Monday 27th January

Saturday was fairly uneventful, I spent most of the afternoon recording these songs for Miss Shanti and we went to the beach at four. When we came back, Rev JP had moved in. He's an okay bloke really, though he's one of those who'd disapprove of me saying so. He's been around a bit and worked as a teacher in Bangalore about thirty years ago. He's going to stay in three parishes while he's here and try to find out how unified the CSI¹ is.

He went to Veerambal for the Harvest Festival yesterday. He's a bit of a 'Stevens'² when it comes to sense of humour and most of my jokes go straight through him and he says things like Do you really think so? Now that's interesting... and No, I don't think so.

Everything you say seems to trigger some 'interesting' anecdote and we've had Norwegian Pilchards In Malawian Village Shocker and other stories. He's brought some classical music (Vivaldi!) and still eats dosai in the morning, rice for lunch and Iddlys for dinner. He has only been here for two weeks. I think he thinks we're pretty awful eating wheat flakes and English food. But we did have nothing but Indian for six weeks when we first came. There's a limit to how much a man can take.

The Republic Day celebrations were quite interesting - all these chubby soldiers marching around (the Ramnad Police) and then a few speeches, Giving Of Gifts to the Poor and Impoverished and dancing. The Schwartz Matriculation dance was really good and the 'costumes' didn't look too bad! There was an amateurish motorbike stuntman who fell off his bike into the crowd. He only held each 'stunt' (ooh look, I'm standing on my seat! No wait, there, no... no.. I got it, there!) for about two seconds before losing control.

C. was feeling pretty rough and had to have a lie down for a bit while I ran about with my camera.

We went to a house group worship (invited by Juliet) in the evening which was fairly Tamil-ish and they had some terrible taped songs to listen to which I'm sure God doesn't like. We were given an English bible which had lots of interesting things in the back about prophesies, history journeys etc, so we read through that. Juliet came and translated the speaker's testimony for us.

He'd been a Bad Boy, all violent and drinking and sweary but now he's nice.³

The thing is, he's happy now, everyone likes him and his family don't get sick any more. The woman who was running the group is an ex-Hindu who is a much happier Christian. But most Hindus don't understand the really spiritual part of their religion. in fact it's like they believe what they want to. Their stories are really dodgy as well, it's like us saying that Robin Hood and King Arthur were Gods.