Mother's Day Special

I've been a largely uninspired blogger. Of late and in general. I'll take this Sunday morning to make amends, which will be appreciated the most by my most avid reader/reminder-that-i-don't-update-enough: my Mom! Happy Mother's Day!

Sometimes it's not easy to feel like a diplomat when you're sitting in Hyderabad working the visa line. We're a visa mill. A factory. A manufacturing plant. A conveyor belt. It seems like our only real goal is to get through as many visa interviews as possible. When you a slog through 100 a day, coupled with the ensuing paperwork, that gets tough. The hardest part every day is simply the disconnect between how much each interview means to the applicant...and how little it means to the interviewer personally. It's grueling to take that on our shoulder, if you're the type of person who cares about people. And it doesn't make help to have a growing stack of paperwork as the number of applicants continues to grow, even as we're not ready for it. The result is i come home tired, swim, play on the internet and go to bed.

Sometimes as I'm stirring a six-foot metal pole in a red-hot burn barrel, watching sensitive-but-unclassified information melt into toxic white smoke (HYD is, after all, too new/small/insignificant a post to warrant a heavy-duty paper shredder), i bemoan the here and now and wonder why exactly the United States has sent me on diplomatic assignment...to man a burning barrel...

But the past two weeks have felt far more interesting. Almost, gasp, like I've found myself in an exciting, dangerous, fanciful profession:

- planning and strategizing with the regional educational advising coordinator over dinner. battling through eggplant to get to the much tastier dal.

- giving a long-planned tourist visa presentation for 80 travel agents and travel industry professionals at one of the nicest hotels in town. battling through 2 hours of questions with helpful but calculated answers that come pretty easily after four months here. seeing self in newspaper.

- invitation to join in drinks and dinner and conversation at the Secunderabad Club, a ritzy country club i'd have no business visiting in the United States, but it feels right here.

- helping two first-time public speakers get prepared for -- and nail! -- a presentation in Medak, a town a few hours west of Hyderabad. Mission accomplished, except i learned that my training plan needs to expand a bit in at least one area. the local staffers fielded the ole "does the united states discriminate against muslims?" question and could only muster a "no comment." Of course we can comment, because there's an important (especially in these parts) answer to the question: No.

- the braised lamb at Ruchi and Idoni.

- an assassination attempt on a local politician in the Old City. possibility of violence, tempered many think because it was Mulsim on Muslim violence, not sectarian. he's transported to a hospital 150m down the road, which has been periodically blocked the past week now by marching mourners.

- a close 7-6 loss in tennis doubles.

- after ten years, the USG finds and eliminates the world's most dangerous terrorist. he'd been hiding in pakistan all along, closer to India than the Afghanistan. americans feel good about america and our president. indians feel justified in hating pakistan, discuss starting their own raids into pakistan territory to hunt terrorists. consulate security seriously strengthened.

- checking out a potential permanent apartment...and turning down the chance to request it because it doesn't meet the same standards as the rest of the housing pool. not feeling too bad about being picky.

- playing tourguide and friend to visiting DC-wallahs. patio dinner at Our Place, a nice new restaurant.

- meeting the foreign commercial service. flowcharts, but no chipotle. yet.

- tailgating with Miller Genuine Drafts in the middle of the dusty Deccan Plateau. first live cricket match, even if the Deccan Chargers went down in a blaze of glory.

- dinner with the Indian Foreign Service classes of 1983, 1984, 1985 at the Indian School of Business. hobnobbing amongst mid and senior-level diplomats at Hyderabad's ten-year-old business school, which already ranks #13 among all business schools in the world, partnering with peers like Wharton and Kellogg.