Ajanta Caves

We started our Thursday with a trip to the Foreign Tourist Quota window at Chaatrapthi Shivaji Terminus got us two reserved tickets and one "unconfirmed" ticket on Friday's 21:35 train to Jalgaon, the closest town to the Buhddist caves at Ajanta. An unconfirmed ticket means that we had no seat/bunk reservation, but the guy at the window said, "This will get you on the train, and then you will manage." And so we did. After some initial confusion, we found ourself in the right car, on the bench that was the lowest bunk of three which we had the lower two reserved. After not long, a man appeared with the ticket to the third bunk and sat down across from us, a look of, "Oh crap, there are Ferengi sitting in my seat." Soon after this, the rest of the opposite bunk was occupied by three generations of one family, and then some people came in and started loading boxes of yogurt onto the top bunk opposite, and a few other people came by and wedged themselves into the fourth seats of the three seat benches. We struck up conversation with our train friends. The first guy's twitchy frown changed to a smile when he learned that we were only going along for a few hours (he was on his way to Bangladesh and would be on the train for a night a day and a night). The family were Jain and on a pilgrimage to a holy mountain where twenty of their teachers attained enlightenment, or moksha. The yogurt was for people on the same pilgrimage, and was being stocked by a tour operator - Jain dietary requirements are particularly strict. I do notice that Jains tend to have the clearest eyes of most Indians who I meet.

After a little while I set an alarm to wake us at 4am, and made claim to my bunk and Mike and Rhi to theirs, setting off a shifting puzzle after which everyone seemed to have a space to stretch out somewhat. After a few hours, I woke up cold, and tried to reach down for my bag to extract something warm like a sleeping bag or even a long sleeve shirt, but I found my way blocked by a small boy snuggled up against my backpack. After another hour or so of closing the window most of the way and trying to remind myself that it really wasn't that cold and I should really be enjoying it since I haven't been cold for a few months, he shifted and I was able to extract another shirt so that my last hour or so of almost sleep was slightly more restful.

We went to the end of the car and found that the doors were completely blocked by people sleeping on the floor. (Just like Eric and I had to do on our lucky to get on the train at all trip from Bombay to Delhi in 1991.) At about 4:15, the train stopped, but the door that we managed to open had no platform, and there was a sign that did not say Jalgaon. Someone with a flashlight was walking alongside the train and told me to stay on, which seemed like a good idea. The train started moving and fifteen minutes later stopped at Jalgaon, where we were able to get out the other side of the train with the help of a young guy who had woken up when we opened the other door and took it upon himself to help the confused looking Ferengi.

Jalgaon is a small town in northern Maharashtra. A motorcycle rickshaw brought us to the bus station where we found seats in a mini-van headed to Aurangabad, and passing by Ajanta. Ashok, a slight man who wore a blue sweater that morning and was headed to his job as a clerk in the court in Aurangabad, found us and convinced us to pile into the little black box playing Hindi show tunes. It bounced merrily along for 60km. At the town (truck stop) of Ajanta, then let us out as the dawn began to show itself. We had some tea and caught a ride with a Goods Carrier back down the hill to the caves, where we were amused by long tailed monkeys and replenished by breakfast.

The ride in the Goods Carrier was pretty exciting. The Indian trucking industry is a massive fleet of privately owned and lavishly decorated trucks. Somewhere on the front of the cab, bordered, serifed and multicolored letters declare "Goods Carrier" and the states in which the truck is licenced to operate. The back may repeat this information, but in any situation, it requests "Horn OK Please" in foot high letters. This is a request which most Indian drivers are only too happy to oblige. The interiors of these trucks' cabs are also often lavishly decorated with flowers and shrines to various dieties and of course pictures of seductive women.

The sun rose as we blinked and caffienated the haze of sleep depravation into submission and tried to figure out how to get back down the hill to the caves. We had passed them in the dark, but decided to continue on the few miles to the town so that we could at least get a cup of tea before the place opened. Ashok told us that the government bus would come every five of ten minutes, so after finishing our tea, we stood on the roadside and wited for it to appear. A few jeeps slowed down and asked us if we wanted a lift, but it seemed better not to risk acquiring an unwanted guide. One of the trucks that had been waiting pulled out, and the passengers waved at us as they left. I waved back. "They weren't offering us a ride, and you didn't turn them down, right?" Rhi asked. "Uh, maybe," I replied. "I want to ride in a Goods Carrier!" The next one that passed waved us to get in, and we were off with Asif in his elegantly carpeted 1998 Tata Behemoth. Inside were Asif, the 21 year old owner of the truck, an older man in a red checkered scarf, and the driver. Between the caves and the town of Ajanta is a rather significant hill, and the road winds down it like the drop from Los Alamos to Pojoque. The minivan managed up it OK. Asif's truck was a bit less nimble, and the driver kept it good and slow and was totally focused on the road. Except when I snapped a shot of the guy in the red checkered scarf and he wanted to see the picture. in any case we made it back down the hill without incident.

The caves are a 4km walk from the main road up in a horseshoe shaped river valley. There was a bus, but we opted to walk. The end of the monsoons two months ago and the lack of moisture since has turned was is clearly a totally green and lush place for part of the year into sparse trees and dry brown scrub. About halfway to the caves, we were overtaken by a group of elementary school kids. As they snuck up behind us, Rhi suggested that we turn around and yell, "BOO!"

1 ... 2 ... 3

(kids shrieking)

It made us some new friends.

At the end of the road, we stashed our packs in the cloakroom and headed up the stairs cut into the stone. From the side of the cliff where the ticket office was chiseled into the rock, one could see the walkway snaking around the bend of the river, connecting the thirty caves cut into the rock halfway up the hundred or so meters of cliff above the river.



We were completely unprepared for what we encountered. I was expecting to find some caves where some monks would go to meditate, and had maybe carved a few statues and painted the walls with some interesting images. The first cave, like many of the others, was a large rectangular (almost square) hall, supported by carved pillars, with painted walls and ceiling, and at the back, an alcove containing a huge statue of the Buddha sitting in a lotus position and holding his hands in a gesture of teaching. One of the caretakers motioned for us and a few others who were standing around to come back into the alcove and lowered the rope that blocked it off. Standing with my back to the cool stone and looking up at the peaceful smile of the stone figure, I felt a reverential awe and heard something deeper and softer than silence.



We emerged blinking into the morning sunlight. Mike was starting to suffer from something flu-like brought on by jet lag, strange food, and a night on the train, and the hordes of vacationing schoolkids had caught up with us again. But even this didn't seem to perturb our amazement with the place. Many of the caves were shoes-off caves, and so we simply carried our shoes and felt the smooth stone of the path between the caves with our bare feet.



Some of the caves were like the first one, with variations on the individual elements but the same basic layout. In one of them, a scene from the life of Gautama is depicted making use of vanishing point perspective. This is amazing, considering that the development of these caves happened mostly during the 2nd and 1st centuries BC and the 5th to 7th AD, at least seven centuries before Durer made his famous investigations.



Other caves had a deeper rectangular floor plan, and housed a stupa or dagoba consisting of a sphere supporting a square pedestal. These were also richly decorated with carvings and paintings on the walls and columns.



Looking at the walls covered with thousands of images of Buddha, I contemplated how this one individual has become an icon of enlightenment, but that the message of the philosophy is that all beings exist with the potential for this state of existence. Whatever enlightenment is, it is not something that is exclusively owned by Siddharta Gautama. The repitition of the image of Buddha seemed to make the point that there are many Buddhas, many teachers, many experts in deep meditation. This is clearly an idea that finds expression in all the large world religions. Eventually, one's relationship with the universe is a personal thing. One might hone and refine that relationship through study or meditation or prayer or devotion to a church or Tantric exploration of hedonism, but there is no extracting the individual that understands from the understanding. A room full of Buddhas mirrors a world full of people living in a state of awareness of which he is the symbol.




As we made our way through the caves, various other groups of people meandered in and out of sync with us, including a group of yellow robed monks from Thailand. It was interesting to watch the monks exploring like any other group of tourists, taking pictures of each other ("Hey, get one of me praying in front of this one!") and staring drop-jawed at the immensity of the place. We jokingly suggested that some of them were not actually monks, but just some Thai guys who had said, "Hey, lets shave our heads and get some of those yellow robes and go around visiting Buddhist stuff!" And then one of them said, "You guys shave your heads, I'm going to wear this leapoard print hat and carry a cane wearing a different colored robe. They'll think I'm the head monk!" They were very friendly, and had Mike take a group picture of them in front of one of the Dagobas, but somehow, we didn't get that picture in any of our cameras. There was also a small group of Tibetan monks who we passed when we were on our way out. "Tashi Deleg," (hello) I said to one of them as we passed, gathering a response of, "? ! :) Tashi Deleg!"

We also ran into Brian Conrad, and we finally introduced ourselves. I had thought that I had met him at some point, but I guess I hadn't. "You might have met my twin brother, he also does math," he said when I explained why I hadn't introduced myself earlier.




By the time we had made it to the 29th cave, it was mid afternoon and we were totally exhausted. It was all we could do to haul ourselves back to the bottom of the stairs. Luckily the restaraunt by the coat check had some lime water and food for us. We took the bus back to the main road, and found a shady spot to decide what our next plans would be. As we were thinking, a group of schoolkids got off one of the busses that was ferrying people back, and they all wanted their picture taken with us. (This had actually been a repeating theme throughout the day.) The idea really caught on, and for the next five minutes, we found ourselves posing with a succession of kids, some of whom brought hats for us to wear, but I bet that few of whom actually smiled for the camera. Their teacher was trying to herd them onto the bus, but then he suddenly broke ranks or succumbed to persuasion - no way to tell which - and came over to join a photo. I'd be really amused to know what becomes of those photos.

