Photo: The Hindu / K. Gopinathan I learned a new word today — POURAKARMIKA. In Bangalore, this is the name given to the cleaners who pick up the garbage that everyone dumps on street corners and improvised rubbish tips. (We don’t have household dustbins here.) When I first arrived here it was a surprise to see that in a cosmopolitan and supposedly hi-tech city of 9 Million people, the streets are cleaned by women in saris, using 2 twig-brooms, which in the […]
Photo: Caisii Mao I saw something very poignant and sad on the way to work this morning. Even on my short journey, the auto-rickshaw goes past quite a few rubbish dumps. They’re generally on a street corner, or a plot of empty land. Not really official dumps, but just a place used by the people who live and work in the area as a place to put their garbage. There are almost always rag pickers there too, sifting through the […]
So I started a “Festive 50″countdown just before Christmas, but didn’t get to the end of it yet… mainly because I’ve been working absolutely flat-out at college since the start of January, and I’ve just been utterly exhausted. Plus I couldn’t decide on the categories for the last 20… :P Anyway, after Birds, Words and Food, here comes Part 4… LIFE. Here are 10 of the most notable ways in which life has changed since moving to India. #20: Weather A […]
As I wrote 2 months ago, I had to move to a new apartment — or “shift” — recently. Actually it’s been 4 weeks since I moved, but work has been unbelievably hectic since the start of 2012 and I’m only just catching up with stuff. I had been really dreading finding a new place, since my first experience of flat-hunting in Bangalore wasn’t good. So many apartments here seem to be a pile of junk, or really dirty, or […]
This says a lot about the lack of infrastructure here in Bangalore… The Hindu reports on a project to build a “Skywalk with lifts” in the city. It’s a footbridge. Given that you’re taking your life in your hands when crossing a busy road here, it’s difficult to believe that they previously met with a “cold response”. Maybe people enjoy the danger element.
A regular feature of everyday life in Bangalore, and apparently much of the rest of India, is the power cuts. Since yesterday we’ve been having one thunderstorm after another, and somehow whenever there’s heavy rain we seem to get power outages to go with it. Most of last night the power was off, and it was still off when I got up this morning. Given that it’s Good Friday and I’ve got a day off work, it was a big […]
There was a state-wide Bandh in Karnataka today — a kind of protest, curfew and general strike, which meant that shops, restaurants and pretty much everywhere was closed all day. My fellow lecturers and I had planned to go and see the degree show at Srishti, but that was closed too. So we ended up whiling away the day at a swanky hotel, eating a long slow buffet lunch out on the terrace. It was pretty full, presumably because it […]
