Character is the important eligibility for being staff member of GMFI, if you will loose your character you will automatically loose your job.

Okay, so I know I haven’t updated the blog in a while; for the very good reason that nothing much happens here. Basically, my life has been following the same pattern for two weeks:

I get up at nine, get dressed, have breakfast and walk through the hall to the office at nine-thirty. I spend the morning at the computer (which many of you will have deduced considering the amount of time I spend on facebook), have lunch with the T---‘s at one, back to work at two, finish around five-thirty, have dinner, and spend the rest of the evening reading/surfing the ‘net. Saturday I only work until two, and in the afternoon I go shopping with Mrs. T---.

I spent the first two weeks in a kind of limbo, with no real work to do. The Impact Assessment Study I was supposed to help with was cancelled due to lack of manpower (they needed to people to conduct the interviews, and since I don’t speak Hindi I couldn’t exactly be of much use), so I decided to copy-edit pretty much every English publication the company has (Annual Reports, Operations Manuals and the like), which, though necessary (see title), was unutterably dull. As many of you know, I kind of hit a wall this weekend in terms of frustration, but things are looking up. Mr. G---, the Chairman of the company (a Canadian, incidentally!) arrived yesterday, and he’s decided to launch a pilot study of the Impact Assessment Questionnaire, so it seems I’ll probably have enough work for a week or two. I still might come home a little earlier though; surfing the Internet for eight hours a day is something I can do at home as well :)

My evenings are quite monotonous. The T---‘s really don’t like me leaving the compound, since they don’t think it’s safe. I snapped yesterday and just quietly said I was going out for a walk (something I’ve asked about before but haven’t done because they reacted negatively and I didn’t want another Varanasi Kerfuffle). Today I was about to do the same when Mrs. T--- suggested I walk for half an hour on the roof if I was craving exercise, since “The street very Danger!”. Sigh.

The upside to this is that I’ve finally gotten to do a “Summer of the Classics”. Penguin Classic Paperbacks go for about Rs. 50 or 1$ Canadian here, so I’ve loaded up on them instead. So far I’ve read Frankenstein, Candide, Crime and Punishment, Fanny Hill, the complete Sherlock Holmes, Journey to the Centre of the Earth (which starts in Hamburg and Copenhagen! How cool is that? And how did I never know this?), The Europeans by Henry James and Persuasion by Austen. I still have Moll Flanders, Northanger Abbey and Kipling’s Kim, but I think I’ll have to pay the bookstore another visit on Saturday. Any suggestions for must-reads?

Some random observations/anecdotes about/from India:

I never realized just how much we take electricity for granted in the developed world. Here the power goes out about four to five times a day, and though the generators usually kick in after three minutes, sometimes they don’t. Last week the power was out for four hours in the morning, and since everything is on computers here all work came to a halt. I spent the morning sitting with the other office workers, singing. That’s right. Everyone took a turn singing a song (I sang “House of the Rising Sun” since it was the first thing that came to mind – thank goodness they didn’t understand the lyrics or they’d have been scandalized!), and I can confirm that music is very different here. Not bad – in fact, they were all quite good singers – just very different in terms of scales and melody. Also, everyone seems to know massive amounts of songs. They spent about two hours playing a kind of game where one person sings a song, then the next person sings a song that starts with the last letter of the song before. It never took them more than five seconds to come up with one, and everyone seemed to know every song, and chimed right in. I’m guessing it’s partly due to every single movie having several songs it it; but interesting nevertheless.

Also, phones here get spam! I get several messages a day about ringtones etc, but I also get these update-like messages that say stuff like “Lifetime Achievement Awards – Like or Dislike?”, “Tips for meeting the love of your life”, “What was the name of the actress in Jab We Met?” etc etc. Very very odd, and kind of annoying. The worst is random phone-calls from what I think are Telemarketers. I'll admit I've yelled some choice danish profanities at them when they disregard my requests for English and babble on in Hindi. I honestly have no idea what they want; They could be telling me I won the lottery for all I know.

I should have some more interesting stuff from tomorrow though. We're getting up early and going to a village to conduct the first interviews. I'll be bringing along my trusty camera, and I'll have the professor along to translate. So yay!

Speak to you all soon, and please keep the updates coming!

Cheers, Hugs, Knus,

Gitte