Eventually, we decided that we would head into Aurangabad, continuing another 100 km along the way we had started out in the morning. Rhi decided that this time, she wanted a ride in the back of a goods carrier. It seemed that the highway djinn or whatever they call them in these parts were in to responding to her requests, because the next truck that pulled up had a back full of boxes of rice and a few guys who waved us in. We clambered in and had a great view of the countryside as we climbed slowly up the hill. In the town of Ajanta, the driver told us that we would have to ride up front with him, maybe because us being b ack there was disrupting traffic as everyone slowed down to take pictures of the Ferengi sitting on the boxes of rice in the back of the truck. The rest of the ride was long and we were squished into the not-as-roomy-as-Asif's cab, and Mike was running a fever and feeling generally not so good. The scenery was quite nice, with rolling hills, fields of cotton (bordered by what looked like giant riacin plants?), groups of buffalo lounging in the shade, oxen with brightly painted horns pulling carts and plows, and a group of boys playing cricket in every village.

A little after dark, we made it to Aurangabad, took a bus to the train station, and checked into a hotel suggested by the Lonely Planet. Mike crashed out and Rhi and I had dinner and played Scrabble. We didn't keep score, but she clearly thwomped me by getting both blanks and making seven letter words with both, but I did put down saith and gaijin, which made it a successfull game on my part as well.

In the morning Mike still wasn't feeling well, so we decided to not go to the caves at Ellora of the meteorite crater at Lonar this time and I walked over to the train station and picked up a ticket to head back to Mumbai.

Our train left at 2:45 in the afternoon, and there seemed to be no mention of what car to get into on the ticket. We ended up in a second class chair car, and managed to get half a butt worth of seat each, which we managed to improve to a two person bench to share among the three of us after a couple hours. People made their way up and down the train selling tea and coffee and samosa and vada pav and deep fried potato sandwiches. (I had to try one eventually, but it was cold and I immediately wished that I hadn't.) We were certainly a conversation piece. After we had been there for a while and made some new friends, a guy got on at one of the stops and claimed to have one of our seats reserved. It was quite clear that nobody else in the car was sitting in a reserved seat, so we just gave him a look of incredulity and ignored him. Someone in the next bench said something to him which I think probably translated roughly to, "I don't think that they are that stupid. Besides, we like them." In any case, he left and did not reappear. After over seven hours, we made it back to VT and took a taxi back home.

Three in Mumbai

So, after travelling for more than a day of the time that they carried with them and two of that which is stuck to the ground, Mike and Rhi showed up in this city that was once called Heptanesia.

Yesterday we found ourselves at the Banganga Tank for a while, watching the birds and fish and water snakes and praying humans splashing in the water.

A walk along Marine Drive brought us to the Tea Centre at Churchgate where we had some delicious Darjeeling.

Today we will explore a bit more of the city and then are heading out to the caves of Ajanta and Ellora for a few days.

Bollywood

I finally went to see a Bollywood movie. Dhoom 2 (Dhoom translates roughly to Zoom) is a version of James Bond or perhaps Ocean's Eleven (the modern versions - heavy on eye candy, low on substance) transculturated. It has all the whizzy special effects, chase scenes, etc. But the real purpose of the movie seems to be to play the theme song, which was the credits song from the original Dhoom. The movie is long, but much of the time is taken up by dance numbers. Don't think Fred and Ginger, think Michael and Janet. I had little trouble following the plot, even though most of the dialogue is in Hindi, the Indian intermingling of English is there enough to make most conversations make sense. And the plot is not thick enough to need any explanation anyway. It is a very racy and modern movie by Bollywood standards. Ilangovan says that the actress who plays the heroine apparently decided that she wants to be thought of as hot as well as beautiful, so she shows up in various revealing outfits. The biggest scandal comes from the on screen kiss, for which there is an obscenity suit pending. It was a pretty tame on screen kiss. The movie would probably be rated PG-13 for mild violence in the US.

This shift in mores apparently helped in my understanding of the film. I mentioned that I was able to follow the movie okay, and I was told a story of a couple of westerners visiting TIFR who went to see a film a while ago (not sure how long ago, the person who told me has been at TIFR for a while). They mistook the lead's wife for his sister and the sister for the wife. Physical contact between the siblings was okay, but spouse touching spouse would corrupt the youth with impure thoughts.

Even in this movie, the fantasies that flash through the funny cop's head when he meets the sexy cop are of them getting married and popping out a bunch of kids.

Family is a big deal in India. Arranged marriages (as opposed to a "love marriage" or the more politically correct "self arranged marriage") are still fairly usual, and I see a lot of billboards for matchmaker websites - the emphasis certainly being on finding someone to marry. I'm not convinced that functional Indian families are any more common or supportive than in any other place in the world, but many Indians seem to think so. In any case, the bride-as-commodity image is pretty present.

At the theatre, the audience was at least 80% male, probably more. I asked Ilangovan about this and he said that most families came to the earlier 7:00 shows. I mentioned that not all women are married, and he didn't really reply.

On the other hand, there is Sonia Ghandi and Kiran Bedi, and plenty of other powerful Indian women, and the gender skew in the PhD students here is no worse than anywhere else.

Anyway...

When I mentioned to Sreekar that I had gone to see Dhoom 2, he was a little confused. He thought that I had said something about playing Doom 2 on the computer.

"No Dhoom 2, the movie," I said.

"It's playing here?"

"Um, yeah, you went to see it two days ago."

"Oh you mean Dhoom 2, not Doom 2." (I hear no difference.)

"I thought that is what I said."

"No, Dhoom, like 'th' in father."

"Thoom?"

"Yeah, that's it."

"But that sounds different to me. I hear a difference between Dhoom and Thoom but not Dhoom and Doom."

"But when you say Thoom, it sounds more like Dhoom than when you say
Doom."

Wierd. The difference between t and th is in the position of the tongue. But when I mimic that change and say a d, I get what sounds to me like a d in either place. The conversation resurfaced (minus Sreekar) over dinner at McRajan's. I sat down to have my soup and into a conversation about th three indistinguishable k sounds in Farsi. I related my difficulties with dh, and found that they extended to the two forms of sh, but that I could tell at least the difference between g and gh. We also talked a bit about emphasis is English, which is one of the most difficult things for Hindi speakers to get. I remember at Reed, Cam had a differential equations class with Rao where "coefficient" became "quafishen" and was mis-heard as "equation" and this led to some confusion. My ear has still not adjusted, and I have a hard time understanding most of the time.

!

Mike and Rhi are at the Moscow airport en route to here. They take off in a few minutes (hopefully) and will be here in time for breakfast.

Update: The snow in Russia kept them grounded for a few hours, but they have arrived. We took a walk and had lunch and now they are napping in my apartment.

A few more pictures

The intricacies of Victorian architecture confront the deeper intricacies of tropical nature.



Agnes is using the office when I get an email with pictures of my little brothers. "Are all Americans in the newspaper?" she asks. Perhaps it is inflation, but I had to wait until I was 5. Alex on the other hand, before his 6th birthday, is appearing for the third time, in print and in color.



Quite a train station...



The cafeteria on the ground floor of Jagdish, my apartment building, is run by a guy named Rajan, so it gets the name McRajan's. They are open every evening, so if I miss the canteen's rice and dal, I can get puri (like sopapilla) or dosa or fried rice or soup. They also have chai.

Incidentally, McDonald's delivers in Mumbai. Just call 66 000 666.



During the monsoons, Mumbai has troubles with flooding. Sreekar's uncle last year walked home from his office after a particulaly wet day in water up to his armpits, carrying his phone and laptop over his head. It took him eight hours. A lot of the trouble is due to the proliferation of plastic bags that clog up drains. I picked up some kurta (a traditional type of shirt that can come as far as the knees or more) at a store near Regal Cinema this afternoon. They make their bags out of old newspapers, and block print the name of the store. There is also a cafe in the store where I had a good coffee, an okay bagel with olive tapenade, and a papaya and yogurt shake.



I like pictures of rust.



And trees taking over architecture.



This is from the roof of my building. Somebody did it on purpose.

Three Months

Long enough to learn a few tricks of living in this place, long enough to form some habits, some good, some not as good. Long enough to feel comfortable in my apartment, but not entirely at home.



The past few weeks I have been exploring less and focusing more on mathematics. I'm only beginning to really interact mathematically with Srinivas and the others here. Until recently, I was doing a lot of reading of other people's work, enjoying the process of understanding what they had done and looking for directions to take my own ideas. It doesn't do much good to talk about math if you don't know what you are talking about... Anyway, now there are a few things on the table that I can actually work on. Talking more with Srinivas the past few days, he has helped me to understand some of the technical issues that come in to play if I really want the calculations in my thesis to say what I would like them to say. Algebraic geometry has this word "general" that is something of a cheat in many cases. To say that something happens "for general X" means "there might be exceptions to what I am saying, but if you are playing the same game that I am, it is okay to ignore them. In my thesis, I show that a certain calculation is true in general, but there could still be plenty of specific examples that my proof ignores. On the other hand, it is quite likely that the result is true without the "general" cheat, and that the exceptions to the rule can be dealt with. But that will involve some more involved tinkering.

