I gave him a list of places I wanted to [...]]]> I was fortunate in the taxi driver I’d hired for a day-long tour of New Delhi highlights chosen from my guidebooks and research. First of all, he showed up on time. He was dressed in a clean shirt and trousers. A promising start that he eventually fulfilled.

I gave him a list of places I wanted to visit. He actually studied my list . . . asked a few questions about why this and why that . . . made a few suggestions, which I accepted . . . and then revised my list in a logical and do-able sequence. I really enjoy encountering professionally competent people.

Unfortunately, probably due to my own carelessness and incompetence,  I’ve lost my notes for that day. With the exception of a few scraps of paper, they are gone.

To make matters worse, when I got home a month later, I discovered that the CD onto which I had transcribed the day’s photos (along with once-in-a-lifetime shots of my days at the Taj Mahal) was somehow damaged. Meanwhile, I  had reused the camera chip and over-wrote whatever might have been stored there.

Attempts to read the disk only revealed there were 232 photos, but nothing more than their assigned numbers and date. No images. I tried many recovery software programs. None worked. I turned the disk over to various “experts.” None were able to display the pix.

But some 5 months later, while in downtown Manhattan with a few minutes to kill before an appointment with a client who wanted a web site makeover, I stepped into a photography shop on the north side of Chambers Street, a few steps west of Church Street.

Shortly thereafter, for a $10 fee, I had a new CD with all the pix restored. Some of them can be seen in the “Delhi Day Tour” posts that follow.

It was a poetic example of competence at opposite ends of the world. The recovered images appear throughout this journal