Ride Critical Mass tonight in Seattle

If you ride a bike in Seattle, you should go out for Critical Mass this evening. Meet at Westlake at 5:30, leave by a little after 6pm. Tonight's ride is a memorial ride for Susanne Scaringi, who died this week after a collision with a van. The ride will go to join her family at the site of the accident in West Seattle for a vigil that will then continue on to Alki.

I didn't know her, but if I was in town, I'd like to be there to support those who did.

On a not entirely unrelated note, I also read this open letter to drivers that someone else who I don't know wrote.

And I promise to write about something other than bikes soon.

Track stands on MG road

After lunch on Wednesday, I couldn't get back into the math, so I dicided to go for a bike ride. My clothes that worked reasonably well for Seattle tend to be a bit on the warm side here, so rather than spend time shopping (which I generally dislike) I had planned on picking up some cheap stuff from the sidewalk vendors when I got here (which tends to be a bit more interesting). A certain section of Mahatma Ghandi road is known as fashion street - the sidewalk on one side is lined with stalls selling all sorts of clothes.

On my way there, I took a slight detour and passed by the town hall and Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus), where I spent most of my previous visit to this city. I didn't check to see if the guy who sold my Dad and I a child's ticket to the next town claiming that it was a first class ticket to Delhi was still there. He's probably retired by now.

Many of these places will require a return when I'm in a mood to take pictures.

I eventually made my way to the vendors and picked up a few nice cotton shirts, some shorts, and a pair of pants for thrift store prices. Whenever I would stop while browsing along the stalls, a crowd of people interested in my bike would form. A foreigner on a bike is not a common sight. People always ask about the one brake, and then show them that it is fixed. This is also not a common thing here, which means that the crowd is easily impressed by a track stand, especially without hands. I should work on my backwards circles if I really want to show off...

Sunday bikings and such

Although it would have been exciting to head out into the countryside this weekend, the need to clean my apartment and prepare my seminar talk ended up winning out. Saturday found me washing windows and making my fridge a place where I would consider keeping food. later in the afternoon, I decided to head in to town for some other supplies, like kitchen utensils should I ever want to make food here. I wasn't sure that there would be a place to lock my bike, so I took the TIFR bus. As is generally the case when I opt for a bus rather than a bike, I wish that I had ridden. I did manage to get a broom and some incense and some colored shawls to try to fashion into some sort of shades for my currently bare light bulbs.



In the end, I didn't find kitchen supplies. There was a woman walking with a basket full of pots and pans on her head who looked like maybe she was selling them, but I wasn't sure and I decided not to ask. I ended up walking back home because the busses don't run all that often on the weekends. I worked on my talk a little more and turned in early so that I could get up and ride in the light traffic of Sunday morning.

Which I did. I was out the door at a little after 7:00, and pedaled first down along Marine Drive (which has a new name now, but I haven't heard it used...) to Malabar Hill. As predicted, the roads are quite empty on Sunday mornings. When I first left the colony, I moved to the right of the road for a second, but quickly remembered that traffic flow is opposite here. Left turns are the easy ones, and the ones where a car coming up behind you is potentially going to swerve into you if you are going straight. I think that this switch is easier to make on a bike than in a car, partly because one doesn't have to switch sides of the vehicle as well.



Since I am so new to this place, I don't have a really good sense of who rides a bike here. There are lots of bikes out on the streets, ridden by people of all ages. Almost all of them are single speed city bikes with a diamond frame, sometimes with two top tubes. A fair number are clearly delivery vehicles, of both the huge-bundle-on-the-back-rack and the reversed-tricycle-with-a-big-cargo-area-in-front sorts. I don't think they are used to seeing non-Indians getting around on bikes; there were lots of encouraging smiles and waves people as I passed by.

I asked at tea today if there is much of a recreational cycling phenomenon in India, and those present didn't seem to think so. They were surprised to hear that people like me who don't have cars are becoming less fringey, at least in places like the Northwest.



Anyway, Marine drive is a large wide street, they were doing some construction, expanding or repaving the sidewalk promenade along the water. I stopped and took a couple of pictures - people thought it strange that I was taking a picture of my bike. This land where Marine Drive runs along was "reclaimed" from the bay early in the last century. This was once a city of seven islands, but they have been merged into one large connected mass by a series of regrade and fill projects.

