Some Pics

Two shy, but colourful ladies carrying water from the local borehole, near the Old Madras Road

There are little food stalls such as this all over the city.  They provide welcome stops for local residents, and those passing through.  They are perfectly fine to eat from as long as you can be sure that their produce is really hot.  No problem with this guy!

These jolly chaps insisted I take their photo as they lazed around in this rickshaw.

Mosquitos

If there is only one mosquito in Bangalore, it will find Jennifer.  In this case there were more than one.

Back to the Future

I suppose the question of  "What the hell am I going to do all day?" has been at the back of my mind since we agreed to move out here.  Of course I can travel, do some sightseeing and some diving, but that isn't exactly productive or of any advantage to anyone.  I can't work either for reward or voluntarily as I don't have an employment visa, so I was a little concerned about how I might fill my time for the next two or three years.

As seems to be so often the case in my life, something turns up out of the blue.  Jen's company recognise the fact that I have had to make sacrifices in order to come to India to support her (Yeah!).  As a result they are in a position to bung me sweetener to do whatever I want with.  After the initial thought of new scuba equipment, smarter skis and a new set of bagpipes, I embraced reality and decided to spend it on joining the Overseas Women's Group.

Actually, no.  I was a bit more sensible than that.  I thought it would be an excellent opportunity to do some studying.  In more recent years I have had the desire to read for an LLB.  Probably due to having some degree of experience in the law, and really not finding my career intellectually stimulating enough.  When I was younger there was no way I would have even considered it.  I was not a keen reader, and would have considered it boring.  I suppose I was after different things then.  I think now I have sufficient interest in the subject, and can see its worth, not to mention having a bit more self discipline and the lack of distractions here.

Anyway, I applied and was accepted onto the University of London's International Program for the graduate entry for the LLB.  I have registered and am now awaiting my study materials.  With the graduate entry I would only need to study nine subjects in total, rather than the usual twelve, and it is possible for a graduate to complete the LLB in two years, doing four subjects in the first year, and then five in the second.  This seems a bit mad really, and I would rather do three subjects a year for three years in the hope of getting a better final mark.  I am under no illusions as to how difficult this will be, but am going to give it a good effort.  I may never practice law, but at least I should get something from the experience.

Moving In

At last we moved into our new villa on the 15th July.  The whole process was difficult in that this was the fourth house that we had tried to secure.  The other three fell through due to unscrupulous practices by the landlords.  They let you think you have secured the property, and then at the last minute the pull our because they have had a better offer.

Infuriating.

The move was ok, given that we have absolutely no furniture as yet.  It all should arrive by sea on the 12th August.  We did have an air container which was waiting for us when we arrived at the villa.  It contained essential linen items etc and my computer.  It took a little time to get the Internet connection sorted out, but it is up and running now, and seems ok, but not the fastest.  The power will just cut out here in Bangalore all the time.  Sometimes or four times a day, but the complex here has a backup generator which kicks in after about thirty seconds.  However, it means that I have to run my PC off a UPS in case I might lose any data.

The villa is in a gated development in a quiet area on the Eastern edge of the city.  There are two hundren and eighty three villas here of five different styles.  It is one of the most affluent developments in the city and is inhabited by mostly rich locals and a few ex-pats. from the USA and UK etc.  Our next door neighbour is actually an Israeli.  It is served by a central clubhouse, which is smartly built and boasts significant amenities.  There is a great outdoor swimming pool with sun-loungers very much in the Caribbean style.  There are also two outdoor tennis courts.  Upstairs there is a new, well equipped gym, and also courts for squash, table tennis and badminton.  There are even yoga classes.  The central part of the club has a restaurant.  There is the main restaurant and also a Tandoori outside next to the pool.  The menu is comprehensive with Indian, Italian and even UK food at unbelievably low prices.

The villa itself is great.  All marble, with three bedrooms, each of which is en-suite with a wetroom.  It has a good sized kitchen, living room and dining area.  The diningroom and living area are of a large open-plan design, and at the top of the stairs there is an immense landing - big enough to be a room in itself.  The two upstairs bedrooms both have quite large individual sun patios accessed by wooden french doors.

I'm going to stop there, as I am beginning to sound like an estate agent, and nobody wants that.  Here is a pic of the villa, and I will post a few more once our furniture gets here.

