Back at the cyber café, using a fairly modern LuckyGoldstar* PC which has been endorsed by Sourav Ganguly, Sunil Gavaskar, Krish Sakant and Ravi Shastri. I wonder if I can get Kevin Pieterson and Andrew Flintoff to autograph my Pismo? For no real reason apart from having been able to wash with hot water and get my pile of manky clothes washed, I’m in a fairly silly mood and I hope this will carry on today.
*It’s running windows 98 – they cybercafe owner tells me that it’s easier to network 98 clients than XP or 2K clients. (He uses XP on his server.) I’m a bit surprised by this choice for clients and would appreciate comments from the BOFHs out there.

I’m going to stay at the Rajanthandri tonight and get a train south tomorrow, assuming I can book a ticket on-line today. Apparently India Rail offers a very up-to-date online booking facility. I’ll let you know how I get on with it later but for now, on with the blog-catch-up…

Tuesday 29th
Walk to Wilson Point to watch the sunrise – yes, I was awake and moving before 6pm! After the sunrise, I bought a cup of ginger-enhanced khala chai from a vendor who had a wee stall on a handcart. (How did he get the water up here?) Of course, this stimulated my abdominal systems and I had to crawl into the undergrowth. Thank goodness I don’t go anywhere without necessary supplies…

I went back to Haji Kwajabhai’s shop to continue my Marathi martyrdom and met a chap called Virindra who’s a local licenced taxi-driver/guide. We arranged for him to take me on one of the official tours of the more distant viewpoints, starting at 11am on Wednesday. He also spontaneously offered me a 50 rupee discount on the official price of 350 rupees.

I ate lunch at a fairly upmarket place called Tinklers – the tastebud and watched England’s attempt to beat India’s score in the first one-day international of this series. England were chasing 226, IIRC, and had plenty of overs to do so. However, after both Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pieterson were both out for just over 40 runs apiece (KP’s innings included two beautiful 6s, IIRC), and Geraint Jones failed to score, the match was interestingly poised when the inevitable powercut finished my viewing. (Much later, a friend in the UK sent me the final score: England’s tail enders just can’t bat, while Harbajan Singh, after having been India’s top run-scorer, had taken 5 wickets for a piffling amount of runs.)

While England were crumbling in the afternoon heat, I slept off my lunch and caught up on the miserable amount I’d slept last night. Every night in that hotel, there was a lot of shouting, banging and crashing until about 1am: it restarted around 6am, so I averaged around 5 hours’ sleep a night in Mahabaleshwar.

I then searched for a restaurant that took either of my plastics because I was down to 50 rupees and the only bank I knew of was closed. No-where wanted to know but fortunately I met a magician* who showed me to an ATM (which isn’t mentioned by my guidebook). I ate a Maharashran-style thali, accompanied by a strawberry juice somewhere, phoned a friend in the UK, found out I’ve become vaguely famous here for allowing someone to overcharge me and crashed out.
*I forgot to add that last night, I’d encountered a magician from Pune. We talked quite a lot – he’s been all over Europe and had a show in a theatre here. He gave me a private show on the pavement, making all sorts of things (including my signet ring) disappear and reappear. We all know it’s just sleight-of-hand (he insisted this himself) but it was truly brilliant.

Wednesday 29th
After another patchy sleep, I finally surfaced at 10.45 and charged to where I’d arranged to meet Virendra, arriving just after 11. He wasn’t there and so I waited, while getting more Marathi ‘lessons’, for about half an hour. I’m still in two minds about this – I was a couple of minutes late and so broke our agreement and feel I owe him something. However, I’d have expected him to wait at least 5 minutes before giving up on me, I called his cellphone several times without success and I didn’t get any service from him at all, so I certainly don’t feel I owe him anything like 300 rupees – maybe a glass of chai, over which we could chat and remake the arrangement. (I didn’t get the chance because I never saw him again.)

I couldn’t face any more Marathi martyrdom and so decided to walk to a viewpoint called Arthur’s Seat, about 12km from Mahabaleshwar. (Constantly being bothered by taxi and autorickshaw drivers had turned me against them.) I’d got maybe half a mile down the road and realized that I was getting quite warm when two blokes in a wee three-wheeler van overtook me and then stopped to ask me where I was going. They insisted on taking me halfway, to Old Mahabaleshwar, to where they were delivering a load of laundry at a posh hotel. So we pootled off, me wondering whether the van would turn turtle under our combined weight or whether the engine would simply refuse to get all thee of us up the slopes on this road.

They dropped me off at Old Mahabaleshwar, which seemed worth a look. However, fist I downed a very welcome Mirinda (Indian fizzy drink) and bisleri (bottle of water) and a café, while watching a bloke wash his scooter and then his socks just next to me.

