DELHI - The Mysterious Journey of Col. Bindra

A couple of weeks ago on another stinking hot Delhi afternoon, the Colonel came up the stairs to visit and tell us he was off to his hill station in the Punjab. "I have a new house," he told us with a smile on his face, "you should all come and visit it." (The Colonel is always inviting us to come to the other end of the country with him, which would be fabulous if we didn't have work every day and, therefore, only weekends for these epic journeys) He told us that he'd be gone three to four days, leaving our food and water needs in the hands of his daughter who'd been left to run the household. A week later, still no Colonel. Asha (the daughter) was beginning to look harassed but we didn't press the issue (her responce to questions on her father's whereabouts was the characteristic head nod from side to side which Indians give to mean yes, no, maybe and "don't be so stupid, you stupid tourists.") Lightning storms racked the skys, rumours abounded from our co-ordinators of burst pipes and fallen trees causing hill station havoc. And then, a few days ago, the Colonel reappeared. He came up to see us and we asked how the trip was. He nodded his head from side to side. We didn't ask again.


Lightning over Delhi. After the dissapointment in Brazil, finally I managed to capture nature's most elusive eletrical effect photograph. Hurrah!

In other goings on, the excessive Delhi temperatures have become even more excessive. Now simply leaving the house for five minutes is enough to cause premature sweating and exhaustion. Coincidentally, I now run the morning games lesson for one of the Special Needs classes at Akshay Pratishthan. A curious activity to be involved with in a class where most of the children have some sort of physical disability, half a dozen are in wheelchairs and not capable of moving themselves and English is not understood. Oh, and on asking to be shown the school's sport equiptment I was presented with a single flat volleyball. Thank goodness I have a hacky sack and Sarah has been carrying a long skipping equipped piece of rope for the entire year. Both of which, incidentally, are all that is required to elicit peals of excitement from my lovely kids.


Demonstrating the art of skipping. Not that any of the kids actually did skipping, per se. Luckily the rope is amusement enough.

In the cause of finding ways to use the sun to our advantage and satisfy the growing need for non curried snacks (since everything, *everything* tastes of curry) we spent a happy afternoon melting Mars bars in the sun and over the toaster and mixing them with cornflakes to make some gorgeous Mars bar/cornflake cakes.


Mars bars and cornflakes. Happiness is just a short sit in the fridge away.

A word on jogging, which Mollie and I have been doing in the mean streets of Delhi (she's worried about having put on too much weight this year, I'm worried about having lost too much) A fun activity which involves the dodging of children, old people, bikes and, eventually, cars. It'd probably be a good idea not to do it in the middle of the night, but it's just too darn hot to try at any other time.


A cow on the middle of a street in an upper middle class area of Delhi. A normal occurance. They're sacred, you see, so they can roam where-ever they please.

AGRA - For Love Nor Money

So, the Taj Mahal. Mausoleum and signifier to Princess Di's mental state. It is a big, white, marble building and it is as astonishingly pretty as all the pictures you have seen. The Taj photographs particularly well but, due to symmetrical design, either comes across looking like a cardboard cutout or looks impossibly angled. I'm sure the mentally anguished Prince who built it for his dead loe would appreciate the frustration of photographers several hundred years later. Inside the Taj itself is the most evocative spot in the complex: a tiny darkened crypt where every word and whisper is magnified into something like a wail. It must have been a cathartic way to mourn. Darn hot, though.


Behold the vast, white prettyness of the Taj Mahal's frontal view...


... And the bizarre fakery of its angled one. I secretly blame Shiboan and Sarah for throwing off the universe with their grins.

Elsewhere on the fast streets of Agra, thousands of tourists try to negotiate crumbling streets to find the other four or five mounuments in the town worthy of visiting. Despite the abundance of tourists from all corners of the world, it seemed that the six of us were the ones who everyone in town wanted to stare at. Perhaps our mostly female quotient makes us look like some sort of celebrated Hollywood harem, or maybe there's a large billboard of James McAvoy somewhere which I haven't seen yet. All I know is that I'm getting the stares but not the requests for autographs or the offers of multiple camels for my companions (I was told that you can be expcted to be offered twenty by the upwardly mobile rural types looking for cosmopoliton wives) an it's another of the reasons why India is a country the tourist tends to enjoy in very small doses. We did manage a walk around Agra Fort; a building whose purpose has become confused over the centuries between a palace, a place of worship and eventually a British stronghold. The architecture is all very impressive, but the place suffers from a glut of over enthusiastic 'tour guide touts' who try to charge unsuspecting tourists to be told historical titbits which they'll instantly forget. I object to this type of commercialisation for two reasons. Firstly, when confronted with an elaborate building with tiny passages and hidden rooms I prefer to discover and ascribe meaning to its mysteries by myself and, secondly, after tagging on the end of a couple of tour groups in the same elaboratly decorated room and hearing two entirely different histories given I have concluded these people must surely be failed creative writing students trying to make their way in the world by scamming its populous. Actually, I do quite admire the latter. Must jot it down as possible future career.


