So, Mysore has again been good. Was pretty washed out after the Hyderabad thing and the aborted travels in north Andhra - took a while to get sorted but the yoga has been good and have really enjoyed meeting new folk here as usual - some great Aussies and Canadians this time.
Off to Sri Lanka in a week, looking forward to some surf and beach.
Back on Facebook for those interested in such inanities.........
This blogging thing has dropped off a bit hasn't it.
I am back in Mysore for a few days now simply because up in northern Andhra things were so booked and busy I spent one afternoon 'touring' over a dozen hotels just to find a roof for the night - which I managed - and then spent 3 hours the next day to secure a berth on an overnight train. No need to force it so I hopped back here for a bit of peace and quiet. And it is quiet which is a blessing.
Such things reveal to me that though I may have more patience than ever previously (believe it or not), the stock is still very much exhaustible and even pulled into deficit sometimes which is, to be honest, a very unattractive place for patience to dwell.
Cue extremely moody dealings with all encoutered in the public space - rickshaw drivers trying to squeeze a few rupees more out of me because they think the backpack looks heavy, hotel owners who try charging a tenner for a room worth about GBP1.50 and won't deign to make eye contact, fruit juice sellers who just want to sell you (tap) water with fruit fragrance included. Yes, even cinema staff who want to remove your carefully chosen snack and drink and force you to buy their revolting over-sweet drinks and whatnot. It was I, the very annoyed individual, who made a fool of myself in front of probably a hundred people plus in a cinema lobby in Hyderabad just the other day when confronted, tired, emotional and hungry, with just such a scenario I did not hold back, even though I should. Not very dignified. Indeed, not very dignified for two reasons - because unfortunately shouting actually gets you somewhere here a lot of the time which is not a good thing to have worked out and also because Indians by and large are acutely embarrassed by being harangued whether or not they have well and truly earned it. The fact that one can thus coerce and embarrass people with relative impunity is of course due to many different factors in Indian culture. After the fact it is easy to feel uncomfortable about these outbursts. However I console myself with a couple of rebuttals in mind. First, that for the most part I am more than respectful to people here even when they are taking the piss and second that when one does come across an instance of courtesy, kindness, respect or 'good service' (in inverted commas simply to distinguish it as being part of the management-speak which should be clearly recognised as a special compartment of English for describing things within the artifically constructed world of business English as opposed to actual English - where meaning can be traced back centuries and actually stands for something while pretending otherwise as opposed to seeming ethically neutral whilst being totally amoral) it is such a pleasant experience, makes everyone's day better and proves that some people are just bloody-minded, ignorant or simply desperate and you can't always work out which one in time to prevent yourself being a total dick.
So, in amongst it all I did manage a few days up near the Araku valley, at around 3000ft a little cooler and a lot greener than the plains of AP. Did some strolling around quiet valley roads, riding on local buses with weathered, dark, partially clothed tribal women with 3 or 4 large gold rings in each nostril, often with a child in a sling on their front and a couple of live chickens in hand and seemingly oblivious to the sideways glances of disgust/shame given them by good self-respectin' 16 year old Salwaar clad hindu girls going home from school, their perfectly black, oiled and plaited hair decked with the customary little strand of flowers on the hair clip at the back and contrasting with the greying frizz and disarray of the hill-women's fashion statements. Oh, and visited somehuge caves tucked away in the hills and 'discovered' by some Britisher in 1807, although of course humans had been living there for about 50,000 years before he came along.
So, Mysore for a few days. Spent another couple of hours in the rail booking office yesterday to secure a ticket to Tirupathi early January. There I will visit a friend from Hyderabad who is recovering from major surgery to fractures of the skull and jaws and also do a little pilgrimmage to Tirumala and see the temple of Lord Venkatesh - the richest in India. You can make a donation/do puja online. It is apparently the largest place of pilgrimmage in the world with over 100,000 people per day visiting and some 20,000 staff to 'coordinate' it all. After that it'll be time for a quick couple of weeks looking round Tamil Nadu before meeting Helen in Sri Lanka at the end of January. I've gotta get there first and sort the deluxe pad as a base for our surf mission. Seems that overall Mum and Helen are enjoying their Aussie hols again - getting to meet the locals www.couchsurfing.com style I thnk this time, although they do of course have their own house!
