One month in the life of...

Hello again all. After a week off from the blogosphere I thought I would celebrate reaching one month in India with a couple of the more amusing and random events that have happened so far.

I've started to get abit more involved with my project recently. I am currently working on a comparison of the UK Freedom of Information Act and the Indian Right to Information Act (RTI) for the next isue of Manush, scheduled for publication in June. At the moment I'm putting together a folder of RTI groups across India who can then be approached to contribute for the magazine. My favourite part of this has been the slogans that some of the RTI groups have come up with. There's the all time classic, "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right" which absolutely killed me the first time I read it. And for a more specific analogy to RTI, how about "Mushrooms grow well in the dark. Good governments don't." Sheer poetry.

I had dinner with Madhu on Tuesday which was cool. We would normally go for 9 hours a day sitting next to each other without talking about anything other than work so it was good to be abit more relaxed. She certainly has friends in the right places - as well as knowing everyone in government from the President down, my name is only 2 below Sonia Gandhi's in her phonebook which I thought was pretty cool.

After the collapse of my sandals following the first week of jumping on and off moving buses I thought I'd splash out on some shoes which could be for both work and play. After a browse of Lajpat Nagar Central Market I picked up some rather dashing camel leather slip ons for a tenner. The only problem is that they hold the sweat as any liquid within them doesn't escape, though that's kind of to be expected when the whole point of a camel is not to lose much liquid.

Of the 4 buses hoem from work that I caught this week I had a half hour chat with either a Delhite or a Kathmanduvian on 3 of them. They wanted to practice their English and suchforth - if it works for them then my English is going to be perfect by the time I leave India. We also had to break up a fight between two or three auto rickshaw drivers on Tuesday whp were arguing other who was going to take us home. One was trying to undercut the other by 10 rupees (about 12p) and this led to several getting involved.

We're also makign some changes to our flat. We've argued the maximum number fo people who can live there down from 9 to 8, and the two guys who wanted to move out, Subin and Yutaka, have found places down the road. So we're down to 6 at the moment - myself, Michi and Taka from Japan, Dirk-Jan and Richard from the Netherlands and Roberto from Italy(obviously) - and it may stay like this for a while. So we're going to do abit of interior decoration. Because the living room is a wder patch of corridor, we're going to try to put a shelf upon the wall to act as a sort of breakfast bar, with stools and everything. Then we're going to try to get a table down in the wider space by the sliding doors to turn that into a proper living room area. At the moment it's just a deserted rather manky space.

So we're all quite positive about that. Though the light's broken in the bathroom again. Ho hum.

But anyway! Things are well. I still havent properly got my head aroun what's happenign but I'm getting there!

I hope everyone's well, and sure I'll see you on MSN/Facebook in the near future.

Adios