Mostly unrelated, but connected to the current plan of joining the algebraic geometry group here more fully, I gave a talk on Tuesday. Our weekly seminar has been looking at multiplier ideals for the past couple months. Yogish has been giving all of the talks. I somewhat prefer the style of seminar that we had in Seattle, where there would perhaps be a director who would decide on what paper or papers we would work out of, but then all of us attending would divide up the lectures. What it lacks in consistency it makes up in the variety of viewpoints and the increased impetus to understand the material well - it takes quite a bit more understanding to draw out the theory in chalk for a hour and a half (the talks here are long) than it does to smile and nod in the back row. Anyway, Yogish's lectures were wrapping up and I took the opportunity to talk about the connections between arc spaces and multiplier ideals (they can both be used to compute the same sorts of things, like log canonical thresholds), as developed by Mustata et al. I'm used to the 50 minute talks that we had at the University of Washington, and though one would think that if this is what develops with five pages of notes, that nine pages of notes gives 90 minutes. However, it seems that I now compress more than ten minutes of lecture into one page. Maybe it is the A4 paper size. I ended up totally mangling the last bit of the talk, and the proof of the result that I had set out to accomplish went up on the board after about 1 hour 45 minutes. I really should have made it two talks. On the other hand, there seems to be less distress about long talks here than in other places. Yesterday Brian Conrad took an extra 15 minutes, and Yogish never ended less than five minutes over time. Regardless, I don't like talks that go over time, and am a little annoyed whenever I do it. But other than being rushed at the end, I thought the talk went well.

I spent Wednesday rewriting my research statement. For whatever reason, I only updated the one page version when I sent out a batch of applications for next year. One of the places that I'm interested in me is interested enough to want to know more, which is a good thing. It is kind of annoying to be looking for jobs for next year having just arrived here, but that seems to be the nature of the beast. I could have opted to stay here for another year, but I think that a year is a good span for now. I like the international aspect to the work that I am doing, and am excited that I have mathematical friends in India, Germany, Brazil, and potentially all over the world that I can go and visit, but am at the same time feeling a bit detached, and want to work a bit more on having a base in western North America. Of course, that all depends on me getting some interesting results and producing some math that the rest of the community thinks is valuable. As open minded as mathematicians are, being a nice guy still only gets one so far when asking for tenure track jobs in nice places to live.

I've been scrambling somewhat to get some tangible work done, to prepare for the arrivals, beginning in a few days, of people coming to visit me here. Doing math at TIFR is pretty amazing, but I would be blatantly lying if I said that getting to be in India and explore this country was not at least as much what drew me here. Mike and Rhi arrive on the 20th, Jill on the 28th, and then there will be a surprise appearance of Joby later in January (he's going to be here for work, so it'll only be a weekend or two - but we are looking forward to .83 India). Of course, due to the fact that I plan like a cat and my companeros are not that much better, exactly what we are going to do is a bit up in the air. There are ideas kicking about involving Rajahstan, Goa, Kerala, Assam... Today Yogish told me about the trek he did last week out of Musoorie and, "if you feel really adventurous," an amazing trek that can only be done in the middle of winter up the Zanskar river in Ladakh. I'm hesitant to take my North-America-living girlfriend to the land of snow for her escape-from-the-winter vacation, but this place looks really beautiful. (It would not really be a possibility for Mike and Rhi since they leave on the 5th.) Goa is only really something I am interested in if there was a plan. The crazy party scene could be a lot of fun, but the hassle of getting there and finding a place to stay at this point is probably not worth it. However, Girish might have a plan that could be added on to.... Kerala would be warm and pleasant. Uniformly good reviews of cruising the backwaters. Assam would be far away and involve more of the hassle sort of travel, but would be rewarding in the off the beaten track sort of way, and there are some amazing nature parks there. And Rajahstan has all sorts of classic north Indian coolness to it - camel treks in the Thar desert and color coordinated cities and all that, plus some interesting sounding wildlife parks.

Anyway, we kind of feel like we have sat down at a restaurant with a twenty page menu, and rumor has it that the chef is running out of train tickets. As long as nobody orders the sitting-around-Mumbai I'm cool with it.

And the menu analogy leads into the next story, which is the experience of going out to dinner at my new favorite restaurant in Mumbai.




I was introduced to it last Saturday, and went back last night. I took the TIFR bus to VT and walked past the Metro Adlabs cinema to this second floor-impossible to find without a guide place across the street and down a little from Bharat Cycles and the building with an elephant on the facade.



I sit down with my back to the open window; a stainless steel platter and four empty bowls are in front of me. In this restaurant, there are no facing seats, one side of every table is reserved for the waiters who circulate, dressed in black accented maroon with F.U.J.C. (Friends uf Joshi Club?) drawn on the pocket in yellow paint, carrying trays of roti and paratha, ladles full of dal and curry, vegetables and chutneys. There is a choice of three types of dal, one spicy, one sweet, and one that is less dal than thin sweet spiced yogurt. Then there are two dry vegetables and two wet (in a gravy). The first time I came here, one of the wet vegetables was a potato preparation that tasted just like chorizo. Today, we have two unidentified green vegetables, a brown and red tomato curry, and some plain yellow lentils. For roti there are chapati (tortillas), paratha (like chapati, but spiced and stuffed with various things), some cookie like things that might be sweetened with jaggery, and some denser, less sweet ones that go quite well with the yogurt dal. There are little fried balls of something and a chile sauce that goes on them.




One eats with one's fingers, tearing off bits of roti and using it to scoop up morsels and bring them to the mouth. This keeps much of the sauce off of the fingers, but the rotis are drizzled in ghee, so keeping it from being a rather messy affair is a skill that takes an upbringing to acquire. The place of food in India is similar to Italy. At lunch today, a middle aged physicist was reminiscing about the first time he went to Italy and how he thought that if India were a European country, that this is what it would be like. The Italian mother who must feed her guest until they collapse has a perfect counterpart in the collection of Indian archetypes.

In addition to the Indian mother, the food-pusher finds expression in the institution of thali. The waiter's mantra of "have some more to eat" is part of the Thali experience. At FUJC, most of the waiters are content to stroll by on occasion and top off any bowls that are running out. The roti guy is the pusher. All smiles, well fed and proud of his product, he drops a chapati and a cookie and a whatever the other dense little disks of stuff are among the little bowls and piles of food as soon as one is half through with what is already there. Of course, with roti on the plate, one has to get a little more curry to eat with it... And so on. Finally, after the second or third, "one more?" is finally withdrawn, another waiter brings out a couple scoops of rice to mix up and absorb the rest of the dal and sauces that are left on the plate.

Plants

I finally have some houseplants. The nursery was one of the first things that I discovered when I came here, and I visit occasionally to look at the ranks of interesting plants. The founder of TIFR, Homi Bhabha, was a lover of gardens and though some of the grounds that could be made quite nice are not, the arrays of flora that are distributed about the buildings and those parts of the grounds that are kept up are great. I learned recently that the nursery sells plants on Tuesday and Friday mornings, and was able to find the person who I needed to talk to yesterday. I picked out a few, and that afternoon, three of the guys who I see spending their days maintaining our ameoba-like French topiary and creating the elaborate bouquets adorning the lobby carried over my three new friends.

A modern elevatoring system

There are two elevators in the main lobby of TIFR. For my first month or so here, the one on the right was being serviced. The doors often revealed the dingy mechanicals of the open column, guarded by a sign informed us that we would soon be enjoying a "modern elevatoring system". Not only is the newly operational lift modern, it is at times explicitly futuristic. It is, in fact, perhaps a post-modern elevatoring system, having deconstructed our quaint notions of consecutive dates and matching clocks, it replaces this information with capriciously selected times or emoticon like blips of ASCII. While the elevator on the left stoically intones via lcd display that we are on floor 2, going up at 10:30 AM on December 6th, 2006, the right elevator is more creative, and upon my exit from the straight laced lift, the third floor display tells me that had I waited for the door number two, I could have journeyed through m.. =1, 2016.



The strangenesses are not limited to the displays either. Within the box of brass plates and shiny dark-grained veneer, the right elevator extends its rebellion. The polished metal bezeling the buttons is complemented by elegantly engraved floor numbers that have been carefully filled in with a white-out pen for easier reading. The lift is moody in its movements as well. When confronted with a large crowd requesting a stop at every floor, the elevator reacts by declining to budge from the lobby. The crowd stands packed together, staring at the five green circles and wondering why nothing is happening.




Neither is the ride a silent one, as one would expect from a sleek machine of the modern era, where all the working parts are sequestered behind smooth surfaces and clean lines. The fan, just out of sight above the lighted roof, is slightly out of alignment. The speed of the fan and subsequently the amplitude of the wobble and the insistence of the tap-rattle correlates with the movement of the lift.




I tend to take the stairs.

Saturday afternoon with a bicycle

Last night I had the idea to possibly go to Matheran in the morning. I set an alarm, but slept through it by about half an hour, which meant that I had less than 20 minutes to get to the train station, so I bagged that idea and went back to sleep.

Instead I spent the morning doing nothing, and then went on a ride around the city in the afternoon. My first stop was the Oxford bookstore. I had heard that they had good tea there. This was true. I had a little argument with the security guard who didn't want me locking my bike to the fence. I asked him where I should lock it then, and he suggested that I park it on the sidewalk next to the other bikes. Now, I love my bike, but I'll admit that by bike shop standards, it is not super fancy. It is a fairly standard fixed gear conversion. However, it is the fanciest bike I have seen in Bombay by quite a bit. People with more than a hundred dollars or so to spend on transportation in this city do not buy bicycles. Also, I keep it fairly free of mud, and there is no rust, which is not at all the case with the rest of this city's fleet. So it sticks out like a sore thumb, and is likely to evaporate quickly if not chained down. This was as obvious to the security guard as it was to me, and he kindly decided to let me lock it to a tree inside the fence.