There are two temples at Old Mahabaleshwar, one of which is built over the spring which gives rise to (or at least is used to celebrate) 5 rivers. (Mahabaleshwar and surrounding hamlets appear to be on a peak from which various spurs and ridges fall away. I’ll scan my map when I update my photo-website so you can see what I’m on about.) The water has been channeled to come out of a carved bull’s mouth, into a sacred bathing pool, then to flow through five neat channels, each in a niche with a statue/altar to an appropriate god, on its way to the rivers.

I can’t show you any photos because photography was forbidden within the temple and I searched all the stalls around the temple for postcards or pictorial guidebooks. All I could find were written guidebooks (in Marathi!) so I’m really sorry I can’t share with you how this temple looked. It wasn’t grand, yet it was obviously important and in constant use by a thin trickle of visitors. In fact, the lack of grandeur made it more impressive to me. It seemed to be saying ‘here is water, here is god: react how you will’ without saying ‘I am god, I am going to overpower you.’

I recall buying some rather foul peanuts (still in their shells) from a stall and watching a couple of boys play cricket along the alley between the stalls. However, it was soon time to move on and so I started trudging up the road again. I encountered two little girls who were selling bunches of flowers wrapped in newspaper, ready to offer at a temple, for 2 rupees a bunch. Again, I felt unable to refuse and so bought a posy from each of them, then tied these to my rucsac. While I was doing this, some other children arrived, asking me to do ‘jaadoo’ (magic). This confused me for a while but I soon understood they wanted me to take photographs of them (I think they’d realized I have a digital camera and so they’d be able to see themselves on its screen.). I have a few shots of them spontaneously dancing and cavorting in front of me. I intend to send them hard copies sometime and so have the address of one of the older lads.

Again, after walking less than a mile, I was offered a lift on a scooter by a photographer going to Arthur’s Seat. He knew this road very well and so it was quite a smooth ride, punctuated by stops to restart the engine after freewheeling (to save petrol) down slopes wherever possible.

The views from Arthur’s Seat are breathtaking and I really hope my photos do them justice. I also met the photographer: he takes Polaroid photos of punters who are on a platform overhanging one of the many drops from this point. Since he had refused to take anything for the lift and I fancied having a ‘professional’ photo, I got him to take one. It’s hopefully on its way to my parents in the UK but I’m a bit concerned that this parcel is overdue.

I bought two makkai (cinder-grilled corn-on-the-cob which is then rubbed with lime and masalas [spices]) – absolutely delicious and ate them while dodging flies and watching other stall holdes play ‘throw-tag’, then walked back to Old Mahabaleshwar.

Back at Old Mahabaleshwar, the kids I’d met earlier were playing cricket with other friends. They asked me for more jaadoo and again I have some shots which amuse and give rise to other emotions I can’t name. It’s always lovely to watch children playing without falseness or guile and with amazing exhuberance. I noticed that one of the small children wasn’t getting into the shots and so hoisted him onto my shoulders and got an older lad to take the photos. Of course, quite a few others wanted a turn at this. Also, some of them, learning I was from England, wanted me to pose with their cricket bat, and finally a shot of me holding a very young child. I don’t have any qualms about any of this – it was pure enjoyment for all of us, as far as I could see and two local adults were looking on. (I’d also asked one of them if I was causing problems: he laughingly said ‘no’.) Also, one of the kids gave me a sprig of small black berries (reminiscent in flavour and colour of individual blackberry pips) and showed me that he ate them, so I munched away quite happily – again, purely delicious! By now, dusk was approaching so I got a seat in a shared jeep/taxi back to Mahabaleshwar.

I ate an indifferent methi dahl with jeera rice at a dhaba (restaurant) near my hotel, then played a couple of frames of pool at an amusement center on the main street. While waiting for a table, I chatted with some trainee homeopathic doctors from Mumbai. One was a curious about western marriage/relationship ‘culture.’* On learning my status, he asked how many sexual partners I’d had. I replied honestly (but incorrectly because I was quite surprised by this question) and his friends joked that he was offering to be my next – this had all of us giggling. I jokingly declined and they went away.

I played a couple of frames with a man who turned out to be the owner of the pool-hall. He beat me but I was quite proud of some of my shots – I haven’t touched a pool-cue for over a year. I also learnt that women don’t smoke here (unless they’re super-rich and ‘westernised’, though many men do) and that the owner’s woman cashier (who appeared to be around 25) was divorced due to some domestic problems. (This information was volunteered by a local lad who runs a stall here. We’d also been chatting while I was waiting for a table, during which we touched on the conversation I’d had with the homeopaths.)
*Many people here have asked whether I’m married and whether I have any children. My usual replies that I’m separated from my wife and so am glad we didn’t have any children [because otherwise they’d have been hurt by our break-up] is usually understood and accepted but the questioners’ reactions imply that such events just don’t happen here.

