I know everyone says this, but a little repetition never hurt: if you’re ever in a situation where you have to choose just one country to visit in the world, make it India. Having spent two months the southern regions of Tamil Nadu and Kerala last year, I can say with good authority that it’ll be an experience you’ll never forget. Even the wonderful ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ cannot quite cover the feeling of what it’s like to be really there, in a country of over 1,139,964,932 people, sixteen languages, seven major religions, and one vibrant, turbulent history.

It would be impossible to contain everything about my trip in this article, especially seeing as the six hour journey alone, from the airport to where I was living, filled six pages of my travel diary However, there are always highlights…

One special morning was spent at a wedding, although sadly, as a friend pointed out, being a westerner, I attracted more attention than the bride did! The expense of Indian marriages can bankrupt poorer families, and it’s easy to see why: this particular couple had cooks preparing (a delicious) breakfast for 500 people – and that’s an average size wedding. The saris were beautiful, the decorations gaudy, the bride rather frightened-looking – this was very much an arranged marriage.

However I had to eat my words when I visited the couple two weeks afterwards, as they seemed very much in love, and, if anything, she was the one in control, with a better job and higher ambitions than her husband.

One of the most gorgeous places I visited, even though it did involve an 11-hour train journey sleeping on a luggage rack, was Cochin, in Kerala, off India’s west coast. It has been colonised numerous times, as it is a perfect trading spot, but most notably by the Portuguese. It’s famous for “Jew Town”, a massive network of bazaars selling everything you could possibly want, but not actually need; the beautiful Synagogue, which is the oldest in the British Commonwealth; and the Chinese fishing nets, a bit like nodding-donkeys, which hark back to a much slower way of life. Cochin is also perfect for a break from other more hectic Indian towns, and there are plenty of restaurants that will quench any cravings for western food!

However, for the ultimate “Europe-in-India” experience, one must visit Puducherry, on the east coast, which was under French rule until 1954. The seafront promenade is like a rather run-down version of Nice’s Promenade des Anglais, dotted with numerous French cafés and a towering statue of Mahatma Gandhi, who sadly reminded me rather too much of the BFG. The mix of Catholic churches, like the Notre Dame des Anges; gaudy Hindu temples; and the wonderfully peaceful Sri Aurobindo Ashram, filled with flowers and dedicated to meditation; really justifies this town’s reputation as a melting pot of cultures.

Needless to say, but India really is unlike anywhere else you will ever go. Although the North is now getting its fair share of globalisation, the South is still relatively untouched, and wonderful for it. Home feels incredibly far away as you get on a jam-packed, rickety bus to travel across dusty plains, rock ranges, backwaters, and bright, clustering towns with all their hand-painted adverts, usually for a minimum of six hours, to reach somewhere which looked so close on the map. The people, most of whom were the friendliest I’ve ever met (although sme were definitely not – especially the more suspect men on crowded buses!), have such interesting things to say, in the most delightful form of English possible. Don’t miss it.

Everyone has heard of Oxfam. As one of the world’s leading humanitarian aid agencies the charity has an international reputation for excellence and has, in the course of its 68 year history, become a national institution. Its work divides into three major sectors: campaigning, development work and emergency response. The latter has been the organisation’s principle concern in recent weeks, with the focus on the earthquake-stricken Haiti and its displaced 85,000 people.

With Oxfam operating on such an international scale it is easy to forget its original, local roots – it was in Oxford that Oxfam was founded and its connection to the city remains significant. Their national headquarters are based in Cowley and the first Oxfam charity shop is still operating on Broad Street today.

The committee was formed in 1942 in response to the developing aid crisis in Greece, which was suffering famine as a result of Allied naval blockades. The country was in urgent need of assistance and by 1960 the charity had developed into a major international non-governmental aid agency. The number of Oxfam related shops in Oxford is impressive, with establishments to be found on Turl Street, Banbury Road and in Cowley to name but a few. However there is one shop that stands out from the rest – the Oxfam Book Shop. Nestled on the corner of Pusey Street and on St Giles, the bookshop is the second most profitable Oxfam store in the country; it has on its own generated £4.6 million for the organisation. For its twenty-first anniversary last year Phillip Pullman worked a shift as a volunteer.

Chatting to the manager of the store provides a great insight into the mentality of Oxfam that sets it apart from many similar charities. Their aim is to be fair to the customer, but to remain committed to their humanitarian goals: do not go there to get a bargain, go there to find value for money. The shop operates in an extremely professional manner, confirming the widely held view that charities need to work as a business in order to achieve sustained results.

There is a worrying fact about charity shops, however. While the shops may be a very useful source of income for charities, purchases are an inefficient way of donating your money- don’t let yourself soak in that charitable glow just yet because on average it is only 27p of every pound spent that makes any difference, according to a survey published last year by the magazine NGO Finance.

The rest of the money is soaked up in the expenses of running the shops – so charity shops need to maximize what they sell. It’s not easy task: Help the Aged, which has 374 shops, pays councils £300,000 a year to dispose of goods left by the public that are impossible to sell. The Children’s Society spends more than £30,000 each year for the same reason.

