Tamil Nadu 2006 |
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Week 5March 5, 6, 7,8 & 9, 2006 |
Morning spent doing domestic chores and reading. Over lunch I chatted with a young woman who works on the Information Village project. She gave me a lot of useful background and I was delighted to find her name was Sophia, one that I can manage and remember at last. She is going to Pune, near Mumbai tomorrow. It makes you realise how big this country is, because that is just the other side of the peninsula, but it's over a 1,000km flight away. I did some more writing based on what she had told me, and then went for a walk in the evening down to the beach. The sea here has a very open, powerful feel to it. Many large freighters in the distance, but no pleasure boats at all, just small fishing boats which raise a small blue plastic sail to blow back to the shore. My little boat would feel very exposed here.
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Sunday evening down on Elliott beach. Heaving with
families, many paddling in the waves in their clothes. The beach is very
wide, and is covered in a permanent funfair here. Hand powered ferris wheels
and roundabouts that would freeze a safety officer's blood. Dozens and
dozens of kites. The wind off the sea is very steady, so many of the kites
are simply tied off to seats and bicycles. I can never quite see the fun of
kites. Once you have got it up, well, that's about it. There are so many dogs here. Most are pariahs, I think, but many are pets. It is strange to see collared dachshunds and dalmations amongst them. I saw one young man tonight cycling no hands through the traffic, clutching a puppy to his breast with both hands. There's a fatalist. |
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It gets dark very quickly in the tropics. The whole beach lights up with flames. Most are from badly adjusted Tilley lamps which flare like oil wells, but there were many of these stands sparking and roaring. A hand cranked blower blasts air through a furnace of charcoal and a corn cob is roasted in the inferno. I risked one, reckoning that a furnace which can melt steel would kill any bugs. Hope I was right. |
Working in the Informatics section all day. Being in the main office now is a great benefit because I can actually get to talk to people. I've been trying to develop some ideas for using GIS to identify isolated or underprivileged areas, which several people have said would be highly useful. It was a technique which was used in our Central American project a few years ago to assess travel time to the nearest food market, and proved very useful in the aftermath of hurricane Mitch. I hope I can actually explain it clearly enough.
In the evening I dropped one of my old favourite shirts into "Gay Men Tailoring" (sic) to have copied. One of those typical Indian shopping experiences. You ask if they have got any checked cotton material. Five minutes later there are 30 rolls laid out and you haven't the slightest idea how to choose. I once asked if they had a shirt in my collar size. They insisted on laying out on a table every single shirt of that size in the shop, about 50 I should think. They can't be stopped, but they don't mind if you say you actually don't want any of them. Where I fail is bargaining. I just can't do it with any conviction.
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The concept of Health and Safety hasn't even reached the
horizon here. Would you paint a building like this? When I see barefoot men
holding a steel bar between their feet whilst they cut it with an angle
grinder, or a carpenter using a circular saw blade screwed to the end of a
power drill to cut wood, I wonder how anyone survives. Mind you there are a lot of men around here missing one or more limbs... |
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It gets worse, they got up there using the rope ladder.
That isn't a safety rope next to the painter, he had used it to slide down
from the top.
I saw another man out on a single projecting scaffolding pole at the top of one of the half built stations, about six stories up, screwing another pole to it. I didn't dare photograph him in case I distracted him and he slipped. |
Again working most of the day and out for a short period in the evening. I took an auto to T. Nagar (or Theyagaraya Nagar if you must know. I don't know what Nagar means yet, but it is a very common part of place names all round this part of India) and ambled through Pondi Bazaar, which is a huge area of stalls selling just about everything, but mostly pretty trashy plastic. Great numbers of parked cars with enormous numbers of sub-Disney stuffed animals on their roofs and bonnets. Presumably someone buys them. I saw one woman earlier selling hanks of hair on the side of the road. This time I found a whole stall selling it. Maybe I should get some, but they only do it in black. I did find the silk shops, which are amazingly big, three to four large floors selling silks, saris and cottons. They have the saris grouped by price and the wedding saris can go right up to Rs 100,000. That's well over £1,000. For a 5m length of cloth!
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This is technically a bad picture with all the camera
shake, but it actually gives a good idea of what the side streets of T.
Nagar look like at night. This street is full of stands and trolleys, but
there are little tight alleys running off to both side where you walk
through the stalls. They are selling all kinds of plastic tat, especially
coloured bangles. I can never understand the economic logic. There are
thirty stalls selling exactly the same stuff. Why does someone bother to buy
at any other than the first they come to? Why does anyone want to buy this
stuff at all? There was one boy with a tray with about 20 safety pins on it which he was selling individually. There are many beggars here. I hate to say, but you do get hardened to seeing people without hands or feet begging on the pavement. After a while, anything repeated often enough just starts to look normal. |
Again a working day. I have just about completed the first full draft of my book chapter. I will write a conclusion tomorrow and then leave it for a while before I finalise and send it to Hamburg. It still amazes me what you can do with the internet now regarding moving documents around. We just take it for granted but we've only been doing it regularly for about eight years. I've been writing for over 25 years! How did we ever manage?
One thing that is curious here are the encyclopaedia salesmen. They are usually well dressed young men lurking outside the gates of institutions like MSSRF. As I come out they race to get to me first and all start waving the same thing in front of me, the Dorling Kindersley Illustrated Encyclopaedia. Why this of all things? Is this where all remaindered books finally end up? I'm offered lavish discounts on an undisclosed starting price and then the ultimate temptation "It would make a very good present for a woman sir!" nudge, nudge... Make of that what you will. I was always taught that chocolates and flowers were the best, or as Ogden Nash put it :
"Candy is dandy,
But liquor is quicker"
Make of that what you will.
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I'm not really into designer labels, but I couldn't resist this one. I had the shirt made, and it is beautifully done. Not bad, a bespoke shirt in excellent cotton fabric for about £5. I shall get a couple more and they make good trousers as well (the tailors, not the shirts!). Then I'll be "Gayman" dressed from head to toe. I have yet to track down outlets for "Handcuff: dressing up the male ego!" which I've seen widely advertised. When I do I might get something special there. That should excite the ladies! Nudge, nudge... (Better not wear my Gayman clobber though L) |
Nothing worth writing a diary about really today. I have spent most of the day writing up papers and preparing a teaching funding bid. There is a group from the Ohio State University here on an Indian project tour. Their president is with them and she gave a lecture this afternoon on the ethos of OSU, which was really quite interesting. I don't know how long they are here for. Not long I don't think.
In the evening I went to a small Keralan restaurant for fish and a slight change of cuisine. One of the tediums of being away from home for long periods is having to eat out, or institutionally, every evening. Restaurant eating soon palls, however well it is done. I lived in the Middle East for a year and just got fed up with the ex-pat routine. You aren't ever really part of what is going on, just a watcher on the side, and you start to feel curiously detached after a while.