26 January – India’s Republic Day

The 26th of January is a major holiday in India. As a child in the Indian diplomat scene I saw this celebration in quite some glory during the different postings I was at. I never really understood it fully then (History isn’t so much fun to learn when you have to sit exams for it!). I saw the big parade televised when I lived in Delhi, it was a day off school and I could see the North and South block buildings covered in lights for several days from the flat I lived in Delhi.

This day is a big deal for which there is a lot of preparation, even more so than the actual Independence Day of India, which is actually on the 15th of August.

Lit up Buildings in Delhi on Republic Day

The 26th of January celebrates the date on which the Indian National Congress party declared the Independence of India on 26 January 1930 and it’s political movement (lead by Gandhi) for full self rule or Purna Swaraj. India was eventually granted Independence on 15th August 1947 and there was a sort of interim government for a while that was run under The Government of India Act 1935. On 26 January 1950 India transformed into a fully fledged Republic and a constitution of India was adapted. And so officially this is now celebrated as the Republic Day of India.

There is a big parade in Delhi on the day which the public can see. There are floats that display the culture of different states in India which are quite interesting as there is a lot of variation of culture within the states of India. And there are displays of Military equipment and a gun salute. The Indian President’s speech is equivalent to the Queen’s Christmas speech in the UK and watched nationwide. In the embassies around the world the Indian ambassador hosts a party and the flag is raised in celebration. I went to a few of these parties and they were fun, the biggest social event of the year and a big gathering where you get to dress up in traditional Indian clothes and all. There is a really great air of celebration on the day.

There is a special guest to see the Delhi parade, usually world leaders and previously the special guest has included the Queen and a British Prime Minister. So it won’t be long until my invite for DonkeyBox to play a rocking gig at the event

In India it is really just another celebration of India’s independence and transformation into a modern day democracy and a secular state with a lot of variety of religions and cultures. It is the world’s largest democracy by population. And the formation of it is a pretty good cause to celebrate.

The Iron Lady – My Review

I have to admit that I am not much of a cinema goer. Usually it is a social outing of some sort that will get me out there. And in the case of The Iron Lady it was a Friday night family outing while I was doing some residential tutoring. However, I have to say I was quite impressed by the film, and hence this blog post!

The film is done as a flashback from the aged Mrs. Thatcher’s point of view and memories that are triggered off. The central theme behind her recollecting and looking back is the loss of her husband and how she is coping with it. And I can certainly sympathise with this since after losing my dad I’ve seen the effect it as had on my family. So, from a personal point of view we get to see how her relationship with her husband was and how she misses him now. We also get to see how her daughter Carol Thatcher is the one who is still taking care of her aged mother, while the son is now living away in South Africa and distant.

I guess what made this film quite good for me was the history lesson that it had in it. I wasn’t living in the UK when she was in power so it gave me some idea of the events of the 80s and early 90s in British politics from a film point of view rather than reading cold facts.

She goes into flashback to her earliest memories in politics, that of listening to her father’s speeches as MP to Grantham. That bit I didn’t actually know about and it should then hardly be a surprise that she went into politics. However, when she did go into politics she was one of the very few women in politics and it was quite a job breaking into office in a largely male dominated arena. You have to respect her what she achieved in that era.

And her rise to the leader of the Conservative party is also quite a story against some big odds. But she overcame all of this to eventually become the first female prime minister of the UK. Then there is the politics itself which were covered in her random memory flashes. Her coming close to a terrorist attack, the reforms and cuts she had to make and her policies in privatisation. She was a determined and strong leader and push through quite a few things.

But it was exactly that forcefulness that was to be her downfall, she mentioned the cuts as “delivering medicine to children, they might not like it now but it is what is good for them..” or something along those lines. The other members of the Tory party of the time were plotting behind the scenes, understandably so as she always got her way and was in effect running a dictatorship in her own party towards the end. The characters played by John Major and Michael Heseltine are just about recognisable and amusing even.

Her role in the Falklands War is particularly well shown. Despite being under a heavy backdrop of heavy cuts and American advice on not to attack, she went ahead anyway and she took a very good gamble in doing so. By winning the Falklands she became a sensation and hero and now I finally understand this whole Falklands War thing a lot better.

So, I was glad to learn a bit of history in the cinema in a nice film and drama kind of way and Meryl Streep does an amazing job in playing out Thatcher. Having said that I can’t see anyone outside Britain being too interested in Thatcher and in that sense this is a UK film really rather than an international one.

And whether you like her or not she was quite a character and it says something that a film has been made for a Prime Minister who is still alive. I can’t think of any other ex PM who would be interesting enough to have a film made for them, can you imagine a film being made for Tony Blair? Yeah I thought not!

