Day 8 – Tuesday 28th April

Today I was excited to get out of bed early for a change. The occasion – a warm shower! The club hotel offered many services, but for my room at least a warm shower wasn’t one of them unfortunately! It wasn’t a big problem, apart from the first brave leap into the cold flow of water at 8am. I would usually start with the arms, take a deep breath and then jump and hit the icy water head on.

Anyway……

From the shower and after nice buffet breakfast, we were collected by Santosh who whisked us to the first of our two scheduled appointments for the day. It was to a government all-womens college. With 3,000 students enrolled aged between 18-22 it was an impressive institute. The campus was big and seemed to be expanding or renovating everywhere.

We were in a meeting with the heads of various departments and the head of the whole institute. The meeting left myself and Mark feeling extremely positive, more so I would so then after the meetings with the two institutes in Mumbai. It turns out that the college has been eager for international partnerships and once we have sent them a letter outlining possible collaberation they will present this to the ruling body for permission to accept and then get the ball rolling. They have a Psychology department, big sports pedigree (they expressed a keen interest in the elite sports squad when we explained it to them) and also student counsellors amongst other things that we can see potential in. Again, we will explain in greater detail about the intricacies of what was discussed but we felt very encouraged by their interest, enthusiams and the opportunities that were discussed.

The meeting lasted about 2 hours and their excitement at our presence was obvious with the head of one department taking pictures of the meeting at different times and then the events that followed. They took us into classrooms to say hello to students, took more pictures of us all and introduced us to academics including the science department!

The academics from this department then took us around their labs and museum also. Their reaction to us was very kind and flattering. Mark in particular was treated like a rockstar with myself and Santosh following him and his fans! (we talked about the biggest snakes he had seen in India while walking around the labs watching Mark sign autographs!)One of the science academics then asked me if i was a student which was also amusing!
They were all extremely welcoming to us which wont be forgotten.

Summarising, we feel highly enthusiastic about a future fruitful collaberation with the institute.

We moved on then to have a fantastic lunch in an Afghanistan themed restaurant. It was superb food which we thoroughly enjoyed. From there we had a quick walk through the market and then onto our final appointment with an NGO that Santosh had close contact with.

From a personal point of view, I left this meeting feeling the most positive I had after any on the trip. The guy we spoke to – Ashok (from SICHREM) was really friendly and explained what work they did. Myself and Mark immediately saw great ways in which we can collaberate to mutually benefit both parties. There are many options which I believe could raise our profile significantly and recruit students. These possibilities don’t seem to complicated either, but I will stop there before my enthusiasm for this one spills over into another 4 pages for this blog post!

From the meeting we headed back to the hotel, thanked santosh and went for swim in the pool. Later in the evening we enjoyed an hour and a half of free drinks – which is always good I admit!

And its now 12.15 here so I will finish this by slurring ‘goodnight!!’