Space is a commodity in Mumbai, and the bookstore was evidence. The shelves were stocked with glossy new covers like a Barnes and Noble or some such, but the arrangement of the aisles had more in common with a used book store of the sort that tries to fit the entire literary history of the world into a few square meters. Somehow there was room for a tea shop with an extensive menu, and I had a good cup of tea. The sweet milky chai that can be had at every street corner is in many ways a wonderful thing, but the quality of the actual tea is moderate at best. It is mostly sweet warm milk with cardamom and tea flavor.

Oxford bookstore is in Churchgate, and from there I rode out along Marine Drive past Chowpatty Beach and up onto Malabar Hill. I had actually done this part of the ride that I did on Thursday night. I'm really needing some escaping the city, hence the plan to go to Matheran, but riding randomly around the city seems to help. The tide was way out and I stood for a little while and watched people picking their way around in the muck.



Up on the hill I encountered Banganga Tank. The road heading up from Chowpatty continues for a while, and then peters out and at some point is a driveway. Before this happened, I turned off on to a smaller street, and continued down the other side of the hill, picking my way through the fairly empty streets. I stopped to look at a temple that was nestled among the blocks of apartments, laundry fluttering like prayer flags in the background of the elephants and apsaras and monkeys carved into the stone of the temple roof. A few small plants sprouted from the among the granite menagerie. Someone directed me to continue on down the steps to the tank. Legend has it that on this spot, the Hindu hero Ram asked his brother Laxman for some water, whereupon Laxman shot an arrow into the ground and created a spring. Or so it apparently happened five thousand years ago.

Today, the tank is a rectangular pool about the size of a football field. There are stone steps leading down to it on all sides, and a number of temples wedged in among the apartments and tea stalls and vegetable markets, including the one that first caught my attention. Some kids were trying to get their cricket ball out of the water. A few people were sitting on the steps, and there was one guy bathing in the tank. The water looked thoroughly uninviting. It was a blackish green color and had a lot of trash floating in it. I sat by the steps for a little while and appreciated the incongruous craziness that is Bombay. Sitting there had a nice peacefulness to it.



From the tank, I continued north up to the Haji Ali Mosque. The mosque is built on a rock in the middle of a small bay/tidal flat, and is reached by walking along a causeway from the mainland that gets submerged at high tide. Along the causeway are people hawking flower garlands and caps for the devout, knock off designer sunglasses for the cool, and brightly colored plastic things for the small. There are also the ranks of the crippled, asking for alms. It occurs to me that in this country with such a labor pool that a seemingly good job like landscaper at a major research institiute won't even necessarily get you out of the slum, these people are professional sufferers.



Inside the compound of the mosque, I sit and absorb the activity around me. I chat for a little while with a guy from Gujart who is in Mumbai interviewing for some jobs in marketing. He thinks we should go to Goa for Christmas/New Years. Families sit about chatting, people selling ice cream and tea stroll through the crowd, and the voice of the Imam drifts out over everything. A man with huge dreads and dark glasses walks past, talking to the tea seller. He has at least fifty pounds of steel chains and padlocks draped over his torso, and carries what looks like a brass spitoon. He is also the most in-shape person I have seen here. My guess is that he spends much of his time smoking ganja and doing yoga.

Mathematical advent calendar

Some pretty and interesting math for your perusal, courtesy of Hans-Christian Graf v. Bothmer and Oliver Labs:

December 1st.

December always takes me by surprise.

Even when I think about it ahead of time, I am always surprised when I first realize that it is December.

Here are some pictures from the last month that didn't make it up earlier. It seems that the focus issues that my camera is having are here to stay this time. Just think of it as a stylistic effect.

November 06

Cheese...

So, the best thing in my world over the past few days was definitely talking on the phone with folks on Thanksgiving. Friday morning was first spent on the phone with Eric (and Alex, and even Aaron, who says, "Ack!" quite well - not sure it it means Zack or Eric or Alex) in Santa Fe. They had had a good sized crowd over for dinner at the new place out by St. Francis and I-25. Alex asked when I would come over, and I asked him how he was doing on the transvator that he's been telling us for quite a while. World travel would be a lot easier if he would hurry up and build it. Apparently a bicycle chain and one more trip to the junkyard should do it, and then I could just teleport over.

After this, I moved over to my office to try Fall City with the computer. There were some issues with the microphone, but Josiah soon had them sorted out and I spent a while talking to everyone, who told me all about the Ride for Pies 2. If it's going to be a tradition, I'll try not to miss it next time.

It also seems that it is becoming winter in other parts of the world. While I'm not complaining about the continual 80 degrees and sunny, snow is nice.




On Friday evening, TIFR was throwing its annual terrace party, which takes place, oddly enough, on the rooftop terrace of the building next to the one where I live. My evening began there, but before I had known the date of the terrace party, I had made plans to join Laurent and Agnes at a Beaujolais nouveau party hosted by the federation of French expatriates in Bombay. I considered bagging the whole evening on account of the rumblings in my gut, but they seemed calm enough to deal with for the time being, and the French party promised to have cheese, which is the one food item that I miss the most.

At the terrace party people milled about and talked in small groups and a few danced awkwardly. It was somehow obviously a party full of scientists, but I'm not sure how to describe what makes it obvious. So I guess if I was trying to mathematically prove that it was a party of scientists, I'd avoid the word obviously. But I'm not, so I think I'll use it and feel just fine about it.




(idea stolen from Kevin's wife Megan)

We picked up a taxi to Breach Candy, which is the name of a very fancy district of Bombay. The name must be a British leftover. Why they feel the need to rename half the main streets in the town but don't exorcize a name like Breach Candy seems beyond me. I guess Salaman Rushdie is from this part of the city. The Breach Candy Club is one of the most extreme examples of upscale Bombay that I have yet seen. Inside the walls are multiple large swimming pools with fountains, a large lawn coming up against the sea face, and some buildings that are presumably full of nice things. On the lawn was set up a tent where the wine and cheese were served, and a number of tables where they were consumed. We picked up some of the offerings. The wine was not great, but I never have high hopes for Beaujolais and even the cheese was a little bit of a let down. Oh well. Asked if it inspired nostalgia for France, Agnes replied that it might have if the wine were good.

We met a few people, and we made plans to go out after the temperance laws governing this sort of gathering kicked in at 11pm. We ended up at Polly Esther's - as the name suggests, it was exactly the sort of too loud, bad music, bad beer nightclub that one would expect. Freedom, it seems, is being able to go to one of these places in any country of the world. I didn't stay long.



I spent the rest of the weekend being sick. It was bound to happen at some point. I'm guessing that it was the samosa that I had in Chennai when I ducked into the nearest tea stall to avoid the rain one day while I was out walking. The place was not a crowded one, which is generally a bad sign, and the samosa was not even warm, so it had been sitting around for long enough for many a fly to take a stroll on its at one time crispy exterior. Perhaps it was that, perhaps it was something else. There is something going around here, I'm not sure if it is what I have or not, so maybe it is just something in our water supply, or something in the dal that comes out of the East canteen. In any case, I got hit, but not too bad. My gut began telling me that something was amiss on Wednesday or so, and continued to degrade throughout the rest of the week. When I woke up on Saturday, it was clear that I wouldn't be doing much for the weekend. I seem to be doing better now, but I am really feeling like getting out of the city, and had been planning to take off for the weekend and find someplace green without so many millions of people.

Sometimes I feel like mathematical research is a long and arduous process of having an idea and then figuring out who already had that idea.

Thoughts on Thanksgiving morning

When Satadal and I were riding to dinner in the auto-rickshaw through Chennai last Saturday evening, I could feel the blue prickling in my fingers of oxygen deprivation coming on. We had been swimming through the sea of exhaust since entering the city. I wished that I'd had my handkerchief to cover my nose and mouth as a few of the cyclists and motor bikers do. The auto-rickshaws run on two-stroke engines and the busses have old diesel engines, both of which are noxious polluters, especially when inadequately maintained. America may have lax emissions standards for our autos compared to the rest of the world, but we sure as hell enforce them better in Washington than they do in Tamil Nadu. It is easier to breathe riding a bike hard through rush hour traffic in Seattle than taking a working class taxi ride through the streets of that city at any hour of the day. On the other hand, riding through South Mumbai, where the auto-rickshaws are not allowed and the busses and taxis run on CNG is lots better than Chennai and at times comparable to Seattle. I hope that this small pocket continues to grow.

While we navigated the streets, dodging potholes that had become small lakes and oncoming vehicles that turned on their headlights at the last second, I looked through the haze and imagined a glimpse of my Utopia (not sure I like that word - nonexistent place). In this world, these fume spewing beasts are replaced with modes of conveyance of a more human powered sort. Pedal rickshaws exist now, but are few and far between. And the demons of social and economic hierarchy do their best to keep the bicycle relegated to those who cannot afford an engine other than themselves. But in my mind's eye, I could see this world, where the ringing of bells, snippets of passing conversations, and the chirping of the frogs that becomes overwhelming as soon as one steps off of a busy street replaced the revving of out of tune engines and the unstopping honking of horns. Passengers of neighboring rides discussed the evening's plans, politics, and the latest Bollywood movie. Pedalers jockeyed with each other just as the drivers do, but in my fantasy thay are testing their legs instead of an overheating block of metal. And Instead of zipping around in the latest tricked out Hundayi, trendy young Indians cruised about on Campy and Dura-Ace, or better yet, Hero Cycles' answer to the high end market. Best of all, I could breathe.

Of course, this idea is ridiculous to most people. Nobody would be willing give up sitting in an effortlessly air conditioned moving box, or even a much less protected seat on the back of a motor trike in favor of riding to dinner on a bicycle or being hauled to the theatre in a pedal powered trike. Certainly not enough people to make the honking stop.

