16th Jan: Work and Shopping

So when you go to the shops what do you take....

Well today I took, a torch, mosquito repellent, toilet roll, a map and sterile handwash. I went on a journey to find a tailor to make me some shirts. this was based on a recommendation by Michael Johnson who was here last year that you could get good quality shirts here made for a very reasonable price.

Do you know what the tailor charges to make a shirt? 110 rupees that is £1.60 for someone to spend an hour or so making a quality shirt. Can't believe it so I went to another shop and bought some material. I'll go back to the tailors with the material and drop them off. A few days later hey presto new set of shirts for work. Fantastic.

The ride from the tailors to the textiles shop was the scariest yet in a rickshaw. It was hilarious, we hit a couple of motorcycles, missed a bus by some miracle. I thought I was going to lose a kneecap at one point as well.

What I have noticed today on the rickshaws are the comedy horns that they all have. In Madurai it is all the old fashioned horns that you squeeze the rubber ball to make the noise. I think they are all unique so when there is a swarm of rickshaws its funny as anything.

The only noise I didn't here from the horns was a clowns aarroogahh followed by doors falling off. I did see the closest thing to road rage today between a rickshaw and a car. The poor rickshaw had run out of petrol or broken down and the driver was pushing his vehicle along when a car drove into him. The driver in the car start shouting, very peculiar.

On another note did you notice I have put a counter at the bottom of the blog, how cool is that? The only thing is that when I'm not on the blog site I'm wondering if the numbers have gone up. If I look at the site and the numbers are up I'm elated if it remains the same I'm gutted.

Follow the link check site stats and you can get lots of fancy graphs generated so I've become addicted to the stats site now. Its good though as at least I know now that some of you are reading this and not just sending the odd email encouraging me to waste time typing for my own pleasure.

The worry I had about all the coconut seems to be OK. The food in the guest house is really pretty good, however after a bit of toilet time this morning It did look a bit like what I was having for breakfast.

When we came here we were told to only drink bottled water which I thought I was doing but I caught the cook today filling up our water from the sink. Now given that I have had no effects so far I think I'm going to be OK but it just goes to show you that you have to be careful.

As for work today I met Dr. Aravind the hospital is not named after him, Aravind is a very popular name in India. He is a very cool guy, hugely passionate about what he is doing and very appreciative of the help that he is able to get from Adopt a Business. We were having a discussion about the fact that there can be great pleasure from doing something that is literally changing lives for the better. I told him that you don't tend to feel that way from selling software but he made me feel good as he said that without the help from IBM Aravind will not be able to grow the way that the need to get to 1,000,000 surgeries. So I'm playing my part in that hopefully.

What they are wanting help from IBM for is that to get to or exceed the goal they have set themselves they can't just do it with the 10 hospitals that they either own or are managing just now. They need to get up to dozens of hospitals, and they need a framework in place for people and leaders to thrive in as the culture, vision and beliefs are as important as the numbers themselves.

Its made me realize that IBM have over the years developed a very sophisticated toolset for enabling performance and leadership to be cultivated in the workplace.

Its Saturday tomorrow and I'm working, damn this six day week. Hopefully on Sunday I will do some more sightseeing I will maybe go a little further afield. I have to go and pick a place to eat at least as the cook does not work on the Sunday.

Have a good weekend everybody.