Thursday 11th January 2007: Delwara and Udaipur

Today the boys’ school in Delwara had its own careers day, which was vastly more successful and interesting that I had allowed myself to expect. In fact, if my own event next month is to assume its rightful place in local history as a milestone in educational development then I have to get my act pretty seriously together. The thing that struck me the most was the display of charts designed by the kids in one of the classrooms. Each chart was dedicated to a different career, detailing qualifications required and listing some nearby educational institutions that provided these. Many of these were quite impressive and should be a useful resource for the kids providing they are made available for reference, which I repeatedly urged the teacher in charge to ensure.
   The only down side was Chandrika’s hoped-for coup, a careers adviser brought over from Udaipur, who bored the children at length with what appeared to be a rather generalised homily about careers, not really tailored towards Delwara at all. The biscuit was taken well and truly by a rather earnest moment when she appeared to be advocating a career in tomato sales.
   At the entrance to Vikas Samiti this evening I bumped into Prakash and my fair-skinned idol from the library. I greeted Prakash over-cheerily in an attempt to cover my nerves and he introduced me to his friend Vishal. My heart leapt when Prakash suggested that “You will take some tea now, Jon?” and the three of us went round the corner for chai and gossip. I had never once imagined that Prakash and this boy might be friends and was a little overwhelmed by the situation. The conversation inevitably hovered around me at first - my background, my work with Vikas Samiti, my impressions of India - but Vishal, who it turns out is studying for an MBA, soon started telling me about an NGO that he was in the process of establishing with his friends. The organisation’s unique selling point appears to be its eclectic offering of bringing succour to the oppressed and the interpretation of dreams. The whole thing was over too quickly for me to form any detailed impressions of Vishal except that he is serious as I imagined, but also has a capacity for fun and has a pretty, quizzical smile.
   In the evening a few of us went to a performance of kathak. This is a wonderfully energetic dance form of Hindu origins, but subsequently the darling of the Mughal court, full of stamping, ankle-bells and intricate gestures accompanied by a strangely pleasing repetitive musical accompaniment. The lead dancer was highly accomplished and beautiful, although she had a streaming cold and had to dive into the corner and sniff vigorously from time to time! The tabla player and singer were both excellent and the sarangi player rather less so. The music was based on the kinds of raags that sound most alien to our ears, due to the combination of flattened seconds (komal-Re) and raised fourths (tivra-Ma) and, in the case of raags derived from Thaat Purvi, a flattened sixth (komal-Dha) as well. This combination of notes, especially in the endlessly repeated formulae found in kathak, generates a sound world of awful tension.

Kathak 

(credit: http://pondicherrycity.olx.in)

   After the concert, the English among us felt a strong craving to go to a good old-fashioned pub and drink pints of real ale. In the reality of Udaipur, Ellen and I went back with Zelda to Love Nest to sink a couple of Kingfishers…


Next Post - Sunday 14th January 2007: Jodhpur (will be posted Saturday 14th January 2012)

