Happy New Year everyone! Hope you all had a good night.

I decided to stay in Delhi - Friday I was feeling too sick to face the train trip to Nanital. Teo ended up staying in Delhi as well, he was afraid Nanital would be too cold. Apparently it was freezing, around 1 or 2 at night, although the photos Mauri and Paula brought back were beautiful. I'll have to check it out in a couple of months once it warms up a bit.

I went to see a Hindi movie on Saturday. 'Bluffmaster'. That's not a bad English translation, it was released here with that title. See, the main character is a master of bluffing, sort of like a con artist.
So naturally they came up with the title 'Bluffmaster'! On the whole it was actually a pretty reasonable little flick. It was partly a rip-off of 'The Game', including wholesale the final scene where Michael Douglas jumps off the building only to crash on to a big blow up mattress which has been planted there in expectation of his fall. But 'Bluffmaster' takes more of a romantic-comedy slant and was a little more 'zany', which is a word I don't use lightly.

I was struck by the costumes in the film. The girls were running around in boob tubes and mini skirts, which I had no problem with, but you never see girls in India wearing anything even remotely like that. Or if there is a place where they wear those clothes, I haven't found it yet. I mean, they will wear western clothes, but nothing too revealing. Most Indians, girls at least, seem incredibly conservative when it comes to things like sex and fashion (I've heard). Pre-marital sex is a massive taboo here. Guys are desperate for it and girls under massive pressure to avoid it. I don't know if that's all over India or more in the North, but its very strong here. Its funny because their music videos and films are full of references to sex and are very sexual themselves, but in reality society here is strongly conservative.

Saturday night I went to a small party with some of the other trainees here in Delhi. I wasn't really feeling too well so small and quiet was fine with me. At midnight firecrackers went off all over the city, including heaps on the street outside our house.

On Sunday Teo and I visited Gurgao, which is a mini-city on the outskirts of Delhi. It houses many of the major multinationals' headquarters here in Delhi, and is also home to several of the big Indian call centres. Lots of luxury apartments and shopping malls. Stepping into one of the malls is like visiting another country for a day - doesn't feel like India at all (except when you go into the movies and you get frisked - I'm not sure why they do this, I suppose they have a very strict candy bar policy). The drive there was the highlight - we got into a 'share-cab' with 10 others, basically a big four wheel drive, with a driver who seemed to think he was playing GTA. Some very insane driving even by standards here. At one point a car in front of us tried to make an illegal turn, temporarily slowing our driver down - so he reached out the window at about 40 km/hr and smacked this car on the roof for making him brake. Nice move.