From where I started at the closer end, the waterfront arcs around to the north and west past Chowpatty Beach, which was fairly deserted in the morning, but is apparently quite happening in the evenings, and at Walkeshwar starts up Malabar Hill. Coming from down in the rest of the city, this is quite clearly an upscale residential district. Even so, there were parts of it which were not sharing in the wealth displayed by the high rises of their neighbors. I rode up the hill past the sweepers and the tea sellers and the other Sunday morning people. After a few zigs and zags, I made my way down into an area near the water's edge where some people were standing about next to a stage outside of a small temple. Nothing much was going on - a few people were asleep on the stage, some were sitting about starting their day. I slowed down to look at the scene, and some children took an interest in my bike. The first thing everyone notices is the lack of a rear brake. One kid, taller than the rest and wearing a red t-shirt in particular was especially perplexed. I showed him the fixed gear, but he clearly hadn't seen one before. So I rode back up the street a little bit and demonstrated a short skid. The enthusiastic response prompted a no handed track stand, which impressed him so much that he ran and woke up his older brother who was one of the people sleeping on the stage. The older brother was clearly more interested in sleeping. My new friend asked me to wait for a minute while he ran to get his bike, which he did, and showed off riding standing on the top tube.



After this, I rode around the bottom of the hill a bit more, walked through a small park, climbed back up via a steep and somewhat windy street, past a park with lots of greenery, and then dropped down, rejoining the city by the Crosswinds bookstore. I found my way back without much difficulty, and was able to shower and change in time for breakfast at the institute, which goes late on Sundays.

Post-breakfast, I went up to my office and called Jill using the internet. She was at Davis's housewarming party, so I got to talk to Josiah, my mom, and Davis as well. It is pretty amazing how different the communications network is than just a few years ago. It certainly makes moving to the other side of the world a lot easier.

I worked on my talk some, but was generally rather lazy for most of the rest of the day. At around dusk I took a walk around the colony. The sky made its rapid shift from blue to black and the Banyan trees unleashed their birds to the evenings festivities.



This morning I called Jill to hear her story of race day number one. The first cyclocross race had none of the cold, rainy and muddy features that were expected, but was instead a warm, dry and dusty day at Steilacoom. .83 was well represented, with Jill on her lovely new bike, wearing the kit from her new team, taking 13th of 45 women (And 1st of 2 in the women's singlespeed category!), and Denny placed 7th in a field of 63! Unfortunately, Jane had a fall and hurt her rib - either a bruise or a too small to see fracture. Hopefully she'll be back up for next week.

In the afternoon I gave my talk on rationally generated arcs. The main idea is to define a potential property of a variety X involving rationally generated arcs, and show that this property is implied by unirationality (a variety is unirational if there is a dominant rational map from projective space) and it implies rational connectedness (X is rationally connected if there is a rational curve between any two points). It is conjectured but not known that unirationality and rational connectedness are different, so something that sits between them is interesting. Of course, it could be that rationally generated arcs the same as one or the other, and I haven't done anything but introduce some useless new terminology.

I got a number of questions during the talk and it took me the whole hour to get to that result, the chain of implications. In the past, I have combined this talk with a calculation using arcs to find lines, such as the 27 on the cubic surface, but I think it works well on its own. The questions were helpful for my understanding, and the talk ended up being better and more precise than what I had planned out.
In addition, the fact that I didn't go into any of the intersection theory calculations means that I can try to pick the brains of the resident experts and give a better talk on that part of my thesis sometime soon. Also, Srinivas suggested some places to try applying rationally generated arcs to poke around and look for an example.

Settling in, venturing out

It seems that suddenly I've been here for a week. The fact that my days begin 12.5 hours ahead of the people I talk to back in Seattle made it such that Friday kind of snuck up on me.

In any case, the past few days have been moderately eventful. Yesterday and today there was more beauracracy to deal with, but I am officially here now, and I think that I will not have to deal with so much in the future. Unless I want something like internet in my apartment or a cell phone or to go trekking in a restricted area.

