J's India Trip

I'm flying back to Delhi tomorrow where I will debrief with the main office. Then it is back to the states at 12:15am Friday morning.

I have several more blog posting I want to make on things that have happened over the past few weeks (since I've been a bad blogger), so stay tuned for "retroactive" blogs.

a cole-slaw sandwich on white bread

a lounge piano version of Madonna's Material Girl

A billboard reading: "English Academy, Personality Development"

I wrote this 11 years ago, but never posted it for some reason. It's from my trip to India in 2006 when I was living in Mumbai for two months working on polio stuff.
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So what, exactly, is a hill station? Well, it's a station (or rather town) in the hills. Logical, huh?

As far as I can tell, hill stations essentially developed because the upper classes, and later British colonials, wanted someplace to go that was cool during the summers.

Matheran is the closest hill station to Mumbai and a common weekend destination for Mumbaikers. Two weekends ago I had the wonderful luxury of a whole weekend off (Saturday and Sunday), which is rather unusual. So, in the spirit of getting the hell out of the city, I headed up to Matheran for the weekend. I was considering taking the train there, since that is by far the cheapest option, but given the recent bombings in Mumbai and that the Embassy issued a security alert for that weekend warning people to stay clear of trains and such, I went the "rich westerner" route and hired a car to drive me there and back. We left around 7am Saturday morning.

It was wonderful to get out of the city and out where you can actually greenery. (I didn't even sleep during the 2.5 hour drive up to Matheran). The last 30 minutes of the drive is a steep climb up the side of the mountain. There is normally a train you can take from Neral Junction (the stop on the train from Mumbai). The train that goes from Neral Junction to Matheron is a "toy train" with a 2 foot gauge track. It is a 20 km trip that takes 2 hours, but it supposed to be a beautiful ride. Sadly, the tracks were washed out during the monsoons last year. But the drive up was just a beautiful, climbing out of the valley into the trees.

No cars or bikes are allowed in Matheran. Cars and taxis drop you off about 4 km from the center of town, and from there, you can hire a horse, hire a hand drawn rickshaw (which is actually a three person job, one pulling the rickshaw and two pushing it because the road is too steep for one person to handle it), or walk. Walking was definitely my perference.

I think the area was volcanic at some point and the rock has the sharp gravely appearance that volcanic rock does. But it's red, and really pretty. A gorgeous contrast to the greenery.

Someone posted a comment asking whether there were any concerns about Coke/Pepsi depleting local water supplies near their manufacturing plants.

I have not heard anything to this effect. Some parts of India are experiencing droughts, however from what I have heard, most of the soft drink plants are located in places that have had heavy monsoons this year.

As an interesting note, Pepsi just appointed a new CEO-an Indian woman who was serving as the CFO. I would be surprised if this decision was not related to the recent controversies about their product in India.

I don't know if anyone is really talking about this in the states, but there have been recent allegations that Coke and Pepsi soft drinks made in India have elevated levels of pesticides in them. As a result, various government agencies across the country have started banning all Coke and Pepsi products. Kerala, one of the southern states, has banned products from the entire state, including shutting down one of the Coke plants. A few other states have banned products from all educational institutions and hospitals.

Read more about it here.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with this.

...since my last blog update. Days have settled into a basic routine, wake up, eat breakfast at the hotel, go to the office or meet up with one of my local colleagues in the field, go back to the hotel, exercise, eat dinner, work some more after dinner, and go to sleep. Rather mundane, so I haven't been really motivated to make fascinating blog entries.

I didn't get out to explore the city at all this past weekend. We worked on Saturday and Sunday was a very heavy rain day. Given the flooding and other weather issues, I decided to make it a stay-in day (plus I had a cold) and spent most of the day doing work stuff. (Well, I watched a movie too.)

The weekend before, however, I went to the Prince of Wales museum, which has a quite nice collection of classical Indian artwork and sculpture, as well as a random collection of western paintings, Chinese art and a natural history selection. There is an audio guide that is included with the price of admission (if you're paying the foreigner price), which was a rather good tour guide of the museum. The natural history section, however, was a rather sad collection of stuffed endangered animals (which I assume were killed before they actually were considered endangered).

I do wish I had more time to explore the city and perhaps even get to another part of the country, but I think that will have to wait for the next trip. (Although, I shouldn't say too much about not exploring the city, since work has me going all over the place and visiting neighborhoods no tourist ever sets foot in.)