Wednesday 10th January 2007: Delwara

I had a relatively successful day in Delwara today, getting Mohan to agree to a date in early February for the careers fair, and also to arrange an appointment for me with a member of the Devigarh team on Monday. This is so I can try and persuade them to provide somebody to speak about hotel work at the careers fair, for which I envisage a series of different “professionals” – policeman, social worker, hotel worker – coming to give short speeches.
   Getting more Delwarans to work in the hotel has become something of a hobbyhorse of mine. A luxury hotel plonked in the middle of a poor village with chronic unemployment problems seems like a cruel joke if it employs people from Udaipur, Jaipur, Bombay and Calcutta in preference to local people. Mohan insists that there are some people from Delwara working in the lower rung jobs such as cleaning and gardening, but that the skilled jobs, like front office, housekeeping, food and beverages, are filled by outsiders. I would like to encourage at least a few people to go on Hotel Management Diplomas, get some experience and then come back to work in Devigarh, establishing better links between the hotel and the town. The biggest barrier that I can currently see is that of cost. I will take the opportunity at the meeting to propose that the Devigarh management sets up a scheme whereby the hotel sponsors a few youths from Delwara each year to study at the Udaipur Institute of Hotel Management (or similar), on the condition that after qualifying they come to work in Devigarh. Mohan suspects the management might worry that a large Delwara contingent among the hotel staff would have too much potential power and hence provide a constant threat of trouble. Maybe, due to the feeling of alienation that Devigarh has unwittingly forced on Delwara, this will be the case. In the interests of honesty, I should acknowledge the fact that Devigarh is providing some sort of impetus – possibly financial, but I don’t know the details – to the Nagrik Vikas Manch, and should not, therefore be totally demonised.
   As well as Javed and Shaheen there is a third unofficial guide in Delwara called Imtiaz, who I have met in a number of circumstances. His origins are humble enough, but according to the life story he gave me, he trained in hotel work off his own bat and has worked in Udaipur’s Trident (Hilton), the Lake Palace, a five-star in Surat, and most recently as a driver for Devigarh until he was sacked for crashing into two cows! He now acts as a freelance driver and guide and claims to have driven Paul McCartney and Liz Hurley. Indeed, he has a rakish air of being very well-connected in all levels of society. He is also a snob, and told me how difficult it was in the Lake Palace having to work with backward castes who were so lazy and had to be forced to work and even then were a constant source of worry.
   He recently told me a story about seducing the Japanese widow of millionaire in the back of his car. He picked her up from the airport, and noticed that she was crying. When he asked her why she was crying she told him that he reminded her of her Brazilian husband who had died less than a year ago. He pulled the car to one side, and offered her privacy while he waited outside. In the end, he joined her in the back seat where they made love. Hilariously, Javed later told me an almost identical story, even down to the Brazilian husband, differing only in the detail that his girl was Korean! Imtiaz has Javed’s chutzpah but with it a maturity and man-of-the-world air, and I am prepared to believe his story, even including the sequel that he spent nine months with his lover in Japan.


Next Post - Thursday 11th January 2007: Delwara and Udaipur (will be posted Wednesday 11th January 2012)

