News from Bassi Pathana

It has been a while since you have received any blog post from us, and in a certain way quite a few things have happened even if in general I would define our life as still being mostly very stable. The only main changes might be that we are not thinking anymore about how we could get more liberty, but rather on how to inform the staff that we are not sure we are going to be able to stay for more than a month. I believe it’s simply that a strong North wind began to blow... and we have to move on, discover the rest of India!

What has happened since the last time we wrote will be very difficult to put into a few words, I will therefore apologise in advance for either a very long and boring post or for forgetting some elements of what happened to us. I will probably try to go for the second option since this will give you more curiosity about our wonderful life over here!

1. For Christmas and also my birthday, we managed to have a little holiday to Delhi for 4 days which then became actually 5 or maybe even 6? I believe that if we take away the hours we spent at the airport it was a  maximum of 4 and a half days! Anyway, very excited about this whole new adventure, as we finally had the possibility to go around a city on our own and have a nice romantic week end, with a combination of adventure and simple decadence. In addition I had a possible internship interview, which is important as it also kind of influenced what we then experienced during our stay in Delhi.

Hence as we leave in the morning to get our flight to Delhi, we get welcomed at the airport, without big surprise from a 2 hours delay of our flight because of cold morning fog. This caused that I arrived approximately 3 hours later to my interview. But since its India this had no particularly negative impact apart from us missing out from the Christmas lunch at the office! During my interview Jess made some connaissance and was able to get some addresses we should go to, or places we should visit, as well as an invitation to a stand up comedy show on that same night, from Shishin (I am not sure this is the right spelling of the name...) who worked there. We therefore met up with him and he gave us an amazing first taste of a nice Delhi evening, from starting up by having some drinks and eating pancakes at an American diner, to going to an stand up comedy show just 20 minutes before the end of the show, to then go to another bar where we had extremely nice mojitos toped up with a shisha and some dim sum (which became our favourite meal during our stay in Delhi). The night ended up by everybody being extremely happy, tipsy and driving back to our guest house in a Wonderful Otto, even if we were freezing.

I should probably give you a short definition of an Otto. An Otto can be comparable to an ape piaggio, this might help people who have an idea of an ape piaggio... anyway it’s a small three wheeled motorised vehicle which serves as small taxis. It has a front bench for the driver and then a back bench for the passengers and it is just covered up on the top, the sides are open, which explains why we were freezing. I have no particular rational explanation for my love for them, I don’t know why I love going around with them, maybe it is a good combination of going by foot and going by car. Not as closed up as a car, but still you go faster than by foot, and in Delhi going around by foot is almost impossible. The negative aspect of them is that it is extremely complicated to find a good price with an Otto, as the drivers never want to put the meter on and normally triple the price if not quadruple it, which creates always some quite intense bartering act between 3 different Otto drivers so that one might decide to lower the price .

The day after we spend the whole day shopping in an enormous mall, so we would be able to exchange present on Christmas day. With a little intermezzo of Dim sum and mojitos, this ending up in Jess simply walking into a glass door and pretending nothing happened. Sadly I did not had the honour to experience this moment as she went back on her own to the restaurant to pick up a bag she had forgotten with all the present she was going to give me the next day (Hence an extremely important bag!). In the evening we again met up with Shishin, and a friend of him, we met up for drinks and Jess and I again had some Chinese food. We then had a mission around Delhi in an Otto to get something to drink from one house to then go to another house and just spend to rest of the evening drinking listening to music, chill and to learn some Indian dance moves. Until the light went off and we decided it might be better to go home to our cosy married couple bed.

The next day was Christmas and we started by opening our Christmas socks! Our stockings! First stocking for me! Very nice! I liked it! And this was topped up by our arrival in our 5star hotel room, and ended up in us not leaving the hotel for 2 whole days. The bed was soft and cosy, the shower was a shower and was hot, there was a bath, there was alcohol, there was international food. I would describe these 2 days as a regression of our very beloved decadence. A decadence orgy. A private birthday party, very exclusive with only two participants and an extremely relaxing massage. Decadence again.

Based on the fact that we spend two days doing nothing, we decided to stay another day to actually see a little bit of Delhi (luckily since the flight company changed our flight times, we could call and change our flight timing from exactly one day, without any additional costs). We therefore went back for the last night to the guest house, and spend the afternoon trying to visit some of Delhi (I say try because we managed to get slightly lost, and therefore arrived at our first tourist destination when it was getting dark) by starting to eat some samosas just sitting on a bench a getting observed by hungry dogs. But thankfully managed to have the privilege to see the Lohdi gardens in their mystic darkness of the sunset and its two monuments which were just appearing in the darkness. This continued in a nice last evening even if we were extremely broke (caused by the decadence orgy) with the company of Shishin, who also showed us the India gate by night which we reached with an Otto.

