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Another spin of the globe, the sun drops into the clouds. It occurs to me that I am moving faster than usual with respect to the center of mass of the Earth, my own core's worldline tracing out a curve with greater amplitude in the solar system's equitorial plane spirograph.

The crows call each other to court, mobbing from tree to tree to roofline, reporting the news of the day in the fading light. They are joined by a few swallows, a small group of long tailed and shrill voiced bright green parrots, and an occasional broad winged sea bird of some sort. And of course the bats. I just watched one being harried by five crows. The arching and relatively ponderous flap of the bats' wings make them catch the eye quickly in comparison to the hustle and chaos of the avian mass. I have yet to catch one of them in the act of taking off or landing, and they usually fly low among the foliage, so they are hard to catch with the camera. But they fascinate me.

So I realized today that people have been leaving comments and that they weren't showing up. I'm glad you are reading my ramblings! I'll try to keep doing interesting things. Also, I finally got a phone in my apartment so now people can call me without using skype. I don't want to post my home phone on the internet, so if you want the number you have to email me.

I still don't have a kitchen in my apartment. On Wednesday afternoon I rode over to a store called Sathari Bhandar, near Regal Cinema. Number addresses here are not the norm. People give building names and nearby landmarks. Movie theatres are supposed to be really good landmarks, especially for giving directions to taxi drivers. Speaking of movie theatres, I haven't gone to see a Hindi movie yet, but I'm sure that I will at some point. I was asked if I wanted to be an extra, but it was the day befoer my talk, and I wanted to prepare. Besides, since it was one of the first things that happened to me in public, that it wasn't all that rare an occurence. It turns out I was right; Kevin (the South Aftrican string theorist on the trek) spent a day hanging around the studio looking like a token white guy a while ago. Apparently he was the envy of a number of the grad students because he was in the same room as a rather famous film star. Digressions aside, the housewares section of this store I was directed to is closed for remodeling indefinately. So still no kitchen for me. I'm not yet tired of the canteen food, and it is just as cheap as making my own, lots less effort and much more social, so I'm happy to keep as I am.

One thing I would like to have that I don't is a card for the sport center. I did manage to learn that this requires a visit to at least one more office, which is not at the sport center, and I'll bet is hidden in some labyrinthine corner of this complex. They will want two more passport sized photos, a copy of my invitation letter, and a copy of my ID card, which I needed my invitation letter to acquire, but never mind. I suppose that it never occured to them to just have the ID card function as the mambership card for the rec center. Or perhaps it did, but they dismissed that outright as not in keeping with the way things are done here. Kevin put it appropriately when he described the Indian love affair with beauracracy with its forms in triplicate and neverending series of receipts and rubber stamps as a "colonial hangover." 250 years of being administered by merchants has left some marks. I bet that the paper trail person tracking system that goes on here shares some features with the British East India Company's system of managing bales of tea.

The game Settlers of Catan has been described as analog Civilization (referring to the computer game, not the tendency for large groups of people to come up with complicated communal habits). In that vein, moving to India is analog hardware installation. The same analogy applies to the network of Dabbawallas or lunch couriers, whose deliveries are like analog email. I passed by their meeting point at the train station on the ride I ended up taking after not getting any kitchen stuff on Wednesday. In the late morning a Dabbawalla picks up a tiffin (specially marked stainless steel lunchbox) from the home of a customer. By not long after noon, it has passed through various hands and ridden on bicycle, train and pushcart to the office of it's recipient. I wasted some time reading about them on the internet after seeing their depot.



So although I have no kitchen or access to the sports center, I did manage to I post a paper to the arXiv and send a copy to a journal for consideration yesterday. When I showed the link to Jill her comment was that the notes say that it is a distillation of my PhD thesis, and she wonders if I was making moonshine. Hopefully not, but least then I could drink it. The fact that I sent it out means that I think that this project is at a point where I am okay telling random people about it. But it certainly doesn't feel like I've told a complete story.