2011 Blog Stats in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,900 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 48 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

And so that was 2011

What a year 2011 has been, it hasn’t been a wild roller coaster but definitely had two distinct phases unlike 2010. At the earlier part I became a victim of my own tutoring success and had too many students to tutor away from London. As a result I spent most of the first part of the year out of London (most of my London friends thought I had moved out!).

The band definitely suffered as a result of my long absences and the fact that we didn’t have a bass player compounded to our inactivity. This at times was heartbreaking but I knew this had to be sorted as soon as I was done with the school tutoring year. I somehow still managed to keep a social life in London and kept doing most of my main things here.

I went nuts in the summer and enjoyed some rock festivals and travelling out. But there was a price to pay for no longer tutoring in Yorkshire, where I had a strong client base. By being out of the London tutoring loop it took me another few months to find local clients. I had used up all the money I made earlier in the year as I looked for London work. It really was a case of boom and bust all within a matter of a few months! But I am glad to say that I have found clients here now.

So as a summary here’s what I think are a bunch of cool things I accomplished or happened to me in 2011:

• Faced some of my worst fears, things I had been putting back for 5 years..but this year I did it
• I helped a student that was written off by his school to not get any GCSEs whatsoever to eventually get a grade C at AS Maths
• After living in the UK for 19 years I got a British passport, it was a great feeling to be able to travel freely now
• I forced myself to write new songs for the band, I got into a comfort zone over the last 2 years and it was time to break out from a rut
• The meet-ups I started last year for my Rock Bands in London group got better and better this year
• Despite a number of setbacks I got some band t-shirts printed, this had taken me 2 years to finally get done!
• I saw more small and big gigs in one year than ever before
• Collaborated with Ariel Hyatt of Cyber PR to arrange a meet-up after her talk in London
• Performed at quite a few open mic nights on my own, especially earlier in the year and made lots of new friends that way
• Went live on air on to a radio phone in about tutoring on LBC Radio London!

Looking back at all this, and as a result of organising so much travel during tutoring, for holiday, and organising my band diary I have become very very tight with scheduling and organising and I feel so much more in control of my schedule in general now.

Something tells me 2012 is going to be a landmark year, I will curiously look at this post when I am doing my review of 2012. Thanks for your support all this time and of course for reading this blog!

Entering the T-shirt Business

I had no idea how difficult it was going to set myself up as a t-shirt salesman, it turned out to be quite a project. So much so it is worthy of it’s own blog post under the “DonkeyBox” category

I have been asked for DonkeyBox t-shirts a lot! And in 2009 I found a designer who was designing flyers for us. She designed us a cool new logo, which gave us a newer edgy identity, which I think was necessary as Crap Day and DonkeyBox were giving us too much of a goofy, jokey identity. Without changing the name she made something edgier and more in sync with our music.

So in 2009 I had promised a t-shirt was coming to fans and now I couldn’t find anyone to print them at a good price. Time went on and by 2010 I tried an online t-shirt company that could print and deliver one off t-shirts. Bingo! this surely had to be the solution right? Not quite, with the logo and just one graphic the t-shirt came out to be £17 including delivery. This was way too much already and I really couldn’t sell t-shirts even at this price (where I would make 0 profit) to fans. The company didn’t do bulk orders either.

The most expensive t-shirt I ever bought

I was now stuck and the t-shirt idea was dead and buried, just way too expensive. Luckily on the way to the gym where I live there is a t-shirt printer and I walked in and start chatting to the guy. As the band’s first gig in 2011 (after a 9 month hiatus) was coming there really was no better time to get these t-shirts to print.

But there was another hitch, although the unit price to print each t-shirt was easily sub £10 there was a set up cost that added to the total cost. I was skint by this stage as it was September and I hadn’t tutored for 2 months, I really was on a big low in terms of money. With no guarantee of return I wasn’t going to find any investors so I took some money out of my savings account and went for the advance order!

I told the t-shirt printer guy that I simply couldn’t afford a print run of 20 t-shirts. He kindly reduced the print cost per t-shirt but couldn’t reduce the set-up fee. At this point I hit another hitch. The t-shirt had been designed about 2 years ago but our designer was now totally awol, she had dissapeared off the earth man! And I needed a vectorised form of the design. I certainly hadn’t got a clue how to do this on my own. So I scrambled an appeal on Facebook and Twitter and one of my friends found a friend who is a professional graphic designer. However, this vectorisation cost me money that I didn’t plan for

But I went ahead anyway! I paid everyone out of my savings and got some t-shirts printed eventually just in time for the gig. I just about managed to keep the costs low enough to make a tiny bit of profit from selling the t-shirts. What was important to me that the t-shirts don’t cost more than £10 to fans.

