I fear this is the longest title in the history of my blog, which in a way suits its topic well. I just finished the biggest book I have ever read, actually a collection of books under the title „The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, by Douglas Adams. It comprises the original Guide and the other four books in the trilogy.

I bought it in Palo Alto before my real traveling started, and it has lasted me well into the second quarter of this year, of course as frequent visitors of my blog know with another big and some small readings in between.

Once again, my generally high esteem of artists‘ late work was reinforced — while the original book is funny, the later books are far better. I laughed my hardest reading the second last one, „So Long and Thanks for All the Fish“, and the last one, „Mostly Harmless“, apart from still being very funny, I found most insightful. That despite how I just read on Wikipedia the author himself describing this book as „bleak“, and saying he had a very bad year when he wrote it. I suppose that tells us something about the relationship between art and happiness…

Anyway, here are just some examples of important topics of life made understandable with the help of absurdity, Science-Fiction at its best.

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Hatte heute schon meinen ersten Tag als Physiklehrer in Form 1 und 3 (entsprechend Klasse 8 und 11) der Sekundarschule in Kagondo nahe Bukoba, wo auch Justus mit Familie wohnt. Und bin so bewegt, dass ich gleich was dazu schreiben muss.

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I was so happy to see the familiar face of the Action 5-friend Justus in the crowd in Bukoba and put an end to the aggressive offers from several taxi drivers. From then on I was in a constant flow of events attending a bunch of official occasions with him, who has recently taken a political office next to his work and his activities for Action 5, and reminds me of my good friend Johannes not only in that he seems to be able to do with very little sleep.

The first was the anniversary of a Catholic hospital in Kagondo, appropriately with a lot of church Honorables who held long speeches, and good choir music (with percussion).

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After recently meeting a bunch of people who have to go without meals frequently, I was naturally very interested to read an article on reasons and solutions for world hunger, by two researchers from the „Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, or J-PAL“ at the MIT, which is an excerpt from a recent book they wrote.

After some more illustrative than enlightening back an forth on the „hunger-based poverty trap“ (poor people cannot eat enough to be strong enough to earn enough to eat enough) and examples of how poor people make choices that cause malnutrition themselves (spending money on tasty but little nutritious food or on non-food luxuries, mostly entertainment and drugs) they get to the point, and a quite interesting one. Here are some of the central ideas.

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In catching up with blogging (I was both very busy and very offline for the last weeks) I continue in English with mostly some commented pictures. Please bear with me, the next more content-intensive post is coming up (even though it will be again in German I’m afraid). My 10 days or so in Kenya were very good, even though I arrived with a cold that kept me in the house for some days, and caught my second diarrhea in this year just a few days after recovering from the cold.

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This (for now) last India blog will also be an English-and-mostly-pictures one. Even though I feel in many ways I sped through the country and spent most of my time in different means of transportation, I’m happy I divided my time between „India“ and Auroville as I did, mostly staying and working in the latter. I also feel that it was good to take the traveling „slow“ (that is, slow means of transportation) even though I traveled fast in terms of moving on frequently. Sharing the time in transit with the Indians is I think an experience that tells a lot about the country and the culture. And I get the impression that Indians themselves do that a lot — they spend a lot of time in cheap public transport.

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This will be a post of mostly pictures, and as you see another one in English to not discourage anybody. Again, no promises for the future There would be much more to say about Auroville, but I don’t have much time right now, and am in many ways already so far away that I think my next writing on Auroville and India will be concerned with differences between my Indian and East African experiences. So for now just have a look…

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I take the opportunity of writing about an English book to do my first English travel-blog entry. I still can’t make up my mind how I will move on language-wise, being torn between connection with my friends all over the world and the feeling of integration I get from reflecting on my experiences in my mother tongue.

Maximum City had been recommended to me by several people who’s judgment I trust, and still my expectations have been surpassed. I can’t remember when a book last spoke to me so strongly on so many different levels of observations, experiences and feelings. I can basically use some quotations from it as a sort of diary of many of my own experiences. A non-fiction book of almost 600 pages, a report of an Indian expat to the US moving back „home“ to Bombay with his family, but to me that is only the starting point, for especially continuing to read it now that I have taken in my first week of Nairobi I can assert that it’s topics reach much farther. The book starts with some very good glimpses of what a newcomer sees in India:

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Doing some research for my 10 days of travel in India between Auroville and flying from Mumbai to Nairobi, I was very pleased to find Wikipedia has a category for „Caves around Mumbai“. And then I had to smile reading in the description of the Mahakali Caves a wonderful example of how English sounds over here:

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Das vorletzte Wochenende hielt ein schönes kleines Abenteuer für mich bereit. Mit einem sehr netten Amerikaner, der schon lange in Deutschland lebt und sich als der ideale Reisegefährte und Gesprächspartner herausstellte, bin ich mit dem Motorrad ins drei Stunden entfernte Tiruvannamalai gefahren, wo es einen berühmten Tempel und Kloster („Ashram“) und heiligen Berg mit diversen Höhlen, in denen sich ein wichtiger Guru aufgehalten hatte, zu bestaunen gibt.

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