Economizethis

Yesterday, I was waiting for my bus and made two observations. Observation #1 Firstly, there are a lot of people in India. This may seem obvious since there are more than a billion people in the country, with a population density of 386 people per a square kilometre (compare this with Canada's 3.3 people per square kilometre), but the reality of these numbers only hit you when you're actually living in an Indian city. Sure, Toronto has its crowds: Bloor-Yonge station at 5PM, or Nathan Phillips Square on New Year's, but here it's Bloor-Yonge station multiplied by two all the time. Everywhere. In every building, on every bus, and on every street. People, cars, motorcycles, honking, pushing, shoving, bargaining, yelling (in ten different dialects), gesticulating (so they can understand each other), and/or rushing off to god-knows-where at least twenty minutes late (otherwise known as Indian Standard Time). It's truly amazing. Observation #2 Secondly, there are men ever...

Guess what!? There's a whole bunch of crazy things going on in India right now. Here's a few: Satyam, one of the top three IT companies has confessed to 'cooking the books' for several years...media outlets are calling the debacle India's very own Enron (I've always wanted my own Enron). The government sacked the Satyam board of directors and had installed a new board in a matter of days--proof that government bureaucrats do, in fact, work (at some things). There's also federal elections coming up in March, which is exciting enough on its own. AND there's all these crazy security measures and military shows after the 26/11 attacks. There was a military expo at my university the other day, which I wasn't aware of until a few bombs went off in the distance (I resisted the urge to jump into the nearest pile of garbage--military material, I am not). Scary, but interesting to see. Anyways, tomorrow I'm going to see my aunt's NGO called Swadhar. A...

I've had my first brush with India's famously ineffectual bureaucracy in the form of Pune University's registrar's office. After arriving at the office at 11AM (because that's apparently when public offices open in India), I was told that I had been mistakenly registered for the economics faculty at the university. I would have to wait for a mand named Mr. Shubash to come and redo my admissions offer. Not to worry, the clerk assured me, Mr. Shubash would be arriving at the office in the next ten minutes. So I sat down and waited for a half hour. I bugged the clerk again, who said that it was a mere five to ten minutes wait, "Mr. Shubash is actually ill and at the clinic". To make a long story short, I waited another hour, after which the prodigal Mr. Shubash swept into the office (with surprising vigour for a sick man) with an entourage of five or six Europeans. He quickly disappeared into the backrooms of the office because he had to attend to his guests....