mungbean in india
 

Category Archives: Delhi

Challenges

So I’ve hardly posted anything here since the start of the year… partly due to being unbelievably busy at work for the last 3-4 months, and when you spend most of your day writing documentation, going home and writing more stuff doesn’t really appeal. Plus I’ve been in India for 3½ years now, and I think I’ve probably reached the point where I’ve already said most of the things I wanted to say about the country, and reported most of my observations about how […]

Ek Saal Dilli Mein

Yet another anniversary… today is one year since I arrived in Delhi. The last 3 weeks have seen cold, grey, damp, foggy weather, and even some rain on Friday, the first for a couple of months. (It was even cold rain—a first for me in India.) But thankfully the weather was great today, with clear blue skies and enough sun to get the temperature up to about 17C. Meanwhile at night it’s still down to around 7-8 degrees, and I’ve […]

A New Broom Sweeps Clean?

So here we are on the verge of 2014, and quite a historic day in Delhi.  A new Chief Minister and his cabinet were sworn in today, after their party did well in the state elections here earlier in December. It’s historic for a number of reasons… firstly the party, the Aam Aadmi Party (Common Man Party), was only officially launched a couple of weeks before the elections.  Even so, they managed to take 28 of the 70 seats on […]

Three Years in India

THREE YEARS IN INDIA! Today, 17 December, is three years to the day since I arrived in Bangalore with 2 suitcases, and no idea of what to expect from living and working in India.  Because I had never been here before. Hard to believe it’s 3 years already–2013 has gone by so quickly.  I’m loving my job at Pearl Academy, which is just the right balance of challenging and rewarding.  And I have a great flat in South Delhi, with […]

Happy Diwali

Somehow time has been flying by, and I’ve been neglecting this blog… Not sure whether it’s because I’ve been extremely busy at work, or because I don’t have quite so much to say about India these days.  Possibly both. Anyway, Monsoon is over and now it’s Autumn.  Sort of.  A couple of weeks back, Monday morning was suddenly cooler and slightly hazy.  The day-time maximum is now less than 30 degrees every day, and overnight it’s comfortably below 20 and […]

Small Things #9

9.15pm, Delhi.  It’s after dark, a warm and humid evening, and I’m walking to the shops near my apartment. At the side of a residential road, three men—one of them a security guard—are sitting next to each other on plastic chairs, looking at the side of a parked car, laughing and smiling. As I walk past them, I can see that they’ve placed a mobile phone in the recessed door-handle of the car next to them, so that it’s suspended […]

Rain

  So the monsoon has arrived in Delhi—and the rest of the country—somewhat ahead of schedule. Which means that summer is over, and we’re now into the rainy season.   The cooler weather is obviously a huge relief to everyone… It’s hard to believe that only 3 weeks ago it was 45 degrees, but as I write this it’s currently 25.   Last night was the first night in 2-3 months when I didn’t have to have the air conditioning on all […]

Heat

At the risk of being repetitive, I’m going to bang on about the weather again.  Because it’s now very, very hot. Today it was 45 degrees celsius when I took the photo above, and reportedly it reached 46 in Delhi at some point.  Slightly trumping the previous hottest temperature I had ever experienced, which was 44 in Athens (Greece) and Brindisi (Italy) when back-packing around Europe in the late 80’s.  My memory of Athens was that elderly people were dropping […]

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