Anu here. Lots of you want us to identify who's blogging, so we'll try to do that. It's been yet another news-filled week in India, so apologies for the thinness of my blogging efforts. Just to add a couple of wacky signs to Tarquin's previous post. This one has been helpfully posted in the stairwells of our office building. I had a surreal experience the other day. There are six lifts which service this 17-story office block: 3 lifts in the front; 3 in the back. None of them stop at every floor. Instead, there is a list above each lift of which floors it stops on. There is no rhyme or reason to it, except that one life only goes to floors 0-3 (it is called the executive lift). And one goes only to the 17th floor and back and is kitted out with silvery disco mirrors.
So here i am a couple of weeks ago, on the 5th floor, trying to go meet someone on the 17th floor. A lift stops. I get on. It only goes to the 16th floor. I'm forced to step into what is a very dangerous construction site with exposed wires, men with sledge hammers and the like. I try to take the stairwell up one floor. The doors are welded shut. I go the back lifts. I wait 12 minutes. One finally opens. It is filled with barefoot little men in rags carrying several tons of dry cement in dozens of plastic sacks. I wait for them to unload......
The scene at a tollbooth outside of Delhi last night: as I approached in a taxi, one man flagged down my driver. It was his job to flag down vehicles. The tollbooth was manned by another man. Sitting on a chair outside the tollbooth sat a helper, whose job it was to take money from drivers and hand it to the man in the booth. He performed this function and then took the change and receipt from the man in the tollbooth and handed it my driver. Another man stood in front of the booth writing down license plates in a thick ledger. Beyond him, sat four policemen on plastic chairs. They did not appear to be doing anything. After my driver finished paying the toll, the barrier in front of us was raised by yet another man. Next to him stood his colleague who waved us through. My driver drove on. In the seat next to him sat a ‘driver’s assistant’.
No, it's not Paris or London.... but Delhi's swanky new metro. In fact, at the moment, it's better than Paris or London. Tickets are 12 rupees each (about $0.25). It's quiet, mostly empty during the day and can whizz you from Connaught Place in the centre to the cramped lanes of 
The other day, we went to the cinema, and a large woman, swathed in
an expensive purple sari barged her way to the very front of the queue and
tried to get ahead of us. I'm usually docile in such matters. But some
deep seated sense of injustice suddenly reared its head (or maybe I was just being selfish).... and I put myself squarely
between her and the ticket counter, damned if I was going to let her get her way. (She did anyway, and everyone behind us just shrugged and
said, 'What can you do with such people?') Then today, a motorcyclist
nearly crashed head-on into our car, because he was on the wrong side
of the road. His reaction? He stopped short and gave a lovely, sheepish
smile. (I guess he was thinking, 'Fate has spared me again.' Not, 'I
should stop driving like an idiot.')