I am glad to say I have sold some t-shirts already, and even sent one to Japan. So there you go, whoever thought it would be so difficult to get a bunch of band t-shirts printed at good value? And now that the print has been made there will never be a set up or vectorisation cost again. The t-shirt printer can use the print mould he made earlier and each repeat order is cheaper as now there is no set up cost and I don’t have to pay a designer!

Despite the many setbacks, I knew t-shirts is something loads of our fans would enjoy and I am proud to be now a t-shirt salesman as well. While I could’ve given free CDs to friends all over the world (at a personal loss of £1 per CD plus whatever postage and packaging I paid extra) I’ve had to be very disciplined by not giving away t-shirts free (despite the temptation). Being skint taught me a valuable lesson in cutting costs, sticking to your guns, haggling with suppliers and going for it solo when it comes to band investments like this.

Kindle 3 – My Review

2010 was sure the year of mass marketing of the “tablets”. There was the iPad, the iPhone 4 and the Kindle 3. And I sure was influenced enough to buy two of these products last year. The iPhone 4 I reviewed earlier. I was going to review the Kindle 3 but have only gotten round to it now (this blog draft has been sitting on my folder for over a year now!).

My Amazon Kindle 3 next to a pen

My first impressions of the Kindle 3 was that it really is very very light and the text on it feels natural and pretty much like print. Unlike computer and phone LCD screens the Kindle 3 screen does not throw light at you and so it is way way better to read from. I read it just like I would read a book or newspaper.

I didn’t actually read any e-books when I first got the Kindle 3! I went straight to playing with the “Experimental” features, notably the web browser. It’s a basic browser and can only open one window at a time so clicking on links can get annoying. However you can read things on “article mode”; which renders the text for a website beautifully and almost print like. This makes web blogs a lot easier to read. For what it is the web browser isn’t bad, you can even check email on it. If I knew how useful the web browser could be I would’ve paid the extra money to get a 3G rather than a Wi-Fi Kindle, as you get free internet access anywhere in the world with that! And I sure travel a lot so this would’ve been very useful.

As for e-books, after having owned a Kindle 3 for around 15 months I still haven’t bought a single Amazon e-book. The reason is that they are way too expensive, almost always the print version is slightly cheaper than the Kindle version. I believe this is for VAT reasons or something. In any case I have continued to buy print books from Amazon rather than switch to e-books. In their defence however there are a load of classic books available on e-book format for free, you just need to find them.

Although I don’t read Amazon books on the Kindle I do have loads and loads of pdfs as books. This is the great thing about the Kindle 3 that you can read pdfs as well. Although I have to add that the pdfs can’t be viewed in larger text form and you are limited to the text size offered by the original document. Kindle files on the other hand let you change the size of the text to suit your eyesight and personal taste.

I use my Kindle 3 regularly to read e-books in pdf format and read websites in article mode. This to me have been the most useful features of the Kindle and I am pretty sure I use the Kindle daily. The other experimental feature of the Kindle is to use it as an mp3 player. Forget about that because there is no listing of the mp3 while it is playing and no way to change files and songlists etc., easily.

One last note; I am pretty sure I broke my screen within two weeks of buying the Kindle 3, it is so light that I thought you could just throw it into the rucksack with other stuff like guitar gear and things. The Kindle 3 screen is probably as sensitive as your normal LCD touchscreen so you will definitely need a case for the Kindle. My Kindle was replaced for free thankfully and I bought a case immediately and it’s been cool since then.

Would I buy the Kindle 3 now? No, I would probably buy a smaller touchscreen e-book reader now as there are loads of new ones on the market that could read pdfs and websites a lot better.

India 2011 – Education of Women

So my stay in Delhi this year ends and I have seen a lot of things and heard a lot of people. I love meeting people and hearing their point of view, and the point of view is quite different here. So my last blog post was inspired by a visit to one of my cousins and how she has educated her daughter.

According to Statistics today women in India account for almost 50 per cent of enrolment in higher education. 20 years ago, this enrolment was less than 25 per cent.

And my story demonstrates this nicely. My father’s family are still quite poor and living in rural India they as farmers just about managing ends. My mother’s family are better off, they live in the suburbs of Delhi so now they have access to better facilities and education. The uncle on my mother’s side got a very basic education and worked as a mechanic for the Delhi buses. He had a son and a daughter. Partly due to cultural reasons and partly due to poverty, 19 years ago she was married off at the age of 16. She was two years off from her GCSEs still but was now married as a housewife.

