Election update - news just in...

Ok, I do love the Indian elections after all. Sounds like English Country Walks have some competition...

Shiny shiny, shiny boots of leather

I'm normally a cheerfully grubby shoes kinda guy. But earlier this evening I passed a shoe-shine maestro on the street, looked down at my feet and said 'aw, go on then, you've talked me into it'. In fluent Marathi, obviously.

So for the next ten minutes I get to watch a real professional at work. I can't help thinking that he's far better as his job than I am at mine, but then he's not alone in that... When he's nearly done, a little kid wanders along from nowhere, grabs my shoes and the man's brush, throws on a little more polish, and attacks them with gusto. Gives them some real humpty, too, no messing about. Two shoe-shiners for the price of one! Bargain. (Although in size terms, it was really only one and a half shoe shiners.)

Any allegations that my newfound interest in shiny shoes is prompted by a desire to use them as a mirror to look up girls' skirts will be firmly denied.

Smalltown boy

Whistling In The Dark is a new book assembling a series of interviews with Indian gay people outside the big cities, whose lives are not just illegal (albeit with a law that’s almost never enforced) but almost entirely invisible.

At the launch at the Oxford bookstore, we meet a middle-aged, working-class man talking freely of his secret double-life, completely unknown to his wife and kids. Ok, so people still live like that in the UK too, forty years after legalisation.

But what doesn’t happen in the UK is those men appearing at Time Out-listed book events in the nearest big city to their home. It’s a sign of how massively stratified this society is: the chances of news of his appearance filtering back home are basically nil. The world of book launches and the world of ordinary life in small-town India are, well, worlds apart.

The gaping chasm between the lives of India’s classes is in most ways a vile phenomenon; but perhaps one of the benefits of gaping chasms is that you can shine a little light in.


No milk today

I pop into a big shop to buy a little milk. But they don't have the one that I know is ok. This is a tragedy worse than anything devised by Sophocles. So I spend ten minutes comparing the small print on eighteen different cartons of milk looking for the sacred text: "No Boiling Required".

Eventually, I track one down, to the sound of a choir of angels singing in my head. Joy unconfined. It's amazing that when you know next to sod all about how to live in a country, and you know full well that you know next to sod all, the shrapnels you do know take on an importance of epic proportions.

Flaccid election

Bombay voted yesterday. The first election since 26/11, part of the biggest democratic exercise the world’s ever seen, etc etc. You know the drill: rallies, placards, long lines of voters, intimidation, maybe the odd bombing, all good developing-world election fun. Except that none of it happened.

You wouldn’t have actually known there was an election in South Bombay yesterday, but for the fact that most companies gave their staff a day off so the city was really quiet. I plumped for the train home after work and had almost a carriage to myself, when normally at rush hour you get less than a square foot.

But it seems most people just took it as an extra holiday and cleared off.