This weekend, profiting from the gap between Immersion classes, I managed another quick road trip. Alas without my young friend but with 4 colleagues so I wasn't completely Norman Nomates.

Our first port of call was the sacred Jain pilgrimage site at Sravanabelgola, about 3 hours from Bangalore. It's a small town perched between two of the granite hills that rise abruptly from the Karnatakan plains. On top of each hill there is a Jain temple and the biggest hosts the remarkable Gomteshvara. 18 metres high (!), hewn from solid rock in the 10th century, Gomteshvara depicts a Jain tirthankara (are you keeping up?) who achieved moksha (i.e. liberation attachment and rebirth) by meditating, bolt upright, in a forest so that vines grew around his body and snakes coiled around his feet. It's an extraordinary sight:


I was initially disappointed that the scaffolding from the Diwali celebrations was still up. But actually it's kind of cool because it shows that this place is still an important place of worship and veneration. The real time to come will be in 12 years time for the next Mahamastakabhisheka ceremony. Over a period of several days the statue is bathed in holy water and then anointed with "auspicious unguents" - sandalwood paste, saffron, milk, flowers and jewels. According to the Rough Guide, in 1993 the ceremony climaxed with a helicopter dropping 20kg of gold leaf, 200 litres of milk, marigolds, gem stones and multi-hued powders! Must have been amazing. The link above shows pictures from this years event.

We stayed for an hour or so checking out the statue (and the excellent view) before climbing back down to the town and up the hill on the other side. There's a smaller Jain site there and the light was wonderful - I really love this picture:


Coming down again we found that the smooth rock was popular with the locals who used it as a slide. Young and not so young they came hurtling down either on their own or in great convoys.


We spent the night in the hectic confines of Hassan, a town for which none of the guidebooks we consulted could raise much enthusiasm. But our hotel was clean and England won a cricket match so I at least had a good night.

On day 2 our destinations were the Hoysala dynasty temples at Belur and Halebid (which lets be honest we ALL want to call Halibut but still). At Belur we got a guide who, armed only with a tiny pocket mirror which he pointed expertly at the relevant sculpture, gave us the lowdown on the extraordinary decorations that adorn the temple. The sophistication of the carving is amazing - fashioning that kind of filigree in wood seems arduous enough but in stone it really was amazing.



So a great trip - plenty more photos here.

It should come as no surprise to anyone to hear that Indians love cricket. But it would seem that Indian lovers love cricket in particular. Why else would the commercial breaks during the ICC Champions trophy regularly feature ads for "Triple X flavoured condoms". And there's none of the this after the watershed nonsense - this is at lunchtime!

There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing for a while a week or so ago about when I'd be coming back from India. For a while it seemed imminent but now it seems fixed back at the end of November. But knowing that nothing is ever fixed in ThoughtWorks I thought I should grab some holiday while I could. So this last weekend my young friend and I headed off to Kerala for some r&r.

It was wonderful. We flew to Kochi/Cochin (I'm winingly inconsistent on that front depending how Imperialist I'm feeling), spent a night in the old town then a night on a charming houseboat on the famous backwaters before coming back to Cochin and flying back to Bangalore in the early morning.

Fort Cochin (the old town) was so quiet and laid back it just seemed a million miles from Bangalore. We wandered around for a couple of hours, found a most excellent cafe (to which we would return an almost embarrassing number of times in the course of the next few days), got the boat across to the new town, decided it was too - erm new and then came back.

It was then we discovered the miracle cure I'd been praying for.


Two hours later...



On day 2 we headed south to Alappuzha/Allepey (see note above) for our backwater cruise. We had a houseboat to ourselves plus a crew of three! Cruising through the backwaters, watching the world go by, reading some Arundhati Roy and playing a little Scrabble: reader - I honestly don't think I've ever done anything quite as relaxing.