Yesterday's work was really just preparation for this morning. I was driven to the office where foreigners must go to register and dropped off at around 10am. I signed the first of four log books in the foyer, went up three flights of stairs, waited in line, signed another log book, and waited in line some more to talk to the person who would let me into the next waiting room. She wanted to see the same letter that the consulate in San Francisco had wanted to see, but I parried that with the research visa in my passport. The consul in San Francisco must have put a magic mark somewhere on there, because it works surprisingly well at deflecting these sorts of inquiries. So I moved on into the next waiting room.

This room was air conditioned and had a flat screen TV bolted to the wall showing Mumbai's version of CNN. Among other news, it seems that an Indian bomb squad didn't want to be shown up by the folks from Ohio who took out a bike because it was sporting a "this bike is a pipe bomb" sticker, and go for a Darwin award at the same time. It seems that the squad in question exploded a mine while trying to open it with a hammer and chisel. The bomb, which was buried alongside a road in West Bengal responded to this brilliant move by killing 2 bomb squadders and injuring 29 more people, including 7 reporters. They showed a video of the whole thing on TV. First they yanked it out of the ground with a hook on a string. Then this guy in shirt sleeves goes at it with a hammer and chisel. Then it blows up and all hell breaks loose. I respect the fact that it is tragic, but come on, it's a bomb! Don't try to open it with a hammer!

Anyway, I was in this room for an hour or so, with a few visits to the desk in the next room where the fourth log book was signed. Eventually all was in order, they had my forms in triplicate and I have a nice little book with my picture in it and lots of stamps.

So besides dealing with the paperwork involved with living here for a year...

Sukhendu and I decided to venture out into the city last night, so we hopped a TIFR bus (there is a loop that a bus runs from the institute through the city) and hopped off at the first stop, just a couple miles out. We walked around for a while, stopping in at the Sassoon Library, and the Taj Hotel, by the Flora Fountain, and the Gateway of India. Then, even though neither of us had proved the requisite theorem, we had dinner at Khyber. (Shah told us how to get to the area, he was directing us to another restaurant but that one was closed for a private party, and used Khyber as a landmark, but said that it was the sort of place where one goes after proving a theorem.) The food was good and the ambiance well done. It was not as expensive as a meal at the Taj, but definitely on the US or European price scale.



I've decided to try to keep two conversion rates going in my head. the conversion value of the Rupee in terms of dollars is roughly 50:1, and this is nice to keep in mind when occasionally going out to eat or buying a nice notebook. But for most of life, a conversion rate of 5:1 is a better guide. A meal at the institute's cafeteria is 10-20 Rs., and at Khyber, about 700 Rs. The inequity here is amazing. On the way to the station this morning we drove past a slum where children were using the side of the road as their toilet. Next to the station was a similar slum. Walking through the city on the way to Khyber last night, we saw scenes like this as well. A dog with all of its bones in stark relief showing through its skin stood next to a ring of people, sitting by the road cooking on a fire and playing cards. It makes me feel indescribably lucky to be sitting here in my air conditioned office, while I know that one mile away, a room this size made of scraps houses a family of seven. This city has both extremes though.



This evening presented us with another beautiful low tide sunset. One of the first year students was walking about in the courtyard with the dazed look of having spent too much time studying. We walked along the ocean and chatted about Bombay and mathematics and such. He grew up in this city, and as we looked over at Malabar Hill, he commented that the apartments there are some of the most expensive in the world, but that in some intangible manner, they are the property of all Bombay, like the sunset.

Afterwards, I headed back to my apartment. It seemed like a good time to try out riding in the city. So I put a little more air in the tires and headed out. When I stepped out of Jagdish, I had to step over a snail who was crossing the threshold. Thank you snail for reminding me to go slow and be safe. Vivek and a few other students were at the gates of the colony, they wished me well and reminded me to be careful.

I rode down Homi Bhabha Road to the circle and turned left onto Colaba Causeway. The traffic was not bad, and I had little trouble joining the flow. Traffic in Mumbai tends to move more slowly than in Seattle. The constant use of horns and chaotic movements of all sorts of transport can seem aggressive or forceful, nobody wants to hurt anyone, and the horns are just to announce oneself. It just takes a little getting used to.



