Dinner

Time is accelerating: only two nights left before I come home.

Had a good day at work today: monitoring two of the trainers in process training. One was an experienced trainer and excellent in class, the other is more of a novice and still had some rough edges but got all the info across so that's what matters most. I realised half way through that the photocopying had gone seriously wrong somewhere and two pages were missing in action. So afterwards I emailed the document to someone who had printer access, they printed it out, then I passed it onto someone else who had a photocopy code and eventually got it back (a couple of hours later though).

Last Friday (when I was in Pune) Pallavi and Shalini had phoned me up to invite me out on Saturday to go shopping, have lunch, see a real Indian home. With great regret I had turned them down as at that stage I was still expecting to be part of a group going out to Elephanta caves. By the time I knew that I was alone on the trip (midday Saturday) it was too late to make plans to meet up. Which I am really sad about. However, in moderate compensation we agreed to go out for dinner one night this week, and tonight was it.

We left together after work and drove to Bandra (where Shalini lives) and went to a restaurant just down the road from her apartment. It was called Trafalgar Chowk and was mainly a Chinese restaurant but also had Western dishes. There was a big screen showing a football match in the smoking room (with actual doors to keep the smoke in!) but we were in a quieter area. We all ordered together and shared the dishes. The starters were excellent (spicy chicken in a BBQ sauce and Malaysian veg pancakes), the main courses good too but a bit blander than I expected.

Topics of conversation ranged from their time in Edinburgh (March), castes in India and the strange phenomenon that some people from higher castes are now "converting" to untouchable castes to take advantage of the perks on offer like protected jobs in government.

It's odd to think that on Friday when I leave it may be the last chance I ever see these good people. When you train someone you spend a lot of time in their company, and usually you then see them around the office for the following years so if you get on well then you keep in touch. In this case I have to get my head round the fact that work here will continue without me, and I'll go back to work in Edinburgh and apart from the odd email I won't really be a part of it any more.

I was thinking earlier that the project is a bit like the Royal Engineers: we go to a blank field and start setting up all the infrastructure - physical like PCs and phones and intellectual with all the training and support - and then we clear off and let the rest of the army get on with the real work of fixing accounts. Just hope it doesn't all get swept away in the monsoon... (thunderstorm earlier today).