Tamil Nadu 2006 |
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Week 8March 27, 2006 |
Not much to report at all today. My feet are a bit tender after yesterday's marathon so I haven't gone far. The only disappointment is that my tailor's have made a mistake with my sail bag. They made it half the width I wanted, mixing up width and circumference. Not to worry, there is enough spare material to make three more, so they are going to run one up for tomorrow.
They are getting ready to consecrate the little temple I have watched them painting from nearly my first day here. I just hope it happens whilst we are here so I can see it. It should work out as things seem to move quite quickly once they are put in motion.
I don't know how long it will take to get this on line as our local connection seems to be down. First time since I've been here, so it is very reliable.
I spent the daytime working out how to incorporate some of the work I have done here into my teaching back in the RAC. All being well it should fit into a final year elective quite well. One of the staff here, Dr. Sophia, is keen to know more about techniques for accessibility mapping so I have sent her copies of my work on it. She also thinks a similar technique could be used for mapping information flows, not just movement of people. Could be an interesting line of research.
PM I went for a walk around some of the backstreets of Adyar. It's clearly quite an affluent suburb, with streets of very up market flats. Any number of private schools and colleges. India is obsessed with examinations, and right now is the height of the exam period. The newspapers are full of tips and tricks and pages and pages of test questions and model answers. A near riot was reported in one town where the questions that came up in a school exam were not in the question banks the PTA had built up over the years. The apparently was unacceptable. There is no concept of developing answers to new questions, only trotting out standard "correct" answers to standard questions. It's not healthy.
Speaking of health, there are also a great number of small and large hospitals in this area. One of the biggest is the Cancer Research Institution, whose wards stretch seemingly for miles alongside one street. They are open plan, open sided. I think it was outside visiting hours because a number of people were hanging over the wall calling to patients inside, but they obviously couldn't get in. The wards were very full. Being ill in these temperatures must be very hard. It is up to 38°C now.
Gayman got my sail bag right this time. The only thing I have got left on my list of boat chandlery is three exotic cushion covers. I want the inside of my boat to look like an over the top harem, on a very small scale.
We were off line for 24 hours. I felt bereft and my wife presumed I was dead under a bus or at least expiring with malaria. The worst aspect of easy communication is the tendency to panic as soon as one side misses a message. There was an international Indo-French "What are we going to do about China?" conference here and they needed their full bandwidth for a videoconference link, so those of us who just wanted to send the odd email were cut off.
I'm also cut off from making outgoing calls on my mobile. When I got to the end of my first month's use, it suddenly blocked all calls. I went into a Hutch shop and asked "Wassup?" They said I have to resubmit a full application form with photographs and letter of invitation. When I said I had done that once already they just shrugged and said "It is a government requirement". The bureaucracy here is unbelievable until you experience it. It is the major obstacle to change and development. I am sad that it is probably the major legacy the British occupation has left behind. There are millions, literally, of middle men and middle-middle men, who are probably not well paid and so many are looking for a little extra income on the side. The papers are full of cases of poor farmers who could not get government grants because the man who must stamp the papers needed a Rs2,000 "fee" before he would do it. Many people have committed suicide because of debts of Rs3,000, about £40. I have more than that in my wallet. There is an election here in May and the current government says if they are re-elected they will go completely "paperless" by 2007. That is one election claim I really do not believe. I am looking for what would be an absolutely defining Indian souvenir to bring back, a marbled edge, quarter bound, dog-eared accountant's ledger. It is more Indian than any amount of silk or spice.
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The shade trees along the road outside MSSRF are coming into blossom. Yellow
flowers opening and falling by the minute. Everything botanical is speeded
up. You can't plan to come back to see how something is developing. It will
be all over by then. You can almost see the plants growing. I am surprised that there are clear seasons here. People do talk about summer coming in, and the plants follow clear cycles, even though the daylight and temperature are fairly constant all year round. I've never had a fresh mango in India because I have never been here in the mango season. What we have now are melons, bananas and a few papayas, but not many. Also lots of apples and grapes, which don't seem very tropical.
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Spent the morning getting my phone sorted out. Why it had to be reregistered I never fathomed. Then they wanted proof of my Indian address. i said that would be pointless as I would be staying in hotels in a week. Then i realised that a UK passport doesn't give any address details, which is what they really wanted. why I don't know, but that's India. eventually a more senior lady said she though that a passport was fine, and suddenly it all works again.
Very hot. I was told this was "early summer". It doesn't get hot until "high summer". Hard to do much in the middle of the day other than stay in the shade. Mrs Gnanappazham said she heard that I did some paintings (how she heard don't know) and asked to see them. Her father is a retired art teacher and paints Hindu mythological scenes in oils, really rather well. She told me the shrine I painted by the side of the road is well known and it's not a banyan tree. It is an important tree nevertheless. Lord Ganesha is below it. I asked who had decided to build it and she said, no one really, it was just rising up there and probably will become a full temple eventually.
I took the train in the evening to Kapaleeswara temple. There is a huge amount of temporary building work going on, erecting a roof over all of the courtyards and lining them with white calico. Couldn't find out what is was for, but hope that we can see it whatever it is and whenever it happens. Then walked along the Marina beach, which is covered in identical "Kwality (sic) Walls" ice cream trolleys and corn incinerators. The sea roles in quietly, but the acres of sand are just covered in rubbish. It's very sad really.