Blogs from Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India, Asia - page 16

How to drive in India: Step One: Find the biggest vehicle you can find. If it is a bus or a truck, congratulations! You are officially allowed to do whatever you want on the roads. Please ignore the following steps. If it is a bicycle or scooter, offer a small prayer to your deity of choice before embarking on step two. Step Two: Honk your horn. If you have an air horn (and many cars do), do remember to switch it on. Step Three: Start driving. Honk your horn. Please try to forget about your indicator and seat belts, most vehicles on the road have or use neither. Step Four: When approaching an intersection, honk your horn and ignore any signs/traffic lights/traffic police as indications of what you are supposed to do. Instead, drift into ... read more

Dear Friends Just Chas here as Ana has unfortunately won the race to get sick first. She has come down with a sinus/throat infection that has knocked her for six, but she has seen a doctor and hopefully all the thousands of drugs we bought before leaving Australia will help. Anyway, despite Ana being upset that I am writing this by myself, I am so excited that I have to share news with you. I am at my first day of work with People’s Watch of Tamil Nadu. This organization is absolutely amazing! They started in 1995 just trying to monitor torture in police stations. This is because the official stance is that torture in police stations does not happen in India. This is despite people in India never calling the police and fearing arrest ... read more

This morning I received an unexpected invitation from Ganesh for Sachi and myself to join his family for dinner that evening. Obviously an invitation I couldn’t turn down and even Sachi, who was still bemoaning the quantity of food she had consumed over the weekend whilst having her cookery lessons, couldn’t refuse. Ganesh turned up at the guest house at 7 with his eldest son, Shruti (10) in tow. Ganesh and Shruti were on a motorbike and I was just trying to figure out how the 4 of us were going to fit when Ganesh explained that he had arranged for us to follow him in a Rickshaw! Thankfully! Shruti joined Sachi and I and provided the driver with appropriate directions. He also started the inevitable questioning of the pair of us to understand our ... read more

Today turned out to be a hard slog, the realisation has dawned that I’m now into my final week and I’ve got loads to get through. I ended up spending the best part of 10 hours ploughing through numerous performance metrics and data sources to try and produce a definitive specification to present to key stakeholders next week for sign off. Today has helped re-enforce my early career choice of not pursuing a Business Analysis path! After work I had a few minutes to kill before dinner so I decided to stretch my legs and explore the one direction from the guest house in which I had not yet ventured. I set out and just followed my nose for 30 minutes or so, I was on the verge of turning round, thinking I had reached ... read more

Ward Rounds I knew that this trip would present me with a number of opportunities to enjoy new experiences but what I hadn’t anticipated was being presented with the chance to spend time on the clinical side of the organisation. Yesterday evening, after work, I accompanied Scot Warden, the Ophthalmic Surgeon from Boston, on his post-operative ward visits as he checked on his cataract patients from his morning operations. This gave me a chance to see the hospital wards properly. The simplicity of the arrangements here are a joy to behold. During a patient’s stay in hospital there are no notes kept on file for them at all - they are simply handed their notes and told to keep them with them at all times. A simple and effective way to keep processes streamlined, no staff ... read more