After the hall closed (at 10.30!), I returned to my hotel but played a bit of football in the street with some local lads who asked me to join them. They were all apparently under 13 and one (Shubham) is the son of the man who runs the phonebooth I’d used quite often. I’ve also played a version of hopscotch with these lads (Rohit, Pratik, Pamesh, Dhananjay, Kaitan, Shubham, Yashodam, Ashitish and Daud) a couple of times. You throw a stone into a scoring area chalked onto the path, then hop to it, then through the numbered sections to your stone, then hop-kick it out of that area. If you succeed, you get the number of points in that area and then get another go. However, if you don’t get your stone into a numbered area (or if it lands on any of the chalked lines) or if you put your foot down, take more than one hop between numbered areas, land on any chalked lines or fail to hop-kick your stone completely out of the scoring area, your turn ends.

Thursday 30th
Woken by kid hall- porter – am I checking out? No, so I pay for tonight and then catch the state tour-bus to Pratapgadh, a hillfort built by Chatapatri Shivaji in the 17th century BCE. Here he killed Shah Jahan, a muslim king from Delhi (I think) who was trying to take over the Marathi area at a peace-conference they’d agreed to hold in this hall. It’s an amazing structure at the top of a very high hill, with brilliant look-out posts, escape tunnels and other features which may well have made it impregnable.

(The tour-bus also stopped at a handcraft and fruit-selling center – the strawberries in this area are a large part of its ‘industry’ and are delicious.)

The local folk are raising money for a school at Pratapgadh. there (15 families live in the fort, working as tourist guides and/or running refreshment stalls or maintaining the place) My diary entry simply says that I cooked in the sun and reminds me that I don’t have many photos from Pratapgadh because my camera’s batteries ran out of charge and I hadn’t brought any spares.

My diary then has several pages of notes, scribbles that won’t mean anything to you and then continues….

Thursday 30th part 2
[needs to be re-written]

Friday 31st
[needs to be re-written]

I recall watching India win the second ODI at Faridabad that afternoon. Young Raina and Dhoni were very impressive and it’s a shame that India didn’t have a slightly bigger target to win so that Raina could have scored a century.

Saturday 1st April
There’s nothing in my diary for this day. I recall being woken at 7.30 by the hotel receptionist to ask if I had any problems. (I did – being woken up un-necessarily to be reminded of the check-out time!) I went back to Kashmiri Arts Palace to say ‘au revoir’ to Wahid and Mr Shah then to Haji Kwajabhai’s shop to say goodbye to him. He and some other men were dealing with some photocopies so he asked me to wait for 5 minutes (which turned into an hour) while they finished their business. It appeared to be some local council business so I was quite interested to hear about it but they couldn’t really explain. While I was waiting, I heard some loud Indian/techno music which apparently was part of the start of celebrations for a wedding. I was invited to come in and dance but embarrassment/shyness (and a desire to move on) made me politely refuse.

Having said goodbye to Haji Kwajabhai, I just made the 10.30 bus to Satara. It descended through the usual mind-boggling gradients and overhangs to this town, which appears to be quite big. I sat in the bus-station, recollecting my thoughts from wherever they’d been shaken to on the journey and then walked across the road to a diner-style hotel for breakfast (idly sambar and a bottle of thum’s up [the local ‘coke’]). I also asked around for a cybercafe and a hotel and was directed towards the hotel Rajathadri where I’m now staying.

On the way, I stopped at a street stall and spent 3 hours talking with the man running it. We talked about language origins, local and national politics, the differences between Europe and India and the differences he’s seen in Goa since India took over. (While the portugese ruled there [they still owned it until the 1980s, long after the rest of the country was independent], you’d be arrested for spitting or any other such offense and so the place was neat and well-kept. Now anything goes!) He had a lot of time for British rule, saying that it had kept the country mostly on the straight and narrow but that now politics (in fact the whole state apparatus, including the police) is so corrupt that there’s probably no cure. Several times I was reminded of western corruption and food waste and the conversation rubbed me emotionally quite a lot.

I wondered why an obviously educated (we could even talk chemistry, albeit he knew no organic chemistry and I’ve forgotten almost all I knew of inorganic chemistry [I never really saw the fascination in it anyway]) and cultured man was running a street stall – he had so much more potential – and he told me that he was retired from a fairly senior position in a bank but saw sitting at home all day as morally wrong and physically harmful. Anyway, this work was in lieu of the state pension UK folk are used to. He worked there during the day while his older son was at his main job. Then his son would come to work here while he went home to eat and unwind.