Short impression on Delhi: I would probably truly define Delhi as a metropolis, an immense city, with an enormous amount of people, cars and Otto’s. It would probably take someone one month to be able to have some idea of where you are and in which direction you are travelling, as a newcomer you feel totally lost in this city, with almost no conception of distances. As possibilities to get around you either have taxis, Otto’s our an extremely new metro which has an airport security level in addition to a wagon only for women (which most of the time is empty in contrast to the fully packed other wagons of the metro). I truly don’t know whether I would like to live in Delhi, but in a certain way I am sure I would love to be able to try to live there, this is maybe because there is something curious about this city, probably also related by all its contrasts, from richness to poorness, from modernized to some extremely rustic parts. It is an extremely confusing city and hard to simply love it or simply hate it, but this is probably what makes it interesting and hence even if you generally find the city mostly ugly and you think you would not be able to live there, you still have a curiosity of how it would be to live there and actually experience this city for a longer period. Some European cities compared to Delhi seem a wonderland, where everything is extremely cute; Delhi in contrast is very crude.

2. New Years Chandigarh: As we wished to be able to do something on New Years and try to avoid spending it closed up in our apartment, we therefore ended up having a quite interesting evening which started by meeting a Warwick Uni colleague, who took us firstly to the annual New Year’s Chandigarh golf club party. It was very interesting (I believe this is the right description...).  From Jess’ and my point of view there was a lot of networking going on even at a very young age, but very shortly we got accepted by some to become business men who took care of our drinks. We therefore had our jump into the year trying to get slightly tipsy and being asked to dance with some very new encounters, but thank god as much as I stay faithful to my dear wife she is faithful to me, as a result we decided to dance our way through the new year together without inviting any new encounter.

But this was only the start and we then drove towards a junior house party, this event looked fairly amusing, probably some alcohol available which would make us tipsy and some nice music to groove to. But a chilled idea of amusement was transformed into some weird “throw alcohol down these white chicks’ throat”. Very strangely everybody was not only offering us drinks but literally obliging us to drink letting us only the possibility to choose between having our face, hair and clothes full of whisky our limiting the accident by absorbing some through swallowing it (this is what we did most of the time...). Hence there was some very strange movement of getting us extremely drunk, or in a state where we would hopefully start some kissing charity, thankfully the small amount of alcohol enzymes we still have, managed to keep us to be only into some wonderful Indian/western dance performances (even if we enjoyed some very embarrassing tunes, which I will not name here for different reasons, one being memory issues...). The put it very shortly the evening ended by me having to depurate myself on the toilet and Jess lying on the bed and having some circular experiences. All this was topped up by us having to get up at 9 o’clock the next morning for a hockey function for the Trust’s hockey nursery. Sadly I don’t think we managed to give a good impression by having a last night’s corrected make-up, as well as being in a fairly strong so called ‘vegetable state’.

3. The third celebration during this period was the Lohri festival, something which I believe you can compare to our Christmas. It’s mostly a family celebration where you have music, a fire, food and some dancing. As usual we were slightly worried whether we might be invited or not, but thankfully one of our colleagues invited us at his place to celebrate it with his family. We therefore went there very excited and happy, as it is always a good excuse to be able to have a look at a new neighbourhood of Bassi Pathana (you might thing Bassi Pathana is small, but each time we manage to convince someone to take us out to the market, we discover a whole new street, where we never were before. I believe more than Bassi Pathana being small, is our knowledge of Bassi Pathana which is very limited...). We therefore walked through the streets of Bassi Pathana to reach Robin’s house, and you could really see the Lohri feeling invading the street through small bon fires and some Indian music coming from different corners of the town.

The evening started as usually in India, with some food... Jess and I were extremely hungry so we kind of let ourselves go into the different little dishes offered, as we thought this must be the dinner. Sadly we discovered around 10 pm that what we had consumed as food until now were only some starters and the dinner was very soon to be ready... During the whole evening there was a mix of silent moments in which you don’t really know what to speak about, mostly due to the language barrier, as well as some street musicians visiting us. I would compare these musicians to what is often done in Italy as well during Christmas time, the so called ‘piva’. This is when a small group of musicians just walks around the town or village and plays some music hoping that a house would invite them to receive either some refreshments or some money. As a result we had a mini drums band playing some music, which started up some dancing action from Robin’s wife and the rest of the Family followed up. The mixture of the beats of the drums and the Indian dancing were something truly wonderful, your inner dancing dwarf wished that your feet could follow the specific rhythm which seemed so natural and simply performed by the others. I tried to start once or twice to grasp the feeling of the music, but when I started I felt how ridiculous it was compared to the rest of the dancers; I therefore decided to confine myself to observe this amazing 10 minutes of crazy drum music. The evening then continued sitting around the fire in which we had to throw seeds (these seeds need to be thrown into the fire in exact 7 little tosses) and walked around singing some Lohri songs. A gift was also given to us, something which is always done in India when you are invited to someone’s house for the first time, as a welcome symbol.

In addition to these 3 little adventures, we still have our routine, but with some new activities such as doing some carpet exercises through which we hope to miraculously manage to limit the effect of non-movement, as well as learning some traditional stitching named Phulkari. I would have never thought that Jess would one day be the one wanting to do exercises in the evenings, and I believe both of us would never have thought that we would be sitting on the couch at 11 o’clock in the evening after our movie and dinner, drinking some rum and finishing off our stitching homework in our ‘house-clothing’ and gossiping/discussing about some incredibly irritating students during today’s English lesson or simply loosing ourselves in the complexity of this stitching practice which sometimes breaks some nerves due to the lack of patience in relation to such activities.

These are a part of the news from Bassi Pathana, and hopefully some further news will be coming up very shortly! For the moment I wish all the best from over here and...

...Bohot changa din haen! {Have a nice day!}