This is a man's world ??

I attempt in my humble way to give a feel for life in India and Bangalore through this blog, and it also has considerable therapeutic value. Earlier this week I felt like giving up blogging having read Hemingway’s epilogue to ‘Death in the Afternoon’ – which managed to pack in more evocative detail in one short sentence than I manage in a several blogs worth. Reading ‘essential’, and very manly, Hemingway also seems to have affected some of my choices – I ended up with a macho DVD watchathon over the last couple of days Casino/Godfather Part 2/Platoon. I was also prompted to get a copy of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ which I did for ‘O’ Level several decades ago, and now am anticipating a dinner of barracuda and giant prawns.
I need to resist this and have put all the red tablecloths in a locked cupboard in case I feel the urge to try my matador skills with the local sacred cows, and I feel fly fishing in the local rivers would be rather fruitless. I clearly need to be careful with my reading, I will leave the ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro’ alone before flying off to Singapore later this week especially as my damaged legs have not completely recovered from rugby a couple of weeks ago.

Mrs Reiver has gone ahead, and it is worrying that she is finding it so reassuring just on the basis that simple things such as traffic, water and supply chains for food actually work there. Revisiting the OMATS was surprisingly pleasurable and I am hopeful that revisiting Singapore after living there nearly 15 years ago will be similar but I suspect it will be full of surprises. I may well miss the chaos of India, but probably not the dawn chorus of fighting dogs which woke me this morning. There are some linking themes through between the two counties, with Singapore operating its own ‘caste’ system but based on education rather than family history – as Mrs Reiver would point out these are however not independent variables. In Singapore there is also the concept of ‘Kiasu’ where extracting the most economic advantage out of every situation is celebrated, the same approach applies to interactions in India but on a more stealth basis. I will overtly extract maximum pleasure from my Singaporean weekend and possibly some covert payback if I happen to run into my ex Boss who still lives there – or maybe I have just spent too much virtual time with Vito Coroleone recently.