Tuesday 9th January 2007: Udaipur

Work is looking up! We had a Youth Resource Centre group meeting yesterday here in the guesthouse meeting room presided over by Chandrika. Attending were representatives from all six YRCs [Youth Resource Centres] including Haider from Delwara.
   It was interesting to hear about all the YRC programmes – community radio training, self-defence training, endless sport and debating programmes, as well as the things I have been more involved with, such as livelihoods and skills training courses. It would be easy to write this off as superficial and cosmetic, not quite “real” development work, but taking this view fails to recognise that so many steps of a development mission (in this case empowering youth to face a rapidly changing world) do seem like so much dross until you take a step back and look at the overall tapestry of benefit derived from these steps combined. In this particular case I feel that the tapestry may not have been considered very deeply, although I may be guilty of gross injustice here. And maybe the YRCs do need a trial period where different ideas and programmes are experimented with, paving the way to piecing together a vision by gauging the problems and aspirations and – oh I don’t know what exactly… I’m not simply struggling for words but also for concepts, although writing this helps to clarify what I think and what I don’t yet know how to think.
   In more personal terms, yesterday’s meeting was a success because it allowed me to voice a few ideas. The principle one was that it is all very well to send these kids on training courses (the Dalit Shakti Kendra in Ahmedabad included, but also a whole bevy of other courses which are being considered) but we really need to keep tabs on what happens to them afterwards. Do they find jobs in the field in which they are trained? Does it help them? Does it, put simply, work to send them on these courses?
   To that end, I have spent today setting up a database and accompanying survey sheet, which take into account certain characteristics of the individual before training (age, education, economic status, employment history) and details of the course they went on and, importantly, employment details three months and also one year after training.
   This leads to another question I have been considering a lot recently: what, if anything, is the right approach to this issue of livelihoods? Should we be promoting skills training, or indeed higher-level education that is going to (almost inevitably) lead people away from the centre of intervention (Delwara in this case)? Or should we be doing our best to develop livelihood opportunities within the centre of intervention? The latter, if feasible, would have the effect of curbing further migration, but I wonder how feasible it really could be. There seems to be an innate distrust amongst the Delwarans of home-grown skilled labour, and people have told me that if they wished to get a piece of hardware repaired they would take it to Udaipur, even if it could be done in Delwara, as they had greater faith in the Udaipur market. The former, meanwhile, would promote a new breed of skilled or educated migrant who will be far less vulnerable to the kind of exploitation generally cited as one of the principle evils of migration. I suppose we are dealing with a case of prevention versus cure. Or not really cure – that would be remedial work with migrants who have already suffered health problems or human rights abuses after going to work in a city – not a cure but a different method of prevention. In any case, this higher level of migration should also have the effect of sending money back into Delwara, if at the cost of family life (for a while at least).
   Family life was the subject of an interesting conversation I had with Shiv’s family, whom I met for the first time this evening. His brother Piyush seems nice, with a slightly harder edge than Shiv. His father is moody and surprisingly shabbily dressed, while his mother is a wonderful, extrovert character, with a hysterical guffaw like Shiv’s, slightly grubby and full of strong views about all sorts of things, including the superiority of arranged marriages over love marriages. We all sat in the parents’ bedroom and compared family matters across cultures. I pointed out, not at all provocatively, that while in India it is perfectly normal that Piyush, thirty years old and married with a child, lives with his parents, that would be seen as very unusual in England, where children are encouraged to leave home in their late teens and early twenties. “Do you think this is a good thing?” asked Shiv’s mother, and I said that yes, I thought it was great thing for us to gain our independence and live our lives away from parental constraints while still maintaining a close relationship with our parents.
   “But what happens when the parents become old?” asked Piyush. “Who looks after them?”
   “We do – we go and visit them –”
   “Even if they live far away and need somebody with them all the time?”
And I felt horribly ashamed. How could I look him in the face and tell him that there were always nursing homes and residential homes and ask (even though I might have no intention of banishing my own parents to one of these homes) if people can really be expected to sacrifice their jobs, their lives, for their parents? In India the right thing, the expected thing, is so obvious that it leaves no room for doubt. Parents devote their lives to bringing up a child, and when the parents become old, the child, now maybe a parent himself, looks after the parent. Jobs, loves, lives fit round this fiercely strong parent-child bond.
   “In London,” said Shiv’s mother, “a mother and son’s relationship is only something-something. In India it is from the soil.”
   I don’t think they were right to argue (as effectively they were) that family is stronger in India than in England, because the way family is treated is so different between the cultures. In India it feels like some solid, immovable mass that one could not contemplate questioning, even if one’s experience of family is actually pretty miserable, or at least full of fear, repression and lies, which the peculiar forces of Indian expectations and social mores sometimes engender. In England we take family for granted in different ways and even if, to borrow from Larkin, parents can fuck their children up as much as they can in India (or in Russia, or Haiti, or East Timor!) I think there is sometimes more willingness to acknowledge and discuss problems, and perhaps more genuine desire to engage with fellow family members and indulge in “quality time” that is not just an artifact of ritual and proximity. But these are crass generalisations that any sociologist would demolish in minutes!