Since my hotel was on his way home and he was going there by autorickshaw, he offered to take me but wouldn’t take any contribution towards the cost of this journey. I have to say that yet again, I’ve been wonderfully treated by most folk I’ve met here. So long as I speak slowly enough, I get along fine and people have spontaneously volunteered help many times.

At the Rajathadri, I asked for direction to a cybercafe and whether I could get some clothes washed (they’re being done by hand just now!) and then came here to blog. I ate masala and sadha dosa at a restaurant the owner recommended (it cost under 60 rupees for another delicious meal, returned for more blogging and then crawled back to the Rajathadri to sleep..

Sunday 2nd
Did I say that my room has a balcony overlooking Chatrapatri Chowk (roundabout)? Er, no – well it does and this is a mixed blessing: great views of the town but traffic noise all night long. Once I’ve posted this, I’ll check on my internet banking and then look into traveling on. Next blog will be from Goa or Ernakullam in Kerala, where I expect it to be even hotter…

Before I get on with the blogging, are any of the Leckie/Granada folk reading this? If so, can someone ask one of my former Scottish colleagues to contact me privately, please? (Text me on 07909 504328 or add a ‘for Bruce only’ comment to this post if possible.) I’ve tried emailing and not yet recieved a reply. Of course this may be due to spam filtering by my ISP…

OK, on with my diary’s drivel…

Sunday 26th
Woke a few times in the night – hello to Roachie the roach!
10am surface, put on clean clothes – including brand-new socks and shirt
It ain’t half hot mum!
Ear-cleaning [this bit censored to avoid over-embarrassment and prevent any of the squeamish amongst my audience puking]
No power just now so no internet. It may be restored at 11am or maybe at 12 noon (er, actually it came back at 1pm.
Now in CentrePoint, a ‘pure veg, pure Jain’ fast food joint. It’s quite posh, judging by the nice details in the concrete décor, the clothes and girths* of the customers, the clean tables – think of a posh diner in the US.
*There are actually some fat people (other than me) here.

I’m eating masala dosa (crispy rice-flour pancakes) with green chutni. The chutni is basically a lovely tangy, spicy/citrus variant on bubble-and-squeak (using mustard seeds, onions and fresh coriander/cilantro leaf) and is wrapped up in the dosa, which is served with a small bowls of what tastes like oxtail soup and a coconut-based dip. It’s purely delicious!

Some kids are playing on the next table – wish I could play with them. I’m badly missing Boo, M-J and the flower garden. I realize more than ever how much I need more than ‘single-serving’ friends. [Of course I have them but today brought home just how much I need these relationships.]

Just recalled seeing in Mumbai a poster advertising an Indian remake of Fight Club

I pay with a 500 rupee note which causes problems for the cashier who has to run for change. The bill is printed with a dot-matrix printer on a 3-inch wide roll. My chai has worked – need to amble back to my hotel…

Wondered around more, getting very confused by the map I’d bought. Eventually, by locating 3 definite landmarks, I realized that the cartographer had moved 3 hotels a block east. Since these seemed to be obvious landmarks, I’d navigated by them – and got hassled.

I found a school and a well. Two old blokes came up, each carrying two five(?)-gallon containers on yokes over their shoulders. They would attach one to the well-spindles rope, let it down to fill, raise it 10 metres (estimated from the spindle’s circumference and the number of turns to raise the containers), empty its contents into the other, refill the first one, untie it from the spindle-rope and then attach both to their yoke and walk off. Since both looked over 60 and one smelt of shit and I had the luxury of bottled water (stop me from buying it, please!), it seemed reasonable to offer to help them at least raise their water while I waited for a local tailor to shorten my other trousers.

I was also curious why they used the well when there was a pump across the road, which a trio of young girls were using to get drinking water and to wash themselves and their crockery. One even got her mates to pump water inside the back of her trousers so she could wash her backside. I was impressed by she did this without losing any decorum. The went away and another little girl came up to me, asking me by gestures to fill her water container. I took her container to the pump and found out it’s harder work than the well. I also pumped water to fill a middle-aged woman’s container (about 3 gallons). She then hoisted it up on her head and walked smoothly away. They build them tough here!

I took my altered trousers and map (I’d also gotten the main part xeroxed so I could fold it into my pocket) back to my hotel and then wondered back to tinklers to try the cyber café again. Another power-cut!

Another little girl begged for some food. I had no coins and was getting a bit hacked off with it but not enough to refuse so I saw a solution in a stall selling small coconuts. I bought two (they were 7 rupees each) and gave her one and she scampered away. I also asked the stall-keeper to open mine and he directed me to the temple next door. The attendant there beckoned me into the central altar and whacked my coconut with a curved knife/trowel until it broke into two unequal pieces. He then put the large part on the altar and sent me away with the small part and so I sat outside the temple, eating the delicious flesh from this part and writing my diary.

