If you’ve been following the most recent months’ blog entries then you may have noticed that there hasn’t been much mention of the reason I’m here in Delhi in the first place, that thing called a job. This is mainly because whilst I find writing strategies and campaign plans pretty damn exciting and think that every problem can be solved with a good set of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and well-Timed objectives…I realise that this is not everyone’s idea of an exciting read. However, rest assured I have been busy…
Over the last month in particular, the pace of things seems to have accelerated. This is partly down to the fact that we finally appointed an advocacy officer so I now have a partner in crime whose Hindi is thankfully a lot more fluent than mine and whose English is understood (I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve phoned someone and asked them a question, in English, and they’ve responded, “Maam, I cannot understand you. Can you please speak English?”). In meetings with Ministers and Officials we have quite an effective good cop, bad cop routine which we’re slowly refining. Often there is no good cop and we just alternate between us as to who gets to answer the, “but what can be done?” question that repeatedly gets thrown at us, usually after we’ve just spent half an hour explaining what they need to do. Having an actual advocacy team has also meant we can get our grassroots movements on the go, starting with a project to run some advocacy workshops with students at Delhi University. Again, when it came to meeting the students I was heavily reliant on my colleague to do most of the talking in Hindi whilst I sat by trying to pick up as much of the discussion as I could. My main contribution was answering their questions about how the provisions for visually impaired students in the UK compared to those of students in India. To demonstrate the guy sat nearest to me produced a rusty metal abacus that looked like it came from the 1920s and said, “is this the sort of thing you use in the UK?”
Something I’m still slightly grappling with is how to dress according to the weather but yet maintain a professional exterior. Sometimes, like yesterday, I fail. After a night of heavy rainfall and thinking I didn’t have any meetings outside of the office that day, I figured it would be ok if I wore my circa 2007 Converse trainers, still caked in last year’s festival mud. I also thought it wouldn’t hurt if I left washing my hair for just one more day (it falls out in such large quantities every time I wash it at the moment that I can’t afford to wash it more than is absolutely necessary). So it was unfortunate when an hour after arriving at the office I got a phone call to say that the person I’d been chasing for two weeks for a meeting had agreed to meet with us later that day. One very sweaty auto ride later I arrived dripping in sweat looking like I’d lost my way to Glastonbury rather than come to meet the Chairman of India’s equivalent of Ofsted (the education regulatory body for the country).