Had a lovely yoga practice this morn - has been months since I did ashtanga in a room with a few others and it was very pleasant. At the same time it made me appreciate the value of a period of practice on my own. Even though it gets a bit lonely sometimes!
No plans for the day - want to have a swim, maybe later. Have just been invited to lunch by random Aussies here so will take them up on that one.
Happy Christmas.
The lack of posting reflects a lack of time as opposed to lack of things to say. The internship is in full flow and the workload is easily enough to work 7 days a week, which I am doing.
Today I went for breakfast to the same hotel where, as I sat by a lobby pond of Koi Carp the other week I suddenly had my first nosebleed in a good few years. This time, although the food was good, the staff attentive and I got a much needed haircut the same edge of the unexpected and the unsettling crept in. It sounds weird but the toilet bowl swirled menacingly when I flushed it. I mean really! The other surprise was the amount of dust ingrained into my neck, scalp and hair from the 6 day field trip last week. When I got a haircut the guy sprayed water mist and rubbed my head down with a towel after the cut and I swear the towel was covered in grime. I had been washing of course, but this stuff is fine grained and had just got everywhere. It was very embarrassing. I don't normally burble excuses to strangers, but there I was...
What else? The work has been good if demanding. I am about to go to the villages in the south of the state again to conduct the research which I piloted last week. Should be doable in 6 days, if a little tight. I also did a short report for the NGO on the pilot of a small loan scheme dedicated to education funding loans. The idea is to use the SHG framework to supply credit for this specific purpose to rural communities. Everyone wants it to happen. Parents know desperately that education is the key to economic autonomy and are quite prepared to sacrifice almost everything to make sure their children get good schooling and more. However the route to a sustainable and affordable solution, necessarily involving the local banks, is not clear. The pilot was too small and rudimentary to draw many conclusions. I have to recommend a way forward.
Before leaving for the field trip on Wednesday night I need to finish a redraft of the NGO's strategic plan, and also complete the accompanying Action Plan. This is all very well, and I am of course receiving contributions from all departments, but the original document isn't very well written and time is tight. We need to give it to a senior manager from a large UK consultancy firm who is coming to do an organisational review (free) for 3 weeks from Nov 27. She will need to make sense of it and then assess if the NGO is up to the task or not. My feeling is that, yes it is, but the structure of the organisation needs to change and become more process driven rather than being so conventionally department oriented. But what do I know....I'm short of at least 1, possibly 2, degrees and about 5 years professional experience with regards such decisions.
But that is what happens when you leave the first career, which was unhealthy, to pursue a second on the other side of the world which itself ends up being unsuitable for a host of other reasons. I see that I am very much living a pattern of geographical and metier migration the crystallisation of which is unforeseeable and perhaps uncertain. Its hard for some people to reconcile such an outcome with an apparent bias from the start towards some kind of relatively conventional path, even if the route looked poorly marked at points. And in some ways it is conventional - dully so.
Felt another way I remind myself that each life is lived entirely differently to all others, when experienced personally, and our ability to really empathise and understand others is severely hampered by our conditioning and the power of the forces acting invisibly and unperceived on our lives. Forces on a grand scale, like climate change, and on a minutely personal level, like hormonal fluctuations, which we take so for granted, are in fact the things which in one way unite us and would seem to pull us together while at the same time they inexorably divide and insulate us from one another.
A lot of the dissonance in perspective between people, family members, friends, colleagues, is there because of a fundamental distinction in understanding; between those who at root feel that we can know what we do and why, and those who perceive a reality where such certainty of knowledge seems illusory and deceptive. This distinction draws people apart in another way too because it goes to the very heart of answering questions about personal identity. If you strip away work, friends and relatives individuals are immediately faced with a huge gap in self-understanding, even self acceptance. For most people this would seem to be a crisis of sorts. Even removing one of these elements can provoke extreme anxiety. Witness the number of us who in reality shudder at the thought of more than a couple of weeks off work, although it is never admitted (I hasten to add that I am not in this camp!).
Whichever way we see the world we are forced to live with an incipient knowledge of uncertainty and illusion, or put another way, boundless possibility and the tantalising chance of clarity. Each optic can be held close to the heart, either with love or a tight, tight grasp.
Settled in here now - and the weather has cooled off nicely. Working on editing the (overdue) annual report and also on a couple of proposals for small Impact Assessment studies while I am here.