Eventually I was hungry and went back to Centrepoint for more food: this time a special Jain pav bhaji (fried bread rolls to dunk in a spicy sauce) and realized that I AM TWOFLOWER.* I am also an idiot, putting myself in a place where there are many very attractive women with whom I can’t even start a conversation!
*Read Terry Pratchett’s discworld novels if you want to know.

I then watched the sunset from Mumbai point – my photos are quite fun and the sunset itself was pleasant, and then got monstered on a bottle of Khahuraho lager (not less than 8.75% alcohol) in a permit room. I have to insist that I was not as monstered as the two blokes in the corner who’d majored on shorts.

Suitably steaming, I wove my way back to Vishva Shanti…

Monday 27th
Trying to learn Marathi – arggh! I’ve been taken under the wing of a local big-wig who runs a clock and watch retail and repair stall. He’s Haji Khwajabhai Warunkar of Reward Watch Service, Mutton Market Street (near police station), Mahabaleshwar, District Satara, Maharashtra, 410012, India and is keen to help me but I don’t think it’s getting through.

He’s bought me an ‘uncool pee’ (you can transliterate that into Devanagari yourself if you want – it means little book) which shows how the letters are formed and gives examples of their use in words, with vaguely useful illustrative pictures for some of them. (Well, is a picture of a steam-engine meant to mean ‘steam-engine’, ‘railway’, ‘day-trip’ or ‘John Prescott’s worst nightmare’?) Despite his keen-ness to teach me, which I do respect, it’s not getting through:

• He simply shouts the Marathi if I get it wrong, without really telling me what I’ve got wrong and not letting me explain my questions, such as ‘which bit am I getting wrong?’ ‘Please say it slowly so I can hear the differences?’
• Too many other folk are trying to help me at the same time with bits I’m not actually having problems with at this particular time.
• The script is a nightmare:
  1. There are several symbols for consonantal sounds that sound exactly the same to me.
  2. If two consonants or consonantal syllables follow each other, they’re written as a single symbol combining parts of the two single-consonant symbols. Because there are 34 single-consonant symbols, there are 1122 combination symbols and I haven’t yet seen the rules which allow me to analyse them into single-consonant symbols.
  3. The 12 vowels are written either as their own symbols (if they start a word) or as ‘accents’ above, below, behind or in front of symbol for the consonant after which they’re said, thus meaning there are 12 variations on each single-consonant symbol (and hence 13464 symbols altogether). If no vowel-accent is present, a short ‘a’ is understood to be there (unless there’s an ‘accent’ denoting that this ‘a’ sound isn’t to be pronounced).
  4. All the tops of the symbols in a word are joined by a line, thus eliminating the gaps between symbols that help us parse ‘roman’ script.
• Transliteration is also, er, a bit random. For example, a word I hear as ‘now’ means ‘name’. Yet it’s transliterated as ‘nawa’, which Haji Khwajabhai insists is pronounced ‘by the English’ as ‘now’ and won’t accept that of the two of us, I must the expert on English because
  1. it’s my native language
  2. part of my job (and a part at which I am quite skilled) is proofreading and correcting English.

Having said all this, I am very grateful to Haji Khwajabhai for volunteering his time, introducing me to some of his work and local vegetarian foods and his patience with an apparent no-hoper. (As of now (1st April), I can just about pronounce most short words in street-signs, if you’ll accept that I’m guessing at most of the vowels.)

I later met one of Haji Khwajabhai’s friends who took me to his home for chai and chat. His (adult) eldest son showed me their new-born kittens who were nestling with their mother under the bed – so cute I could almost begin to like cats!

That’s all I appear to have dialysed that day. It’s now 10.30 and I want to get a reasonable night’s sleep, so will blog some more tomorrow. See you anon, space-cats.

Just been chatting with the young owner/manager of this cyber cafe. He asked me how Scotland compaed with Mumbai – it was impossible to answer, except to relate my feelings about the huge numbers of poor there. He too insists that India has it all but just can’t get it together because politicians here are corrupt and just don’t give a stuff. He says that because of this he feels as if he’s living in hell.

He agrees with what I was told earlier – that all police here are corrupt because they have to bribe their way into their jobs in the first place. If true, the only saving grace is that they’re armed with lathis, not firearms. Armed police, such as I’ve seen in Belfast, UK airports and the USA, scare the bejasus out of me – and now I’ve stopped to think about it, armed street-gangs (which exist in all those places) probably scare me more!

And yet this district is quite reminiscent of, say, the outer reaches of the modernised* Bull Ring area of Birmingham (once you factor in the crap road surfaces here). Plenty of high-tech, modern shops, educated/middle-class people.
*and in its way quite acceptable – it used to be eerily horrible.

