They've just been through the state elections here. Forget better roads or communications or transport, this election was truly populist in a way western politicians can only dream of - the two main parties were basing their campaigns on lots of freebies...
- A free television set to every family (state population: 62 million, est cost $250m) for "women's recreation and general knowledge".
- Subsidised rice at two rupees (3p) a kilo to "make women feel happy at heart".
- Free gas stoves and computer training (hmm, high tech-stoves?)
- Free electricity (to farmers and weavers).
- Two acres of land for the landless rural poor (about 8 million acres!)
- Free bicycles to every student in the state (rich or poor)
- Four grams of gold to every poor woman who gets married.
In the end the DMK won (headed by an ex-film writer) over the AIADMK (headed by an ex-film star).
I'm just glad it's all over. It means I'll be able to find a beer again! For the last week before the elections all the "Wine shops" (total dive state-run off licences: 500 ml bottles for 70p) and hotel bars (the only bars: the same bottles are 2-3 quid) were closed (to prevent violence...right, it very nearly provoked it from me. No amount of bribery could get a beer out of any waiter or bartender)
Kingfisher pretty much rules here, though I reckon it's a poor cousin of the export-quality stuff that gets to the UK. If I can find them, Sandpiper or Golden Eagle are what I prefer. Mmm, cold beer.
This is sunday afternoon at the beach in Chennai; a week or so ago when it was one of the first really hot days (42 and really humid). The city kind of surrounds this beach, it's very central. It's also huge; ok, longish at about 1.5km but really wide - about 250m of flat sand from the water to the road. The building looming out of the mist is a lighthouse about 1 km away. The crowd is this deep in a strip about 50m wide from the water and all the way down! Elsewhere it thins out a bit and there are stalls and kids rides and food, and lots of picnicking.
Not many people actually swim as the rips are very dangerous all along this coast. The sport here is to do with these guys on horseback - the beach patrol! No Hoff or baywatch babes here. Basically these guys charge (caught in action, above) up and down the beach swinging their lathi (6-8 ft long sticks) at anyone who looks like they might be swimming, or about to. Forget about rescuing anyone, I think they'd actually hit them...if they could reach them from horseback. So as these guys charge their horses up and down the beach, the crowd rushes back from the water and then just closes back behind the horses again (and the swimmers go swimming again :-). To see this many people moving so fluidly was truly amazing. It reminded me of nature doco's like Blue Planet, when the tuna rips into a huge school of anchovie, which breaks up and reforms again.
The, when I left the beach I saw a similar thing happen with the auto's (the 3 wheeled taxis). Hundreds were lined up to take this crowd away, but it wasn't an authorised stopping zone. I was having problems getting the price I wanted when one single cop on a motorbike turned up...well, it was like watching a massive Le Mans start, drivers diving into their cabs, starting them and hurtling away in a swarm, resettling on the kerb a hundred meters or so down. Fresh ones were coming in behind the cop and settling where the others had taken off.. It was great for me, nervous cabbies, looking over their shoulders for cops, make poor negotiators.
We get a few around here, perhaps a good two hour one each week, or a couple of smaller ones. With the heat climbing here (it's been 42 quite regularly in the last couple of weeks) the aircons are on longer and a few of the old soviet-era powerstations miss a beat or two.
My flatmate goes to a gym 'round the corner and won't run on the running machines, just in case there's a cut - he's seen what happens when the cut hits - they stop pretty much dead, but the runner shoots forward of course, but only so far - the control unit stops 'em pretty quick :-) Ouch.
A couple of weekends ago I took off down the coast a couple of hours, to the village of Mamallapuram. Famous for it's ancient, big-scale, rock-carvings, it still has a very active stone-carving community, though now mainly for things that tourists can take home with them. It's main attaction for me though was that it had some air that could be breathed without a mask.
I checked into a great little hotel just back from the beach. 300 Rupees a night (4 quid) No a/c, but it did have lots of fans and a gorgeous terrace with an extra double bed under mosquito netting.I was determined to sleep outside, but actually got beaten back inside by the nighttime heat. The standalone fan could only ever cool one side of me, the other got broiled in the thick hot air! Roof fans rock.
The beach looks great, but like this whole coast it has very dangerous rips. There weren't many takers, and I wasn't going to chance it either, especially not when I got up early one morning and saw the fishermen doing what they have to do before going out in their boats (you can see them in this pic! with the "shore" temple behind them)
There are several good seafood restaurants right on the beach (I hope they catch their fish a LONG way out...). The routine was basically: Up early, walk the beach, nap, breakfast, nap, massage, nap, lunch, nap, read, nap, check out the carvings, nap...you get the picture.