My cousin and her two children

At the age of 17 she had her first child, a daughter. I visited my cousin this time and she regretted not being educated further and also remembered her last few days at school. She didn’t like Maths apparently (obviously not tutored by me then!). 18 years have passed and her daughter has now started at University and is a fluent English speaker. Her mother is really happy in the investment she made in her daughter’s education and to complete what had been left.

A similar story resonates with the rest of my mother’s family in Delhi and the current generation of girls are not only more educated than the previous one, but they are not being married off as teenage brides! So this has been really heartening to see and I am proud of my nieces and cousins.

However, the situation is not so good in rural India where my father came from. But they do have a local school next to them so hopefully the same success can be repeated there too as I have seen girls and boys in equal numbers there starting off at primary level. Hopefully I can report on that when I delve into rural India next year. Something I missed out this year.

India 2011 – Dogs

Man’s best friend has a very special place in the UK, no doubt about it. They make a great pet and a dog is for life, not just Christmas. And having tutored and lived at so many families I have gotten to be friends with a few dogs myself, taking them on walks and throwing sticks for them to catch. I’ve met quite a different types of breed too.

The story in India is different. Pet dogs are not that common here and dogs are mostly visible as stray dogs. These dogs quietly live their lives in the daytime scavenging whatever food they can get while roaming about from street to street. At night when things are quieter stray dogs come to life on their own. You can hear some barking and howling sounds at night as the rest of the sounds quieten. On the whole stray dogs are pretty harmless and not much of a nuisance. I’ve heard some nightmare stories about Bucharest though!

Go on boy, fetch!

Getting too close to a dog is feared and the prospect of a bite means you don’t see the same level of affection for dogs here as you would see it in the UK. Stray dogs are seen as one of the pests that are out and about. They may be stoned and shooed away if they are straying too close.

One of the main reasons for this general dislike of dogs could be that in Hindu stories such as the Ramayna, Mahabharata etc,. dogs are seen as dark creatures that are related to the god of death, rather than say the monkey god who has a very special place indeed.

I’ve seen dogs here in the past in some pretty sorry states with their scrawny look and sometimes quite literally on their last legs. But more recently the dogs I have seen seem to be fairly healthy. And dogs are of course used as guards and by the police here as well. So man’s best friend lives on and co-exists with the rest of us in the urban jungle.

India 2011 – Eid Holiday

India is a secular state and as Islam is the second most practised religion in India Eid is an official Bank Holiday. And today is that holiday.

Around 13% of India’s population is Muslim and 13% of 1.2 billion equates to it being the third largest Muslim nation in the world. This may come as a surprising fact but if you think about India’s most famous monument the Taj Mahal, it will be obvious that this is an Islamic design.

My sister's photo of the Taj Mahal last year. Taken from the side.

Islam arrived in India in the 12th century and it’s mark in Delhi is very visible. A lot of Old Delhi has a strong Islamic feel to it and there are some of the world’s large mosques in India including the famous Jama Masjid. My mother grew up in an Islamic area of Delhi called Turkman gate. And later on as a family we also lived in Yemen and Libya.

Happy Eid from me, or Eid Mubarak!

India 2011 – A Load of Cobblers

So a week since I first landed in Delhi I have settled into life here well and it almost feels like I never left last year. And I am beginning to take this daily sunshine as granted! As I get into the swing of life here I can elaborate on day to day life and the little things that make it so interesting and different.

A load of cobblers.

This is a cockney expression from East London. Given that I now live in East London and I have just got some precious shoes fixed by a street cobbler, I felt it was time to give the humble Indian street cobbler some cyberspace coverage!

Although shoes, sandals and flip flops (also known as chappals in Hindi) have become cheaper and cheaper the role of the street cobbler is still pretty relevant and visible in India. You can find him sitting at most street corners and he will repair shoes while you wait or within a matter of hours on the same day. He is hard working and does his work in the daylight hours. If anyone has to bear the Indian Summer heat the most then it has to be this humble and hardworking cobbler! He literally spends hours in temperatures of 40 Celsius and higher in the summer months.

Delhi street cobbler fixing some shoes while his client waits

My precious right shoe had a slight tear, it’s a great fit, versatile, stylish and comfortable. I wanted to keep this pair of shoes so I took them to a shoe and key repair shop in London.  I was told that the tear was not exactly along the sewing lines so they could not fix it. The Delhi cobbler didn’t see any problem with this and gave it some strong stitches. After almost a year my shoes are back in action and it feels good

And he charged a very reasonable Rupees 20 for it. That equates to 25 pence in British money. Respect to the cobbler dude, he is self employed, he earns his money in the hot sun and he deserves fair praise for his under rated craft.