Oxfam, in fact all charity shops, want to change the perception of trawling through broken children’s toys and lumpy, Marks and Spencer jumpers, only to find, ah… nothing that you really want. Last year, it launched Sustain Me, a campaign supported by celebrities as diverse as Jourdan Dunn, Jaime Winstone, Cat Deeley and Honor Blackman. Photographed in Oxfam finery (although, one doesn’t imagine that they did the trawling themselves…) it was all about persuading the public that charity shopping was cool, not just for those with a lot of time on their hands and have no qualms about the colour beige.

If you think about it, charity shopping is just quick vintage – and the stock, although sometimes slightly suspect, is not all that different from the vintage shops that litter the Cowley Road, the only difference is in the mark up. The Oxfam on the Broad regularly sells next to new white tie ball gowns – you don’t even have to want to do your bit for charity to buy one.

Recently, as more and more charity shops have capitalized on the fashionista’s clamor for chic vintage wear, charity shops have become big business. The need for better business mentality on the side of charity shops was highlighted in a programme for the BBC last year, where Mary Portas – of Topshop revamp fame- was called in to bring a much needed sparkle to a Save the Children shop, and after seeing the success of the transformation many shops are now following suit.

The annual income of the largest five chains of shops alone is now in the order of £150 million. Many of the big chains are using paid staff to work alongside the volunteers, creating a rather uncharitable hierarchy- but one that only works to the benefit of the shop. It seems, capitalism and charity go rather comfortably in hand.
The new approach has upset some local shops, and with the high street struggling as it is, there have been complaints of unfair competition since charity shops enjoy a rather hefty discount on business rates – generally around 80% – and may even, depending on the local authority, not pay rates at all.

Oxfam still benefits significantly from its connection with Oxford University, and why shouldn’t it? Just because we may have forgotten its connections with the city, it doesn’t mean the University has. College libraries often contact the store to offer their services and boxes of unwanted books. With donations often including extremely rare items, a team of experts are consulted by staff to price books, so that their true value is reflected. Several top university professors are included on their contact list, while the most profitable book ever sold by the shop was a first edition of Graham Greene’s ‘Rumour at Nightfall’, auctioned for £15,000 in March 2008.

Although Oxfam is undeniably an old institution it is by no means stuck in its ways. Banish the image of dusty, cluttered piles of bric-a-brac; this is a smooth, twenty-first century operation. Their latest development is the establishment of an online Oxfam bookstore, a rival to Amazon and similar companies.

Oxfam is an organisation the university and city in which it was formed in should rightly be proud of. Perhaps one explanation for the surprise many feel on discovering their connection is this – Oxfam has become so famous in its own right that it has transcended the fame usually associated with the university. It is not by any means defined by this relationship, operating on such a huge global scale. Having grown from a small meeting in a local church to the international juggernaut of humanitarian relief that it is today, Oxfam is a reminder of what can be achieved with dedication, organisation and the determination to make a difference using the undeniable opportunities and talents that we all have.

The idea of interviewing someone such as Ben Goldacre is an interesting one, even for someone not particularly scientifically minded as myself. As the Bad Science columnist for the Guardian newspaper, he tries to tackle the problem of misreporting of science in the press (often in the pursuit of a catchy headline), as well as vehemently airing his views on what he calls “medical quackery”.

The evening in which I met him, he was giving a talk to the Union, along with Evan Harris (MP for Oxford West and Abingdon). Somewhat disappointingly, the event was more of a platform for Harris to attempt to win votes of the not undersized audience, but Goldacre did talk at length about the dangers of bad science, particularly from the point of view of public health, even if the focus was on how Harris would tackle these issues in parliament.

An exceedingly competent speaker, Goldacre held the audience terribly well with bitchy anecdote after bitchy anecdote, although one couldn’t help feeling that he was simply labouring the same “their scientific methods were flawed” point, and often there was little behind the personal attacks (which ranged from Gillian McKeith to the Blairs) more than the excuse to get a laugh from the audience.

However, when talking on issues that he most deeply cares about, Goldacre is exceptionally engaging. He talked of his outrage over the Wakefield MMR scandal, not only because of the dodgy scientific methods involved, but also because of the mistreatment of some of the children upon whom Wakefield tested. Similarly his libel battle with Matthias Rath (the vitamin supplement entrepreneur who sued following Goldacre’s criticism of Rath’s selling of vitamin supplements to AIDS sufferers, it is claimed, as an alternative to anti-retroviral medication) was touched upon, but again Goldacre’s concern seems to be primarily focussed on the devastating and unnecessary loss of life from such ignorance.

Unfortunately, as can often be the case with engaging public speakers, the charm one sees on the podium is not necessarily apparent in real life. Goldacre insisted on being interviewed in the Union bar, and whilst initially put off by the hoards of fans desperate to get a copy of his Bad Science book signed, nothing was quite as unsettling as Goldacre’s insistence on showering my face with a miasma of spittle and partially chewed peanut, surely if he was so hungry as to forget the “don’t eat and talk” etiquette he might have wanted to swallow the food?