My dad has emailed the following:

Today, Sue received her payslip with back pay to 5th March. ACAS phoned this morning aand said that Morisons had refused to pay her for the period 5th March to 29th March, her restart date. Rather than let the thing drag on, Sue has agreed to accept the settlement. I have written to ACAS, telling them that Morrisons were mean over what, to them, must have been a piffling amount. I suppose it was one of the [people] in their HR Dept, trying to make a name for himself. However, she is back, is happy, the people whom she knows have greeted her like a long-lost relative, so all is now well. There is still the tidying-up to do, like Tribunal to unwind (ACAS is handling this) but basically it’s over!

Well, I’ve just lost an hours’s typing when this bloody Windows 98 box randomly closed my ‘update journal’ window so I’m hoping I can recall the nice ways I phrased everything.

I’m in Satara, staying for a couple of days in the faded grandeur of the hotel Rajathadri on Shivaji Circle, Powai Naka, Satara 415001 (tell [don’t know the code ] 33818). Satara is the ‘county town’ for the Taluka (‘county’) in which Mahabaleshwar nestles. For 300 Rupees, I get a room big enough to contain the lounge of Mycelium Mansion, fresh sheets put on the bed by a flunky as I watch, a clean towel, a new bar of ayurvedic soap, an en-suite, flushing squat toilet and tepid and cold running water!

Last time I blogged, I was in Mahabaleshwar, having arrived from Pune. However, I’ve yet to blog how I got there.

Saturday 25th
Another Brit turned up at the hotel, fresh off the overnight bus from Goa – he’s Tony, an Edinburger (although my ear for accents let me down and I thought he was from, er, a bit further west). He and Adam fancied a look at Pune’s old town and invited me to join them. We meandered through a large area or ‘typical Indian/medieval’ suburb, with no problems apart from relying on the rather hopeless map in Adam’s guidebook. (I’d left my map in my rucsac back at the hotel.) We were approached for performance money/baksheesh by two characters dressed in bright patchwork trousers who wanted to perform with their bullwhips for us but we weren’t keen and refused to pay for things we hadn’t asked for.

Around 1pm, Tony’s lack of sleep and my feeling that I should be moving on led us to aim to get back to the hotel, while Adam decided to carry on to a museum he wanted to see. Tony and I got to within 3 blocks of the hotel before asking at a pharmacy for directions. The pharmacist drew us a good sketch-map and we continued on. About two minutes later we were approached by the pharmacist who offered us a lift on his scooter – it turned out he was a close friend of our hotel’s owner. Tony was leery about 3 people on a scooter (I’ve seen families of 4 or five on scooters and motorbikes here) but I was keen to accept a cooler mode of transport and so gratefully accepted.

The pharmacist whizzed me to the hotel and then went back to find Tony while I ordered a large beer to split between us. When the pharmacist reappeared with Tony (and then refused to accept anything for the lift), Tony and I chatted with the two local politicians on the next table and ordered food. As we were eating, Adam arrived, having failed to fin his museum. We chatted and ate for a while, then Toney retired to catch up on sleep and I left for the bus station.

My somewhat annotated diary takes over:

Natraj Tunnel
New road in places – smooth
Cold stores in mountains
So dry it’s like SCC are of OC
Many hotels [most of which are just wayside diners rather than accommodation], then farming and more random hotels and buildings
Purander Taluka (Kharipol Village)
Swerve to avoid cow
Devanagari* lessons – near crying and puking [because the combination of failing light and road vibrations makes it impossible to focus on the letters and the guy who’s decided he will help me can’t understand this and won’t stop]
At Mahabaleshwar, set on by hotel touts. I forcefully tell them to go away because I’m about to vomit. All but two go away and these two back off at least 5 feel. I sit, swigging water and recomposing myself until I’m ready to ask for help. (It’s after dark and I don’t have a map of Mahabaleshwar.) I ask one to get me to a hotel costing 300 rupees or less a night and am taken to the hotel Vishva Shanti on Cawasji Street. I get a large room with en-suite, sit-down toilet and only two roaches!

*Devanagari is the script used for Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit and other languages in the Aryan branch of the Indo-European family. I’ll blog later why it’s so annoying but for now, just don’t try to learn it unless you have a really pressing need or deathwish.

I’ll blog more later this evening or tomorrow but I’ve just about caught up with where I was and need to eat!

no real updates today: been watching cricket most of yesterday and today and generally having an idyllic time. Will try to blog more tomorrow afternoon.

For now, what happened to Andrew Strauss? 128 in first innings but a power cut stopped me from seeing his second – and very short – second knock.

Hi there

I arrived in India’s equivalent of Blackpool-cum-Evesham last night, except there’s no puke on the streets or shagging in bus-shelters. I’m using a very frail dial-up connection so will keep this very brief.