On our last half day in Cochin we rented bikes and headed down to the old Jewish Quarter (charmingly known as Jew Town)...


before ending up back at our favourite cafe for more cake and Scrabble. I'm sorry to say I came out the loser in our cumulative scoring. But I think I did pretty well to be only 9 points behind after my young friend got all her letters out TWICE IN A ROW (first time with "BASTARD" - how's that for style!)

Jimmy Anderson casts an admiring glance at my Diwali lights...



Didn't help England much :(

No contest!* The Diwali mayhem is in full swing right now and it's fantastic. There are fireworks being let off in every corner of the sky, roman candles and firecrackers on the streets and rooftops, kids with sparklers on every other balcony . I've just been for a wander round my neighbourhood and there are mums in wonderful saris lighting fireworks with sparklers and displaying the kind of cavalier attitude to health and safety that guarentees a good time! If only it had the whiff of Protestant supremacy Nov 5 has as we burn Catholics in effigy on the bonfire I'd be happy. But you can't have it all.

* Of course I exempt East Sussex and the town of Lewes from that - their Bonfire rocks.

Happy Diwali one and all.

I was hoping that all the fireworks and illuminations in the last few days were a sign that Indians were taking St Frideswide to heart. No it turns out, it's all Diwali fun: the festival of lights.


But great fun it is too. We all got given Indian sweets in the office, doors are decorated with garlands, auspicious drawings are chalked on the pavement outside people's homes and there's lots of firecrackers, fireworks and of course light. Traditionally people light Diwas (see above): my young friend told me her family will have about 100 burning around the house. Nowadays of course there's a lot of amazing electrical lights and people really go to town decking out their homes, it's like Christmas in Chigwell....

Jon Ronson on Deal or No Deal in today's Grauniad.

That's our motto here in ThoughtWorks training..

Happy St Frideswide's day!

Tuesday's Afternoon Play on Radio 4 this week is available to listen again for a week. Not only is it written by the radiant Catherine Sheperd AND stars the magnificent thespian talents of Madeleine Brolly, but it's set in India which makes it on topic for the blog right now. What a win-win scenario!

The play is called Cats and Monkeys - here it is: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_play.shtml

Today is the first anniversary of the start of my second life. It's been a year unlike any other.

I read Dad's letter home after D-day again and if anyone else wanted to remember him today I'd love them to read it too.

I ought to mention that I'm still hard at work! Now that TWU is finished I'm working on ThoughtWorks Immersion which is our training programme for experienced hires.

It's a two week course and we are half-way through the October term. It's going very well which is partly down to the positive attitude of the attendees and partly down to the brilliance of the facilitators (of course!): who could not be powerfully moved by Jez's Tommy Cooper style instruction.

There was a nice event in the office this evening. Right now it's Ramadan and there is a small contingent of muslim ThoughtWorkers who are fasting. This evening they organised a communal iftaar (that's the meal after sundown when they break their fast as I'm sure you all know) for everyone. People tend to work fairly late round here, or if they aren't working then they are hanging out playing games of various sorts - it's quite the social hub. So there was a big crowd tucking into some delicious iftaar delicacies. Apparently Indian muslims like nothing better than a tasty biryani and it was absolutely lovely. That's some flavoursome multiculturalism!

Lots of stuff been happening. Nothing I can blog about though.... :)

All this brou-ha-ha over North Korea has one upside: constant references to the capital city. To my knowledge its the only capital city in the world named after the sound you get when you hold a shatter-proof ruler over the edge of a table and give it a flick.

My solicitor has just informed me that the sale of 5 Victoria Road completed today.

There is a not insignificant upside to this but it's still quite a poignant moment. That chapter of my life really is over.

I've just discoverd Craig Brown's wonderful 1966 and all that on Radio 4. Curses though that I've missed all but the final episode and that for some reason I can't listen again to the earlier ones. Is this due to the unique way the BBC is funded? If so I want a refund. Grrr

Anyway do go listen: it's got more puns and historical gags per second than you would think is possible. This week's episode is the 1980's and 1990's. Best of all it's got the glorious honeyed tones of Joss Ackland - what a voice!