I rode along to a large intersection in Colaba where we were the night before, and from there down towards the Gateway of India. Circling the Gateway, my bike and I got a number of looks. I don't think there are many westerners on bikes, or any bikes quite like mine here. With one gear and a flat black frame, it isn't too out of place, but it is clearly not of the local sort. We were definitely noticed.

From the Gateway, I wound my way into Colaba Market, where I picked up a few orbiting urchins who were very interested in my bike. In particular, the fact that there was only one brake was very strange. The crowd was thick enough that I dismounted and walked. Before long, all but one of my young entourage had seen enough, but this one small boy with a red hat and shiny white teeth kept along with me, pointing out various things ("Fish, there is fish ... Look, coconut...") and chattering along about I'm not sure what - it was a busy market and the accents here are still really hard for me. Before too long, we were joined by a older man with a beard and a smile and a small round Muslim cap. He was also interested in my bike, and noted several features, such as the fixed gear and the clipless pedals (these he just said were "small"). We talked a little, but it was starting to get dark and I wanted to get back. He asked if I would come back so that we could go riding around the city together. A local guide like this would potentially be quite useful, and a lot of fun. Trust is always an issue in things like this though. We'll see, perhaps.

Returning was easy enough. I find it easy to match the speed of the motorized traffic on many of the roads around here, and can follow the lead of the motorcycles or the other fast bicycles. Or I can ride along with the slow bikes. Traffic flows much more organically here. There is not so much rules (though traffic signal lights are generally obeyed) as there are customs. As time goes on, I'll come to understand it better, but for a first foray, it was a good one.

Ok, that was a long one. Either I have to stop having such an interesting time, or I have to figure out how to write faster. On a side note, it's interesting being online in the evening here. The little dots on the left side of my gmail window wink on and tell me who has come online for the morning.

Watching the sunset from the roof

On Sundays the canteens are both closed for dinner, so Sukhendu and I met to go see what could be found. There is an open air cafeteria on the ground floor for Jagadish apartments, so we went there. The French post-Doc, Laurent, and his wife Agnes, and their 2 year old Briouc were there. We joined them for dinner and the five of us started to get to know each other. Sukhendu is only here for the next month, but the others will be here for the whole year. I haven't seen much of Laurent since then; I think that perhaps Agnes is off on a trip and he is busy with Briouc

Laurent does some sort of positive characteristic algebraic geometry. One of the things that I am hoping to get here is a better understanding of how these things work in positive characteristic. Yesterday Srinivas suggested that I look into what part of my calculations really use characteristic zero. Perhaps there are examples where the count fails, but they end up being very special objects, like the conic in characteristic 2.

Right now I am in the midst of the bearaucratic process involved in setting me up to sit in this office and do math. First there was a comprehensive physical exam (blood, pee, vital signs, etc.) in the Medical Section. I think that the reason for the exam (which took four visits - mostly waiting for the right people to be in the office at the right time, plus a visit to pathology) is to make sure that I have gone there enough times to find it again in case I get sick. This morning I finally made my way there without any extraneous loops. Once I had received a clean bill of health, there were more visits to at least three different offices with names like "Special Cell". Now there are a few slips of paper circulating about this building with my name and various bits of information, trying to find other various bits of information. Luckily, I have provided my information to enough pieces of paper that it seems that I am free for now. At some point presumably an ID card will be issued.

A few days ago I was walking around the grounds and I found the garden where all of the decorative potted plants and flowers for cutting are grown. I'll go back and take some pictures - there are some very nice plants there. After the walk in the garden, I went in to the west canteen for lunch. It is on the ground floor, directly below my office and looks out over the same lawn and strange amoeba-like topiary shrubbery. I sat looking out at the ocean and eating my rice and dhal. A few minutes into the meal, the sky erupted with rain. People came running in, and others took shelter under a tree. I think that the rain was more than they expected, because they became drenched anyway. But then, within a few minutes everything was dry again, and the dragonflies were back out. To my surprise, a large bat - as big as a raven - flew across the lawn. I wasn't sure if it really was a bat until I saw more of them that evening walking back to the apartment.

