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.