In India it takes approximately five men to do one man’s job, five more to overlook the process and a further five men to comment loudly on it all. Pretty convenient considering its ever-swelling population, or perhaps it’s an evolutionary trait. Did they start off with just two men to work, two to watch and two to scream about it? It’s quite difficult for me to imagine such a slick set-up since I first travelled to India in just 2003. Maybe we should invite a couple of local employment experts over to Europe to advise.

It even took me two days to get on a bus – I missed it on the first day. I did try to get on it but was refused access; mine was apparently the next one. Four hours later, after asking five different men, at five different times, and getting the same response each time – delay delay, wait wait – five men working together managed to work out that my bus had indeed departed four hours earlier (only one hour late).

48 hours and my fingers are already yellowing. Thankfully this is not because I’ve started smoking again, despite how attractive diazepam-loaded (and clear-skinned?) backpacker couples may seem to make it. Exaggeration aside, it is only the fingers of my right hand which have so far got it on with the dhal. The only time my left hand has touched food is to help rip a tough chapatti.

It’s very difficult to decipher one’s effect on Indian men. I answer the stereotypical questions honestly:

“Which country?”
“UK”
“Ahh, very beautiful country. You marriage?”
“No”
“Ohhh, you age?”
“25”
“Yes yes, you parents?”
“Yes”
“Ohhh, ahhh…”

One thing is for certain, the nudist couple on the front of my Calvino book, who have solicited much guffawing, are not doing much for my reputation.

I’m already the local nutter magnet. A deaf and squealing young waiter from the opposite restaurant firstly proffered his dangling, tikka’d and fried chicken legs, followed by his skinny but taut biceps, followed by his self-harm-scar-covered forearm. For his final serenade, he wrote “I love you” on his dirty palm (pictorial evidence to follow soon).

There is so much idiocy in India, so many ridiculous things I could choose to write about, so many orthographical faux-pas’, so much wildlife, man-love, life, death, but apparently “Delhi police wish you all a bright future.” There are also giant LED countdowns for traffic lights (I might suggest this to Boris – the potential relief from that blind impatience is palpable).

Travelling alone in foreign countries is brilliant, until something goes wrong and then it feels devastatingly abominable. In India, solitude is therefore a continuous roller-coaster. So far seemingly a productive roller-coaster… No postcards yet, but perhaps blogs are the postcards of the future. After all they are nearly free, accessible to nearly all (my grandmother is my only exception), and have the capacity to contain far more platitudes, useless information and bad photographs, and good photographs naturally (see above at some point in the future, perhaps). I thought I may as well make this a long one, seeing as my 10 days of voluntary silence are imminent, and you never know, they may well eliminate this egocentric desire to spread some sort of seed.
It was a noisy, bumpy bus journey from Delhi last night (though the man next to me was the most polite and subservient bald and toothless person I have ever sat next to – a Buddhist monk from the Tibetan refugee camp in Delhi – we almost spooned for a while) – please excuse any insanity. A bientot, peut-etre.