So, I thought, what would it take? First off, not everyone, in fact, not most people are going to be willing or able to pedal themselves all the time. Especially in the heat or heavy monsoon. So there would have to be a huge pool of rickshaw pedalers. And how could this possibly exist without pushing a struggling society back towards Feudalism? One partial answer that came to mind is really quite simple, and would generally promote equality rather than stifle it.

What about compulsory service? Many countries are hesitant to give up their systems of universal conscription, and are instead phasing in alternative service options. Suppose that instead of being drafted into the military for a year, every 18 year old had several options, and suppose that one of them was pedaling a municipally subsidized rickshaw around the city. The work would be incredibly hard, but it would not be so viewed as the demeaning task that it currently is, and the fact of its impermanence would make it much easier. Who knows, some people might even like it.

After the reception that the first part of my idea got from Satadal and Munish at the bar, I didn't bother with the rest that night. When I brought up ditching internal combustion for human power, it moved us on to the topic of the reluctance of India's middle class to take jobs in the service sector. Satadal claimed that if the economic obstacles were overcome, that he would not refuse to take a job as a dishwasher. But over breakfast this morning I posed a similar question to some of my friends here. They agreed that the social pressures to see education almost exclusively as a means to a career and not as development of the self were intense. I asked whether my friends could change paths if they found that they were tired of math in 10 years, supposing that the economic disparity between doing what they wanted to do instead and staying put were removed. They shook their heads slowly. Once again, I include the caveat that the people who I am surrounded by are far from being average. I get similar responses when I talk to people in PhD programs at top tier departments in the US. But there, the reluctance to leave that is expressed tends to be more personal, and not less social.

So then I checked my email after breakfast this morning, and found a forward from my mom of an article in the PI that makes reference to another social upheaval. It turns out that Donald Rumsfeld owns a piece of farmland in Maryland containing a hill that earned the name Mount Misery, where Frederick Douglass and many others were once tortured. Perhaps a place can hold a curse. The article finished with a quote from Douglass.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

I took a look at what other news the PI had to talk about, and was surprised by the luck that dropped me on this article, not twenty minutes after describing my idea downstairs. The subject of the article is the increase in power that will come to Congressman McDermott, reviled by some as "Baghdad Jim" for vocally standing up to Bush and daring to suggest that his reasons for going to war might not be totally honest. But, come 2007, he will be a senior member of the party in power, with a ranking position on the Ways and Means committee. And some of the legislation he might be proposing? One year of universally obligatory public service. In the twenty years of no draft, he maintains, our citizens have lost a great degree of any sense of obligation to contribute to the greater good of society. He suggests that if service were broadened to include things such things as working at a national park or in health care, that this would turn the social evil of military conscription into a social good.

My father graduated from college in 1966. One advantage of continuing on to law school was the deferment. But then when that was done, the war was still going on. Doing legal aid for natives on the Navajo reservation, on US Territories in the Pacific, and in the wilds of Alaska earned him enough of a reprieve that he managed to not end up going over to Southeast Asia and ending up in a very different world. Perhaps he would have taken the same path anyway, but perhaps not. In any case, he found his own alternative option, and was smart enough to make it work. The contacts that he made professionally in those years are still the most important professional contacts in his career, and have led to a lot of good being done at pretty much all levels of our legal system. (Though he did just get snubbed by the Supreme Court, I'd say that's a snubbery to be proud of.)

What if McDermott's ideas became law? What if we didn't require a war and the creativity of someone determined to not fight in it to get people into adventures like my father's that they wouldn't have otherwise? And what if it also served to bring more social and economic equality to the pool from which we draw our current "all volunteer" military?

In fact, what if this didn't just happen once in a life, but every twenty years or so? I could be quite happy to take a year at the end of another decade to go and spend every other weekend heading a crew of 18-year-olds maintaining trails and removing invasive species from the mountains. I'll probably do something of the sort anyway, but I think it would be a better place if we all did. It is all a matter of what choices we are presented with.

Just some thoughts. But remember, Jim once took to the campaign trail on a bike.

Happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy the day.

Adventures in Madras

After a week away, I returned home.

While in Chennai, I had a few adventures. Some were mathematical, some explored India as it is, and some explored India as it was.

Mathematics is the justification for my time here, so I did my best to be a good guest. The department at the IMSc. is smaller than the one at TIFR, but the coffee is a lot better. I gave three talks in as many days, one on rational connectedness, one on drawing pictures using the computer, and one on arc spaces. Kapil Paranjape and I made friends and we talked some about math, but nothing really took off. In some ways, I'm still kind of treading water research-wise, reading a lot and looking around for something to really sink into. I have a few examples that I plan on looking at that will hopefully give me some ideas.

My talk on rational connectedness was probably the best of the three. I realized at the end of the talk that the guy sitting in the front row who asked the questions about rational connectedness of open varieties (which luckily I could reply to intelligently because of an article that I read last month that happened to point out a major gap that had existed in my understanding) was Seshadri. It is always interesting to meet someone whose name you recognize from their theorems. He was very nice, and invited me to come to the Chennai Mathematics Institute, a school that he founded about fifteen years ago and is one of the very good places to do mathematics as an undergrad in India. It was there that I gave my talk on arc spaces, but I had to turn down his offer of a longer stay for the time being.

My drawing pictures talk was fun. I just sat off to the side and showed off some of the graphics I have collected. I started with some of the Poincaré disk pictures that I did at Reed and am still getting good mileage out of, but those were mostly just to segue, via Klein's quartic curve, into things done with the program surf and its derivatives. I showed off the animation and how to make it. Kapil at least was interested enough to install surf on his computer that same day and start playing around. The main point of my talk was that to understand math well enough to get a computer to draw a picture of it is one way to learn it well, because the computer that understands commands like, "draw me a K3 surface in an asthetically pleasing projection," is yet to be built. I know that Josiah probably wants to build one though.

Kapil did pose the following interesting question: Can you find a K3 surface whose real points, when viewed as a Riemann surface, are a curve of genus g? Without the K3 restriction it isn't too hard, but he thinks that it should be possible with it, at least to some extent.

My talk at CMI on Friday was a bit of a trek to get to. The institute has a new campus (well, one building really) a bit south of town, in a rural area that is beginning to see a lot of development as an IT park. The building is very nicely designed. It is very open, with courtyards and rooftop terraces and covered outdoor alcoves with chalk boards. I was reminded of the UNAM institute in Morelia, Mexico where I first met some of the Indians. Seshadri and I got to talking and someone had to come and remind us that I was supposed to be giving a talk about five minutes after I was supposed to have started. I was a bit flustered throughout, and though the first forty minutes or so went off fine on autopilot, the end was rather rushed as I couldn't actually decide how much to say about motivic integration or the Nash conjecture, so I ended up saying not enough about either to really make the end of the talk make sense.

Anyway, I plan on collecting my notes into a popular math account of some of the ideas that I talked about last week. At some point in the near future, you should get a glimpse into how I think about moduli spaces.

So, India as it is in the small corner of Chennai that I chanced to explore is noticeably different from the small corner of Mumbai that I have explored.

The day I arrived in Chennai, I took a walk around town, to the beach, where the Bay of Bengal makes a much grater ruckus with its waves than does the Arabian Sea. As I was walking back to the institute, I saw a couple of westerners at a bus stop, one of whom was playing with a Rubik's Cube.

"Excuse me, did you get that cube here, or did you bring it with you?"

"I got it here."

"Could I ask you where you picked it up?"

"At a shop just near here. In fact, ... here you go."

And with that, I met Koen and Patrick, two Belgian computer folks here helping an Indian company set up their mainframes and using the excuse to explore the country, and Koen gave me a Rubik's Cube. I'd been looking for one since I found one in a drawer in my apartment. It was taken apart, and when I put it back together, the red-green edge piece was missing. I tired to mess with it anyway, but it was more an exercise in keeping it from exploding than figuring out the algorithms. Eventually, the springs holding the face center pieces snapped.

So I was a strangely fortuitous meeting. We had a cup of tea at one of the roadside stalls that seem to be every other business in Chennai and exchanged email addresses. We didn't end up meeting up again last week, but Koen did tell me that he is a few cube solves closer to his goal of simultaneously juggling and solving three cubes. I did manage to solve my cube, but of course I cheated and used the internet. I'll try to figure out some of the different methods by looking less in the back of the book. The Rubik's cube is a great way to introduce people to group theory and algorithms, so I'll claim that time spent messing with it is mathematics education research.

The campus of MatScience is interesting. There is a large road in the process of being built right next to it. The road is called IT Corridor, and is supposed to encourage a certain sort of economic development. But for now, it is still pretty much the southern edge of town, in the middle of a swamp. At night, the frogs and other critters make the loudest such noise I have ever heard. I'm in the fourth largest city in the second largest country in the world, but something about it feels like the middle of nowhere.

There was a TV in my room, and I watched part of an Indian game show. Contestants were asked quasi-literary questions such as the name of the villain in Oliver Twist (though that one was asked by showing a clip from the recent film and not mentioning the names Oliver twist or even Charles Dickens). Three pairs smiled and did the head wobble to indicate they didn't know before the last pair got it. The host told them, "That's the right answer!" with great enthusiasm. She dropped the w in answer even further than I am used to hearing. Somehow, there was an w-antiphoneme in between the sibilant and the vowel.

On Thursday night I joined Kapil and his family on an outing to hear some
jazz. A local pianist who was once a mathematician played with a couple of guys who were visiting him from Paris. The former mathematician was still apparently a bit of an academic, because although he was apparently restraining himself (Kapil's daughter was dreading his lengthy explanations) his manner of introducing the pieces sounded more like he was about to prove a theorem than play the piano. The drummer was one of the most creative musicians I have ever watched perform. He was clearly enjoying himself tremendously, and the way he played with his instrument made it clear that he saw it much more as a collection of objects with the potential to make some interesting noises than as a preset array of surfaces and strikers to be combined and arranged. For example, he would modulate the pitch of his instruments - his snare by leaning on the head with his elbow, and his cymbal by flexing it against his chest.

