some of you may remember the story (earlier in this blog) or shared in our conversations over dinner, in Mysore, about Manjula getting her voting card.
She declared that her life was half over before she managed to vote. Well that set me on a journey to help sort out her various ID cards, in a sense to legitimise Manjula in the eyes of the state! This is still a very informal society, at least in some respects, so many people don’t have a birth certificate, know of their actual birthdate and maybe even just have one name. It is, of course, very important to get these things sorted especially if you want to do any formal business or even travel abroad. So this was to become one of our major projects. I immediately I realised there were all sorts of problems….
challenge. This, in turn has led to renting a house, furnishing it partly from the lovely things at Ritz Hotel, creating the cycle tours, registering the business, finding the drivers, herding the cats (aka drivers), spending money on lovely art and working out how to haggle so as not to always pay too much foreigner tax, getting a visa every few years… to mention just a few of the different examples of being tossed out of our comfort zones, into the wild unknown. But I wonder if the latest one is a stretch too far….
Me and MYCycle 