You know, after two and a half years (flipping heck!) in India, I really shouldn’t be finding the hodgepodge approach to the English language funny anymore, but every now and then I feel compelled to photo and share some of the unique ways English is being used here in India. The photo below was taken from a nice little vegetarian restaurant around the corner from my apartment that I went to...

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The wonderful thing about living in India is how many unexpected, weird, cool and bizarre things that can happen to you at any moment and any time. Sometimes it can be particularly special and they happen all at once. For this reason I always have my camera on me where ever I go because you never know when the unexpected is going to happen – although having said that, I guess I’ve got to...

Warning: this blog post is not for the squeamish! I’ve become somewhat numbed to the shock of seeing so many bugs and animals in the house since coming to India, but the I thought the bug that I saw the other day deserves a special mention. I’m quite used to seeing ant super-highways snake their way round the kitchen wall, I’ve killed more cockroaches than Rentokill and peacefully...

Chennai, India. 10:20pm. Despair. So the England football team have lived up to the darkest secret that all Englishmen know in their hearts. We are shit. Not just poor. Not bad. But truly abysmal. Every football fan knows that England is a team of individual superstars that just can’t play together. And yet every tournament the English media builds up the team and raises the expectations of the...

Regular readers to my blog will know that Saturday evenings have turned in to my day of discovery as I stumble across various cultural and exotic goings on. A few weeks back I found myself in an art gallery watching a famous artist draw a picture of a cat (and buying art, who knew?), then it was the youth cultural exchange program that was taking place outside a big temple by the sea. This Saturday...

Sunday morning, 8:17am. I have been asleep for approximately 5 hours. There is a knock at my door. I ignore it, what sort of cretin knocks on the door this early on a Sunday? The door bell goes again. I continue to ignore. It can’t be the maid because she has come to learn that no recognizably human life can be found before 10am, so it can’t be her coming to clean. It rings again. I turn...

In keeping with the Saturday evenings of culture and learning (like the traditional Indian dances I saw the other week when we came across the cultural exchange show), and in a rather depressing sign that my youth and partying days are drawing to a close, I got invited to an art exhibition inauguration event by my friend who had some of her pieces featured. The exhibition showcased work from the final...

The population of London is thought to be hovering around the 7m mark, although obviously if all the Aussie contingent suddenly got bored of rain, cold and snow, this would take a drastic dip to 6.5m and Walkabout bars across the city would go out of business. By comparison Chennai is thought to have a population of around 8.2m, but like London, this figure varies widely depending on how you define...

One of my friends here in Chennai is a classical Tamil singer. The guy is as American as a Ford pickup truck, but he’s discovered a talent for the ancient and somewhat obscure art of warbling (which I’m reliably informed is actually singing). If you want to hear what it sounds like point your cursor over this link and press the left mouse button. We are always being invited to hear him...