Countdown to the new moon

Mumbai is home to a few million Muslims, who are currently observing the month of Ramzan (Ramadan). From the walk along the shore of the Arabian sea, or the crow's perch atop my apartment building, I can hear the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. His song is blasted through a loudspeaker, that industrial instrument that makes the human voice, that most primal of musical sounds, into a mechanical thing capable of being displayed at city-wide volume. Even so the call to prayer is always quite clearly a holy song. Hearing it, I can easily imagine hundreds of thousands of prayer rugs unrolling across this city, the devoted taking a few moments to contemplate the spirit in the midst of the city's noise.

This year, Diwali, one of the largest holidays in the Hindu calendar, and Ramzan fall together. Diwali is a festival of lights, the celebration of Ram's return from Sri Lanka after defeating Ravan, the demon who had stolen his wife. The holiday happens on the new moon of the month Ashwayuja, which in the Hindu calendar spans the end of October and the beginning of November. Its observance involves lots of fireworks. I was talking to one of my neighbors who was also on the roof watching the sunset last night, and we heard a different sounding sort of bang. It didn't sound quite like a firework, and my neighbor asked if I knew what that was. I didn't. It was the sound from the loudspeaker indicating that the sun had gone down and it was time to eat. Last week I went to the barber to have my beard trimmed (my trimmer would have needed a voltage converter, and I decided to find myself a barber instead of buying a new one here. He did a much nicer job than I usually do anyway. When he was done, he vanished quite quickly. Baitosh, the young guy who I had been chatting with while having my trim told me that my barber had run off to eat, since the sun had gone down and he was observing Ramzan. Though fasting is prescribed between dawn and dusk, some of the treats offered in the evenings are quite special.

Last week, I went with Ilangovan, Chan and Sukhendu to Muhammed Ali road where the Kebab restaurants and sweet sellers do a brisk business after dark. Ilangovan is vegetarian (here they just say "veg") so we went for dinner at a place called Shalimar, which was quite good. Afterwards, we made our way through the throng to one of the places selling sweets, including firni, a rice pudding that we had plain or flavored with mango, and malpua, a pancake of eggs and flour, much like a German pancake, but deep fried instead of baked. At the next shop down, we sampled donuts in syrup, some of which were decorated with silver foil. The use of silver to decorate sweets in India is widespread. A very this foil is laid across the top of the item, and then there may be some further decoration adding color, or perhaps a few slivers of nut. It is estimated that Indian annually consume in the neighborhood of 13 tons of silver in this way. It doesn't seem to be killing them. When I asked Yogish about the effects of eating silver, and mentioned that I was trying to figure out what these might be, he said that if I found anything out, I should tell him, and perhaps this would explain some strange behaviors universal in the subcontinent but not so elsewhere.



At this point, we were all quite full, and so made our way to Churchgate to catch the TIFR bus back to the colony. While waiting, I picked up a couple of books from a sidewalk seller. The books that these vendors sell are marked "for sale on the Indian subcontinent only" and are printed on news print paper. Sometimes the pages are out of order or missing, or the printer ran out of ink on a certain page, but they are not so bad that they cannot be read and enjoyed.

Most of the way to the bus stop, we were followed by beggars, many of them children. Sukhendu has tremendous compassion for them. During one of our first conversations, he expressed an idea to me, that while I don't think that I really understand what he is saying, and probably the idea is not absolutely clear to him either, is essentially that while some Americans may be able to think of themselves as 'citizens of the world' an Indian who does so is abandoning something that should not be abandoned. Even by going abroad and becoming a successful mathematician, there is a way in which he fears that he is abandoning his country. It seems sometimes that his heart is broken by every child we meet with an outstretched hand. I follow his example, and when possible, buy an egg or an apple from a vendor to give to them. But in this city, I require for myself a certain callousness. It is one of the largest collections of people living in poverty in the world, and if I were to offer myself to them in any but the most limited way, I would be picked clean in moments. By the time we were at the bus stop, I was out of change and small bills, and I believe that Sukhendu was as well. While we were talking, a boy maybe ten years old walks up to us, bends down and touches Sukhendu on the foot. The boy straightens and brings his hand to his mouth, asking for food. We shake our heads and he walks away. I hiccupped and my over-full belly offered up a small amount of bile to remind me of this disparity.

Today is Sukhendu's last day here. Laurent, Agnes and I took him out to dinner last night. We went to the Kebab Korner, on the second floor of one of the fancy hotels on Marine Drive. It was a delicious feast which occupied the whole evening. He will return in March. Now he is off to England to work with Bridgeland.

