Week  6 March 16, 17 & 18, 2006

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Mar 16, 2006, Thursday

Working all morning and completed my GIS case study. I'll re-read it tomorrow and then send it to Senthilkumaran. I've chatted to one of the staff here and he says the best way of seeing the villages is to go and stay in Pondicherry for a couple of days and one of the field staff will show me round. They are all going to be in Chennai for a debriefing session next week, so I will try to go down the following week. I am thinking of taking a day off next week to go down to Kovallam, a seaside town about 20km south of here. Depends on getting a hotel booking. They are very busy at the moment.

I went into one of the local high class vegetarian restaurants and had a very good masala dhosa, a large thin pancake stuffed with spiced vegetables. I was surprised at first that they bring salt and pepper to put on food that already has a very significant kick to it, but the pepper flavour does get through. It is remarkably strong even though it is a mild spice. Maybe that is why it was the "King of spices" and drove Columbus, Da Gamma and Drake to risk their lives to get it. If my schoolboy history memory serves me well, Alaric the Goth traded what was left of Rome for three sacks of pepper corns. Or was it for a brace of lusty wenches? Probably both. No wenches in the restaurant, just a troop of men in brown uniforms clearing the tables the second you lift your head from your food. No lingering over a meal here. You eat , you pay, you leave.

	I said one of the things that scares me in India are the dogs and the risk of rabies. In fact what really scares me are the electrics. There are bare cables and wires poked into socket holes everywhere. Dotted along all of the streets are sub stations like this (This is actually a pretty neat one). Are they surprised that every time it rains there are power cuts? The vertical rods are handles to circuit breakers. Anyone with a mind to can bash one up and turn off the power and probably get electrocuted as a reward. Two interesting reports in the papers: 40% of Indian electricity is tapped off illegally by people tossing bare wires over the grid cables and plugging their houses into that (assuming they survived the connection process). Some farmers tapped the local power supply to set up an electric fence to keep a wild elephant out of their farms. They electrocuted the poor thing. Must have been more than a 12volt shock. They got found out because they couldn't get rid of the corpse.
	There are huge movie posters everywhere. I mean huge and I mean everywhere. They are all much the same. This one differs slightly from the norm in that he hasn't got any guns, but I presume they are hanging down below the frame. Whatever the poster shows, the plot largely consists of song and dance, with a bit of gross violence thrown in to lighten things up. Sadly very few if any of the posters are hand painted now. They all were when I first came to India about six years ago, but now they are all printed on fabric which is stretched over the billboard frame.
	This is a standard water pot, perched above the Adyar River. You see them everywhere, usually in fluorescent plastic, but occasionally in stainless steel or brass. In the evenings you see children at the water pumps jumping up and down to pump the handles to fill them. One woman will carry one on her head. A cyclist can manage four tied to the pannier frame and a cycle rickshaw can manage about ten. In some areas near the beach there is no piped water or pumps. There are large black plastic cisterns on the side of the road which are filled by truck and in the evening there will be dozens and dozens of water pots lined up around the cistern as people wait to fill them. It's all such hard, hard work. The Adyar river is big, fairly empty at the moment and extremely unpleasant. I hope this pot hasn't been filled from it, but I fear it has been.
	More video! A lady laying a Kollam design outside a shrine. She has just washed the old one away. I think most of them are redrawn everyday. She very deliberately and slowly placed a series of dots on the ground and then just drew in the pattern in a near continuous movement.

Mar 17, 2006, Friday

Again quite a quiet day, mainly working, but I went into Chennai in the evening and treated myself to lamb chops for dinner. Felt quite guilty eating dead animal. Food is overwhelmingly vegetarian here. Restaurants are mainly veg, pure veg (no dairy products) or far less commonly non-veg. It reminds me of the impossible question my father was asked as he boarded an Air India flight back in the 60s "Excuse me sir. Are you, or are you not, a non-vegetarian?" He couldn't think of a reliable one word answer so just had to say "I eat meat."

I think I've found a solution to one potential problem. I have amassed many books and they weigh a ton. I thought I would have to abandon them, but I went into a post office and they can post them back to the UK, surface mail, quite cheaply. There is a "wrapping service" in one corner, where parcels are wrapped and sewn into canvas covers before posting. I shall stagger down there with a load one day soon.

Walking back through the road works here in the dark is quite tricky. All of the workers simply sleep on the site, so you have to pick your way through them quite carefully. There are a few palm leaf huts which have mosquito nets inside, but most just sleep out in the open or under the JCBs. The road outside MSSRF has just been resurfaced (Lord knows why, it is still a mine field of potholes at each end). There are about 20 workers and they simply kip down in the entrance drive. A few have mats they lie on, but most just sleep straight on the ground. Climatically it is not a problem, but with all of the dogs and snakes around, it doesn't appeal.

Mar 18, Saturday

Worked this morning and took the afternoon off. Clear hot day so went to look again for the "biggest Banyan tree in the world". I have also seen it referred to as the second biggest in India. How do you measure a banyan tree? Acreage? Number of trunks? Volume? Anyway I found it, plus several others that could challenge it in size. They are in the grounds of the Theosophical Society, which is a beautiful wooded landscape covering I think several hundred acres, running down to the banks of the Adyar River. There are slightly Greek looking pavilions in amongst the trees and a garden of remembrance to the original founders, an American and a Russian I believe, but I really know nothing about them. A very pleasant area on a hot afternoon.

	The biggest banyan tree in the world. Certainly impressive. The central trunk is not the biggest I have seen by a long way, and there are several in the grounds of the Theosophical Society that look older, but they have not generated such a cathedral of aerial roots/trunks as this. Because the roots drop straight to the ground, they form perfect columns for the boughs above, which often break off from the main trunk, creating independent trees. As I ask, how do you actually measure it? Why bother is the best answer, they are just wonderful to experience
	We call these temple trees, but I don't know what their real name is. They always seem to b naked of leaves, but maybe that is the time of year. I have only seen them in the "winter". The flowers on the ends of the branches are exquisite, white with pink edges and a yellow throat. They often allow them to grow over the pools in posh hotels and three fresh flowers are allowed to drop and float on the water, but no more than that. Very chic.
	The grounds are a botanist's paradise, but I'm no botanist. This lethally spiky vine was wrapping around a palm tree and had fruits on it the size of coconuts. Is it a rattan? I don't know, but I didn't get too close, it looked vicious. Another interesting tree you can see here is the strangler fig. I've only seen little ones in the city. They are related to the banyan (they are all figs of one type of another) which start to grow on the branches of a host tree. They drop aerial roots to the ground and then start to grow rapidly around the host, eventually strangling and killing it completely. A mature strangler is a huge tree with a hollow, empty heart. Not a cheering concept, but it is very successful.

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