After an interesting stint away from Charchit and Bikram I was ready to come home.
Over the next week I settled into my research. The routine was: go to a cafe, buy the cheapest thing, and email people who knew way more than me about production and resource use.
We settled on the idea of following a product through its lifecycle (as a way of looking at climate change). So the research started out by looking for a lifecycle that was broad enough to encompass the large contributors to climate change: agriculture, energy, transportation, manufacturing. After about a week of research we decided a t-shirt would be best.
I started to buy groceries and pay for the internet (which is metered here) because the living situation was becoming more and more housematelike rather than the expected host-guest dynamic. This made me a little self conscious because as close as I was becoming with Charchit and Bikram (we would cook for friends together, I went to visit Bikram’s parents in Chandigarh) I still wasn’t confident that they would kick me out if they didn’t want me to stay.