'Mazdoor Vikas Sangh'

Its been one week since PS started, and what a week it has been! We've come from changing buses at remote rajastan villages and travelling four hours everyday to find lunch that is cooked out in the open, right outside the industry (for the employees' convenience) and deciding to munch on parle g and tea instead and then falling ill towards the evening, to getting transport to pick us up from our hostel here and take us to our station in good time and getting packed and satisfyingly edible food. At the height of the atrocity, our indignity (and unity) reached an unprecedented milestone with the setting up of the 'Mazdoor Vikas Sangh' to protest our right not to have to be guided by incompetent apprentices who come close to committing homicide (and suicide) by almost guiding us under falling spouts of molten copper, or having pipes bursting on our faces and suffocating asthmatics with pure oxygen, or walking under pipes carrying concentrated sulphuric acid with such fine leaks that you can't see or feel falling on you or detect otherwise till your face starts burning on the side that isn't in the 45 degree sunshine.

The complex, leaving apart minor concerns about safety just mentioned, isn't all that bad; the technology is good enough to keep anyone interested busy for a while. Most of us have now found projects (or been forced to take them, in the case of some) that assure us that we will no longer have to take life threatening tours of the plants that seem to have faced such neglect that one might think they were set up as soon as the country got independence.

Evenings at Pilani are rather enjoyable, the place has a very homely feel and you can not say enough about the people's hospitality; leaving aside the infrastructure (which is undeniably growing at a commendable rate) this is one aspect of a campus that I feel Goa must develop if it ever hopes to be counted among the best in the country.

All in all, this has been one week of my life that would be hard to forget. And like Coelho would say, the whole world seems to be conspiring to make things better. Well enough for a memorable first post, we've got a test tomorrow and the instructor is rather particular about receiving feedback in the form of our PS diaries.

Cheers