Of course we had to rent a couple of items as a stop-gap until our things arrive; namely a three piece suite and a bed.  This arrived promptly on our arrival in typical Indian style.  A lorry from the 1930's came down the street.  There were no less that seven occupants - three in the cab and four in the back.  They all got out without a word, and brought the items inside and assembled them, got back on the lorry and drove off.  There was no head scratching, tutting or sighing.  They just go on with it.

We now have a maid who is friendly and efficient and we also have a strange gardener.  He speaks very little if any English, and clearly the request to "Trim a few things back" translates to "Please dig out the entire garden and spare nothing"  A trip to the nursery is planned.

Mature Assessment

The pungent smell of rotting rubbish that gets the back of your throat.  The acrid odour from the open sewers that makes you retch.  The eye-watering pollution that stings your eyes.  The urine soaked pavements.  You would be forgiven in thinking that this was hell on earth.

Well that's where you would be very wrong.

I love it.

It is easy to dismiss India as being a poverty stricken country.  But I suppose it depends on your definition of poverty.  In financial terms, then yes.  There can be no doubt that there is a great deal of poverty in India, with a sizable proportion of the population surviving on only 10-15 Rupees (15-20 pence) a day, and no effective social benefit system, the poverty is very evident.

Of course India is the third fastest growing economy in the World, but it seems to be growing too quickly; stretching society upwards, without the bottom end catching up.  The infrastructure is pretty terrible, but a state of the art elevated Metro system is being completed.  It is elevated above the city and swathes its way through the chaos below.  It will take the more affluent traveller away from the everyday squalor into the sanitised tranquility of the 21st Century.  Then again, it is easier to ignore the poverty and to travel above it, than to do something meaningful about it.

But degree of wealth can be estimated in other ways.  I like to think of social wealth.  To look beyond the financial poverty and see what this country really has going for it.  Here is the real wealth of India -  Its people.  Others have written about this relative wealth in terms of culture, religious diversity and community spirit, but it is the people that are truly responsible for all these things.  Everyday I am surprised at their sense of humour, their eagerness to please, to help you out, their resourcefulness and courage in the face of adversity.

But it is the children that provide India with their true wealth.  Gladstone said something along the lines that a society can be judged by how it treats its dead, but I think the future of any society can be estimated by the conduct of the next generation.

The children come out of school, each and every one of them immaculately presented.  The girls with their hair all identically tied up in pigtails with the same coloured bows, the boys with their shirts done up to the collar and their ties neatly tied.  They are well behaved, polite and above all happy, despite their poverty.  They don't have a games console, or mobile phones.  Most don't even have a TV, and can be seen crowded in the doorways of some of the little shack shops trying to catch a glimpse of the cartoons on the proprietor's set.  They don't hang around street corners drinking and taking drugs, abusing people and being anti-social.

Considering this, and looking back to UK society, I would be ashamed to have people from India to see how our society has dealt with (and is dealing with) social deprivation.  I suppose it leaves me thinking which society is really the better off.

Oh, and by the way, there is no Human Rights Act in India.

Arrived

"I got my promotion!" crowed my boss. 

"Thank God for that" I said to myself. Perhaps now the department could get back to normal, and not be all about his attempts to suck up to the next rung of the ladder.

"Yes", he pontificated".  It was thanks to the new innovative ideas I came up with and implemented in the Silverstone matter. That's what finally swung it for me.  Let's go out for a drink to celebrate. My treat!

"No thanks. Not today. I have a few things that I need to sort out here. Maybe next week."

How could he have forgotten that it was my ideas and my implementation of the same that made the Silverstone matter such a success. Not only that, but how could he be so stupid as to then tell me that he had used my ideas in order to get his own promotion. This was only one of a number of similar incidents.  Just about the final straw for me.

I arrived home to find that someone had crashed into my wife's car; completely wrecked it, but just driven off.  The Police weren't interested, and I sat down quite dejected that our life in rural England could get so impossible.  At least is was quiet and I could relax for an hour before dinner. 

With that, the deaf guy next door turned on his television.  This was a regular occurrence, and as he was challenged in the ear department the volume was up at eleven, even though the dial was probably only numbered to ten.

"I've been asked if I would like to go to India for a while to work for six months" Jennifer revealed.

