I needed a break. A break from moving every four or five days, from looking at stuff, working out where everything is, planning what to see and do, and from the constant haggling. I just wanted a bit of normality, a bit of purpose and to stay in one place.
As much as I love travelling, you can have too much of a good thing sometimes. I had a contact who ran a charity in Pune, a few hours from Mumbai, whom I'd met and helped out a few weeks before, so decided a good way to live a bit more normally, be productive and contribute something to this country was to do some volunteering.
As much as I love travelling, you can have too much of a good thing sometimes. I had a contact who ran a charity in Pune, a few hours from Mumbai, whom I'd met and helped out a few weeks before, so decided a good way to live a bit more normally, be productive and contribute something to this country was to do some volunteering.
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| Manish |
Monday 20th January
Quietly it's a fear many people have, but is one of those things you never expect to happen to you. I got stuck in a lift.
I'd awoken early at the hotel in Mumbai to pounding techno music - not something you generally hear in India, but this place is full of surprises - and went to leave the hotel in the lift. I descended five floors and thought I'd reached the bottom, so slid across the old-fashioned manual concertina door, the type you'd see in a 1930's movie, to find it was still in fact between the first and second floor. I shut the door again and pressed the button, but nothing would happen. I couldn't go down nor up, and there was no emergency hatch or telephone link. There was however a buzzer you could press to attract attention, but helpfully it was only loud enough for me alone to hear. Thankfully it didn't turn into the disaster that it could have been, and fifteen minutes later the lift miraculously sprung into life again and I was on the way to catch a bus to Pune.
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The journey was remarkably good for a change, taking what's considered a luxury bus along the country's only six lane motorway, passing massive hoardings for luxury housing developments, IPL premier league cricket stadiums and luxury German car showrooms along the way. This was an area with money. Of course, you're reminded straight away that you are still in fact in India, when the bus stops twice on the motorway itself (not even the hard shoulder) to drop people off.
Arriving in Pune at lunchtime, I got a rickshaw to Asha Kiran's office and met the four people working there, who spoke some English but seemed quite shy, apart from Manish - the Indian director of this Spanish-formed charity, who even speaks English with his wife at home. Manish is a top guy, very welcoming and helpful, and after a spot of lunch took me on his motorbike to find somewhere to stay, which ended up being in the house of a family who generally take in long term guests. My thoughts of getting stuck-in with work straight away were quickly dampened when I found out there was nothing to do that day.
Tuesday 21st
After a typically Indian breakfast of an omelette sandwich, a dosa (fermented rice-batter pancake) and of course a chai (masala tea) I walked to the office, based in the posh Koregaon Park district of the city. When I say posh, this was the Beverly Hills of India and I'm not joking. I passed one huge mansion after another, all with security guards and grand entrances - homes of various businessmen and industrialists, including one of the top 500 richest men in the world. It was a very different world to what I'd seen in the past couple of months.
Manish and I chatted about suitable jobs I could help with for the two-week stay, and despite his prior assurances that there was loads to do, it didn't seem like there actually was. My heart sank a little to think I'd given up two weeks of my time and paid up-front for accommodation, 'would this be a waste of time?' I wondered. He soon decided they needed some proper photos on the website; right up my street, so sent me off with Rajesh - one of the guys in the office, to some of the building site crèches they run.
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Crossing the city on the back of his motorbike, it was apparent that despite being a more affluent city, this didn't stop the traffic from being typically lawless and chaotic. We arrived at a large building site of some part-finished blocks of luxury apartments, and reached the temporary village where the contract labourers were housed. The contrast and irony was immediately apparent - luxury flats being built by poorly paid folks living temporarily in tin shacks. The government requires that facilities are provided for the children of these workers, and for once the law seems to be adhered to even if the crèches are less than basic. The kids seemed happy though, after all they were young enough to not know any different, and after taking a load of snaps I was invited to join in some of their games, one of which was like an Indian version of 'it'.
I went to the cinema that night in a luxury American-style mall nearby and saw a Hollywood movie called Jack Ryan. Once again then cinema was fantastic, as good if not better than anything at home, and a bargain at £1 entry. The movie was excellent, but I was more amused by the strange method of censoring they used. The spoken words in English weren't censored, but the subtitles strangely also in English were. Rather than just putting the normal astrixes in place of swear words though, they replaced them with darned, blooming, fricking and so on, but in a totally illogical order, giving strange lines like 'I wish you'd just gosh off', and 'this is a load of darn' which made me chuckle. Leaving the posh enclave of the cinema I got chased briefly on the way back by three street dogs, then walked past people sleeping rough on the streets. Yep, definitely still in India.
