T minus 5 hours...

It's a widely-accepted and readily verifiable fact that most things in India make no sense at all. The roads. The fondness among males for dying their hair orange. Most television adverts. I woke this morning - on Republic Day, a celebration of the nation and its beginnings as a proper democracy, a commemoration of emancipation from enslavement which gives rise every year to demonstrations of patriotism all over the subcontinent - to the sound of 'The Last Post', issuing mournfully from a bugle in the road outside. Yes, that's right, the people of India had thought it best to celebrate their ideological freedom and rebirth with a rendition the Remembrance Day - Remembrance Day - standard from the country they used to call king. Wrong, surely, on more than a million counts. Raising my eyebrows for the umpteenth time this week, I turned over and went back to sleep. India!

Seriously, I needn't give those eyebrows such a regular workout, because irony is almost entirely lost on a normal Indian. Or maybe they've just perfected the deadpan. You try outlasting the nearest taxi driver in a sarcasm contest after he has quoted your five times the going price for a trip to the station and you'll quickly realise he is utterly, tragically in earnest. Even the most convoluted bureaucratic procedures are treated with absolute seriousness. Every night, we've made it a ritual to meet up and exchange horror stories about the incomprehensible mess that is your average transaction with any Indian behind a desk. Getting small things done - even finding the place where one can get small things done - can take all day. Stephen, an Irish friend of mine who is also a freelance zoologist, has had more than his fair share of Indian bureaucracy. It took him a week after he arrived in the city, and countless letters and forms, to gain access to the Zoological Survey of India, where he will be performing vital working putting in order some of the enormous stock of specimens the museum has accrued. Apparently, in their average levels of organisation in this field, India is approximately 100 years behind the rest of the world. In one day, he informs me, shoved in a jar and presumed to be identical, he found eight different species of ghecko, four of which were completely new to science. Stories of this sort are usually met with the popular travellers' response, an expression of wonder, disbelief or exasperation...India!

He's been 'working with' these guys for about two weeks now. Every day at 10:30am, with commendable levels of optimism/frightening levels of delusion, Stephen saunters gaily down the street to the Zoological Survey. Ah ha, what is that I hear you huff so Britishly? Is 10:30 am the time to be starting an average working day, especially such vital work, attempting to restore India's international credibility in the field of zoology? Well, ideally, yes. Actually, I think Stephen would quickly skewer any opportunity to start work at 10:30am with a flick of his scalpel, to prevent it squirming away. He provides the conservative estimate, nightly, that in his whole time in Kolkata, the office workers have never appeared before 11:30am. The working day, typically, ends at 4:30.

But hold! An unlikely figure is hurrying down the road at the ungodly hour of 10, to single-handedly restore our faith in Indian dedication to the task. It is the security guard, never missed a mornin' in twenty years, guv'nor. Surely, then, this figure can redeem our beleaugered hero from his misery, and give him a much needed boost in his attempts to tackle the immense backlog of work which the Zoological Survey, through general laziness and incompetence, have carefully accrued over many years. Surely, there is hope! Actually, no, there is no hope whatsoever. It turns out that the manager of the Survey must arrive and sign out the key to the security guard, who can then unlock the door, before science can proceed on its trailblazing course. Every night, as Stevo drinks his whisky, his hands tremble more and more.

Laziness, indeed, isn't totally to blame, though it is endemic. The problem is that there are so many people to employ that most of them, once employed, just sit around doing nothing for the day, at least at street level. Three men do the work one would do in Britain. When you walk into a restaurant, there will be 3, maybe 4 waiters, sitting and staring, and it is an effort to recall even one of them back from whichever imaginative regions they were roaming for long enough to order a chai. Nobody even reads a book. No doubt in the info-commerce scrummages of Bangalore and Hyderabad, people are beavering away with admirable dedication, but I'm sorry, I just haven't seen enough of it so far. Perhaps this indifference to one's job has seeped up the system into the scientific laboratories. The laziness, though, wasn't my point. The upshot of having so many people to employ is that huge paper-chains of bureaucracy have been created - merely see the account of my visit to the Asiatic Society in the previous blog entry for an example - in which everybody knows their step, and possibly the one above and below, but nobody at all can tell you anything about the complete picture. Some guys must have been receiving people at their desks for years, filing and issuing the appropriate bits of paper, without really having a clue what, for instance, the name of the company they work for is, or what it is that this company actually does. If all the man-hours were correctly employed in, for instance, putting in place a system of waste-disposal more sophisticated than 'the cows will eat it', India would be cleaner than, I don't know, our back room (the one that is locked until visitors come).

