Sunday in Kolkata

Sunday was the last day of classes in Kolkata. The morning was less hectic since we already had all the material at the venue. There was an energization class early afternoon for the intermediate meditation class. You see a picture from that event. I also saw one of the guards getting curious about what everyone was doing and joining in the fun. The other picture is some wild horses across the street from the Academy of the Fine Arts where the classes were held.

We also served tea in the mornings and afternoons. It is interesting to see how labor is divided among different people. First of all we had a person assigned to our conference room the whole time, he is like a guard outside, and he also monitors the room occasionally, making sure we are not doing something in there that we are not supposed to do. Most of the time he sits outside by himself or chats with friends. They have shifts so the person may change from morning to afternoon. Some are very serviceful and they are very grateful for any tip (bakshish) they might receive at the end of the day (Rs. 10 goes a long way, since I heard they make about Rs. 100 a day). One day our guard was directing the tea person on where to place the hot tea dispenser on our registration table. We asked our guard to turn the pot 90 degrees pointing the spout the other way. Instead of lifting it up and doing it himself, he called the tea person and have him do it. They do not touch each other's tasks. Similarly if we need chairs arranged for instance, if we start doing it, they don't touch it, even if that is their task. We also found out that they most typically don't listen to women. If Suzanne asks them to do something, they don't do it, or they procrastinate on it for a long time. If I ask them, they do it right away. So, after a while Suzanne stopped asking them to do anything. She asks me, I ask them and it gets done.

Since the book and registration tables were outside the conference room in a public area of the academy, we had a lot of people passing by and browsing through the books. The "spirit-in-nature" essences drew the most attention and most number of questions. We also had people stopping by and sharing their own "spiritual wisdom" when they saw we were selling spiritual books.

At the end of the day on Sunday, we still had 11 boxes of material remaining that we had to ship. We wanted to ship them to Mumbai to use the books/CDs at the next event. GATI is the company Ananda uses here. It's like the Indian version of UPS. They are supposed to come and pick up the boxes when you call them, but finding a person who'd do that proved impossible on Sunday. Their supposedly 24hr international call center didn't answer calls. The local office we found (which also said 24hr on their logo) was closed on Sunday afternoon. I called a dozen different numbers, only one of them answered, but no one spoke English. If I ask them "do you speak English?" they say "yes", but that seems to be the only English they know. We ended up lugging all these boxes back to our hotel (I am sure the bellboys were saying, "oh no, not again"). I called the local GATI number on Monday morning, found an English speaker, who gave me a cell phone number, and finally I was able to arrange a pick-up from the hotel. Things went smoothly from that point on, they were on time.