The specialities here appear to be fruit-growing (blackberries, strawberries especially) and locally made fudge. I won’t get fruit for obvious reasons but if anyone wants some local fudge, best to text me on 07909 504328 (I won’t be able to text back) because I won’t be checking email again before I leave here (in 2 or 3 days) – it’s just too painful. (This is the fourth time I’ve tried – either there’s a power-cut or the phone system is down.)

If you call my cellphone it costs us both huge amounts but it’s no problem to receive a text saying ‘call me on …’ and for me then to find an ISD phone booth – they’re all over India.

OK, time to try posting this…

Not much to add at the moment. Another brit has turned up at my hotel: he’s from Bath and was a local council official until he packed it in for a long holiday. He was also a Labour party member until at least the 1997 election and so it was useful to hear an insider’s account of how and why the ‘Blairite’/post-Maggie modernisation was necessary.

Today, it appears that Sonia Gandhi has resigned both as an MP and from her ‘office of profit’, despite quietly protesting that the position she held did not profit her at all financially. She’s also a good constituency MP, according to constituents quoted in the Times of India and is likely to be re-elected in any by-election.

This has stopped the move to adjourn Parliament (and hence bring in the decree I mentioned yesterday.) Also, the governement is now claiming it never intended to promulgate such a decree in the first place and that the adjournment was simply to allow the budget demate and this issue to calm down.

The irony is that the ‘office of profit’ issue was raised by a candidate from Sonia’s own Congress party. He lost an election to Jaya Bachchan and then complained to the electoral commission that she was an ineligable candidate because of her ‘other job’. (She responded to this by showing that she’d resigned this job just before the election, but then took it up again while still an MP.) However the stink from this process took down his party leader.

She’s played the ‘martyr card’ at least once before. Her party won an overwhelming victory in a recent general election but she didn’t take the opportunity to form a government, possibly due to opposition taunts that a ‘foreigner’ shouldn’t rule India. (See <http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Gandhi_Sonia.html&gt; for further detail.)

OK, time for me to look into how I should now move on to Mahabaleshwar…

Ooops
oops – looks like I took my weekly anti-malarial pill a day early yesterday. So I think I better use the full-on anti mosquito precautions (mossie net, repellant and coils/fumes) for a while, especially towards the end of the week. So far I’ve just used the coils and repellant.

I have been bitten quite a lot but I think it was by other insects. I’ve certainly felt no ill effects other than the ‘mughal’s revenge’. The cyber-cafe owner has just enquired after my health after I went out to the toilet. Fortunately it was no more than ‘business as usual’. However, I am very grateful for his (and others’) concern.

Audaciousness
He also asked me if I was intending to visit Goa. He met a chap at the american consulate who was audaciously robbed in the main train station there. Apparently, he was holding his rucsac between his legs when someone asked him if he’d dropped some money. He looked, hence relaxing his grip, and the whole lot disappeared.

I have my money and plastics in a ‘shoulder-holster’ wallet under my shirt and have my camera tied to my belt when I’m out and about. I keep my main rucsac padlocked shut and chained to an immovable object, while the small rucsac is also padlocked shut. I think I have enough chain to padlock both shut and to something else when they’re attached to another. I understand the temptation to steal from us rich tourists and regard the losses I’ve had so far as a form of ‘stupid tax’ but I’m still sad that this occurs and about the economic conditions that encourage it.

Pics?
Meanwhile, does anyone want a CD of my photos so far, just in case they evaporate? I’ve had a couple burnt (one to keep with me, one to post home) but it’s no problem to get other copies made. If you do, comment below and remind me of your postal address!

New arrivals
Three lads from Nottinghamshire (very close to home) just arrived at my hotel. I hope we can swap some tips on Goa because I still really want to go there. However, the arrival of Brits means it’s probably time to move on.

