my new office, on the veranda

Settling in continues -- this hasn't exactly been the smoothest transition into fieldwork, but I keep reminding myself it's for the long haul. Apparently, most Indian entrepreneurs of note are in New York, supposedly selling 'Shining India' as an investment hub, but certainly visiting cousin this in Boston and my son and his family in this place called North Carolina. So as a result, interviews are starting out slowly. As is phone and internet connections -- the bureaucracy, even in the private sector, seems absolutely obsessed with proving that you're actually living where you're living. This has to come into fairly constant friction with the myriad different informal arrangements that scatter the social landscape. I'm certainly living here relatively informally: renting a room in a house without the explicit knowledge of the relevant authorities, because I'm only here in this city for four months and because it's very little benefit for quite a bit of hassle.

As far as I know, most of the people I know here are living with one level of informality or another -- and these are mostly journalists and academics, not street-hawkers -- so I simply don't understand a system that requires people to prove through government stamps and notarisation that they live where they live.

As for informalisation: I've just discovered that the one free wireless network I can find is on the front porch -- the veranda in this part of the world -- in which there are several comfortable chairs, a couple of lights and a tiny little garden at my feet. There's even a plug! So I get to bask in the very first evening breezes of autumn while being connected in spirit and through electronic media to friends and loved ones far away. This arrangement might actually work: the outside has more privacy (or less proximity) and less stuffiness than my room, and it will only get cooler and cooler as the year goes on. I see the first sprinkling of yellow leaves on the sparse grass in the garden, and playing at the tyres of vans and trucks speeding east-west through the boulevards with overhanging trees.

I'll save my love-song to autumn for when the weather really means it. Otherwise, there have been other moments of splendour: meeting a brilliant young writer, spending time with other friends, and at this moment, a civil breeze coming in from the street. Points of hope among bureaucracy and officiousness that tend to be the currency of social life here.