G-G-G-Goa

I'm back in the state of sand and it's gone with an absolute bang this time. I couldn't feel more like I was in Goa.
Last night, for instance, we were sitting round a fire, on a beach, all seven of us, plus a bunch of other people who we met in our beach tree huts, and three aged hippies, one of whom was one of the most fantastic guitarists I've ever seen, drinking beers, chatting and "jamming" with the aged hippies. How is that for Goan.

We did the famous Anjuna flea market on Wednesday, where they sold all sorts of stuff. A guy even managed to paint, "Archdeaconfauntleroy" on a grain of rice for me. We went and sat in a beach restaurant and watched a live band with sitars and such like before going out to some insane trance party in a club in the middle of NOWHERE.

There are loads of little shaks with cats to stroke and sitting of the beach with a guitar the dogs come to listen too and keep you company.

Commonwealth Games

They are doing a lot for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. They are building a huge Metro system, which is actually quite a lot better than the one in London, but I was wondering what they are going to do about some of the stuff.

The Indian attitude as far as I've seen is to pretend the scruffier aspects of India don't exist. When the BRCM boys saw a picture of some poor people on my camera they told me off and said "you shouldn't be taking pictures of poor India." (I should be taking pictures of the Taj Mahal and India Gate). They also liked to shout "slumdog" at beggars and turn around thinking I'll be impressed.
But when you walk down Chandni Chowk at night, stepping round rats on the pavement and see a line of beggars stretch right down the side settling down for the night, lots of them families sharing a rug, how do you ignore that? It's unignorable.
That made me wonder what they will do with the beggars for the commonwealth games.

When I came into Delhi I had two choices for sleeping. One is Paharganj. Some people seem to love it, but I think it's everthing that is wrong with Indian tourism. It's got neon signs, money changers, and it's right next to the Red Light District. I've never payed a decent price for a hotel there and they haven't been all that special. A previous gaper got her room broken into by the hotel staff.
Or
I could stay in Manju ka Tila, the Tibetan colony. It's a lovely little maze of alleys and eveyone is happy there. BUT they were planning to destroy it. Completely to the ground. That's the problem with illegally raised buildings. The government were going to rehouse the residents but it just seemed such a shame to destroy one the only places where people are looking after each other and not trying to part you with as much cash as possible.
I don't know if they are still doing this. I asked a monk who I was sitting next to at breakfast and he seemed not to know too much about it but thought the situation was better.
The reason they were doing it was because the settlement got in the way of their highway expansion and their beautification of the Yamuna River (good luck with that one.)

All for the Commonwealth Games. It's a big thing when the rest of the world is coming to visit a fast developing country. All you can hope is that it all pays off.

A Weekend in Delhi

As soon as I got on the bus and started rolling away from BRCM it was like a weight that I didn't even know was there had been lifted off my shoulders.
I should stick up for BRCM a little bit though, I made it sound really bad, but it wasn't bad, it was actually full of very well wishing people and I do hope they all do well.

I was sitting in a dirty back room of a shopping market waiting for the security guard to tell me when the bus got there, and I was thinking, this is probably the last time I'll be in one of these obscure little places without knowing what is going on.
The atmosphere on the bus was brilliant and I had a Hindi conversation with the toothy bus conductor.

I love getting to know places better, and I was rushing all over Delhi so I began to piece together where everything was. I went to see a light show at Red Fort which was quite funny, but I got eaten alive by midges. Shaaman Khan, the disembodied, self confessed "cataloguer of the ages" guided us through the history of Delhi, which was nice of him.
I saw Qutub Minar the next day, which is basically a glorified version of the stack in Dundee. It was quite pretty though.

Finished the job

As of two minutes ago I am no longer an English teacher.

In other news, yesterday I saved a poor little bat from drowning in the swimming pool.

The Century

You wil notice that with my last entry I completed
"THE CENTURY"

100 blog postings.

It's up to you how you celebrate really. Perhaps you could get the neighbours round for a drink, or if that's not your thing, maybe you could just spend it with your family.

I hope it's been interesting. I think there's probably quite a few more to come.

Heat

At the moment we have this hot wind named Lou. It comes straight off the desert and really slaps you in the face. It also dries out your mouth when you are playing football.
Heat does funny things. A guild of small insects have decided it is nice to meet just outside my door, so when I go out of my house I get a face full of flies. There is also the occasional massive grasshopper to spice things up.
To be honest I really don't know what I would do without the swimming pool. If I didn't have my daily routine of cooling off by racing the little kids at swimming and pretending I'm incredibly fast I think I would probably have freaked out in the heat and smothered myself in cold mashed potato.
Last night I was too hot to sleep so I had to get up at 4am and move out onto my balcony with my duvet. I didn't sleep very well there either.
Cold sensors are like everything else in the body though, they need excercise, and right now they aren't getting any, it's absolutely ROASTING.
I'm looking forward to getting to Goa, it will be cooler there hopefully. Did you know I'm actually about 90km away from the hottest place in India?

Sir please beat me

Gyan Prakash is different from the average student.
He's really badly behaved but it isn't out of being obnoctious, it's out of being completely intense and highly strung. One minute he is absolutely despairing that he's not being picked when he has his hand up, the next he is absolutely pleading to go and drink water. He is absolutely desperate to impress me. He cannot stay in his seat even though you can see he is trying. In other words, if he was in the UK he would be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.

Today he was lying on the desk crying because I wouldn't let him go to the infirmary for a fever which he didn't have, so after a while I gave up and let him go.

He came back having quite obviously not been to the infirmary. I carried on with the class making it quite clear that I knew full well he hadn't been anywhere near.

Then about 5 minutes later, he stood up, came to the front and said, "Sir beat me."
I said "What?"
And he told me to beat him or take him to the principal because he was lying that he had been to the infirmary.

To start with, it's quite an incredible achievement for him to be owning up to misbehaving like that. But when I looked at him and told him that I didn't want to beat him, I just wanted him to understand what he had done and improve on it-- I understood from his reaction what was wrong with beating.

All other punishment he has ever known has been a quick beating to get him to stop, and no one has ever really asked him to try and do better. It's always-- "Do this or I'll hit you"
The kids are not taught to 'try to behave'. They are taught to 'try to avoid being beaten'. Big difference.