Next Post - Wednesday 10th January 2007: Delwara (will be posted Tuesday 10th January 2012)

Monday 8th January 2007: Udaipur

Prakash’s birthday. Shiv and I persuaded him to come out and celebrate with us, so we whizzed round on motorbikes to Rani Vilas, a garden restaurant on the far side of Fateh Sagar. Dimly-lit, and male-dominated, it buzzes with disrepute. The food was cheap and cheerful, and we ordered a banquet of meat dishes, veg dishes, eggs, rice and naan, washed down with Kingfishers. Shiv, ever the dutiful Brahmin, stuck to the veg and drank Fanta.
   Prakash gave me a lift back to Vikas Samiti and we stopped at a juice bar en route, where he proposed that we take it in turn to list each other’s faults. I am beginning to see this character-flagellation in the name of self-improvement as a typical Indian pastime as my services have already been enlisted several times in this direction.
   “Well,” I said, rather embarrassed after two attempts at demurral, “I think you’re great - intelligent, really interesting, but also very kind. And good fun, as well. Maybe... I don’t know how to put this. I think you can be quite shy, particularly with girls. I think this might be a problem in your romantic life?”
   “Yes, you’re right, “ he said, as if he had been expecting this. “This is a problem for me. What about my other faults?”
   “I can’t think of any right now. I’m sure you’ve got some more! What about me?”
   “Actually, Jon, I think you’re a very great person.”
   “Oh come on, tell me!”
   “Well, I can say one thing. It is a small thing, but...”
   “Arre! Sach bolo!”
   “Well, this is it: when you come into the library at Vikas Samiti, you wander around like you’re totally lost. You’re looking like an idiot, actually.”
   So he’d noticed. With unnerving precision he had located the symptom of my vice without, I trust, discerning its meaning. The truth is that I fancy someone in there. I choose my words deliberately, and “fancy”, with its connotations of teenage awkwardness and shy glances across a crowded classroom, is the right one in these circumstances. The object of my fancies is tall and slender with absurdly pale skin. It is the skin, far paler than mine, that marks him out and makes him the unlikely protagonist in my private melodrama. My natural inclination is towards the olive-, caramel- or chocolate-complexioned, but somehow this cream-faced enigma has defied these odds on his way into my daydreams. How exactly he has done this I am not quite sure, but I think I am responsible for most of the legwork. From the scant evidence presented by his attractive and unusual face, I have inferred that he is clever, charming, sophisticated and kind. Above all, I imagine him to be a little lonely and troubled - not enough to be a head case, but enough to make him a deeply sensitive and poetic soul.
   I have never seen him outside the library - I imagine he must be a student of some kind, although he looks a little older than me - and every time I go in there, I involuntarily scan the tables for him. This, in Prakash’s eyes, is my lost idiot act and my major fault. I would love to approach him, but I have absolutely no idea what I would say. In the sepulchral quiet of the library the whole thing could be horribly embarrassing. So, for the time being, silent worship is the only thing on the cards.
 
Next Post - Tuesday 9th January 2007: Udaipur (will be posted Monday 9th January 2012)

Saturday 6th January 2007: Udaipur

A relaxing Saturday. I had a singing lesson this morning, sharing it again with the twenty-year-old Priyanka and a little brother and sister who both have bright eyes, engaging manners and raucous, inaccurate voices. They are all very deferent to Madhu, while I tend to be more informal and answer back a lot, although I have made an effort to curb this so as to gel into expected procedure.
   We are working on a chhota khayal, a small song. Khayal is one of the main styles of North Indian classical music and contains a short lyric that is sung over and over again, interwoven with alap and tan (slower and faster moving passages of swaras). Our khayal is called Laadli lal, about a little girl blossoming like a flower, and is in Raag Alahiya Bilawal. This raag is based on Thaat Bilawal, and sounds similar to a European major key, although contains a flattened seventh (komal-Ni) in its descending section which imparts a peculiar flavour, almost like a slight feeling of strain.
   Although I find Madhu’s teaching style far easier to understand and appreciate than that of Saraswati-Miss (my elderly singing teacher in Kovilpatti four years ago) there are still some peculiar differences between her method and the British approach I have been brought up with, most obviously the focus on endless repetition. There is also a sort of tacit assumption that if you sing the name of the swara right, you will pitch the note right, so that while Madhu does try to point out to the kids if they are wildly off-pitch, she doesn’t pounce on poor tuning in the same way that any European teacher would. For this reason, it is considered more advanced to sing akar (singing to “ah”) than singing the names of the swaras, which I actually find far more difficult!
   Madhu even discouraged us from practising at first, saying that we would just get things wrong, or confuse ourselves. After some serious pleading on my part - the irony of the pupil begging the teacher to allow him to practice was not lost on either of us - she eventually yielded and let us practice a limited amount of what we had been studying. Once I joked that I would go home and practise Raag Marwa – a far more complicated raag – which horrified her until she realised, with relief, that it had been a joke. I think she trusts me more than she did at first. I am certainly less rebellious than I was initially, and socially we get along well.

