By bluerasberry on 2011-02-17
At the railway station in Agra we ate at Comesum, which is a restaurant chain at railway stations. They offer Western-style fast-food service with both Indian and Western food. Also they advertise that anyone on a long train journey can call their central phone line and order food delivered to them on the train when […]
Posted in India, service industry | Tagged food
By bluerasberry on 2011-02-17
Nandan and I took a taxi in Agra and the driver wanted me to visit some shop. I asked Nandan what he thought and he said let’s check customer service in a tourist capitol. In the front of this shop there were marble workers toiling on the floor with all kinds of complicated equipment. I […]
Posted in art, India, service industry | Tagged service industry
By bluerasberry on 2011-02-16
Chandan, Nandan’s tour guide brother, recommended that Nandan and I go to a certain restaurant to eat. The food was great. Nandan was supposed to tell the staff that he worked with Chandan. He told them this and they gave something like a 20% discount on the bill. Later that night Nandan called Chandan to […]
Posted in India | Tagged food
By bluerasberry on 2011-02-16
Nandan and I went to a stage show in Agra. It was Kalakriti. The show gives a biography of Shah Jahan and the building of the Taj Mahal. It is a melodramatic performance of the historical facts with no character development. The scenes change with simple props and there are lip synced songs with dance […]
Posted in India, presentation | Tagged theatre
By bluerasberry on 2011-02-16
On February 13 Nandan and I visited the Taj Mahal. The architecture and the building’s history are very interesting and many people have produced media about these things. I want to write about four problems I saw during that visit: Monument entry Boy beating Queue control Filthy grounds I want to preface my stories by […]
Posted in India, legal, rights, service industry, tour | Tagged filth, police, violence
By bluerasberry on 2011-02-15
From Noida we went to Mathura to visit the birthplace of Krishna. I was surprised when Nandan told me that the temple had been partially demolished by Muslims to replace it with a mosque. This means that all of the three favorite sites of the most popular gods – Shiv’s Kashi Vishwanath, Ram’s birthplace in […]
Posted in animal, India, religion | Tagged monkey, women's rights
By bluerasberry on 2011-02-14
Nandan and I went to Delhi to attend Chandan’s wife’s wedding. She seems to think of many things relating to Varanasi as having the negative attributes associated with a rural place. The wedding had guns fired into the air as part of the celebration process. I talked with a lot of people there but did […]
Posted in education, health, India, research, tour | Tagged automaton, clinical research, school, vaccine, wedding
By bluerasberry on 2011-02-03
In Benares I met with Attila and Dora who have founded Chance India and Allen who is doing his PhD work on the means by which tabla are produced in Benares. They all seem like good people to me. I hope that I get to work with all of them. It is nice to be […]
Posted in India
By bluerasberry on 2011-02-02
Nandan and I left our Mumbai friends and flew to Lucknow. We visited Imam Bara and the residency and the haunted house as before but all this was just a backdrop for planning our next moves. At Imam Bara we paid for a tour and were charged triple the price we were supposed to pay, […]
Posted in gay stuff, India, non-profit, tour
By bluerasberry on 2011-02-01
Mantu told me that we were going to Lonovala, which is some kind of retreat town near Mumbai but of higher altitude. We took a train there and at some point in the train ride we were able to look outside the window and see the city below us. In Lonovala we visited cliffsides, some […]
Posted in computer, health, India