Wednesday 26th

I woke up around 40 mins before we had to leave, got ready and had a quick breakfast and took the coach to the HR College. The first activity of the day was a game 'The Hollywood Stock Exchange', we had to trade shares in particular celebrities and try and make and make as much money as possible. The game did get a bit hectic with brokers buying many shares in cheap celebrities and selling shares in celebrities which did the best. The winners made over 6 million Rs. In profit and they said they did so by investing all their profit on Zac Effron.

We all then had lunch and went for a wander to the shops around the college. There was a really nice book shop close bye (Oxford Bookshop) which sold most of the books we have in the west at really cheap prices, and good value bollywood movies. We returned to the college to have a lecture by a senior member of the Reserve Bank of India, (RBI) even though I didn't benefit much from the lecture it did bring up interesting issues, we as UK students wanted to know what the RBI and the government in general was doing to close the ever growing divide between the rich and the poor. Even though he answered the question as best he could, many of us left unsatisfied by his response and we came to realise maybe he wasn't the person to ask these questions to and the cause and morbidity of India's poverty was multi-faceted, it was a problem which wouldn't be resolved quickly.

After the lecture we all left to see more Mumbai's sights firstly, we visited the RBI's Monetary museum where had to sit through 20 minutes of a video on the development of India's currency. K L K Our final stop was the clearing building; the building in which all the cheques in Mumbai are checked and verified. It wasn't very interesting but I still learnt something. Having seen the area of financial interest in Mumbai we headed back to the hotel for dinner, the hot topic on the coach was the government's attitudes towards poverty; it was an issue many people felt strongly about.