 The Khandelwal family: L-R Mrs Khandelwal, Dr Nirmal Khandelwal, Madhu

   I had a brief chat with Dr Khandelwal after the lesson. In the comfort of his own home is he is relaxed, benevolent and a little shy. He confirmed something I have suspected for a while: in Indian classical music, it is the performer, not the composer, who goes down in history and has a name. The composer is often not known, which is perhaps not surprising in a culture where music tends to be passed down, rather than written down, and improvisation forms the mainstay of any performance. Possibly composers are more highly regarded in the south, where there is a famous trilogy of Thyagaraaja, Dikshitar and Shyama Shastri, who are sometimes called the Bach, Mozart and Beethoven of Carnatic (southern) music.
   In the afternoon I visited Dinesh, a friend who runs a bookshop on my least favourite road in Udaipur, leading away from the Jagdish temple towards Gulab Bagh. The last time I met him he had told me about his daughter, Rani, who is mentally retarded and cannot speak. She goes to a “special school” and Dinesh is very dissatisfied with the way it is run. The teachers don’t seem to teach anything, and often strap pupils to chairs to prevent them running around. He asked me whether Vikas Samiti might be able to help solve the school’s problems, and I promised him I’d at least look into the matter. He said he knew he was being selfish trying to solve this problem rather than any other social problem in Udaipur, and that impressed me.
   Well, this time round I didn’t have much for him, except to tell him that I had sent an e-mail to the Vidya Bhavan Society, the educational establishment set up by Vikas Samiti’s founder and that Chandrika had also given me a child helpline number that he could ring. Apart from that, I could only give the common sense advice that if he wanted to change anything, he would have to enlist the support of other parents. I will keep going back to see what progress he has made and whether there is anything I can do.
  Interestingly, he is of Baluchi origins – Baluchistan being a region that straddles southwest Pakistan and the neighbouring portions of Iran and Afghanistan – as are the owners of the bookshop next to Hari’s shop, who are actually related to Dinesh. There are apparently a number of Baluchi families in Udaipur, and they are closely associated with the Sindhis, Hindus who would have come over after Partition from Sindh in what is now Pakistan.
   I took a long walk back through my favourite part of old Udaipur between tourist-ville and Delhi Gate. There is a wonderful warren of streets off Bara Bazaar, mostly narrow and dank with a cool, quiet, almost southern Italian feel to them. A whole street is devoted to selling handis (metal cooking pots), while a portion of Bara Bazaar itself sells nothing but shoes and others specialise in gaudy sari material and wedding turbans. Closer to Delhi Gate is a colourful gem of a fruit and vegetable market with a group of beautiful basket-makers in one corner, and a spice market that Carol first discovered.
   Moving away, at the northern end of Lake Pichola is a tapering extension called Swaroop Sagar (after Maharana Swaroop Singh), onto which Lal Ghat abuts. It baffles me, as it protrudes in various directions and crops up in unexpected places. Much of the area round here has the feeling of a rather respectable and quite old planned town. It must be one of the oldest parts of the modern town and presents a totally different face of Udaipur from the narrow streets and markets of the old town. Kids playing in the street prevent it from seeming at all soulless.

