Saturday, September 29, 2007

amusing you?

Hello. How are you? Where are you?

I am sat here under a whirring fan on the 6th floor of “Jupiter Towers” in the Bodakdev/Vastapur part of Ahmedabad. It’s a humid evening and my fingers are working slowly. It’s actually not that late in the day about 9.30pm but I’ve been travelling and I feel a little drowsy.

My drowsy mind keeps asking me a question…How do I start a blog? (there’s a bigger one there as well…how do you I keep a good blog?). But to start…I guess the first thing is with a welcome.

So hello and namaste. Please take your shoes off on the way in. Just leave them there by the door. Yes, just there. That’s great. Thanks. I trust you will stay as long as you need to and I hope that I can write as much as needs to be written.

Where to start now? I’ll try to start near the beginning...

I was welcomed to India with a pleasing surprise – bhindi noo shak (okra curry) was my first meal here in Jupiter Towers. It was pleasing because it was also what my mum cooked for dinner last night in rainy Watford. After lunch I then went over to the offices where I’ll be working, had a little wonder around the streets and then came back here for dinner. I then went out and had a coffee and….

…wait now; you didn’t sign up to hear about what I had for dinner. You were expecting tales of the unexpected, right? Perhaps I would tell you something significant, something important, a revealing idea, something revolutionary or even something a little revolting.

You were expecting blood, and guts and tears and…well anything but what I had for dinner. And didn’t I know it. As I went about the town, there was this extra voice in my head wondering about whether each incident might be worthy of blogging…And frankly there wasn’t all that much that did feel worthwhile

And so a few moments ago when I opened up this computer, I felt like an amateur Marco Polo, shuffling his feet in front of his royal audience holding nothing more than a meagre box of a-not-very-unusual spice from the local corner shop. I was hoping that the royal audience will send me off travelling again to look for something more exciting rather than send me off minus my little head.

So, dear virtual kings and queens, rather than risk this fate I’ve decided that I’m not going to try to amuse you. Instead I’m going to go about amusing myself (easy tiger) ...and if I get caught by something and this something wants to be told, then I’ll come here and I'll share that with you. What do you think? Do you think it might work better than 9 months of ‘what I had for dinner today’?

Night, night.

rupesh