Afterwards, we went out for Chinese food, or at least for the Indian version of Chinese. Apparently, in New York, it is possible to find "Indian style Chinese food". It is certainly unlike what I have had either in China or in the US. In any case, I don't think I've ever had Chinese food that made such use of chickpeas.

As to India as it once was, on Saturday Satadal (who I know because he was visiting TIFR earlier this month) and I went to Mahalabipuam, or Mamallapuram, about an hour's bus ride south of the city. After a little bit of initial confusion, we found our bus, and with a diesel rumble and a blast of air horn, lumbered towards the outskirts. Our driver was very excited to use his horn whenever possible, and I swear it was mounted inside the bus rather than outside. Conversation was a little difficult, because every thirty seconds at the longest I had to plug me ears or risk arriving at our destination deaf. Unbelievably, the guy in the seat next to us slept the whole way. The road was not particularly smooth either.

We arrived in the center of the village where we are headed and the sky, which had been darkening for the past half hour opened up. Ducking into a tea shop to sit through two cups of chai (I am finally learning to order chai without sugar and strong, to avoid getting a cup of tea flavored hot milk), Satadal and I talk about travel. We would both like to visit the middle east at some point, but there is no way that I am going closer than Turkey with the present political climate. Satadal suggests that I pretend to be Lebanese. The tourist population in Mahabalipuram is large. It was a little disconcerting to see so many palefaces about.

Eventually the rain let up and we wandered out to see the sights. The town wraps its way along the flatness of the seaside around a small hill made from a large lump of stone that is more resistant to the weathering than its surroundings. At the base of the hill near the center of town there is a wall of stone carved with scenes in bas relief. The Ganga (Ganges) is a split running vertically through the stone, decoratively indicated with snake-bodied deities. A yogi stands in meditation, his ribs stark after even ten centuries of seaside air has tried to smooth his hunger. A god stands next to him, supplying him with the weapons he needs in his spiritual quest. Humans, gods and animals gather around to witness this spectacle. At a shrine to Krishna four holy men are seen praying and three students whose heads had fallen off recently (a hundred years ago or so) continue listening to a teacher.



"Why the temple?" Satadal asks. Our impromptu host - a man from the Indian Archaeological Mission or some such office replies that in the noise and nonsense of the city, it is hard to meditate, one needs a special place for practice. He wears the initials of his office scrawled in red pen on the pocket of his blue shirt and the smear of white and mark of red of a devout Hindu on his forehead. He carries an umbrella, but still the rain has washed away much of the color.

Up from this cliff there was a large round boulder precariously balanced on a slope. I was reminded of the (formerly) balanced rock at Chaco Canyon. Continuing, we found another of the many carved out caves. It struck me as odd that the caves were carved out as rectangularly as possible, the tyranny of the right angle extending into this construction where it could be of little practical use but as architecturally familiar comfort to the excavators.

At the top of the hill was an unfinished or collapsed temple. A woman was selling some mangos and some kids were selling little marble trinkets. On the way back down, I remarked that some of the paths through the park were marked out by low fence made of barbed wire. This rusty deterrent would have brought down the lawyers in the States, but in India, it didn't even raise an eyebrow. Later, at lunch, I noticed a steel slide and merry go round where some kids were playing and thought about how these things no longer exist in the US. It is as if our system has created a culture of incompetence, where if there is an opportunity to harm oneself, however minor, it is certainly the fault of the person who built the merry go round instead of the kid who slipped or the parents who never let the kid go outside and learn how to stand up on their own.

After walking back down the hill, we made our way out to the shore temple. It was a fenced off monument, and there is an Indian/Foreigner fee scale at this sort of place that increases the fees about 1000% for non Indians. Sometimes, like at The Museum Formerly Known as Prince of Wales, my TIFR card works to get me in as an Indian. But that place is in Bombay where they might know TIFR, and this guy was just being honest.

The shore temple was badly weathered but stunning nonetheless. It is situated on a piece of land that juts out from the beach, and is capped by a breakwater of large boulders. There are a lot of statues of cattle placed around the temple, ghosts of the ancient bovines that milled around browsing and pooping a thousand years ago just as their descendents do now. The temple itself was apparently covered with carvings of asparas, or nymphs, but I couldn't see anything that survived as more than a vague humanoid form. The beauty of the place was a ghost anchored in a setting of cloud and sea.



Soon enough it started raining again, so we ducked into the government run handicraft center and admired some of the beautiful stuff that I would love to bring home with me at some point. But it would have been hard to carry a chandelier of elephants holding acrobats swinging oil lamps back with me on the bus.

As I write this and another small ant crawls across the screen, I wonder if there are some ants trying to live inside my computer. I hope that they don't do any permanent harm.

After the second rain let up, we made our way down the road to the third main attraction of the place, which was the thoroughly uninspiring Five Rathas. Or maybe they were amazing and we were just hungry. We walked back and had lunch at a seaside restaurant. From my viewpoint, I could see the shore temple and the ocean. It was quite nice. There was a picture on the wall of what the place had looked like pre-tsunami, with a different roof supported by nonexistent concrete pillars. The second floor balcony sported a mark indicating how high the wave went.

After lunch, we wandered back through town and caught a bus back to Chennai. It was crowded and I stood the whole way back. Back in Chennai, we switched to an even more crowded bus and took it to a bookstore called Higgenbothams where some prices were still marked in pounds. I picked up a copy of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a book of poetry by the Bengali poet Tagore, and some selected Indian short stories.

The air in Chennai is not good. The fact that Bombay runs on CNG taxis and busses makes a big difference compared to two cycle auto-rickshaws and diesel busses. When I got back to the guest house, my clothes smelled like smoke. Our busses engine compartments were not well sealed, and the auto rickshaws made their way through the smoke with open sides.

After a dinner at a somewhat upscale and very tasty place, we went to Zara, a "tapas bar". It was clearly unsure about whether it was a bar or a restaurant. TPosted by the door was their request for "Elegantly Casual" attire. The night before, we had tried to go out to a different place, but the sandals of one of the guys who was with us kept us out. In any case, at Zara, we were greeted by two people who tried to turn us away. First they said that the place was full, but then they decided that maybe we could stand by the bar. One of them ran up to check on this. The other kept looking at our shoes, perhaps with a hope that they would turn into sandals. Or maybe he was just an extroverted mathematician. We weren't particularly scruffy or anything, it seemed more a matter of wanting to keep the gender ratio balanced. A group of women who arrived while we were there were ushered right in. It was finally they decided that there was space for us to stand near the bar. Inside, a DJ in a booth was playing crap, six people were sitting at the bar with a few more standing around, and the rest of the space was taken up by people at tables. We got our drinks and stood around.

It is interesting how India deals with alcohol, at least as far as I can see things. Much of the middle class seems to look down on drinking, and tolerates it sort of like vegetarians tolerate meat eating. In Chennai especially, the bars seem to be aimed at people whose wallets and minds are closer to a western economy. My whiskey and soda was 140Rs., which is closer to an American price than an Indian one. At Gokul in Mumbai, the dark beer den that is the frequent haunt of the non-teetotaling TIFR crowd, it would be maybe 50Rs. Also, the bars in Chennai close at 11pm. The other option, as Satadal mentioned that he had observed, seemed to be to get a bottle and drink it right away in front of the liquor store.

We met a guy who was sitting at the bar, and found ourselves in a discussion about the Indian national character. This guy's point was that there is a middle class Indian stigma against doing manual labor, and that this is one of the reasons why the percentage of the country that is actively trying to "catch up with the west" is relatively small. Satadal agreed that this stigma existed, and probably hampered some creativity or adventurousnes, but he contended that that was because in India, labor doesn't pay. If one could make a comparable wage driving a taxi or washing dishes in India, it wouldn't have the stigma that it does. In the US, it is not really worth batting an eye when one's espresso is pulled by someone who could critique Schopenhauer or your landscaper happens to have an advanced degree in Physics. In India, there are intense social and economic pressures to keep on whatever path you find yourself on. I took a year off in the middle of college and basically loafed around Santa Fe, teaching skiing and tutoring math and doing lots of SCA stuff. This is pretty much unheard of in the (admittedly very small and of very skewed selection) collection of Indians who I have talked to about this. And then after finishing college and getting a job that paid quite well, I ditched it to drive a cab and tutor math in Santa Fe again. Apparently, this would have gotten me disowned from some Indian families, but my situation was quite the opposite. An example of how this attitude plays out is the idea of tipping in this country. It is not that it isn't done, but it is different from the custom in most other places where I've been. It correlates somewhat to the amount of the bill, but sub-linearly. A tip here is what most Americans who complain about leaving tips wish it was - an indicator of really exceptional service. I'd be fine with this, if the social and economic differences between a waiter and a business person was not so marked.

I have a lot more to learn about this country.

a family of blue sextics

I'm in Chennai this week, visiting with Kapil Paranjape and the rest of the people here at MatScience (it's hard not to want to pronounce it "Mad Science"). I'll give a talk tomorrow morning on my thesis work, but I'm also giving a talk on Thursday about illustrating mathematics. So this has given me cause to geek out with surf and create some nice animations.



Of course, one of my great mathematical inspirations in this direction is the artistic work of my friend Lun-Yi Tsai. Lun-Yi recently gave a colloquium talk at the UW where he presented his work and asked for mathematicians with theorems that they visualize to share their ideas with him.