Swaroop Sagar

   Nearer to home, Fateh Sagar was in top form in today’s slightly cloudy evening light. The blue-grey hills on the other side, with the island Nehru Park in the foreground, all cupolas, fountains and bougainvilleas, is a beautiful sight in all weather conditions. This view, combined with fast-food stalls and coffee stalls and walls packed with pretty girls and boys “roaming” on the near side, make it one of my favourite spots in Udaipur. This opinion is shared by all my disparate local friends – Shiv, Prakash, Dilip, Madhu, Hari – indicating that the lake has a universal appeal.
   I went out again in the early evening in a group to a concert of ghazals in the Town Hall by Sunil Mehta, a pupil of Dr Khandelwal. He has a pleasant, slightly fuzzy voice, and he warmed up throughout the evening with evident enjoyment. The guest of honour, sitting on a throne just a few metres away from me was the Maharana himself! He is portly and rather bear-like and does not conform in the smallest degree to my romantic image of an Indian Prince. He didn’t stay long, and I think Sunil relaxed and opened up more after he left. However, the whole evening was permeated with that atmosphere of disorganised formality and haphazard deference that India excels in. Lots of local bigwigs were in attendance and there was consequently lots of touching-of-feet, lots of “No, no – you first, please, I absolutely insist”-ing and constant rushing in and out on the part of officialdom who would confer anxiously amongst itself about things, pre-eminently the Maharana’s comfort. The big M himself excelled at the little displays of humility that are probably expected of a modern Maharana, including a degree of physical force required to ensure that the other guest of honour – Rajasthan’s High Court Judge – be garlanded before him. He didn’t, however, turn down the tea that was brought round for him and his chums (the rest of us had to be content with individual glasses of water, no mean feat considering there were about 500 of us!). Nor did he bat an eyelid when Priya’s friend Mithun ran round in front of him and took a photo of him as if he were some kind of attraction or amusement. Priya and Mithun didn’t understand why us Brits found this so hilarious.

Next Post - Monday 8th January 2007: Udaipur (will be posted Sunday 8th January 2012)

Friday 5th January 2007: Delwara

Delwara and I have entered into a cautious truce, and the last two days have been quite enjoyable. Wednesday was the turning point, when after two days of the old frustration I went in desperation to Chandrika back in Vikas Samiti and asked if there was anything else I could do besides the Delwara project. She suggested that rather than trying to do something outside Delwara I could try to do more within Delwara. In particular, I could organise a careers fair. Having been to a few of these myself, I find it hard to imagine replicating even the most basic ingredients in Delwara, let alone the bustling stalls, glossy brochures and powerpoint presentations typical of such events. In the spirit of a good challenge and a good joke I have taken it on.
   Meanwhile, there are still frustrations, mainly the product of having to depend on other people’s availability and working with a language barrier. Mohan, the boss, although fundamentally decent, is hard to work with. Unless you have his full attention, usually only obtainable through a specially arranged meeting time, it is entirely useless trying to communicate with him because he simply doesn’t concentrate. With Haider, I have long discussions about our various projects – the DSK youth training, and now the careers fair – and although he generally agrees with me and respects my ideas without being unhelpfully subservient, he never gives me the impression of having fully grasped and retained everything and it sometimes feels like we have to start from scratch each time. We generally speak in a sort of Hinglish – me skipping between the languages with an unmerited air of ease, and Haider sticking doggedly to English (where so many sentences seem to start: “But Jon!”) and occasionally reverting to Hindi to explain something difficult, which is usually beyond the limits of my understanding anyway.
   Still, there are rewards. I feel that somehow in all this tangle I am contributing something - in ideas, in organisation and a determination to get things done. Since yesterday, as a preliminary to thinking about the careers event, I have been traipsing round the town and talking to young people in an attempt to get an idea of their career objectives inasmuch as they have any. These range from the obvious, if unlikely, paths of teaching and medicine to the more unexpected but very understandable aspiration towards hotel work (Devigarh looms large in every sense) and samajik (social work), the seemingly cushy option of a largely office-based job at the Nagrik Vikas Manch. One boy even told me of his ambition to make films about the life of the surrounding village, while a number of others expressed an interest in working with mobile phones, in some unspecified way.
   My trips around the town have also allowed me to meet new people and strengthen existing alliances. I can’t walk five paces without encountering Javed and Shaheen, a pair of charmingly raffish self-appointed tour guides who are Delwara’s answer to Hari and his colleagues. They hang about near the entrance to Devigarh and ingratiate themselves with the millionaires who venture out to explore the town (“So many gay people from Denmark” as Javed put it) and usually end up pocketing a handsome tip. They are regulars at the Nagrik Vikas Manch and make it a point of honour to know exactly what I have been doing and what I am about to do, and even seem to have acquired that indefinable tourist-ville knack of appearing just a little above everything. 