"Could you not make it longer and take me with you?" I joked.

"Well, actually, they did want me to go for a couple of years on a long-term assignment and bring you with me, but that's obviously not possible"

We arrived in Bangalore in the early hours of the 29th June 2011 and got straight to our temporary apartment.  It's on the eighth floor, but is modern and spacious, and just a couple of minutes from Jen's office on the Old Madras Road.  We were the only white people staying there and as a result attracted a certain amount of inquisitive stares. 

Staring at white people - one of the more annoying habits of the locals.  When I am in the mood, I have fun with it now.  I stop dead in my tracks, and stare back saying "Is there something wrong?"  This seems to be sufficient to end the deadlock and send the offender scurrying away with head bowed. 

This country is intense.  The heat, the noise, the smells and hustle and bustle make it quite disorientating at first.  There appears to be no order; no system. A free for all and whoever gets there first wins.  This will take some getting used to.

On Friday morning we were to meet the relocation company to view our permanent residence.  We had viewed a number of properties when we went over a few weeks earlier on our orientation trip.  Anything that seemed to be agreed with the landlord then fell through at the last minute.  We had finally agreed on a property and were looking forward to seeing it.  When they picked us up, they told us it had fallen through as well.   They knew this the day before, but never told us.  It was evident from what they said that they had told us a number of lies.  These people are just incompetence personified.  All the time they promise to ring or email, and never deliver.  Really frustrating.  Anyway, we may have got somewhere else, but I'm not positive about it until we are actually walking through the front door.

This practice of telling lies in order to save face was to became one of the more dominant features of our time in India.  It is not even the fact that someone is not being truthful, it is the insult that they think you are stupid enough to believe them.  I have had countless shouting matches with shopkeepers and service staff for blatantly lying, as you will see later.

We have had real problems with our bank in the UK.  They just blocked our cards because they thought it strange that we were in India, despite me writing to tell them that we were moving here.  We couldn't get any money out. Jen rang them four or five times (ten minutes on hold each time) and they kept saying that they had unblocked her card, but it refused to work.  Couple this with a number of unreliable ATMs in Bangalore, and we were pretty angry.  We eventually got someone that said that her card had been cancelled as the Police had found a card skimming machine, and her card details were on it.  It must have happened somewhere in the UK before we left.  They just cancelled the card without bothering to tell us.  Great customer service.

Finally, we got my card to work.  The joy was short lived.  The ATM machines work in a different sequence here, whereby you get your money and then your card is returned.  This is the opposite in the UK, so now I have walked off and left my card in the ATM.  This was to be yet another recurring theme of our time in India.  Sometimes I have been lucky and got my card back from the ATM security man, but others I have had to wait up to four weeks for a replacement to be sent.  Now who's the idiot?!

Our three cats were arriving the next day and we had to pay cash on delivery.  Eventually between us we scraped the money together, but we just had boiled rice for dinner!

So, where do you find a cat litter tray and cat litter in Bangalore?   Maybe I should he asking "How do you explain to an Indian what cat litter is?"  Que Gareth and Jen's random rickshaw drive along the streets on Bangalore looking at every shop to see if we could solve this problem in time for arrival of the cats.  I spotted an animal hospital (a very liberal description) that supplied me with a huge 25Kg bag of Chinese cat litter.  I then found a shop and got two plastic trays.  It was a strange sight - two white people in a rickshaw in the middle of all that traffic with a large bag of cat litter between us.

Anyway, the cats arrived the next morning, and were none the worse for their 26Hr journey.  I can say that they are a little confused though.  Well, then so are Jen and I!  The realisation has hit home, after of weeks of planning and headaches, we have finally done it.

Jen's underwear blew off the balcony.

No, it's not what you are thinking.  She had hung them out to dry; I mean after she washed them - there were no accidents so don't all rush out and buy shares in Tenna Lady.

Of course I was dispatched to go down the eight floors and retrieve them.  I was fishing around in the bushes and emerged brandishing Jen's underwear in my hand in an almost triumphant pose, only to look up and see a security guard about ten yards away.  He had a look on his face that changed rapidly from "What is he doing?" to  "Is he some sort of panty thief?" to  "it must be something that foreigners do." and finally "I don't get paid enough to enquire further."  He shuffled off back to his hut.

I wonder what the next week will bring.