On not passing go

When Jace and I were arrested in June, we were taken out from the van in a garage/loading area under the King County Jail. One of the most reassuring things at that point was the moderate degree of trust I had that the system that I found myself suddenly within would sooner or later (and presumably sooner) spit us back out again, and that nothing really terrible was going to happen in the interim. One of the good things about the US penal system is that, at least close to the surface level, things are generically not so unpleasant. I'm not saying that there are not serious problems close by, but I was pretty much right in figuring that we weren't likely to disappear into anything too horrible. But it was easy to imagine a slightly different situation where our fortunes were not so easy to predict.

Reed College sends out emails every so often keeping me posted on what notable things people associated with the school are up to. In today's mail, there was a story about a guy who graduated the same year I did, and also grew up in Santa Fe. I must have run into him at Reed, and we probably went to the same preschool for a little while. (For some reason, I apparently attended just about every preschool in Santa Fe). Even so, I can't say I recognize him. Anyway, he was arrested for creatively trying to woo his girlfriend with some stencil art, and for being of Afghan origin, and now every time he reenters the US, he is detained and questioned. Here's the story in the New Mexican.

In this same email, Reed told me about an article in Slate by Darius Rejali, a political science professor and general interesting person. The last time I ran into Darius, I was walking across the playa at Burning Man in 2003. In the article, he links to an interview that is posted on the white house web page which includes the following endorsement of torture by Dick Cheny:

Q Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's a no-brainer for me, ...

Darius goes on to make clear the connection between torture in a military or intelligence gathering context, and in a police context. It's pretty obvious really. Somebody learns all sorts of fancy torture techniques while off in Iraq or Afghanistan in their early twenties, and then comes back home for a long and distinguished career in their local police department. Meanwhile, terror suspects, or perhaps just graffitti artists, it is hard to tell these days, are pulled in off the street for something minor, and suddenly life is much less pleasant. Jail wasn't fun, but in most parts of the world (here for example) it is a lot less so.

And while I'm on the subject of torture, I'll link to this very sad story.

So I'm really glad that there are some long overdue checks to be put in place as of this week. And I'm glad that Valerie Rumsfeld's daddy is finally out.

Traffic

Here is a video that somebody else took of traffic at some random intersection in India. This is not an exceptionally high traffic spot.

Notice how there are no signals and it is all rather chaotic, but somehow it just works.

Towards the end is an event of the sort that led to the coining of the name Critical Mass for a certain monthly bike ride.

Climate change

So, here is the story of last Sunday's adventure. Anupam, Arati, Alok and I met up and took the early ferry (6:30 early) over to Mandwa, where I had gone before. They took the bus and I rode th 20 km to Alibag. We had breakfast at a hotel in the middle of town and got directions to Kashid beach, about 35km away. (Breakfast included a "paper dosa" that covered about a third of the table.)

I set off out of town, asking directions frequently. I stopped by a pond covered with amazing lotus flowers, huge and pink standing on stalks at least two or in some cases three feet out of the water. I need to fix or replace my camera soon. I stopped to admire them for a little while, and watch the women in their bright saris washing clothes at one end of the lake. As always, a small crowd gathered to inspect the ferengi and his bicycle. Among the six or so things I have learned how to say in Hindi (which is close enough to Marathi that a large number of people speak both), "Mai cycle kud banaya hai." (I built my bike myself) is one of the more useful, since it answers or diverts a number of questions that do not have answers like "America" and "yes". After a few kilometers, I was instructed to turn off the main road to the right. The new road passed through some swampy areas and then wound through villages that kind of merged into one another. The road was quite bad.

After about 17km of this, I came to a big bridge over a river that was letting out to the sea. On the other side was a police checkpoint, but they were not interested in me. I turned right onto a much nicer road that wound along the coast and up and down a couple hills. It was a very pleasant ride. Quite a few cars packed full of beach goers passed me, and most of them slowed down to look and take pictures.

I arrived at the beach at around 11:00 and found the others sitting in the shade of some trees at one of the tables set up by a concession stand. They had not been there long. I had a coconut and we decided to head down the beach a little away from the crowded part. The water was nice enough to swim in, and the slope was very gradual. The others could not swim, so they didn't venture far out into the water. I swam out a fair bit and was surprised that I could still stand with my head out of water and my toes on the sand. We played in the waves for a bit. Anupam and Alok were quite excited by the fact that one could duck under a wave that was about to hit them.

By 1:00 we headed back to the cover of the shade, had some more coconuts, and moved our chairs to try to stay in the shade of the scraggly beach pines. Some neighbors moved in with a car stereo and really bad taste in music. Eventually they switched from whiny sap to Eminem, and while this is certainly not what I would like to lounge about on the beach listening to, it was infinitely better.

At about 3:00 I started back. I was not really full of energy, but the first part of the ride was nice enough that I enjoyed it. The second half of the ride to Alibag, the part after the bridge, was probably the hardest 17km I have ever ridden. This was entirely situational; the combination of the villagers burning trash, the exuberant horn use (probably 20% of people passing me in either direction honked before and while doing so), the bad road and my lingering cold combined for a less than fun ride.

At 5:00 I met the others in the restaurant where we had breakfast. They had just gotten there, the bus having beat me but only just barely. They had had to stand the whole way. So we were all a bit dazed and tired. We had some tea and snack, and at about 5:40 I started back towards Mandwa to catch the 6:45 boat. By the time I was getting back near to Mandwa, the sun had gone down and the 15 minutes of twilight were gone. By the time I realized that I had made a wrong turn, it was pretty clear that I was going to miss the boat. When I finally got to Mandwa, it was 7:00, and it appeared that the last boat was gone. A group of motor rickshaw drivers stood around saying, "No boat, climate change." I didn't understand the second part, but no boat was clear enough. Alok, Anupam and Arita were not there, so I assumed that they had gone ahead without me.

One of the drivers offered for me to stay at his house for the night, and I figured that this was my best option, since I didn't really want to ride back to Alibag and look for a hotel. I loaded my self and my bike into the seat of his trike and was annoyed and amused at myself for taking a wrong turn, but glad that things seemed to be working out. I was a little annoyed when he decided to name a price after driving me a few miles down dark unfamiliar roads, but since it was only mildly exorbitant in the local economy and not at all in dollars, I didn't seem worth it to care.

At his house there were two more trikes parked. I was introduced to his family (who then stayed in the other room for most of the rest of the time), drank some tea, and watched cricket on TV. I was exhausted, and I find televised cricket as boring as televised baseball, so I went to bed quite early. (Not that I don't enjoy going to an occasional baseball game, but the enjoyment has more to do with having an excuse to sit around outside than the details of the game. Cricket seems to take this picnic idea even further. Instead of innings, there are breaks called tea and lunchtime.)

Anyway, in the morning I got up and caught the ferry back to Bombay. I met Anupam and Alok in the hallway outside my office. It turns out that there was an unseasonal storm on Sunday night in Bombay (where I was there were dark clouds and a bit of wind) and the 6:45 boat did not leave without me, it had been canceled. The bus that was going to take them from Alibag to Mandwa was canceled as well. They thought that I would figure this out, and so they waited until about 9:30 for me, and then took bus and train the long way back to the city. I guess that is what the motor rickshaw-wallahs meant by climate change, no boat.

So, it was a bit of an adventure, and I'm going to finally put the bigger tires on my bike. I seem to get some points here for having ridden 100km. Cycling for fun is almost unheard of for many Indians, especially the wealthier sort. Bikes are seen as transportation for poor people and toys for kids. Of course, this philosophy exists in the US too, but it seems more entrenched here.

So, what else...

Today I got a bank account at the branch of the bank that is here in the institute. It only took two and a half hours. Plus whatever time I spend when I go back to pick up my checkbook and ATM card. I'm hoping that this will be not much.

Srinivas has arranged for me to go and spend a week at the Chennai Institute of Maths, to meet Paranjape. I'll go on Sunday.

Dipankar pointed out this article by Terrence Tao titled Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture; a nonlinear PDE perspective. It seems somewhat unreasonable that looking at anything from the perspective of nonlinear PDE would clear things up for me, but this paper is quite lucid, and I feel like I understand something deeper about these ideas after an initial reading.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the things that fascinates me about mathematics is how some very interesting structures are particular to three dimensions. My favorite easy example is that this is the only place that one can tie a nontrivial knot in a piece of string (two or fewer dimensions and there is no room to cross the strands, four or more and there are enough dimensions to untie anything you like). Clearly, there is something special about three dimensions, because this is apparently where we live.

The string theorists Andreas Karch and Lisa Randall seem to share this fascination of mine. Their work explores the idea that somehow the universe starts out with lots of degrees of freedom (dimensions) and then, following the basic principle that the universe is essentially lazy, reality relaxes, folding dimensions into each other until something stops up the process. This something is a collection of structures that happen to exist in three dimensions. I'm probably horribly misrepresenting their argument already, so I'll say no more.

Another thing that three dimensions does with its weirdness is make proving the Poincaré conjecture a lot harder. Some of the reasons that this basic topological problem is so difficult are similar to the reasons why tying a knot in a string works; there is just enough room for really tricky complications to arise, but not enough room to avoid any of them easily. In three dimensions, the topology (that flavor of geometry in which a donut and a coffee cup are the same - a point made the other way by Vivek this morning when the cart carrying the cups was late coming to breakfast, but there were plenty of savory Indian breakfast-donuts) is really entangled with the geometry (that flavor of geometry where one actually measures things) of things, and the geometry is sufficiently complicated. This is the basis of Thurston's geometrization program. It says that any 3 dimensional topological manifold has a canonical decomposition into a set of parts with specific geometric structures, and that understanding the topological structure can be achieved by understanding these geometric structures. Problem is, understanding the geometric structures is rather hard.