Next Post - Saturday 6th January 2007: Delwara (will be posted Friday 6th January 2012)

Monday 1st January 2007: Udaipur

Look at the date! We’re edging further and further into the interior of the 21st century and beginning to find out what it’s really like. I reached Udaipur at nine yesterday morning and came straight to Vikas Samiti for a leisurely shower and breakfast. I spent a long time checking and writing e-mails and Facebook messages which, combined with lack of family, left me with a feeling of disconnectedness that was dispelled throughout the day. I spent the evening itself with Rachel and her boyfriend Steve, who are midway through a grand tour of Rajasthan and staying in Dream Heaven hotel rather than Vikas Samiti. We first went to Shilpgram, the craft village outside Udaipur, which was holding a tribal dance festival. We stayed long enough to see a troupe of South African dancers who threw coconuts in the air and let them drop and crack on their heads, and a group of sword dancers from Manipur in northeast India, who were impressive, if not terribly interesting. We ended up at the opening of a new restaurant in Udaipur, just above the bookshop next door to Hari’s shop. There was a good buffet, a bar and a crowd of Europeans and some Lal Ghat boys. The atmosphere was festive, perhaps self-consciously so, and the evening was a perfectly adequate way to see in the New Year given that our usual family celebration was out of reach.

*

Today has been a day of relaxation, of sorting out and of people. I had tea with Prakash and Shiv in the middle of the day which, unpuctuated with square meals to demarcate its various sections, lacked a morning or an afternoon. It was lovely to see them again. Prakash told me in private that he is currently studying for Indian Administrative Service (IAS) exams. These are the hugely prestigious first step in a long drawn out yearly selection procedure for outstanding individuals to fill the role of collector (a district administrator) in whichever districts have vacant posts that year. Once you become a collector it is a lifelong post that only retirement, death or deposition by the president himself can interrupt. What exactly they do, I am less clear about, but they are apparently viewed as demi-gods in their district, and Prakash is full of burning ambition and a worrying lack of backup plans. Still, I wish him the best of luck for the first round of exams in May and will try and find out more from him about the collectorate system.
  Shiv is Shiv – full of life, honesty and a sometimes embarrassing admiration for the “sharpness” of my mind. I worry that he may be rather lonely. When I asked him how he spent New Years’ Eve he said “I came home and I put my bag down”, setting great store by the action of putting his bag down (perhaps a sort of “collapsing in front of the TV”-type gesture, shutting oneself out from the world) in contrast to Prakash who had been out drinking with friends. Perhaps because Shiv doesn’t drink or smoke and seems to have a fundamental mistrust of people, he finds the Fateh Sagar camaraderie difficult. He doesn’t lack friends to go “roaming” with, but his attitude towards them is difficult to gauge.
   “Have you seen Vinod recently?” I asked. Vinod is a friend of his whom I have met twice.
  “Vinod is very irrelevant person,” said Shiv with a look of mild disgust. “What is this meaning, irrelevant?”
   “It’s when something isn’t relevant,” I said unhelpfully, yawning with tiredness as Prakash bailed me out.
   “Irrelevant is something with no bearing on the case.”
   “Achcha, thik hai. Can I say this ‘he is irrelevant person’?”
  “Well it might seem a little odd, unless he specifically wasn’t relevant to what you were talking about. Maybe irreverent? Meaning that he doesn’t respect sacred things or figures of authority?”
   I had a feeling that Shiv was more concerned with the adjective’s syllable count than its aptitude.
  “Yes, yes, irreverenced. He is very irreverenced man. Actually, Sam, I’m like... Sorry, yaar! Jon! Actually, Jon, I am like a businessman.”
   “A businessman?” I queried “I’ve never imagined you as a businessman!”
   He guffawed, and Prakash, who evidently knew what was coming, rolled his eyes.