The massage was interesting - Ayurvedic, which I am guessing means "very oily"...naked and battered with an oiled mallet thing ("panchen"). Sounds bad, it was actually pretty good. Very weirdly the guy asked if I wanted the oil, er, down there. I didn't fancy the panchen treatment down at all, as you can imagine, so skipped that.
Check out the pre-and post-tsunami fishing boats below. No, the wooden one isn't damaged, that's the old style - open-backed. They then bolt a motor to that back end (closest the camera) and they're off. The new ones were mainly donated and the feeling is that they are not as sea-worthy! The carvings are incredible, the elephant here is life-sized.
Each morning at work there is a 30 minute "devotional", from 9 to 9.30 , consisting of bible lessons, prayer and singing (in English and Tamil). Perhaps once a week I'll sit in on these - more to show my face than anything. While they all pray, I might try and meditate, and I'll join in the "singing" (I make noise anyway) - I'm encouraged in that by the fact that some of them have less tone than me!
I sometimes get included in the prayers too; "...and lord, look after Andrew, lord, keep him safe from the heat", and "Lord, we ask that the eMerge project [the software I am installing] goes well and is delivered without problems.". It seems to work, at least the heat one, it's been very hot, about 42 recently, but I've seldom been too uncomfortable in it...not at work anyway, though often when stuck in traffic, or if walking to and from the train.
Caught this guy in our big meeting area the other day. Just before this pic he was sitting up on the wall next to the white board (top right), playing with a pen. It looked like he's just written all the stuff on the board. I guess type-writers and shakespeare are a bit old-hat for your modern IT monkey.
A day prior to this, one of them had walked in the front door of the building, straight through to the kitchen at the back, taken the sugar jar and scampered back out. He was seen by the receptionist just as he nipped out the door!
The organisation here is called IMED, you can see what that stands for in one of the pics in the "It's a zoo out here" entry, below. Behind the monkey. A very christian organisation, protestant - I am strongly discouraged from mentioning drinking & smoking and certainly not anything more hard-core than that. Swearing is also frowned on, but you can't work with computers and not swear, so I am introducing them to this concept (frequently) and while they did tend to look down at their feet and shuffle a bit at the beginning, they now seem to be getting used to it.
I have a Romanian colleague working here with me who arrived complete with a big sticker on the top of his laptop saying "Albaniasex.org", in big bold white text on a red background. Unmissable. The IT boys saw it and were completely goggle-eyed. However, It's not actually a sex site - just albania's equivalent of jobserve (i.e. a job-hunting site), it's just that they weren't getting any hits with their original name...
There are only 2 sorts of handbills posted around this town - undecipherable ones (by me, anyway) in Tamil script, and all the others - advertising computer programming schools, courses and jobs. Java seems to be the main tech wanted. On the plane here, the nice little 50 (maybe 60) year old lady across the isle turned out to be a C++ programmer...not quite the same demographic as in London, I think.
Chennai has the reputation of being the second IT city in India, after Bangalore. Mainly BPO's (business process outsourcer), meaning both call-centres and businesses that do actual processes. For example, I've heard that some hospitals in the states electronically ship their doctors written patient notes to a BPO here where they have typists and data-entry people who stick it all into the hospitals computer system so that it's there for the doctors when they come in for work the next day...
I've never seen such rampart bill-boarding as I have here, and not little ones either, these are HUGE, some are 2 or 3 stories high, and everywhere thoughout the city. The seem to be mainly for sari and jewellry shops, and our CFO reckons they are mainly used as a way for those businesses (or their owners) to launder money, either for themselves or on behalf of others.
I have a flatmate - Biju. He's O.I. as well - actually working as the project manager for my project. He's also a yank - His family is Indian, from Kerala state (to the west) and he grew up in Philadelpia.
When not actively trying to be somewhere the other isn't, we have to spend a serious amount of time around each other; sharing the flat, travelling to work most days, and then working together in the same room, with close co-operation, each day. Thank god, we get on well...so far ;-)
So much for being OI's Eastern Europe regional director, here I am in Chennai, India on a project...well, at least the "East" bit was right.
I've been here 3 weeks so far, but it seems like 3 months :-( The main reason is the volume of traffic and the waves of noise that wash over you - ringing two-stroke exhausts, horns being beeped - it's just so tiring. The mornings can be bad, though at least that is done in daylight, but the evening trip home...when you can see the smog in the headlights, ugh. And the auto's (above) are open, right? and murphy's law says they will always pull up alongside the big whale of a bus, just so that the 4" exhaust is pointing right into the back of the auto. Unerring.
Ok, so there's lots of vehicles on the roads, but that least that also equates to a lot of people being moved about too. Not like one-person-per-car in the UK. 4 on a bike is not uncommon - nor 5. The most I've seen is six. After that they'd have to get fancy and do an inverted pyramid or something :-)