Last night I went up to the rooftop terrace (that makes it sound much more glamorous than it is) of my building to watch the sunset. At this central Latitude (18.96° N 72.82° E are the coordinates) the sun drops much more suddenly. The ever-present clouds on the horizon swiftly swallow the last rays of the day, and the sunset does not linger like it does halfway to the pole. As the day gave way to twilight and then this faded, I watched the lights of this city coming on. The lights along Marine Drive, the road along the inside curve of Back Bay follow the arc of the beach. Apparently they are referred to as the "Queen's Necklace" - a strand of pearls draped along the city. These came on first, and then the lights of the apartment buildings began to emerge. All around me are lives densely packed, and hidden, emitting less light from less high a perch, even more lives even more densely packed. Mumbai his home to around 13 million people, packed with an average density of about 71 thousand people per square mile. Manhattan, on the other hand is about 67 thousand per square mile. But then, I don't have a personal understanding of how dense Manhattan is, so maybe it is better to say that Seattle has an average density of about 7 thousand people per square mile.

The density of India's cities and its vast population mean that the type of waste that Americans produce quickly causes severe deleterious effects. In Delhi, when I was there in December 1991, the air was quite bad. Much of that was due to the Diwali fireworks, but not all, and a few years later, it became so bad that it was necessary to do something. So now many of the cars and busses run on compressed natural gas. Sukhendu is from that area, and tells me that the air is much better. I can't image - I don't want to imagine - what it would take to do that in an American city. The sparseness of the cities in the Western US makes the degree to which we produce waste far less apparent. If the 26 Mumbaikers produced as much waste as their 1 counterpart Seattleite, the city would overflow with trash, choke with foul air, and die of thirst in a matter of weeks. The press of humanity here is impossible to forget.

But I can avoid it, I think fortunately, and only encounter it when I venture out of this ivory tower that is becoming home. In here, life is quite calm and relaxed. The difficulties and challenges of life in India will present themselves soon enough, I am sure. And I will welcome them. But for now, I appreciate this refuge.

Where I am

Right here is my new office. (Looking out at that Amoeba shaped thing.)

I'm settling in, starting to meet people. Of course I'm still a bit jet lagged. Sukhendu's talk was this afternoon. He has an explicit description of a derived version of the McKay correspondence. He's kind of down on his work right now because it turns out that it can be found as a consequence of some work by Kawamata, but everyone here agreed that even so it is nice work.

Arrival

So. I'm off in India. I would like to keep in touch with people somewhat while I'm here. The magic of the fiber optic cable running under the Pacific Ocean means that as far as the internet is concerned, I might as well just be keeping strange hours in Seattle.

The title Three Spheres occurred to me this morning. The Escher print of the same name has always been in my house. I'd say that there's a good chance it influenced me in some ways. It certainly reflects some of my ways of thinking about art, perception, and mathematics.

Read slightly differently, three spheres could also be referring to what it has been long suspected and we now know are the only three dimensional simply connected closed manifolds. The peculiarities of three dimensional geometry which Poincaré's conjecture reflects, while they are not what I study officially, are one of the things that keeps me fascinated by mathematics. I am sure that more meanings for this title will reveal themselves as it continues.

I dont know exactly what or when I'll write here. Once a week at the least, I think. We'll see how this evolves.

Anyway. I arrived late Friday night:



The aging 747 lumbered onto the tarmac with a series of thuds and the roaring rumble of 300 tons shedding speed. According to a plaque at the rear of the passenger cabin, this plane was decreed sanitary by the city of Seattle in 1989 for use by Korean Air, and it still carries markings in Hangul informing passengers to fasten their seat belts while seated and return their try tables to their full upright and locked position. It had ferried its cargo from Chicago to Frankfurt to Bombay. Or is it Mumbai? It depends on who is speaking. The name of this city seems to be a word slightly akin to potato in Hungarian, which is spelled burgonya and pronounced krumpli. It was not until the following afternoon that I overheard the name Mumbai used in conversation. The mix of Marathi, Hindi, English and other languages in this city is amazing. I'll catch snippets of conversation as the speakers shift through English mid sentence.

