Sunday Posts

My day two in Rome was , predictably , spent in Vatican . In sharp contrast to the squalor and graffiti of the backstreets of Rome , Vatican is a neat , fabulously wealthy , glittering affair . It is expensive too - a total of 22 Euros just for the museums - but it is all worth it being able to spend a few minutes inside The Sistine Chapel ( above , the photo I took before being told not to use my camera). But , while I, like many others , went to Vatican to see Sistine Chapel in person , the real show is in the St Peters Square . Being accustomed the Hindu holy places , which are bare and serene, the St Peters Square was very different from what I was expecting : This was , in my perception , more about power than piety . This looked every bit as imperial as the Roman ruins I saw yesterday . I was almost thinking of the idea of one unending empire , that of Cesare and Augustus , carried o...

Krakow: Where History Envelops Everything The Market Square & St Mary's: Where the trumpet stops halfway Gates to the old, walled city The Palace of the Polish Kings in Krakow The Market Streets The River Vistula from the Palace: Where the dragon lives

Warsaw: Where History Was Wiped Out and Was Built Brick by Brick Stanislas Poniatowski: The Last King of Poland University of Warsaw The Old Warsaw: Not The Concrete Jungle like the Rest The Polish Academy of Sciences

Wootz: Where History is best forgotten Ul. Piotrkowska - Lifeline for Lodz, and Europe's Longest Street As obvious, a Gas Station without Gas And, a ghostly side street The New Lodz, Infosys and all that

The Old Ministry of Culture Building - the Warsaw Landmark and a classic Big brother building The Images of Warsaw Uprising - from The Warsaw Uprising Museum

The English training business in India finally got launched - on the 28th September in Hyderabad. An interesting point in life for me - this took me three years of effort to get there. This meant bringing together people I have worked with for a while to make this project happen, and some of the new people I came across. For this launch, everyone came together - a happy occasion. The idea was to create a multi-purpose learning centre with a core offer of English language training. The problem of English language training indeed is that it is difficult to build a medium to long term offering, which means that one needs new students to sign up every month or so to keep going. This is the other end of the scale of the education business, where you need students in annual cycles perhaps. In India, a price-sensitive and highly competitive market for English Language training, it will be a challenge to establish a premium training centre. The business model will be a matter of negotiation an...