in August in India — and which might come out in the United States as soon as next year. She wrote of life in the alleys of Delhi, but chose to do it from the perspective of cats in her novel.

“The advantage of writing about animals is that you can make it all up,” she said. Walking around Delhi, the journalist and literary critic took a fancy to the secret lives of cats, got a kitten, and a couple of years later, wrote about them.

My colleague in the Delhi online newsroom asked me today if I felt offended by coal minister Shriprakash Jaiswal’s comment that “wives and victories lose their charm when they become old.” It’s like the remark that John Huston made to Jack Nicholson in “Chinatown” — “Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough” — but it’s not funny.

Jaiswal made his comment in Kanpur while talking about the Indian cricket team’s win over Pakistan at the Twenty20 World Cup, and predictably apologized and said that his comments were taken out of context.

The Delhi government’s ban on plastic bags and gutka — the cheap mix of chewing tobacco and betel nut that you take for a quick high — is a welcome step, but it may be too soon to imagine city corners free of gutka “graffiti” and plastic-choked sewers.

Plastic bags lie strewn in city alleys, clogging drainage pipes, harming cows that eat them along with the garbage that they nibble on, and offer a prime breeding ground for harmful bacteria and disease.

A few buses have been torched, a few trains have been stopped, a few people failed to get to work, a few shops were shut, a few lost their daily wages and the exchequer will register a big loss. Someone is telling India’s “common man” that this strike is in his interest.

The transportation shutdown that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and several left-leaning parties called for as a protest against a steep rise in petrol prices is seen as a means to exploit popular anger against the ruling Congress-led government, though political parties insist that they won’t benefit at election time.