A Tour of Fort Kochi

One of the most attractive features of Fort Kochi is that there are things which change little over the years. Our first encounter with the autorickshaw drivers who have specific pitches in the tourist areas was on our very first visit and most of the crowd who hang around the Malabar House Hotel are still there.
Salim, with his clean and well-maintained rickshaw is one of the most ubiquitous and persistant. He was our "Ferrari Man" who rebuked us, he kidnapped me and tok me on a whirlwind tour of the tourist shops one afternoon and always stops to chat.
On our last visit, in February this year, there he was. I stopped to chat, and although he probably didn't remember me stopped whenever he saw us and introduced us to his current ride.
His tours of Kochi are recorded by a satisfied customer on YouTube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPrxsVlDTEkthisvideo

Great tour of the spice market!

At last the paperback is going to appear.

I've finally pressed the button on the paperback of my book and it will be out at the end of the week! These last couple have weeks have been like one of those dreams where you keep trying to do something and then get sent back to the beginning to do it again.
My proof copies arrived in three days, printed and delivered from the US and it was really weird to have a solid copy in my hands. The cover has worked OK, much to my astonishment, and I thought that, after four proof reads, I was home and dry.
I found a mistake the first time I opened the book and all the page numbers on the first couple of chapters had gone squiffy- again. I was rapidly losing the will to live, when enter Richard. My friends from Stroud arrived in their caravan for a week of forts and military tunnels, and while not crawling around underground and when it was raining they volunteered to proof read for me. Richard used to edit very long technical documents and in no time the poor old proof copy was bristling with markers and covered in pencil. Just what was needed! He did a very thorough and accurate job and I can't say how grateful I am.
He didn't get all of the typos, inconsistencies and bad grammar, however, as I proof read it again, for the fifth time and found a couple more daft things. Then back to Amazon to fight their review process and go round in circles a couple more times before I finally pressed the button today!
This is it folks, warts and all and very scary.
It will appear in about three to five days and then the real work begins if I want anyone to buy it. That's a good question.

The Fort Kochi Lorry

One of my most enduring memories of Fort Kochi is the lorry. It sat outside the police station in Fort Kochi for years waiting the resolution of its court case, getting more and more forlorn and more and more spattered with bird poo and draped with vines every time we saw it.
It seemed appropriate on our last visit that it was gone, replaced by a selection of broken and deserted autorickshaws which would probably be gone before they got to their day in court.


The owner presumably did not have the money to release the vehicle, and possibly not the driver.
One night, on his way home and possibly a little fuddled from toddy, which he denied ever drinking, Narayan swerved to miss a cyclist and demolished a wall and the front of his car.

Anil was called to the police station in the middle of the night, where a terrified and intimidated Narayan was trying to explain that if he hadn't demolished the wall he would have demolished the cyclist. Large amounts of money changed hands to prevent the case going to court, a process which could have led to Narayan being in prison for several years and the costs going even higher.
To make matters worse, he lied about his age. Although he was properly licensed and insured, the police inspector thought that he was too old to be driving and took his license away. On reflection, and a further sum of money, it was only taken away for a year. This was bad enough as it was his means of support and there is no social security in India.An additional stress was his usual futile attempts to amass enough money to make a good match for his daughter.
Narayan spent the year working as "security" for Anil's brother, possibly as a night watchman and we doubted whether we would see him again. In the end he turned up at the wheel again, as cheerful and as gung-ho as before.

Ripped off already!

The Kindle version of the book has been up for just four weeks now and already it is appearing on a website as a free download. No, I am not going to tell you where!
I didn't go into publishing it with the idea of making money, but it would be all the same if I needed to recoup my costs.Having spent a career fighting other people's attempts at copyright infringement (well, OK, not too aggressively at times, but always with an eye to not doing it where possible) I find this galling.
How dare people take ownership of what I spent four years producing?
I have demanded that they take it down, which they say will take 72 hours if they decide to do it. Amazon say it is my responsibility to get it removed as I have an agreement with them which says I must not sell the e-book elsewhere. They are not bothered that their links are being hijacked by a resource which then gives their books away- strange, as it is essentially stealing from them as well.
I am not sure I have the energy for this crusade, but it is pretty unfair on those who are trying to write for a living, so I suppose I'd better join.

