The doorbell rang at 7.50 this morning, and there at the door was a woman I didn’t recognize. She said she had come to work, which puzzled me, but I pointed at the number on the door and suggested she had come to the wrong apartment. She didn’t seem convinced, and asked if I needed any work doing. “Not here”, I told her. She asked again, and I told her the same thing. After a few minutes of back and […]
You can see why people say one of the best things about Bangalore is the weather. Although we’ve been into monsoon season for 2-3 weeks now it hasn’t really rained much — just a few afternoon showers. But the skies are now quite often grey, and there’s a cool breeze blowing most days. It was even so cool yesterday morning that I could walk to work instead of catching an auto — normally infeasible because I would arrive dripping […]
It’s 18 months ago today that I arrived in India, for the first time ever. Three jet-lagged days later I started my new job. I’ve been trying to avoid “Robinson Crusoe” accounts of living here — notching up the days — but this feels like a bit of a landmark and anyway I’ve not really been counting since it was 1 year. What I’m really interested in is documenting how it feels to become an ex-pat for the first time, […]
One of the things you first notice when arriving in a supposedly hi-tech, cosmopolitan, “top-tier metro” city like Bangalore is just how quasi-rural bits of it are, particularly animals roaming the streets full of the notorious traffic. (This bull, above, was sitting happily on the pavement next to a very busy intersection, when I was on my way to the supermarket a few days ago. There wasn’t much pavement left after he’d sat down, so we were all […]
So, the monsoon is upon us again — almost. The newspapers here had been talking over the past week about how it would be “late”… it’s supposed to arrive in Kerala (first place of landfall) on 1st June. It’s now 5th June and you can see from the map that the actual (green) is 4-5 days behind the predicted time in red dotted lines. According to the map it’s coming in from the South-West, as expected, and has arrived at […]