It seems that a position and its powers are everything. In these paper chains, those above are called 'Sir', and those below call you 'Sir'. Phil, a clever American chap and my very English friend Roger distilled the Indian methods of powerplay into one basic tenet - ritual humiliation. If anyone can make you look small, they hold the upper hand. The blow could be as petty as insulting your cooking - something I witnessed in an Indian house very recently where the housekeeper was treated like dirt - but they all count. A man behind a comparatively big desk will lose his rag very quickly with an attendant, who is sent scurrying off down gloomy corridors on another pointless errand, perhaps to fetch some bloody pride. I'm sorry, I'm typing this out for the second time after the local internet crashed, so if I seem slightly exasperated, you'll know why.

You have to understand that the mood of the foreign traveller fluctuates wildly over here. At best, you are merely bemused, revelling in the freedom of living in a place where a smile or a shove will get you so far; at worst, you are cursing the day you ever set foot inside the Foreigner's Registration Office, attempting the inoffensive task of obtaining a pass for the north-east. This means that, probably, for negative point I've outlined above, India has a great and unique pro. It is, for instance, possibly the only place in the world where you can watch jazz legend Herbie Hancock perform for three hours with Wayne Shorter for the equivalent of about one quid fifty. This I did, with a Norwegian friend of mine and his English girlfriend. What else have I done? I woke up at 8am one day, on the spur of the moment, to go and find someone to play football with on the Maidan. I came across one game, consisting of about 30 middle-aged Indians haring around a pitch with apparently no touchline. Someone would just boot it and off they'd go. The quality of the play was utterly appalling and I quite fancied my chances. Only problem was that I was wearing sandals - they were the most solid shoes I had, an improvement on flip-flops. I put on some socks to complete the illusion, which fooled no-one. Got into a scuffle with a fat old Sikh who decided to give the foreigner some of the John Terry treatment - it was quite liberating to scream some of the foulest things you know at somebody, knowing they have utterly no comprehension of what you're saying. We made it up and they invited me back the next day, but, alas, the urge to wake up before 10am had deserted me.

What then? I've been staying in dorms at the Paragon, a local hotel which has been popular with travellers for thirty years, and made some really good friends. Got to know a load of the Koreans, and was very sad to say goodbye to them. Buying a guitar was the best decision I've made so far out here, it's very good for building bridges. Only problem is it's bust again. A few days ago, I ventured to Raipur to visit Dixie at her NGO offices. I'll let her tell you about what the place is like in her blog, but suffice to say that on the way back I had another train-related mishap (kicked the guitar off the bunk in my sleep). Actually I had a lovely few days, good to get out of this city, which is comfy and tends to sap your time. Dixie is staying in the region of India with possibly the fewest tourists - we amassed crowds when we went for a stroll, and were given free chai. Dixie's housekeeper, a certain Saros, is a living legend, and her employer and his silent cousin are also very nice. We sat on the roof one night and played the guitar, and everyone had a sing - you see what I mean?

Back in Cal, I went to visit the College Street market, which houses apparently the biggest collection of books in Asia. It's quite a surreal experience to debate the relative literary merits of George Eliot and Shakespeare with an Indian shopowner as part of a haggle. India! Won't say too much about that because I'm planning to take Dad there...

That's right, in approximately three hours now, Beech Senior will touch down at Dum Dum airport, Kolkata. I've a rough itinerary to take up the first few days, but to be honest I want to keep it loose, give him a flavour of what travelling is really like over here. Might even let him say a few words in the blog. We'll be heading down to Orissa, a predominantly tribal region of India, possibly the location of the elusive 'Old India' so many tourists seem to be seeking. I'll let you know. Until then, Indians beware, the Beech boys may be utterly lost in a street near you...