Alright, hello everyone! Sorry for my lax blogging. Work got crazy and I was behind, then there was dissertation to do. It’s still a little crazy and I’m still a little behind but tomorrow I’m off to Udaipur on the bus and a quick trip through Rajasthan so I’ll forget about it for a little while at least and tell you all about Phaltan.
Harry and David are two other Engineers without borders volunteers working for an NGO called ARTI who deal with agriculture and energy in rural areas. Supposedly they’re here to set up a biogas plant in a pretty remote village near Pune but as it rained there once this can apparently no longer happen. Well... actually that’s not quite fair. The village is about 2 hours walk from the nearest road and for India that’s a rare thing as the government is supposed to have built roads to every village in the 70s. A combination of bad weather (apparently diesel generators are heavy and so hard to carry up the side of small mountains during flash floods), bad organisation by their NGO (mainly due to lack of funds it seems) and a reluctance to let them stay in the accommodation nearby because it’s “not good enough for you” has put this on hold. Arti has too main offices – in Pune and in Phaltan and so it was to little rural Phaltan, before all this had turned out to be the case, to which we travelled a few weeks ago.
Finishing work early on Friday afternoon I wandered along to the nearby bus station to meet Harry and Dave. Martino had had the week off after being ill again and was only just recovering so just the three of us that weekend. After two hours of buses with either ‘no standing allowed!’ and every seat reserved, or too much standing and one or the other of us not managing to get on we decided to have a break and get some food at a cafe across the road. When we returned to the station the first bus was practically empty. Not too bad really so off we went and three hours later we were in Phaltan (despite a brief attempt by a drunk who seemed to be dressed like a cowboy attempting a mild hijacking.) We were picked up by Imtiyaz who works for ARTI – Harry and Dave’s NGO - and whisked to our hotel.
The next morning was the kite fighting festival, and after a brief tour of Imtiyaz’s son’s school (new uniform day!) we headed to the house of a friend of his. Roof full of men and kids, sky full of hundreds of kites with their strings coated in crushed glass and the sun beating down it was a spectacular scene (No women though and (for some people I'm saying this again, so you may skip ahead ; )) this bothers me. But I fear I can’t say much intelligent about it without sounding like a knob – “India needs a demographic shift similar to that caused by the second and first world wars in order to give the kind of sexual equality we have in the west a chance to develop” – see? Or I suppose exposing myself to being beaten up by historians...). Every second roof had a sound system or drummers and so followed a day of grown men playing with kites, deafening each other with firecrackers and generally acting like children. Taking the string once I quickly snagged another kite and in one fell swoop cut it out of the sky. Gracefully my kite powered into the roof of the building opposite and smashed to pieces and the guy next to me turned to look at me with a frown, his line holding nothing. I’m not sure you’re supposed to go for people on your own roof... It was an amazing, tiring day.
That night was dinner with Imtiyaz and some of the best food I’ve had in India at his house on the edge of town. While dinner was cooked we passed the time at the house of his relative who keeps chickens and spent a little while rounding up the chicks that had escaped their pen in a blackout, not certain what the link was here but it was certainly fun... The next day off we went into the hills by auto and walked upstream to a nearby waterfall for an afternoon of swimming, getting crushed by the force of the river, climbing into gaps in the rocks and diving into the water. Exhausted and breathless, sunburnt and still a little deaf in my left ear; we made our back the the village where Imtiyaz had parked his auto and set off back to Phaltan to stand on our bus back to Pune.
I’m writing this a few weeks later, after alot of work, and a couple more weekends in front of a laptop doing dissertation and dealing with Shelter’s website than I care to admit... Today was Eid and the start of the Ganesh festival. Two excellent excuses for renting sound systems and dancing in the street it seems. Tomorrow I’m off to Rajasthan with Dave until the 20th – Udaipur, Jodphur, Pushkar and Agra (though between Udaipur and Agra it’s up in the air...) but tonight I spent a little time in the streets of central Pune which are draped with lights, the air thick with music and incense as Ganesh idols are brought to temporary shrines and people flock to the temples, and where flags with the crescent moon fly in half the streets and outside every mosque alongside a dancing crowd. I missed the insane human pyramids 10 people high that went on for Krishna’s birthday but I’m glad I saw this. At one point some Shiv Sena looking guys turned up and did a dance with lances - a lance dance? You certainly don’t see the BNP doing that. (well, not to my knowledge...) Then I set out for Rishi’s for a kind of final dinner. Martino will be gone before I return. It’s all kind of coming to an end for this trip at least. No autos though! So I walked about half way, getting swept up with the drummers and processions bringing the Idols to shrines along the way. It was time well spent dancing and getting covered in paint. Found one in the end and after an alcohol free dinner (today was a dry day) we were back for the night an hour or so ago. I’ve still got red on me though...