I heard from several people that Hyderabad has the highest quality of life of any major Indian metropolitan area. True, it doesn't stink really and there is not too much begging and destitution visible. It doesn't have any pavements though, so walking around can get you regular clips round the elbow or ear from passing rickshaws.
I am installed in some style in fact on the very top of a 5 storey apartment block with a lovely room and ensuite which is part of, but separate from, where my boss and his family live. This is good because Banjara Hills rents are exhorbitant. As I am only really renting a room I get a reasonable rate - plus Mrs R makes breakfast for me every day which I get to enjoy with the Boss and his two cute kids.
I heard there is a staff meeting this week. I thought 'couple of hours on Wednesday'. Think again. We are all going to the residential training centre, 2 hours drive away, for 3 entire days from Thursday! One of my fellow spectators at the 4th Military World Games on Saturday remarked, as we watched the 84kg division semi-final between North Korea and the USA, that Indians don't necessarily excel at sport. This is mainly because in a country where so many still struggle to feed themselves priorities dont tend to lie in the 'making yourself a better person' column. Rather they sit firmly in the 'making and keeping yourself a person' category. So entertainment more usually focuses on food and, of course, talking.
All of which makes me look forward with (shall we say) interest to the next few days.
'Trample the weak. Hurdle the dead.'
This is the latest in a series of T shirt slogans which, over the years, have caught my eye. Reminds me of a birthday present given to a friend of mine in London one year - an inspirational bit of comic-book style illustration, clearly modelled on Fantastic Four type stuff - with the attention grabbing 'I will take down all who stand before me'.
Nothing, however, has yet topped my all time favourite, spotted on the streets of Dayton, Ohio, of all places back in 1993. 'Stop Plate Tectonics' could only have manifested in a university town seriously dedicated to intoxication of various kinds. It is perhaps the most ironic statement I will ever come across. I still savour it.
On another note, I just listened to Nirvana while reading an interview with Margaret Thatcher from 1971 in the Guardian. Such seemingly incongruent and contrasting bedfellows made for a surprisingly complete experience. A woman the same age as the Queen, who came to Parliament in 1959 and became the first ever female leader of a Western nation, tussling with a journalist wearing a sports jacket and tie, backed by a band who were born out of economic alienation and rage inspired by hopelessness; a lack of hope bestowed from the mast of an economic doctrine to which the then Education Secretary would later firmly nail her colours.
On the subject of Facebook - I am thoroughly sick of and repulsed by the whole thing now and have deleted my profile. Ha! Something with such a rapid rise can have only one way to go. Jaldi jaldi!
Sometimes this stuff can be slippery right? There I am just browsing the newspapers online and this article unexpectedly gave me a jolt - a part of me actually cares whether or not the All Blacks win the world cup rugby in France. This is less about rugby of course and more about the whole concept of where I feel home is. Looks like I'm split.
I can imagine barracking for the ABs, going nuts as they scrap near the tryline in the last five minutes of a final where they need a converted try to take the prize - they would deserve it; they play great rugby, still, even though we know they can be beaten like everyone else. There is still something special about the team and what it represents. That's not to say that Kiwis are enamoured with their number 1 national icon in the way they once were. Living the rugby of the 50s, 60s and 70s as it happened, fully aware of the aura and mystique the teams embodied in the amateur era, and watching the pros grind out results and star performances for 6 figure compensation are night and day in many ways. In an country once a byword for egalitarianism the concept has been hollowed out and replaced by deunionised free markets. Commercialism may attempt to conflate pride, passion and raw determination with digital broadcast revenues but it always rings hollow - perhaps particularly so when commentators like Murray Mexted get in on the act. We are left then with mere remnants of emotional ties to things like sports teams in such cultural environments. These attachments run deep though and if push comes to shove, and I can find a TV to watch, I will lap up the coming matches.
The tricky bit comes though if England manage an (unlikely) face off with the ABs. I still enjoy the novelty of glimpsing my two passports when I reach into the money belt securely stashed at home here but think little about what they represent, as emblems of belonging, tribal affiliation, right of entry and sanctuary, who I am. A NZ friend of mine recently joked that just because I hold a NZ passport doesn't mean I'm a kiwi - but of course it does. So who would I cheer for in a crunch match? It's finely balanced and I qualify my answer by saying that it pertains solely to the narrow context of international rugby; whoever plays the best rugby. Of course this is likely to be the ABs. Doesn't mean to say I'm about to throw away that slightly ragged, scuffed and well travelled maroon book.