Agra Fort and the tomb of one of its former commanders, one John Colvin. I'll have to break the news gently to my dad. It's always a shock to learn that you're going to die a hundred and fifty years in the past in the middle of India.


My favourite sort of shot, people walking down immensly long corridors of interesting looking pillars. Does it ruin the effect to tell you we were heading for the bathrooms at the end? Well, they were very nice ones by Indian standards.

Life in Delhi has hit a bit of a standstill this week. A week into the placement at BVB School we began realising that our presence there wasn't really adding much to the institution or to ourselves. See, the problem with the school is that it's a normal, privately funded school full of middle class kids and fully staffed by professional teachers. Basically having foreign visitors adds prestige to Indian instituions, and it was this prestige which BVB wanted to attain, rather than desperatly needed volunteer help. And as much as observing the day to day antics in a British style education system is diverting for a few days; it isn't really something I needed to come to India to do. The school has bent over backwards to welcome us and to show us every single thing they do but my sense of social activism is not nutured by watching a teacher read through a textbook to her class for an hour, or not turning up to work one day and leaving us volunteers to teach the class, only for someone to wander in half way through and tell the kids they needn't bother doing the work we set them as we're not their proper teachers.

So myself and the Sarahs spent a couple of days in limbo waiting to see if there was an instituion in the city which needs some volunteer help. Which apparently wasn't as straightforward as it sounds, despite poverty levels in the city currently riding around the twenty five percent mark and all of us having experience volunteering in stituations where we speak barely a few words of the language (something which apparently just "isn't done" to foreign visitors in India.) Thankfully a four second investigation on our part led us to discover what eluded many others: which was the second project which Shiboan, Molly and Lauren have been immensly happy with for two weeks is desperate for more volunteers.

We are now based with them at Akshay Pratishthan, a school for the disabled in South Delhi which aims to equip kids with physical and mentally disabilities with the skills which will help them find paying work in the fast, scary world of commercial India. So there's a mind boggiling array of subject areas from the academic to woodwork, yoga, cookery, dress making and even the manufacture of their own prosphetic limbs. All mighty impressive. For our first day, we were treated the the annual school prize giving which inclued the usual mix of terminally uninteresting guest speakers, small scared children clutching large trophies and a bizarre choice of entertainment. The undisputed highlight of the day, if not the entire month, was a dance by half a dozen boys dressed in black tie, wearing mascara and using vegetables as their instruments.


Best. Dance. Ever.

A word on the food as everyone seems to be asking. It's India. It's curry. All the time. This is causing much trauma to some but for me whose diet was practically all Indian curry *before* leaving the UK it's a veritable heaven of spice three times a day with only occassional stomach cramps (there's only so many lentils you can eat, you know). And yet, thanks to the current bird flu scare depriving India of certain poultry products, I'm still craving a Chicken Byriani from the takeaway at the top of Whiteladies Road.

DELHI - You Cannot Tame a Camel in the House

We've been here and already we're exhausted. Life in India, it seems, is best lived at a slow and non tourist like pace. A typical day starts at 5.45am: which is actually something of a blessing because by 9am the heat really begins to hit town (this week has been mostly above forty degrees. That's pretty much brain frying temperature) And then comes the daily arguments with auto-rickshaw drivers. India's shaky transport system is supported by a network of independant drivers of even shakier three wheeled vehicles who'll take you anywhere in town. That's as soon as you get them to agree to a reasonable price since, having white skin in this country means you are regarded as a bottomless money pit. Amusing the first time but tiresome on a twice daily process, the convoluted method of dealing with these people is first to settle on a destination (not always straightforward. Why should you know where to go better than someone you've never met, right?), then to agree on a price (i.e. you say what the ride actually costs having done it every day for a week, they say it should be twice as high, you beat them down again and then threaten to walk away and then, lo and behold, ride granted. Anyone who remembers dealing with Stan in the seminal Secret of Monkey Island will feel right at home)


Playing cards with the Colonel in Chez Bindra. Rummy went down well, Big Scum, Little Scum took a little more explanation.

It's no wonder that the schools start at seven and are done by one. Just getting anywhere and spending half an hour in constantly honking traffic is exhausting enough in itself. The school I am working at, along with the Sarahs, is your usual common or garden Indian school. Which is, pretty much, a British school but with yoga classes. We are based in the Special Education department, which has some very curious work practices ("Don't worry about him," one teacher assures me as I help an austic boy with his homework, "We all know he lives in his own little world." I think my mother would have a thing or two to say about that) but a lot of very bright kids who speak faultless English and call me Mr. Phil. And, really, who wouldn't feel proud being addressed like that?

Slghtly disconcerting moments this week have included receiving some very bizarre philosophy from the teaching staff, (see the heading of this post) having to take an entire class's lesson on my first day because the teacher needed to leave for half an hour to talk on her mobile phone (and then tell her friend in the next class all about it) and then taking my kids over to a mainstream class for an art lesson where forty kids were sitting, unsupervised for an entire hour. Cue bedlam and lots of anxious waiting for hometime.


See the many varieties of tourist at the local museum with their bizarre array of headsets and guidebooks.