Perhaps I am being unreasonable, but I also was not particularly impressed by his fairly lacklustre attempts to answer my first question (lacklustre in the sense that he decided to completely ignore what I had asked him), which saw him heading off on a self-aggrandising spiel about sitting on “the human conveyor belt of life experience” and having to do “Control-Alt-Delete on [his] whole life”. Seriously.

Eventually, however, I was able to pick out some sense, and so what exactly was his motivation for writing about “bad science”?

“When you start to look at a lot of what we do in medicine, it didn’t actually have a very good evidence base and the notion of evidence based practice was quite new, and that was how I got into writing about bullshit because to me bullshit like homeopathy or anti-vaccine campaigns are the easiest examples for explaining the wider issue of how you make evidence based decisions about what the appropriate thing to do is and the same skills translate into not just medical treatment but also social policy.”

Although his loathing of “quacks” is very apparent, but it is not them that seem to get the highest level of his criticism.

“We have different expectations of different groups of people; I’m not surprised that there are chancers like Gillian McKeith out there who want to brandish a non-accredited correspondence course Ph.D and come up with all kinds of funny pseudo-scientific stuff about the relationship between diet and health… but I do have high expectations of Channel 4 not to give her a platform, not to describe her in their promotional material as ‘Britain’s Leading Clinical Nutrition Specialist’, not to present her in a laboratory setting talking about molecules and blood tests. I think Channel 4 bear much more responsibility there.”

He claims, however, that his concern does not lie with the motivation of such people, but rather the methods that they use. For him it is all about the science. But to say science does not necessarily mean science in the conventional sense, but rather the idea of the scientific, evidence gathering, method.

Where else then are we not using the proper evidence based methods to our greatest advantage?

“In the case of criminal justice there is absolutely no reason why you couldn’t do randomised control trials on sentencing, for example. A judge giving out a sentence to a heroin addict who’s stealing your video recorder to get money to buy drugs, has two sentencing options, either drug testing and treatment or a custodial sentence. Nobody knows which of those two are the best, they could give half one sentence, half the other and follow them up five years later… but criminal justice is so poorly evolved that we don’t even know what our objective is when we sentence people.”

Although I have barely been with him for fifteen minutes, it soon becomes apparent that he would be far more interested in signing books than being interviewed by me. Any further attempts to ask questions are cut painfully short; my tentative question over whether students should take Berrocca (I really was grasping at straws by now) was met with a rant about “health advice in women’s magazines”.

Indeed, it is a deep shame that he is not more likeable, particularly as it appears that he really is talking sense about issues of serious magnitude. Maybe it is because he seems to take himself so seriously (if ever in need of a laugh, read his personal info on his website), or just because he is such a know-it-all. His immediate response to other viewpoints seems to be puerile ridicule; one anecdote about incompetent doctors sees them backing up their theses with the claim “but I’m an expert!”, and yet one can’t help but think that his own response, if challenged, would be to affirm that he himself was, of course, an expert.

‘Blind Date’ is kindly sponsored by the Oxford Retreat, open for lunch, supper and drinks at 1 Hythe Bridge Street.

Jade Mansell, Pembroke, English

Vivacious blonde 2nd year with scintillating chat, bored of Bridge intrigues, looking for her Romeo (but hopefully without the double suicide ending)

When I first found out my friends had entered me for a blind date I nearly killed them, but this wasn’t necessary because I had a great night! It started off a bit dodgily since Jacob was waiting inside the Oxford Retreat, and I was waiting outside, and it took us a while to work out we were one another’s dates. However once we got over that hitch it turned into a really nice date. The convo flowed easily; we had similar interests and a couple of mutual friends…I was surprised at how well we got on considering we were complete strangers! There was a bit of a battle at the end of the dinner when Jacob insisted on paying, but I insisted we go halves. However, it was very chivalrous of him, a rare quality these days! Though the notion of having your social skills rated by a stranger seems daunting, it was a laugh.

Banter: Witty and easy
Looks: Shall I compare Jacob to a summer’s day? (Yeah he was fit)
Personality: Affable
2nd date? Our paths will cross again

Jacob Sewell, Magdalen, Classics

Latent lad hoping for a reason to disprove the dictum that “the only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everyone else.” (Oscar Wilde)

Our date began somewhat awkwardly when I left Jade standing in the freezing cold for twenty minutes (unintentionally), whilst I enjoyed a languid pint at the bar. Inside/outside confusion. Fortunately, I was forgiven and we sat down to a nice meal at the Oxford Retreat. Jade extemporised on her great love for Harry Potter and her cult status at her local school, whilst I chipped in with some auxiliary, and rather tepid chat. Fortunately my offer to pay the bill at the end of the meal (a calculated gamble) was rejected out of hand. Win. All in all, a fun evening and a good experience.

Banter: Lashings of chat
Looks: Striking
Personality: Bubbly
2nd date? The tour must go on…