The Paperback is on its way!

At last, after about ten attempts, I managed to produce a file which was acceptable to the non-humans at Amazon Create, and then acceptable to the human file checkers.
The non-humans seemed to have the most awkward requirements, each check coming up with a different,and increasingly obscure, problem.
The last objection was that some characters were appearing as squares on page 2. There never has been any text on page 2.
In desperation I produced a Word-translated .pdf file and after some grumbling, this was OK.
The next job was pricing. Boy is it expensive to produce print-on-demand books! Having had to choose a price structure which effectively makes me want to apologise and say I'll lend everyone who wants to read my book my own copy, I had to go with the arcane methods and choose a price which means I won't exactly get rich on royalties, but that was never the idea.
So now I am waiting for the proof copy to make its way from America, bearing in mind that the 4th of July will hold everything up.
Still, hate Amazon as you might, I can't fault their systems on this. There is no other way I would be able to have a real book in my hands and a world-wide distribution.

Beggars; to give or not to give? 1.

Mark Tully was asked one how he stood the poverty in India. He answered that he didn’t have to stand it, it was the poor who had to put up with it. This is the only sensible way to face down the guilt which can creep up on you as you sweep past those whose lives are fettered by the need to earn their paltry 100 rupees a day when you have thousands of rupees to spend on just a fortnight. Conscience stalks you all the time in India and our consciences should have been heavier than most. We were encouraging people to use up the planet’s resources to visit one of the poorest places in the developing world cocooned in the luxury we probably did not experience at home.

How did we appear to the people we met on our journeys? Did they resent the fact that, as previous colonial masters, we were coming back to see the results of our handiwork? It seemed not. Everywhere we went we were greeted with curiosity and no animosity. Well, accepting that I did not actually repress anyone a hundred years ago, why should I be blamed? We were often told that the English gave India its two most worthwhile things, the railways and education. This might have been stretching a point in Kerala, but we had left the already liberal education system in good shape. The Civil Service was also beloved of Indians with its clearly defined routes into prosperity and its jobs for life.

On reflection, did I resent the super-rich who had taken over the London I used to live in, the Russians and Chinese, who bought homes and visited them rarely, if at all? I did not. On the rare occasions on which I rubbed shoulders with those with substantially more resources than myself I found them wanting in their intellectual and spiritual lives. Accepting that I was a complete snob, I was happy to play the game with those who wanted to travel to India in a sanitised, smell-free, voyeuristic bubble. I was more sympathetic towards those who wanted the India experience but who were worried about their own reaction to the descriptions of poverty they had heard from others. Not giving to beggars is a sound principal wherever you go in India. There are levels of exploitation and downright badness in Indian society which are hard to grapple with. Orphanages open up at the beginning of the tourist season and close at the end of it, tour groups being shown the wonderful work which is being done with street children who are then back on the street.

Most tour operators have charities which their clients can donate to and we had contacts with an orphanage in Tamil Nadu which was struggling to establish itself. We visited and were overwhelmed by the love and care given to the children. They were all focussed on one thing, to get an education so that they could help their struggling families. Few of the children had lost both parents, most being taken to the home because their parents, or mostly parent, could not afford to keep them any longer. Here were children with disabilities, whose parents were alcoholic or disabled themselves, children whose previous lives had left them scarred and afraid, and we saw children who helped each other, were happy and fed, and who were totally aware of the advantages they were being offered. Krishnamurti and Elsie gave themselves totally to the care of their fifty-strong brood, both money and time and a great deal of love. We were humbled by the visit. There was not a lot we could do apart from try to divert some money their way, little enough for them confronted by a big new building project.

Their work is still going strong. Visit their web site at http://www.hapsi.co.uk/index.html

or the Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/awakemercyhomedgl?fref=ts

and of course send them money. You can be sure that every penny will go where it needs to, to the education and care of the children.