I've learned a new word: bandh. We are having one today in Bangalore, indeed it's going on all across Karnataka. Can you guess what it is yet?

According to Wikipedia, bandh "originally a Hindi word meaning 'closed', is a form of protest used by political activists in India. During a Bandh, a large chunk of a community declares a general strike, usually lasting one day."

Jez told me that Gandhi began them as an act of non-violent civil disobediance. Turns out they were a pretty effective way of sticking it (non-violently) to the (British) man. Nowadays they have been declared illegal but, like today, they still occur and are efficiently (if unoficially) organised by the main political parties to make whatever point they want to make. The roots of this particulary bandh seems pretty random. Apparently "Kannada activists" (that's the language of Karnataka) are outraged by neighbouring Maharashtra's intentions towards the border town of Belgaum, which they believe are not entirely honourable. Read all about it in your soaraway Deccan Herald.

Pretty much everything is closed. Only Kannada language television channels are broadcasting - everything else has been taken off air. Our office is officially closed today as bandhs are sometimes accompanied by aggression towards scabs and strikebreakers. That is apparently very rare though, more pressingly from our point of view people who live beyond walking distance just can't get in as the buses aren't running and the strike is being rigorously adhered to by the auto-rickshaw drivers...


This has lead to an almost eerie quiet and calm on the streets. Airport Road runs outside our office and crossing it is typically an adrenalin inducing rush somewhere between bungee jumping and facing a firing squad. Normally more crowded than George Osborne's plate at a Tory party fundraiser, today one could stroll across in a leisurely manner and even pause to take photographs:

Today is mum's birthday - she would have been 75. It wasn't till yesterday I realised her birthday was in the same week as Mahatama Gandhi AND Desmond Tutu. What auspicious company (FOR THEM!)

Today is a public holiday in India to mark Gandhi's birthday.

I shall be celebrating by making my own salt and driving the British out of... hang on..

I had the very good fortune to be invited along to the ThoughtWorks India Away Day this last weekend, at the Kadavu Resort in beautiful Kerala. Although I initially quailed at the thought of the 9 hour bus ride to get there, when the bus arrived it turned out to be spacious and quite comfy all in all. Nevertheless it was still a long trip, made even longer by having to do three point turns around the tight hairpin bends as we descended the bumpy road through the Western Ghats towards the sea! We got there in the end and exited the air-conditioned coach into the warm moist tropical fug. Kerala turns out to be the hot, humid India I was expecting all along and now I have the heat rash to prove it :)

Getting into our rooms at about 3am it wasn't till morning that we really saw how charming our surroundings were.


Saturday was the main day of sessions. My colleague Marco gave a very interesting talk on his current project and how they have combined agile techniques with an offshore team in Bangalore and a UK-based client. It's still a work in progress but the story so far is impressive.

I had to sing for my supper, in a sense, as I was presenting my own session on Agile software development and Improvised comedy aka Whose Line of Code is it Anyway?. The idea began as a bit of a fun and light-relief at the UK away day but having done it at the Canada away day too I'm getting more and more into the idea that there is actually a useful message! The main point is that the way improvisers work together and harness each other's creativity without a script could help people on agile teams develop software without a big functional specification. (I'll stop there as I'm veering into dangerously work-related territory and thus violating the prime directive of this blog which is to "keep it shallow" wherever possible). Anyway I got a big turn out, and as I had rather suspected, my Indian colleagues took to it like a duck to water:


That was only the start of the comedy shenanigans in fact as some people in the office had written a sketch on XP practices in a Bollywood style for performance that night. Despite not understanding a word (it was in Hindi) or getting any of the film references (save for a brilliant rendering of the Columbia-Tristar and MGM logos at the start) it was hillarious.

But the real business of the Away Day is simply to get away, talk and chill out with your colleagues and there was ample opportunity for that. In the hotel...


on the house-boat trip....


or at the beach in Calicut (from where, it turns out, we get the word Calico*)


Good times.

*