A Winter in India

When we were in Nainital one of the professors where we spoke at Kumaon University told us that Almora was full of old hippies. Sure enough, they are here, hanging out at the Internet Café. Old ones, young ones, English (one sure sounds like he’s from Manchester), American, Australian and a few French and German mixed in. We have heard more English being spoken in this tiny village than we did in Delhi!

Today we left our little village and traveled back about 10 km to Almora “City”. Well, it would have been 10 km, but when we got about 8 km towards town, the road was closed due to construction. So as an addendum to the blog on way-finding, we can now add that when there is a closed road there are no signs, no detour, and everyone just points randomly up and over the mountain and says go that way. So we had to backtrack about 6 of the 8 km and start over. So the 10 km (6 mile) trip that should have taken half an hour, took about an hour. The road on the back of the mountain was a newly paved road and very good, except in one part where they were still widening the road. That involved dozens of men standing on a nearly vertical rock face and chipping away at boulders with chisels and pick-axes. Luckily none came down as we drove by.

Lalal Bazaar, in the center of Almora, is a narrow lane of tiny shops. Off one end of it is an 800-year old Hindu temple. About a third of the way along, and up on the top of a ridge above the main bazaar, was a big courtyard that turned out to be the lawyers area. If hippies at the internet café are one example of the past, present and future all being in your face at the same moment, these photos show another example.

The top one is a sign for the National Informatics Centre. The federal Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has made a commitment to get internet technology out to all the villages, and to gradually computerize government record keeping. The sign is on a building that looks like it dates from the colonial days.

The second photo, taken at the opposite corner of the same square, shows one of the many people available to type up your paperwork or government forms for you, if you don’t happen to have one of these gigantic old typewriters of your own, or if you can’t read and write. As with so much in India, the future is coming faster for some people than for others.