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