Schliersee TV

It's been surreal. After the Munich-Dubai-Mumbai flights, I undertook a 30-hour train journey to the southern city of Chennai and then spent 8 hours on a rickety bus to the temple-town of Thanjavur. To say hello to my mum, leave most of my luggage (with all the heavy winter clothing D&F provided us) at her place and eventually move on again.

On the train, there was the usual cast of an Indian second-class bogie: eunuchs prodding for money, beggars tapping, ticketless people squatting at the door and spitting outside, their bags blocking the way to the loo, and all this straight after autobahns and Bayrischzell.

The bus was a little better, although it rattled all the time. It was nice to see green rice-fields again and I kept wondering how the countryside- the buffaloes, the shoddy small shops- would look to some of the people from the project. To Florian, for instance, or Darcy.

My Dreamplan began to seem elitist and unlikely. Whenever I've returned to India before it took only a day for things to feel normal and familiar again. This time it's been different. The tickets of my journey feel like spins of a crystal ball or time-machine.

Deepak had one question throughout the project: why is Germany the way it is, and why is Nepal backward and poor? My response then was that it depended on what you considered wealth and development, that the Western yardstick wasn't necesarily appropriate everywhere, that a country that didn't have highways and automatic doors could still be wealthy in other ways, in its culture, in its music. Now that argument feels academic, and the question feels real.

There was this one moment when that 8-hour rickety bus stopped at a traffic jam. A length of dust began to curl around the seats, lit up by the sun and egged on by the honking. I was fiddling with my wallet, and I began to find business cards. Among them was Oya's card, the most recent one, and it felt incredibly surreal, as tangible evidence of something fantastically impossible. Oya Ogurcu, designer from Istanbul. It still carried, unmistakably, her perfume.