India

Journal

Wed 23 Feb 2011

It wasn't until 3-30 ish in the morning that I finally figured how upsetting such long flights were to both my body & spirit. Fortuitously we were in the right place at the right time & with the right guy to ask & got the right bus, air conditioned, that was luck too, . . . to get to Fort Cochin, where we wanted to go.

And the bus journey was a beautiful overload on my eyes, on our eyes . . . What's a good word for describing beautiful overload?

The road we took was a main road but not a main road as we know it in the UK. It was alive, a boiling mass of humanity, beautiful humanity, on every available square inch of land along the sides of this road seemingly turning a buck, absolutely anything to earn a bit of money.

Later, when we'd settled in at the second homestay, therein lies another tale, but that later, I reflected on how in the UK we'd standardized & regulated effort to the point where as a nation we were not entrepreneurial anymore, certainly not in the sense that I witnessed on the road from the airport to Fort Cochin..

This road was a main road, a serious of shorter stretches none more than a couple of hundred yards leading on one from another, both sides alive with every possible commercial activity at any achievable level of the entrepreneur . . . Mostly small & makeshift moving up to the more serious attempt at a business activity to the odd corporate Samsung store our Mercedes dealer, not many of the latter though.

We've strangled the entrepreneurial spirit with ' civilized' culture with standards & regulation . . . Gotta be more on that!