Hamilton's idea was to write down a differential equation, the Ricci flow, which would take an arbitrary geometric structure and relax it to the canonical one. The equations of Ricci flow are similar to the ones that describe the tendency for heat to flow from a hotter part of an object to the cooler parts, but instead of flowing heat, it flows curvature, sort of like when a squashed balloon bounces back to round. There are some problems with this process, like the fact that regions can develop where the curvature is infinitely high, like a balloon that wants to lose all of its air until it collapses to a point. The plan was to use some sort of surgery-like procedure to cut those parts out and replace them with more well behaved parts in a way where the topological information that was hopefully to be extracted would not be affected. The problem then becomes finding information capturing quantities that scale perfectly, so that as the singularity develops with all of its infinities, the quantity is not changed drastically.

Perelman's accomplishment is that he did this.

Tao's paper caught my attention because he focuses on this idea of a critical quantity, one which scales perfectly in the presence of a singularity. I've been thinking about moving information across scales a bit lately. My brain wants to build an analogy between space-time relativity and scale-observation relativity, but exactly how this analogy looks is somewhat elusive. Stuff that is very far away runs into the observational problem of it being seen closer and closer to 14 billion years ago, and hence outside of our concept of time, and stuff that is very small exits our observational paradigm. So then a critical quantity would be one that would pass through the too-small-to-understand barrier and tell us something interesting. Of course, I immediately thought of the stories that my dad would tell me while we were on road trips when I was a kid. The incredible shrinking man was a scientist at Los Alamos who started shrinking, and every so often, he would pop through a quark or into a black hole and out into a new universe.

I tend to think about a lot of this stuff sort of like I think about science fiction stories. I don't know enough physics to really separate possibility from nonsense, but perhaps enough to come up with lots that sounds like it might be one or the other. It's sort of like how I play with installing software on unixy machines instead of playing computer games. In that case, I tend to know just enough to make something good and broken if given sufficient time.

Anyway, back in reality, I wasted far too much time today paying attention to American politics, which was spouting better news for once. I hope that some worthwhile changes are in the works.

the wall

100+Km on bad roads in this country of exuberant horn users, burning trash, and overhead sun. The beach was nice though.

On the way back I made a wrong turn and ended up missing the last boat back to Bombay. Stayed at the home of an enterprising motor rickshaw wallah.

I'll expand yesterday's adventure later, but don't really feel like it now. It was bound to happen eventually, but I feel I've hit the culture shock wall. At least I'm not tired of Indian food, and I have a nice secluded cave I can hide in. And when I decide to venture out again, I'll still be in this very interesting place.

Starry night

As I was walking over to have lunch yesterday, Benny walked up to me and asked what I was doing for the rest of the day. Benny is a Computer Science graduate student, and I met him when he recruited me for his Founder's Day tug-of-war team (which was last week, instead of on Founder's Day this coming Monday for some reason, and we were soundly defeated by the grounds crew).

"Nothing planned," I said. I had actually planned on doing nothing, because I woke up with a bit of a sore throat yesterday, and wanted to take it easy. It was not to be.

"Do you want to go and look at stars?" he asked.

"Sure."

"Then go and get on that bus, it is leaving right now."

I had just enough time to go and change for shoes from flip flops and grab a jacket. The bus was about half full of people from the institute, and we filled up the rest of the seats, picking up people who had some connection with TIFR on the way out of town. The program was primarially a science outreach program, so there were plenty of undergraduates and kids.



(Thanks to Mahua for the pictures!)

We played logic puzzles and movie-title charades on the way out of town. Probably half of us had missed lunch, so we stopped for vadapav, which is a roll with a deep fried ball of spiced chickpea flour and vegatables. Vadapav is the quintessential fast food of Mumbai.

After a few hours, of jostling along we turned off onto a dirt road. I was just thinking to myself that the driver was doing a much better job that the unlucky guy who Jill and I encountered on the Lost Coast when one of the wheels slipped off the road and we were stuck in a ford. There was not much further to go, so we walked, and the bus was unstuck by morning.

Our destination was the flat top of a small hill, with a nice unobstructed view of the sky and the surrounding valley. There was water available in large clay pots, which one would dip a stainless steel cup into, and then, in the way that Indians have adopted to keep one's germs to oneself in such situations, pour the water from cup to mouth without touching the lips. I'm getting better, but I still usually end up with some dribbles on my shirt. We milled about for a while and watched the sunset. The place is called Shivalik Eco Farms, and is a small establishment that the astronomy group has been patronizing for these semiannual night sky outings. Shivalik provides chairs for those who want to sit and a tarp for those who want to be on the ground, water, tea, dinner and breakfast, toilets, a shelter for those who want to nap, and electricity for the slideshows that were part of the program. Like everywhere here seems to be, it was in the midst of many half finished projects. A swimming pool/mosquito breeding pond was full of slightly green water, and about half suurrounded with paving stones that already had grass growing up between them (though to be honest, that probably takes about 30 minutes). Piles of dirt and bricks were scattered about. Were they part of the pool project or perhaps the start of something else? One of them was decorated, and there was some debate as to weather this was a purposeful shrine or just something thta some of the kids who lived there had built.

We settled into the chairs or arranged ourselves on the tarp after enjoying an excellent sunset. Our two main lecturers introduced themselves. One was a theorist, who would tell us about the history of Astronomy and the mechanics of celestial objects. The second was our rerpository of lore, who would point out the individuals in the sea of twinkling points. It seems that the theoretical astronomers don't all know the night sky so well. Punching in coordinates to a computer doesn't take familiarity whit what is where when. I guess it is sort of the same thing as the rediculous phenomenon that happens when a table of mathematicians tries to figure out a restauant bill. You might think that a PhD in algebraic geometry equates to quick access to all sorts of facts like 18 percent of 47.32, but you would in fact be wrong. Anyway, I like the amazing pictures that these telescopes produce, but I think that my personal interest in astronomy is more of the naked eye sort.

The first lecture, as the stars began to show themselves, was a 90 minute version of Astronomy 101. It began with speculation about the first astronomers, imagining hunter gatherers observing the cycle of the moon waxing and waning, and the longer cycle of the sun, and how the paths of the zodiac would become apparent after time, especially as agriculture took hold and people became more sedentary. People would notice the wanderers, and after many years, discover mysteries and learn that Hesperus is Phosphorus, and discover the longer cycle of the moon, predict eclipses, invent telescopes to further sate one's curosity, and continue on to the idea of a not-moment not-place fourteen billion years ago where the uiniverse began expanding from every point at once.

The stars were now shining in much of the sky, and the waxing crescent moon was falling into the west. The next lecture was a sky talk. I leaned back and looked up at the sky as my attention was drawn in turn to Casseopeia to find Polaris, which sits a mere 19 degrees above the horizon here. From there we wandered over to Lyra, Aquarius, Cygnus, Aquilla and their neighbors. We were told the Sanskrit names of the constellatons and stars as well, and shown some of the 27 Nakshatra, or constellations of the lunar Zodiac.



There was a break to look through the telescopes at the moon and at a nice binary star. Dinner was served, a tasty meal of puri, rice, vegetables and Lassi. Our bellies full, we reconvened for a lecture about telescopes, which many took as a chance to catch a breif nap in preparation for staying up all night. I listened to most of it, but the power point slideshow was bright and out of place, so I just looked a the sky. Following this was a talk about the status of Pluto by our first speaker, who also had a slideshow, but seemed to have perhaps tailored it a bit better to giving it for an audience who didn't want to lose their night vision. He is a fan of the new situation, and viewed the contreversy as mostly silly. But, he at least appriciated the political humor that emerged alongside the debate. He showed a few political cartoons that maybe I'll find on the net at some point and post here

During the talk, a black dog emerged from the night and sat down beneath the table where the equipment was sitting. Chuckles went out, as people exclaimed that Pluto, or perhaps Cerebus had come to visit and listen to the talk. I guess that our hosts were embarrassed, because they quickly appeared and carried him away.

Our night sky expert returned to lead us further along the Zodiac, to Pegasus, Pisces, Andromeda, Perseus, Cetus, Aries and Taurus. As well as being the first sign of the Indian and Western Zodiacs, Aries contains the first two Nakshatra, the third being Kritika, or the Pleadies. He continued to refer to Pluto as a planet, perhaps indicating that a bit of the debate existed in Bombay as well.

The telescopes returned, and we peered 22 lakh light years into the past at the fuzzy patch of Andromeda, into the cluster that is the Pleadies, and at a few other places where the 4 inch scopes could show some nice detail.

There was a quiz game to kill some time and reinforce what we had learned, and then our guide's torch drew us to Gemini and the gates of Heaven, which all the wanderers pass through in their travels, Cancer, and Leo, where Saturn bides his time these days. The Indian version of Orion is not the hunter but the hunted. The belt becomes an arrow, and the legs and shoulders of Orion are the splayed legs of the fallen prey. The hunter who shot the arrow is brilliant and faithful Sirius.

This time, the telescopes turned to the Orion Nebula and to Saturn. It was unfortunate that Saturn was our only wanderer visible last night, but he made up for it with a beautifully clear display of his rings and of Titan.

I lay back on the mat and watched the last hours of darkness give way to dawn. The blackness sprinkled thick with faint stars gave way to a deep blue upon which Orion, Saturn, and Leo stood bold and nearly alone. I got up and stood at the edge of the hill, watching the misty valley of rice paddies and scattered huts resolve itself. The sun climbed its way over the ridge to the East, and it was time for breakfast and our return to the city.