Elsewhere in Delhi, the National Museum is well worth a visit especially for the esoteric experience of sitting in an empty cinema for over half an hour before watching an out of focus video on archelogical discoveries in Palestine. We tried to work out the link to Bollywood cinema, really we did. Oh, and then there were the relics of the Buddha. Enough said about those, the better.


Those relics of the Buddha in full! Eww.


Me on the big screen. At long last, I'm sure you all agree.

Perhaps the best experience so far was getting out of the city on one of our school's trips to see the local charity village. Run by the Austrian based SOS, the purpose built village provides homes for around two hundred orphans. Perhaps more interestingly, though, it provides a place of employment and eventual retirement for India's middle aged and unmarried women, a subclass who like their English counterparts some centuries ago seem to not really exist in India's social hierarchy. Interesting stuff, especially since it was Sports Day which allowed for all sorts of communal reminising about skipping races past.


Sports Day at the SOS village. It's very sweet how the kids put on all their best party clothes to go running down a field.

So, India. A fabulous, crazy country. But much improved by constant sleep and not acting like a tourist. And where am I going to tomorrow, I hear you ask? Why, the Taj Mahal of course!

DELHI - Beep If You're Driving

Never again shall I complain on the loudness of roads anywhere in the world. They are quiet, restful places of personal contemplation. The M4 on a Friday morning, or the LA freeway on a Tuesday afternoon are places of ordely conduct and the upmost respect for the rules. Delhi's roads are a free for all. Ruled by the maniacs, respected by only the biggest Mercs and used by everyone. Red lights? Lanes? Merely squiggles on the road and pretty coloured posts. It's a chaos which everyone understands and which very few ever come to harm on. This is India: madness of living a life whilst the sun beats down.


The five merry ladies of Delhi and my companions for the last leg of this trip. Lauren, Mollie, Sarah, Sibohan and Sarah (remember her?)

Living arrangements are one guaranteed source of amusement. Unlike Brazil where our volunteer squad was scattered around our home city in separate families, all six of us are sharing one roof in the scarily named but very pleasant Defence Colony. Our host is Colonel Bindra (Indians like their titles. And ours really is a bona fide Colonel with twenty five years service behind him) who after seven years of retirement has decided he wants to enter the tour industry by opening his house to groups of foreign tourists. We are his trial run and therefore are treated to all the comforts of home, both Indian and foreign. Lisa Kudrow's purple eyed visage stares out from imported napkins, showers run whenever they are wanted abliet always cold or tepid and the toilet roll, a rarity in this counry, is endless and pink.


Government House and one of the many relics of British colonisation built on a massive scale. Perhaps to try and upsurp the city's indigenous places of worship which are also massive.

Work at our school placements begins on Monday. Myself and the Sarahs are working in the special education section of one of the local schools which, in the proud tradition of many former British colonies, keeps to familliar British syllabuses and impeccable school uniforms. With an exciting sideline in social action and responcibility. Indian poverty is, like Brazil, a part of life but, unlike Brazil, is integrated into the middle classes way of thinking. Sometimes in literal ways: most houses employ servants (which poses the usual quandry: servitude versus unemployment) and sometimes simply in the designated areas where beggars can congregate and collect arms.


The seedy underbelly of a Delhi subway. Which means, uh, a couple of dogs trying to get out of the sun. Or maybe even cows if the steps are easy enough to climb down.

You might think of Delhi as a seedy place but, really, it just isn't. It's dirty, dusty and the chaotic road system means a pavement is no guarantee of pedestrian access. But you're more likely to get ripped off by a westernised travel agent than a market stall holder. Or so we've been told. Certainly what passes for a tour is an interesting experience. Seven hours on a coach with Hindi/English commentary is a fascinating way to spend a day (Hindi has picked up not only modern English words to add to its vocabulary but also whole turns of phrase. In a mobile phone shop you can expect to understand everything which is said until pricing becomes the issue, at which point the words "rip off" and "debit card" are all that can be gleaned. I'll stick to postcards.)


The Lotus Temple which marks the centrepoint for world Ba'hia. Now I don't claim to be an expert but it seems to be all about collective love, peace and sitting in silence for a few minutes in the Indian equivalent of Sydney Opera House until the next group comes shuffling in. All very bizarre but, as you can see, rather popular. The Hindu temples and rituals are much more impressive. More on those at a later date.

One name which crops up a lot is that of the Ghandis. Many of them lived and died, and usually violently, in this city. They are the closest thing to royalty or perhaps more aptly, the Kennedy family. Life as a Ghandi, whether Mahatma, Indira or Rajiv consists of growing up with an international education, discovering a social conscience and then waiting for assassination (and giving speeches pertaining to that fact, starting "If I am not here tomorrow...") And yet they are perhaps the closest thing Delhi has to organsation in the chaos. Sonja Ghandi is seen by many as the potentiol link to India's continued development and relations with the west. Whilst we were touring Indira Ghandi's house, and the spot where she was assisinated, the road ahead was closed for Sonja's motorcade to pass. For a few minutes not only did every car stop running, but so did the horns and the shouts. And then the barriers came up, and somewhere someone started screaming about how good their bottled water was.