This morning I sent off a batch of applications for various options on what to do next year. There are good reasons professionally why I would want to stay here for a second year, and it would almost certainly be a possibility, but there are reasons I'd like to come back as well, and now is the time to make sure that my options are available. The job search in academia has a bad reputation that is not entirely undeserved. It is sort of a ridiculous procedure. People send out, in some cases, hundreds of applications. Then of course they get to throw out the very confidence boosting hundreds of rejection letters. I had a friend in high school who used the sheaf of rejection letters that he got from colleges who were not interested as the background pages for a 'zine. It was quite clever.

For myself, there are lots of places that I'm just not interested in moving, so I sent out a more reasonable number of letters. Even so, it was enough that it took a chunk of time. Last year's process was a lot more of a pain. This year, even though I rewrote at least half of the materials in my applications and applied to a somewhat different set of places things went much more smoothly. Anyway, I'm glad to have that out the door and now I feel like I can get back to doing math and being in India more whole heartedly. Somewhat appropriately, I came across this poem in one of the books I picked up the other night.

Ithaca

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
and angry Poseidon - do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your heart does not set them up within you.

Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenecian markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities, to learn and learn from scholars.

Always keep Ithaca in your mind,
to arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry on the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all that you have gained along the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches,
Ithaca has given you a beautiful voyage.
Without her you would never have set foot out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must have already understood what the Ithacans mean.

Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933)
Translated by Rae Dalven

I have a few different threads running in my thoughts mathematically. The battles with the ants that I had over my apartment last week have me with ants on the brain, and I imagine my mathematical explorations as akin to trails of ants radiating out in search of forage. On Tuesday afternoons, Yogish is giving a series of talks about multiplier ideals, which we worked on understanding in our algebraic geometry seminar at UW but I would certainly be lying if I said that I really understood them well. So I'm reading Lazarsfeld and listening to Yogi. He had the superfastallatonce lecture style down rather well, and they are 90 minute talks, so Tuesday evenings I always feel a bit drained.

Then on Fridays Srinivas's student Vivek is giving a series of talks on logarithmic schemes, as a way of learning about them himself. It is moderately technical material, but seems useful. I'm trying to translate some basic things about arc spaces into this language in order to help my understanding. Also, there has been some interesting work done by El Goul, Dethloff and Lu using logarithmic jets in the context of Kobayashi hyperbolicity, which I studied for my Master's project. All of that was in fairly analytic language, so it will be interesting to see how it spells out once I can write it down in the language of sheaves of monoids, functors and moduli spaces.

In addition, my own ideas about rationally generated arcs are still moving me along. Venkatraman pointed me to some ideas of Bien, Borel and Kollár about homogeneous spaces. Some of the background material is in French, so I'm trying to do some translation. Luckily I share my office with a guy who knows some French.

One of the habits that many of the researchers here have which I have taken to is the habit of pacing back and forth in the courtyard between the auditorium and the main entrance, beneath the A-wing. The ground is covered with slabs of grey stone, and the building keeps the sun off during the hottest part of the day. This is where the doggies like to hang out too. TIFR, like Reed, has its dogs. It is refreshing to be in a place where they are welcomed, or at least tolerated with friendliness. Hopefully the Diwali fireworks this Saturday don't scare them too badly.



I'll probably go down to join the crowd and watch the fireworks along Marine Drive. I was there on Tuesday, and there was a little bit of a preview of what's to come, but just a little. After Yogi's lecture I felt the need to be out on my bike. So I went home, picked it up, threw a few things in my pack and headed out. I first went to the barber shop, because one of Baitosh's friends said that he wanted to ride around at some point. He was there, but didn't want to go for a ride. One of the pairs of pants I brought with me needed some mending, so I dropped them off at a tailor.

Then I rode over to Marine Drive, and made my way along to Chowpatty (said Choh-pohtti, not like a burger) beach as the twilight quickly faded. I locked my bike up and wandered out along the beach, was a thin layer of dirty sand over hard packed dirt. I was accosted by a few hawkers, a massage guy, a mat to sit on the sand guy, and a tea selling kid. They realized before long that I wasn't interested and left me to wander along the beach. A storm drain/sewer outflow was dumping into the bay near the west end of things, and a clan of fisher-folk was camped out, cooking dinner and lighting off fireworks. I was reminded of the week before the fourth of July in the US.



I wandered back and across Marine Drive, where I found a place to print out some photos, which I have been wanting to do. They said it would be an hour, so I wandered around a bit more. One of the streets I walked down was the diamond and jewelry district, with all sorts of fancy shops and a Mercedes showroom. Then I ended up on a back street and stopped to admire a very picturesque orange paper lantern over a light bulb hanging over the flower-box outside someone's window. While I was admiring it, someone invited me to take his picture in front of his store, so I did. It seems like the smiling for pictures is not an Indian thing.