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As if encouragement were needed to blow horns Goats as we drive north Shrine as we turn into the farm Rather discreetly decorated Potato field Cows Stairway to the heavens Farmers Shadows on carpet Discussion Sparrow’s nest Well Amy interviews Rohit

We flew this morning to Ahmedabad, arriving at 11.30, and then were driven three hours north to meet a group of farmers. A moment of vertigo as I looked down the farm well, or one of them, to see no bottom and no obvious water. First time, I think, that I have seen biogas digesters in the wild, though these ones didn’t look that effective. Among the minor touches I liked were the home-made sparrow nests that had been tied to pillars around one of the courtyards, to help birds that helped hoover up the flies and other insects that gathered around the farmyard. Then three hours back to Ahmedabad.

Charcoal Richard, Amy, Azita, Rohini, me Selco awards Amy interviews Chitra Vishwanath at Biome Solutions My tent – the morning after Someone else on a journey as we leave

What a relief Bengaluru (Bangalore) is after Mumbai, with abundant signs of better urban management. We fly in on Jet Airways 2112, then make the long trip into town to see Rohini Nilekani – and learn more about her various initiatives, among them Arghyam, the India Water Portal and Pratham Books. Lovely to see her again and to see how her team is growing and her agenda evolving.

Next we headed over to another of my favourite social enterprises, SELCO, to see Harish Hande and his colleagues. I really like their pragmatic approach to appropriate solar energy. For more details, see here. Then we headed across in the dark to see Chatri Vishwanath at Biome Solutions, where we had a lovely informal supper with him and his team.

Afterwards, very late, we were driven into town to a top-flight hotel, only realising at the last moment – and after some 45 minutes of driving – that we were booked into a hotel near where we had started. So we retraced our steps, finally turning off onto a side road that became progressively more pot-holed, and where it seemed that the driver was having to steer around cows in their farmyards, while my heart progressively sank. Finally, we arrived at the Olde Bangalore Resort & Convention Centre, where it turned out that we our bookings had been switched to the original hotel we had arrived at an hour or so previously.

Too tired to retrace our steps yet again, we checked in – only to find that we were sleeping in tents, albeit ones appropriate to a very up-market African safari, with TVs (on which at least one of the team watched the World Cup ) and showers. I went to sleep with the sound of dogs howling, planes roaring overhead, and a rat or chipmunk gnawing at something under the platform on which my tent stood (I recalled my father saying that when he was in India in WWII he was kept awake by the sound of rats crunching their way through cockroaches).

The one thing to be said about it all was that the morning light gradually illuminating the fabric of the tent was lovely – and I prefer waking to the tropical dawn chorus rather than an alarm clock, even if it is several hours before I would normally fall out of bed. Compared to previous tented nights I have spent – including one with a grumbling appendix in Wales aged around 13 or 14, and another in France in 1970 where we pitched our tent atop a nest of the most vicious ants I have ever come across, that got inside our eyes and even more sensitive places – this was tented heaven. Biome Solutions had helped design the place, which is – or is next to – somewhere called Utopia. Hmmm.

Bandh clears the roads Bridge and skyline After the guests (or most of them) had gone

We are in India working on a new project with Bayer MaterialScience – and spend the morning at their Mumbai offices, hosted by Stefaan Gerlich. Later on, we do a teleconference with Kishor Chaukar of Tata Industries, who I know as a fellow member of the Board of the Global Reporting Initiative. We had intended to meet face-to-face, but the nation-wide strike (or Bandh) today makes travelling to some parts of the city difficult – or impossible.

In the evening, after the Bandh has wound down, we head across town to a dinner organised by Rajni (Bakshi) and hosted by Manjeet Kirpalani, who used to be the bureau chief of BusinessWeek, and is now co-founder of Gateway House, a fascinating new think-tank. Rajni’s new book, Bazaars, Conversations and Freedom, is available from Amazon, here.

Manjeet is on the far right in the final photograph above, while Richard Northcote and Azita Owlia of BMS, our companions on this trip are respectively far left and third from the left. Amy is in the pink – if I can trust my Leica. I’m looking rather formal. Outside, it was raining heavily. A wonderful welcome to this extraordinary city, happily at one remove from the agitations of today’s Bandh.

Glencot school photo, early 1960s

Was sent this photo today by Sam Hunt, who lives in Somerset, showing the denizens of Glencot preparatory school, near Wookey Hole, sometime early in the 1960s.  He is third from right, third row; my brother Gray, who would eventually become Head Boy, eightth from the left, front row; and I am seventh from right in the back row.

The school teetered between periods of intense learning (which I badly needed after weak schooling in Ireland and Cyprus) and, alternately, Harry Potter, Gormenghast and Lord of the Flies.

The headmaster, shown here with the adults, the Anthony Eden face and pocket handkerchief, was eventually committed to an asylum – which would have come as no great surprise to those of us who he routinely subjected to canings that wouldn’t have been out of place in a prisoner of war camp. But he also taught me a huge amount in key subjects, so I feel a considerable debt of gratitude to him, too. Complex.

Slum with a view – of how the elite lives Amanda and Amy Gate of India (detail) Equine illuminations  

Flew in to Mumbai today with Amy (Birchall) on flight 0199, bringing to mind the Beatles and Back in the USSR, though this was BOAC’s successor, the embattled BA. And Russia’s influence on India is way less these days than it was the Sixties. We are staying at the swish Renaissance Mumbai Conference Centre Hotel – where the view from my room, when I swish back the curtains, and fittingly perhaps, turns out to be of satellite dishes, skyscrapers and a somewhat cheek-by-jowl slum.

Delightful meeting with Rajni Bakshi, a long-standing friend, and then Amy and I head south by taxi to the Gate of India area, to see Amanda (Feldman), recently an intern with Volans – who also arrived this morning to start on internship with Tata. The Gate was the first landing point for many who came to India from Britain, but I found myself recalling the last British troops – the First Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry – passing through the Gate from the landward side in 1948, the year before I was born. Despite the fact that I was born post Imperial India, I have always felt both a profound connection to – and responsibility for the state of – the country.