tidbits
Not much else to say so here’s some tidbits from the Times of India

• Parliament is in uproar: an MP (Jaya Bachchan) was disqualified because she holds an ‘office of profit’ in the civil service. (I assume this law is to prevent conflict of interest and people being paid two state salaries.) Her party then accused 14 other MPs (mostly from the party leading the governing coalition) of committing the same offence and demanded their disqualification. (Seems fair enough to me.) This session of parliament has been adjourned by the government so it can pass a decree that the ‘offices of profit’ held by its MPs can be exempted from this ruling. (Apparently government by decree is allowable when Parliament isn’t in session.)
• This adjournment has also affected the passage of a witness- protection law that was prompted by the collapse of a recent murder trial when the witnesses withdrew their statements, presumably under threat from the accused’s accomplices.
• Following a protracted set of disputes, a woman was persuaded to go to her disputants’ village ostensibly to try to to settle them. On arrival she was set upon, paraded naked and had acid thrown over her. Truly horrifying.
• The Mumbai High Court has ruled that builders must fulfil the ‘promises’, such as garden space, in their brochures, even if the actual contracts with purchasers don’t mention all of them. (Would that this could be applied to elected governments!)
• IT companies here, including Wipro and IBM, have fired some employees for faking their CVs. Some of these employees had been in place for up to 2 years!
• There’s been some success in tracing suspects in a case of abduction and murder of an IT employee who got a lift from Pune to Mumbai. Apparently up to 500 people do this each Friday because the bus, train and taxi services are inadequate.
• There’s a big campaign to undo some of the ravages of the Mutha, one of Pune’s main rivers. Apparently construction companies have been dumping rubble in it, reducing its capacity and hence causing stagnation and flooding when there are releases from the dam upstream.
• Some songs have been banned (from cable TV) because they’re too raunchy. Also, some TV companies have been told off for allowing promotion direct or indirect of alcohol and tobacco. How’s the smoking ban in the UK going?
• In Afghanistan, a bloke is on trial for rejecting Islam and converting to Christianity. (Apparently this is an offence there and such offenders may face the death penalty.) However, a state prosecutor has said ‘We think he could be mad. He doesn’t talk like a normal person’ and a religious advisor to Afghanistan’s president has stated ‘If he is mentally unfit, Islam has no claim to punish him. He must be forgiven. The case must be dropped.’
• And finally, Australian cricket supporters have been officially reprimanded in a New Delhi court for ‘premeditated, co-ordinated and calculated’ racial abuse of some South African cricketers. Such actions will now attract heavy fines. Rightly so, in my opinion. These bloody mongrels have shamed one of my home countries and insulted my preferred spectator sport.

Truly all human life is here!

Well, today has been a very lazy day. I woke around 8.30, just in time for the morning power-cut and lazed in bed with my sudoku and Ethnomedicine books. Some time after 10pm, power was restored and the hotel staff and I sat back to watch the final day of this test series.

cricket news
India had apparently already lost another batsman and were chasing just under 300 runs, needing a run-rate of around 3 per over. This is just about achievable and they nominally had the batsmen and wickets to achieve it. However, despite a few dropped catches that must have frustrated the English bowlers, none of the India batsman lived up to their potential and they were all out for 100. Only Sachin Tendulkar scored above 30 runs and he was suffering from shoulder-pain and shouldn’t really have been playing. Dhoni tried to blast a few boundaries and was dropped by a highly embarrassed Monty Pradesar. A couple of balls later, Dhoni gave Pradesar an almost repeat opportunity and this time was safely caught.

I think the last three wickets went for 1 run, not even ‘The Turbanator’ (Harbajan Singh)’s fixed determination improving India’s lot. For most of the last session, the hotel staff watched the one-day international between Sri Lanka and Pakistan, having given up hope on the Test match. In fact, someone (who may be the hotel’s owner) angrily denounced ‘cheating’. I protested at this because I don’t think Flintoff and co would want to win this way and he calmed down but said that something was definitely amiss because India’s tail-enders can normally get 30 or 40 runs between them.

I’m a bit sad for my hosts (overall the series was a draw: 1 match apiece) but happy for England’s fairly scratch team (5 English top-flight players were too ill to play in this series) and disappointed that the day was an anti-climax.

musical accompaniment?
All day, the Roy Harper song When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease has been echoing around my head. It, along with Kate Bush’s Lionheart is one of the songs that reminds me that, for all its faults, England does have something worthwhile. The notions of fair play and dedication, the timelessness of the brass accompaniment and the reminders of the green-ness around Worcester (in particular, the stream 5 minutes’ walk from my parents’ house where I’ve spent hours listening to the water, the field of cows just beyond it, the majestic sight of the Malvern Hills rising above Worcestershire’s rich alluvial plain and memories of many happy times spent there with friends): all of these have powerful emotional effects on me.

You can check out an mp3 at <http://www.royharper.co.uk/shop/product_info.php?products_id=11&gt; and the first verse’s lyrics are, as best as I can google/recall

When the day is done, and the ball has spun
In the umpire’s pocket away,
And all remains are the groundsman’s pains,
For the rest of time and a day.
There’ll be one mad dog and his master, pushing for 4 with the spin.
On a dusty pitch, with two pounds six of willowwood in the sun.

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, you never know whether he’s gone,
If maybe you’re catching a fleeting glimpse, of a twelfth man at silly mid-on.
And it could be Geoff, and it could be John,
With a new ball sting in his tail.
And it could be me, and it could be thee,
And it could be the sting in the ale………sting in the ale.

OK, I don’t expect this to mean much to anyone else but this is my journal and this song has been going round and round my head. Maybe, just maybe, I am English and can be proud of it.

Time to post this, check on friends and then go back to the hotel for food! Toodle-pip!