   “I will make you understand,” Shiv continued. “In front of people’s faces I am a very friendly person, but when they are not here I feel nothing about them. Only I am saying they are fools, or they are irreverenced. Are you getting it now?”
   “But Shiv, yaar,” said Prakash with a note of exasperation, “This does not make you a businessman but an anti-social idiot! Businessmen can form genuine friendships also!”
  “Arre! He is not getting it actually,” said Shiv, giggling.
   Both are infected with the excitement of the growing India, and it is little wonder that Prakash is unburdened with cares about the environment and global warming – from his point of view why should his country’s new lease of life be curbed to mitigate the damage done by its former oppressors? – and that Shiv looks to America with a mixture of unexamined admiration and scorn.
   I also spent some time in tourist-ville today, particularly in Hari’s shop, which was full of rather dubious characters, all boasting about their “hunting” prowess with European female tourists. All of them had the same unsavoury dandiness and emaciated good looks as Hari, and all were doing their best to impress a visitor called Mario, a stylish Bangalorean sculptor of Goan origins who was visiting from his home of several years in Paris. He had a friend, possibly lover, in tow called Phillippe, a peculiar but quite likeable Frenchman who seemed disgruntled by the company and latched on to me as a fellow European. There was also a former college-mate of Mario’s from Baroda who had an unnervingly gravelly voice that would have suited an escaped convict.
   Later on, I met Hari for supper at a little place near Delhi gate. He seemed ashamed of his friends’ crude behaviour of earlier and did his best to distance himself from them by telling me something about the politics of Lal Ghat. There seems to be a lot of infighting and jealousy, especially involving money and girls, and Hari claims that he is the object of a lot of jealousy because he has lived in Lal Ghat all his life. He told me that this jealousy also stems from the fact that “in the past” he had a constant string of European girls on the go. I don’t know whether this past means a long time ago, or recently, or whether it is merely the “past” when he wishes to distance himself from it and its associations. He certainly seems rather fed up with the lifestyle running a boutique in the tourist nerve-centre of a popular city, and loves being able to get out. However, he is probably too rooted to the place to be able to leave, much as he toys with the idea. I remember him coming back from a few days at a family wedding in a distant village and complaining that after an hour he had been fed up and desperately bored and couldn’t wait to come back to Udaipur! On the other hand, I suspect he would find Delhi or Bombay far too difficult and impersonal – even he if set up shop in Paharganj or Colaba (the “tourist-ville” parts) he would not have the same clout that he has in Udaipur and it would take an extremely long time (if ever) for him to integrate into the community to a sufficient degree to be able to live the happy-go-lucky life he lives here. He is also concerned about his father, a friendly, kind old man who always stops me for a chat when I pass, even though we have little to say to each other. He is completely out of touch with the real world, Hari says, and people take advantage of him.

Hari

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And Priya. She seems to have found love on the internet – a young professional from Bombay who she has met twice now, including last night, when he ruined her New Year’s Eve by being miserable. Somehow she seems to have resolved never to talk to him again and also to marry him. I shall watch events with interest.

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Saddam Hussein was executed yesterday and, judging by the newspapers, India is up in arms, seeing it as yet another disgraceful crime against humanity by the Bush administration. I am very confused about what I feel myself.


Next Post - Friday 5th January 2007: Delwara (will be posted Thursday 5th January 2012)