John Heron Project

Someone bombed a train near Mumbai. They still don’t know who did it, although Kashmiri separatists and Al-Qaeda stooges have been blamed.

I want to say something important and helpful, but words still fail me, like they did last night.

I’m praying for India, for the Muslims and the Hindus and all the other faiths.

Do they need my prayers? I don’t know.

So, that conference I went to yesterday (which is still going on, actually. There’s the plenary session today, but I’m unable to make that).

First, it was good to see Mukat Singh and his wife Jyoti, directors of the project (both of whom were delighted to hear about Tracy’s pregnancy) and a couple of people I had either exhanged emails with or met at other occasions (it turns out that a couple of the IVCS crowd read my APK blog, so I had a bit of “you’re the John Heron guy”, which was nice). Hari Dhanoo was there, a gentleman from Trinidad who had stayed for two weeks in India in the room next door to me and Paul along with his friend Raj Panday. Hari was as genial as ever, and we talked for a while. I was very sorry to hear that Raj had died in January, and I offered my sincerest sympathies to Hari, who now has the job of sorting Raj’s estate, because he died intestate.

Anyway, the conference. My notes are a lot scrappier than I thought they were, and I may be misrepresenting the speakers, but see what you make of it (full account beneath the cut).

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I’m not going to the Make Poverty History rally in Edinburgh tomorrow. I thought about it (and I know I’m missing something special; if you can go - go). But on the same day, in London, there’s the 2005 INTAF Conference, which is what I’m going to instead. When I was in Amarpurkashi, I was present at the Indian Assembly, where I was one of the people who helped draft the declaration the India group will be bringing to this conference. I’m only actually responsible for about one sentence of it. Which wasn’t bad, considering that most of the conference (from which we were to draw our declaration) was in Hindi.

Bit of a hard choice in the end, but the opportunity of seeing some of the India crowd won out in the end, and it means that my right-on credentials are still intact for a bit longer. Phew.

This morning I received a letter from Anil Seni, one of the lecturers with whom I shared digs back in Amarpurkashi.

Which reminds me - I still haven’t finished all the stuff I promised to do for IVCS. Oops. Better get back to the Hindi, too.