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Wednesday 22nd
The Indian work ethic can be a little different to what I'm used to. The Asha Kiran office starts at 9 - 9.30, but I found myself waiting for it to open until 9.30, followed by half an hour or so of everyone reading the newspapers before cracking on. To be fair, they do work until 6pm or later so it all balances out, it's just a different way.
I visited another couple of building site crèches with Rajesh to take more photos for their website. The big sites appear fairly professionally run, with compulsory helmets being worn, actual portajohns, and proper steel scaffolding instead of bamboo. I was given a chai in the site hut, where the labourers took a break and watched some India vs New Zealand cricket live on the TV. Asha Kiran run a kitchen that delivers meals to all the crèches, so at lunchtime I was invited to join them to eat, sat cross legged (or more like sprawled in my case) on the floor, eating curried veg, rice, curried boiled eggs and a soup with our fingers, ripping off small pieces of roti bread to pick everything up. Messy, for me anyway.
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Thursday 23rd
After another slow morning in the office, doing my own things whilst waiting for a job to do. I later went with Rajesh to a couple of other crèches on these edge-of-town new build sites. On the second site, Rajesh had to meet the site manager so left me with the teacher for an hour, as well as the very friendly construction Camp Manager, Nivrati who bizarrely also taught the kids sometimes. Crèche is a very loose term in this case, as the kids are between three months and eight years, so they're sort of schools really, though without a proper curriculum or qualified teacher. Better than nothing I suppose. I was given the honour of entertaining the kids for a while but it's not exactly my area of expertise; it's been a few years for me since school and there was the obvious language barrier as well so it was a pretty terrible attempt. On the spot all I could think to do, which you'll laugh at, was get them to attempt to sing and do the hokey dokey (I forgot half the verses), sing humpy dumpty by following me, then arrange themselves by height order then age order. The kids once again on the face of it seemed to be happy and well-adjusted despite the basic conditions. |
| Workers' accomodation |
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| Buffalo dairy farm |
We finished up by visiting a community centre that Asha Kiran run in one of Pune's slums. A group of around twenty women were on the last day of a three month free tailoring course that had been organised. Like the few other Indian women I'd met they were fairly shy, but were pleased to show me a selection of garments they'd made, and allowed me to take photos for Asha Kiran.
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Friday 24th
An introductory computer course was soon to be starting, and Manish had six or seven second-hand computers in the office that had been donated by local companies, that needed checking and testing before being taken to the slum community centre. So after an hour of this, disappointingly my day was done.
I hung out for the afternoon to use the internet, and chatted with a pair of Spanish and Portuguese women who came in for a while to see Manish and use the internet, who are former volunteers. One manages a factory nearby that makes labels that go in clothes, and the other works on theatre shows in different parts of the world, and was in Pune for practice and research. Interesting lifes. I told Manish I'd like to really get stuck into something the next week, and he promised there would have more on offer. To be fair to them, two weeks of volunteering isn't really enough to get someone like me established and properly setup, so it was the situation that dictated, more than anything else.
Saturday 25th
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| View from Parvati hill over nearby Slum. Note the satellite dishes - simple relief from poverty, or unnecessary extravagance? You decide. |
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Pateleshwar Cave temple was an interesting stop a bit further on, a rock cut cave temple built by digging a big hole in the ground, then excavating sideways into the hill. Inside, they'd carved out a huge room, leaving moulded columns and shrines - all from the original material without putting anything back. It was very impressive and reminded me a lot of Petra, Jordan where I went a couple of months back.
After more aimless cruising and exploring around the city on the bike, I stopped at one of the big posh malls to see what it was like. It was Independence Day throughout India that day, which didn't turn out to be the celebration I expected, but the mall was packed with people waiting for some entertainment on a stage put on for it anyway, which I must add was terrible. I looked around a huge supermarket briefly, since I'd not actually seen one the whole time in India, and it was based on, and partly supplied by the UK's Tesco, with loads of their products and signs present; a strange sight so far from home. Apart from that it was a typical mall, large soulless and boring, yet I couldn't get over how high quality and well crafted it all was - another world completely compared to the typical street shops and stalls of India.
More from Pune soon.
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