One of the first thing I noticed, as always when I land in a new place, was the smell. I recognized it immediately from 15 years ago, when I was last in India. It is a smell of warm damp stone, lush trees, richly spiced cooking, auto exhaust, and the sweat of 13 million people. The memory washed through my time addled self and I smiled with it as my feet carried me up the jetway.

By the time I reached baggage, my things were on the belt. There was some confusion at customs regarding my bicycle, but eventually I just showed the TIFR in my visa and was waved through. The taxi driver met me at the curb, and a throng of self appointed porters helped carry the box and bags. This was a task for which the cart I had been using was a perfectly fine tool, and the porters soon came to this conclusion as well. The box was too large to fit in the car, so I unpacked it and my bike sat in the back seat while I rode up front. After 22 hours of flying, I was too tired to make conversation, so we drove in silence. At 1am there are still lots of cars on the road, and many of them drive without lights.

It took a bit more than half an hour and we came to TIFR and my apartment. It consists of an interestingly angled kitchen (a sink, small fridge, and propane hot plate), living area (couch, chair, coffee table), balcony, bathroom and bed. From the balcony one looks over a riot of green trees and can catch a glimpse of the Arabian Ocean.



In the morning I wandered across the street to the institute. The gardens could be nicer, but perhaps it is the look of things late in the monsoon season. In any case, I am glad to have them here. Hooded crows with iridescent black bodies and grey hoods fly about making a familiar corvid ruckus. The campus is on the water, and one can walk along a sidewalk and look out over the ocean or across the bay to the high rises of Malabar Hill. Inside, I found the canteen and breakfast. Options were an omelet or a scoop of what seemed to be very cooked rice with onions, peas, and spices. And there was tea of course.



Upstairs, I found the library and the math offices. Sukhendu, who I had met in Köln last month, was in his office. I stopped in and we chatted a little. He's working on something having to do with Bridgeland stability conditions and Frobenius manifolds. I'll read up a bit and try to learn some things from him. I guess he's giving a talk next week. I told him a little bit about my ideas on rationally generated arcs too. Sukhendu's office mate, Sreekar, is not here right now, but I look forward to when he gets back - he and I know each other from Budapest in 1998.

After lunch, Sukhendu and I found my office. It looks out over the garden and the ocean. Right now there is scaffolding in the way, but the view will be great when that is gone. I share my office with Frenchman, who is here with is wife and their small son. From the collection of texts he has here, I can't tell what he works on, other than that it is Algebraic Geometry. A well worn copy of Hartshorne is a good sign - with good appropriately interpreted. Srinivas stopped by and said hello. I'm sure I'll learn a lot from him this year. There wasn't too much to do in my office except look out the window, so I went down to the library to look through the journals. I started reading the paper about the recent Hamilton-Perelman results in the Asian Journal of Math. I figure if the New Yorker is going to do a story about it and my friends are going to ask me to explain these things while we are out for beers, perhaps I should know a little more about the topic than what can be picked up by osmosis. And it is interesting math.



Later in the afternoon, I walked up Homi Bhabha road, past the Afghan Church and towards the part of town called Colaba. The air was rather thick with dust and pollution and I had to blink a lot to keep my eyes from becoming irritated. The never ending activity of this place is fascinating. TIFR is in Navy Nagar - the Navy area - so I'm only allowed to walk down Homi Bhabha road for the first mile or so. Then I turned left at the church and walked into an area with many stores, including "Car-O-Parts" and a nice little photo studio where I had some ID photos taken.

On the walk home, it started raining. It was a soft, warm rain, and it was not unpleasant to walk in. I kept waiting for the sky to open and drench me completely, but perhaps that happens more earlier in the season. The air was much more pleasant after the rain.

I'm sure that India will offer me many opportunities to explore, and I look forward to this. But for now, I seem to find myself in a place where the atmosphere is ideal for doing mathematics. Distractions are not difficult to avoid, and my basic needs are well cared for. Received wisdom tells me that what I do now mathematically does much to paint what I will be doing mathematically in the future, so I am glad to be here.